Introduction
It is noteworthy that Ray Bradbury is considered one of the best science fiction writers of the 20th century. It is also noteworthy that Ray Bradbury is barely a science fiction writer at all: in his own words: “I don't write science fiction. I've only done one science fiction book and that's Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see? That's the reason it's going to be around a long time—because it's a Greek myth, and myths have staying power (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury).” So Bradbury is actually one of the best fantasy writers of the modern era. And one of his best American fantasies is the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. In this book Bradbury, despite his atheism, describes vice, virtue and Christian joy, and therefore, like the Greek myths, Something Wicked This Way Comes has great staying power.
Section 1: Plots, Tension, and Temptation
Morality provides the book’s central tension: Will Halloway and his father Charles love what is good; Coogar and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, a carnival that has descended onto Will’s town, loves and presents what is evil; and Will’s friend, Jim Nightshade, true to his name, can’t decide which he loves. The story follows Jim and Will’s unveiling of the shadow show’s diabolical machinations: Coogar and Dark are not peddling in cash dollars but rather in the sin, fear and death and anguish of tortured souls: “the carnival is like people only more so. A man, a woman, rather than walk away from or kill each other, ride each other a lifetime, pulling hair, extracting fingernails, the pain of each to the other a narcotic that makes existence worth the day...so maybe the carnival survives, living off the poison of the sins we do to each other and the ferment of our most terrible regrets” (203-204). Through the story, Will and Charles Halloway both discover and try to stop this evil feeding, while Jim is half pulled to the menagerie of temptations the carnival offers: but the temptation that pulls at even Will and Will’s Dad, the temptation that binds all the carnival freaks and the hosts themselves to the carnival, the allurement that is the central problem of the novel is offered by the carousel. Even after all the carnival is dead and in ruins (spoilers), Jim, Will, and Will’s dad stand in front of the free carousel: “Just three times around thought Will. Hey. Just four times around, ahead, thought Jim. Boy. Just ten times around, back, thought Charles Halloway. Lord” (289). You see this carousel spins forward in time to make you older, taller, wiser, or it circles backward to make you fresh and young again: in other words, the carousel offers immortality to the rider. But Charles Halloway thought of the catch, “once you start you’d always come back. One more ride and one more ride. And eventually you’d offer rides to friends and family until finally...you wind up owner of the carousel, keeper of the freaks...proprietor for some small part of eternity of the traveling dark carnival show” (289). The carousel’s temptation is how Coogar and Dark have sunk to their depth of evil: they succumb to the desire for control over their own life, and are therefore, ironically, hopelessly slaves to their vice, forever devouring souls. The carousel’s temptation, too, is how the freaks came to be: their mashed physical bodies reflections of their mashed souls, chained to the carnival by the promise of becoming human again by means of the carousel: “on the promise alone of being returned to normal old age, that train travels with the world, its sideshow populated with madmen waiting to be released from bondage, meantime servicing the carnival…” (206-207). And the carousel is how the carnival could get new recruits like Jim, Will and Charles Halloway. So the book’s themes are righteousness versus wickedness, as well as the vices of humanity and especially according to Bradbury our strongest temptation which all the characters so far have succumbed to: the desire for immortality. In the face of that temptation however, Charles smashes the carousel.
Section 2: Charles Smashes the Carousel
Charles resists the temptation of immortality and fights against the wicked by laughter. Laughter tears the carnival apart, withers Dark, disperses the freaks, crumbles the dust witch, and shatters the glass mirror. Laughter raises the dead. I believe there is much truth to this, but I also think because Bradbury is functionally an atheist, it's necessary to take a minute and sift the wheat from the chaff. Bradbury presents laughter as the solution, but for Bradbury, laughter comes from the fact that nothing matters: “somehow irresistibly, the prime thing was: nothing mattered. Life was a prank of such size you could only stand off on this corner and note its meaningless length” (229). As the character Stubb states in Moby Dick and on the first pages of this book: “I know not all that may be coming, but be what it will, I’ll go to it laughing” (). So life’s meaninglessness, our inability to control life should make us carefree: if you can’t control life then why bother trying? Why not laugh and not care about your life? This is the ideal that Bradbury gives his characters as the winning mentality: however this ideal undermines his novel’s morality and is simply not possible. Melville was much more honest with himself, and Stubb at the end of Moby Dick fails to hold to his own standard and fears for his life, all his laughter vaporized. Not caring about yourself is not possible because humans are designed to care about themselves deeply (just think of the command to love your neighbor as you do yourself.) Loving yourself is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean you simply cannot will yourself to not care about your life: eventually, like Stubb, something will come along (for instance, your imminent and painful death) which will make you blanch.
