Upper Middlebrow
Episode 59: “The Bathetic Fallacy,” or Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
The UMBers tackle Ray Bradbury’s 1950s classic novella and are impressed by how much influence this book has had on other writers and the intellectual landscape. The lads rattle off at least five or six other works they’ve read that owe Fahrenheit an allusive debt. Both find the prose and dialogue somewhat clunky, but in a role-reversal it’s Dukes this time that thinks Bradbury may have intended the clunkiness for artistic effect, while Bagg is merely triggered by it. Regardless, both agree that this book (and its enduring popularity) are a product of its socio-political moment, when fears of fascism and censorship rippled through American society.