The Illustrated Ray Bradbury. James Arthur Anderson
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BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JAMES ARTHUR ANDERSON
The Altar: A Novel of Horror
The Illustrated Ray Bradbury: A Structuralist Reading of Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man
Out of the Shadows: A Structuralist Approach to Understanding the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
The Milford Series: Popular Writers of Today
(ISSN 0163-2469)
Volume Seventy-Seven
Copyright © 1990, 2013 by James Arthur Anderson
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
To Lynn Llorye,
who still makes my dreams come true.
INTRODUCTION
Ray Bradbury was one of the first science fiction writers to achieve the best of two worlds. His books have sold millions of copies and have remained continually in print, even though science fiction has only recently achieved “best-selling” status. Even more noteworthy, perhaps, Bradbury’s works have been accepted as serious literature in an age when science fiction is still burdened by the old stigma of being “pulp” literature. His stories have found their way into anthologies of modern fiction and are frequently taught in college classes.
In this book I intend to examine the Ray Bradbury phenomenon by conducting a structuralist reading of selected short stories from one of his best-known collections, The Illustrated Man. This structuralist reading will attempt to illuminate how Bradbury has captured the imagination of the reading public and earned the respect of the academic community. The Illustrated Man, originally published in 1951, represents Bradbury at his best. I will use the stories from this collection to illustrate (pardon the pun) Bradbury’s narrative techniques and to expose his major literary themes. My analysis of the stories will show that Bradbury cannot be classified as a science fiction writer, at least not in the traditional sense of the term. Finally, I will show that The Illustrated Man is more than just a collection of short stories: this analysis will demonstrate that it is a unified work in which each story contributes to the meaning of the collection as a whole.
I have chosen to analyze the stories using a structuralist methodology for several reasons. First, structuralism has always been attracted to popular literature. Early structuralist critics such as V. Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss examined myths and folktales; later structuralists studied detective stories (Todorov, Poetics 42-52), as well as science fiction (Scholes, Fabulation) and the literature of the fantastic (Todorov, Fantastic), stories that, I feel, represent the mythology of the space age. Popular fiction best represents the thoughts and ideas of the culture that produces it, and structuralism defines itself, in part, as cultural analysis that “seeks to explore the relationship between the system of literature and the culture of which it is a part” (Scholes, Structuralism 11).
Second, The Illustrated Man makes good material for a structuralist reading because the stories are connected to a larger framework that links them together to form an overall theme. We can, therefore, use structuralist techniques (such as Todorov’s plot “equations”) that compare stories to find a common plot as tools to show relationships between stories in a collection. Finally, structuralism as a critical methodology has historically been used primarily to study prose, most notably, perhaps, short fiction. Traditional formalist techniques concentrate more on theme than method, while structuralists such as Gerard Genette and Seymour Chatman have developed a science of narratology. This study of how a story works, in addition to what it actually says, seems most appropriate for analyzing Bradbury’s style and attempting to account for his popular success.
To “illustrate” Bradbury I will use a specific methodology, that of Robert Scholes (Semiotics 87-104), which I will adapt to my analysis as needed. This method combines the interpretive techniques of three of the most influential structuralist critics to date: Tzvetan Todorov, Gerard Genette, and Roland Barthes. I will apply this methodology to five stories from The Illustrated Man: “The Veldt”, “Kaleidoscope”, “The Long Rain”, “Zero Hour”, and “The Rocket”, and to the narrative framework, the prologue and epilogue of the work.
I realize that these methods were never intended to be used for the purposes of explication to which I will put them. A “pure” structuralist would never approve of my interpretive technique; however, I feel that these various structuralist theories “complement one another in addressing the fictional text from different angles” (Scholes, Semiotics 87), and that they can be used for textual analysis. I will adapt these methods as needed in each particular story, since my goal is an understanding of The Illustrated Man, not an essay on structuralist dogma.
The first of these three methods, that of Tzvetan Todorov, catalogues stories according to plot structure by reducing plot to the form of an equation, much like the grammatical diagram of the sentence, where nouns represent characters and verbs represent action. This method allows the critic to reduce stories to their barest form, then to compare them for similar plot structures. Looking at the nouns and verbs of several related stories may afford the critic some unusual insights; often, the reduction process forces the critic to thematize the work in novel and productive ways. Although Todorov’s ultimate aim is to catalogue all the plots that occur in literature, his critical method can be quite valuable, I think, in the analysis of a single collection of related texts.
The second critical method I will use is that of Gerard Genette. Genette’s narrative theory distinguishes between narrative and discourse. The narrative, or “story”, includes the basic sequence of events that occurs in the text. The discourse refers to the way that the author tells the story. To use this method of analysis, the critic examines narrative voice, time reference and frequency, and the pace of actual events in the story. The critic looks at narrative voice in order to determine who narrates the story and through whose point of view the events are seen. This structuralist study goes beyond mere “point of view” to determine how and why a narrative may subtly shift from one focus character to another. The critic examines the time reference and frequency to isolate the present narrative from the past, as shown in flashbacks, and from the future, as shown in foreshadowing and predictions. Finally, the critic looks at the speed with which the discourse moves through the sequence of events in the story.
The third critical method is that of Roland Barthes as outlined in S/Z. Barthes examines a text by breaking it down into a series of semiotic “codes” common to all literature. In order to understand anything, be it a work of literature, a piece of music, or an advertisement on television, the human mind must interpret it through fixed codes of understanding. Language itself represents such a code; unless one understands the “code of English,” discourse in English becomes meaningless. According to Barthes, there are five basic codes of understanding in any artistic work. These are the proairetic code (or code of actions), the hermeneutic code (or code of enigmas), the cultural code, the connotative code, and the symbolic code:
...Each code is one of the forces that can take over the text (of which the text is the network), one of the voices out of which the text is woven. Alongside each utterance, one might say that the off-stage voices can be heard: they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices... de-originate the utterance: the convergence of the voices (of the code) becomes writing, a stereographic space where the five codes, the five voices, intersect.... (S/Z 21)
In addition, written works may contain a textual code, and a specialized symbolic code called the psychoanalytical code.
The first two codes, the action and hermeneutic codes, define the narrative elements that distinguish between the story and the discourse. The action code resembles the grammatical diagram of Todorov, or the “story” of Genette, except that it concentrates more on the physical actions of the story—Todorov’s “verbs” in the plot sentence. Since I will be applying the theories of Todorov and Genette in my analysis, I will focus on Barthes’ action code primarily in terms of the physical location and movement of the plot’s actions (i.e.