Bradbury’s thesis ‘nothing matters’ also undermines his novel’s morality: for though he says nothing matters, Bradbury in this book seems to take the wickedness of evil and the righteousness of good very seriously. In fact, he has categories like good and evil, which implies a whole host of moral imperatives, an army of shoulds and shouldnts that we must obey. But if, as Charles and Bradbury maintain, morality is simply conventions all humans agree upon (like murder is wrong) then all the shoulds and shouldnts dissolve from commands into mere suggestions. Murder is wrong? Says who? Who made you, a human on the same footing as me, the arbiter of morality? By what standard? Atheists (like Christopher Hitchens) attempt to give a standard by presenting the idea of common morals: everyone naturally shares the same morals (like abstaining from murder), so we can all agree on a standard without God. But saying we all agree murder is wrong is like saying we all think doing bad things isnt good. Obviously no one thinks murder isn’t wrong, but the actual problem is that nobody agrees with everyone else on what murder is: Stalin thought eradicating an entire race wasn’t murder, some Americans currently consider killing animals is murder, and other Americans praise murdering infants in their mother’s womb. Stalin, Margaret Sanger, and your vegetarian neighbor all agree murder is wrong, but with three such radically different takes on what murder is, a unified standard to measure murder by is entirely absent. Taking one thing with another, human history can’t agree entirely on anything, and until we do morality is just whatever goes. The failure of Bradbury’s reason for laughter both practically and ethically comes to a head at the end of the book (warning: major spoilers here). To raise his friend Jim from the dead, Will and his father have to forget entirely about Jim: “where was Jim! Jim was forgotten” (284). But this is problematic: not only does it seem on a practical level impossible, it also seems unethical. Could a way of life that has no room for sorrow, even for the death of your dearest ones have any compassion for anyone else? If someone else is suffering, it seems the only thing one is allowed to do according to Bradbury is laugh, which is far from Jesus’ lamenting Lazarus’ death, or Paul’s exhortation to “comfort each other” (1 Thessalonians 5:11). Bradbury’s reason for laughter is neither possible nor moral, and ends up thwarting the climax of the novel and turning victory and joy into a strangely introspective denial of reality.
Conclusion
So Bradbury’s reasoning is off. But the story he tells, with laughter as the great weapon, is bang on. Consider Ezra’s statement “the joy of the Lord is our strength” (Nehemiah 8:10), or Paul’s exhortation to “rejoice always” (1 Thess 5:15), or Solomon’s quip “he who has a merry heart has a continual feast” (Prov 15:15), or Jesus’ declaration “these things I have spoken to you that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:10-11). Only the Christian can be truly carefree: not because we don’t care about our lives or others (we do very much care about both), but because our lives have been given into someone else's keeping and we don’t have to worry about it. This allows us to be truly carefree, because of the kind of person our lives are given to: “He who did not spare his own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” And later, “for I am persuaded that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:32, 38-39). Christian’s lives have been given to the kind of God who is not only sovereign in all things and has not only predestined before the foundation of the world what will come to pass according to His will, but He is a God who loves his people, so much so he killed his only Son to save His people. And so absolutely nothing can take our lives from Him, and nothing can remove from us the genuine immortality and sincere joy set before us in this life and once we die. To live as a Christian then is to have a continual feast, to die as a Christian then, is gain, and thus death and all the devil’s varied offers of pleasure and faux-immortality have lost their sting. Here then is why Bradbury’s story, despite his explicit atheism resonates and has ‘staying power’: Something Wicked This Way Comes describes how the joy of the Lord is our strength: and all the flesh, the world, and the devil can do when we rely on our strength is get out of Dodge.
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