Books as a Mode of Cultural and Historical Memory
Before I read Fahrenheit 451 for the first time, I began by reading the introduction and supplementary texts appended to the sixtieth anniversary edition. Upon reading the epigraph to these readings, taken from the novel itself, I was immediately struck by the idea of books as a tool or vehicle for cultural and historical memory. “Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us,” says Professor Faber to the book’s hero, Guy Montag.
If one knows anything about the first “texts” written and etched into clay tablets in ancient times, one knows that these “texts” were lists and records concerning the keeping of accounts for kingdoms, an early form of bookkeeping for tracking transactions and inventory. Eventually, the deeds and decrees of kings became recorded as well. Then, naturally, to ensure the oral traditions of a people were kept alive for future generations, the stories and myths of these peoples were written down and became what we would call “a literary text.” This, then, became one among many modes of cultural and historical transmission of ideas, facts, and beliefs. It is not my intention to map a linear path from ancient written records and myths to the electronic texts and books we pen today. Rather, it is my intention to speak of the value of books as a mode of cultural and historical memory.
Books, simply speaking, are works of art. They show us ourselves, as readers and as writers. It often fascinates me the connections I make between things and the subjects I have deep interest in and feel strongly about, and then write on, and the source of all this is books, the literature of all kinds that I have been voraciously engaged in reading for the last thirty years. For it will soon be thirty years since I fell in love with literature and knew I had no choice but to pursue it as a major and become a writer.
Books not only teach us about ourselves but about history, about the people who have made history with their own blood, sweat, and tears, and their own deeply held beliefs, values, and ideas. Books are read for pleasure and for information, if not for both. Nonfiction may have as its central purpose the goal of disseminating knowledge and information, but the writer of nonfiction hopes, just as a novelist does, that we will read their books with a certain amount of pleasure as well, not just in response to how they weave the narrative they set down but also in response to the information we learn from the text.
The “magic” in books is not so much the information we learn, whether facts or concepts, but the bridge that is built between us and the text, the readers and the writer, the connection that pivots on the fact of our humanity, of what it means to be human. Fiction reveals us to ourselves as individuals. We may read a book whose main character acts, thinks, and speaks as if they are our mirror image, our very own doppelganger, and this is the magic and beauty of the book, for this resemblance ignites an association between us and the character, us and the book, us and the writer. But, as with nonfiction, which records the details of history and the biographical lives of great individuals who have shaped it, fiction also illuminates human character, the psychology of human beings, on an individual and more universal level. We may all look, speak, and act differently on the surface, but our needs, desires, and motivations are essentially the same underneath; it is our actions that illustrate these basic human traits and individualize us to a great degree, creating our character in the sight of others, whether it be indifferent, good, or evil.
Beyond the fact that books reveal us to ourselves as individuals and delineate the profound truth that we are all fundamentally the same, uniting us in the commonality of our fears, hopes, dreams, emotions, and passions, books are the repositories of our past history as a species, depicting our struggles for freedom and redemption, progress and equality, innovation and success, love and power, and pleasure and happiness against the suffering and pain, all of which emphasize the agony and ecstasy of what it means to be human and part of something infinitely bigger and greater than ourselves, the human race itself always in motion in the flux of creation.
Books are tools of cultural memory, wherein we find the story and history of our many multifaceted traditions and innovations as a race (always searching, questioning, in conflict with ourselves, with others, with Nature, society, and the cosmos, and the ever-elusive God that may or may not be behind it, the ground upon which all this restlessly moves) and as a multitude of nations that have gone to war with others and with ourselves. Books are vehicles of cultural and historical memory because they bring the progress and struggles of the human race out of the dark past into the light of the present, and usher us forward, acting as signposts and torches that mark and signal our path away toward a future not yet fully conceived or born, but nevertheless which is built from the glorious and devastating events that definitively and irrevocably altered our progress as a species.
Books speak. They contain the voices of individuals from the past telling us who we are as human beings, individually and as a race, by showing us in great meditative detail who they were as individuals and who we were as a race in times long gone. The depths of the events and peoples of the past can only be truly plumbed by preserving the art and culture of those times, which conserves our varied histories as a nations and peoples across time and space, and most of all, as human beings with similar thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and passions that make us one family.