Ray Bradbury and Fantasy

Author(s): Anita T. Sullivan

Source: The English Journal, Vol. 61, No. 9 (Dec., 1972), pp. 1309-1314
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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English
Journal
December 1972
*
Volume 61
*
Number Nine
Ray Bradbury
and
Fantasy
Anita T. Sullivan
Free Lance Writer
Arlington, Virginia
ELEMENTS
of what
may
be called
"fantasy"
were
present
in
Ray
Bradbury's
works from the
beginning
of
his
writing
career. His own recent re-
mark
distinguishing
science fiction from
fantasy
in literature is that "science fic-
tion could
happen."'
This
implies,
of
course,
that
fantasy
could not
happen.
But in
today's
world,
where
change
oc-
curs at such
rapid
rate,
nobody
would
venture to state
dogmatically
that
any
idea is
incapable
of realization. There-
fore,
whether or not a work of literature
is
fantasy
becomes more a matter of the
author's intention rather than a matter
measurable
by objective
criteria. This is
especially
true of an author such as Brad-
bury,
who
by
his own admission writes
1
Mary Harrington
Hall,
"A Conversation
with
Ray Bradbury
and Chuck
Jones,
the
Fantasy
Makers," Psychology Today
(April
1968) 37.
both science fiction and
fantasy.2
Bradbury's
own brand of
fantasy ap-
parently
came to birth in the world of
the carnival. His
imagination
was nur-
tured with carnival
imagery,
both
through
the
teachings
of his Aunt Neva
and his own
experiences.
Whenever a
travelling
circus or carnival came
through
Waukegan
in the 1920s and
early
1930s,
Bradbury
and his
younger
brother were
always present
from the time the train
pulled
in until the last
piece
of cotton
candy
was sold.3
Young Bradbury
was affected
deeply
by
the
spectacle
afforded such
shows,
and the carnival became for him a sort
of subconscious touchstone for a whole
2
Ray Bradbury,
S
Is for Space
(New
York:
Doubleday, 1966; reprinted
New York: Bantam
Books, 1970),
p.
1.
3
Ray Bradbury, "Any
Friend of Trains Is a
Friend of
Mine," Life (August
2, 1968) 49.
1309
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1310 ENGLISH
JOURNAL
system
of moods and
images
which
emerged
later in his
writings.
As a
result,
the carnival world can be
thought
of as
a
clearinghouse
for
Bradbury's imagina-
tion-the
place
where he
goes
for his
symbols
when he is
writing
a tale of
horror,
nostalgia, fantasy,
or some com-
bination of the three.
TT is easy enough to point to "carnival
imagery"
in his horror tales of the
1940s. The
opening
lines of "The
Jar"
(1944),
for
example,
take the reader im-
mediately
to a carnival sideshow:
It was one of those
things they keep
in a
jar
in the tent of a sideshow on the out-
skirts of a
little,
drowsy
town. One of
those
pale things drifting
in alcohol
plas-
ma,
forever
dreaming
and
circling,
with
its
peeled,
dead
eyes staring
out at
you
and never
seeing you (The
October
Country, Ballantine, 1955,
p.
81).
Many
of his horror tales contain
witches,
skeletons, dwarfs,
magicians,
and carni-
val "freaks." Even "The
Big
Black and
White Game"
(1945),
his first
straight
tale,
emits a breath of
fantasy by
the use
of
images throughout
the
story
which
link the
Negro
baseball team with black
magic.
In the 1940s
Bradbury primed
his
fantasy
sensibilities
by creating
a
family
of
slightly
offbeat witches who are latter-
day
remnants of what
(they
claim)
was
a
long
and noble line of
highly
effective
magicians.4
Their
magic
is
strangely
er-
ratic, however,
and not
altogether
obedi-
ent to their commands. Uncle
Einar,
for
example,
in the
story
"Uncle Einar"
(1947),
would be a
perfectly ordinary
man
except
that he has
green wings.
This
is
quite
an embarrassment to him because
he is afraid to
fly
in the
daytime
lest he
be mistaken for an Unidentified
Flying
Object
and shot down. He seems to be
unable to work
any spells
or even to
play
4
Bradbury
himself had an ancestor who was
tried as a witch in Salem in the late 17th cen-
tury. "Biography,"
Wilson
Library
Bulletin
(November 1964)
268.
little
magical practical jokes.
He has
only
one claim to
witchery,
his cumbersome
wings,
which his wife finds
quite handy
for out-of-the
ordinary
domestic chores.
But of
Bradbury's
tales at this time
more were horror than
fantasy. Perhaps
he would
regard
an
attempt
to
distinguish
between horror and
fantasy
in his works
as mere semantic
quibbling.
The differ-
ence,
it seems to
me,
can almost be de-
scribed as a matter of
levity.
In the hor-
ror
tales,
he was
completely
serious and
trying
his best to achieve a shock effect
upon
his readers. In the best of
these,
he
probably
succeeded because he also
achieved,
in the
writing process,
a shock
effect
upon
himself. He was
trying
to
exorcise
something
in himself as he wrote.
Thus his horror tales were not written to
enable his readers to
escape,
but rather
to cause them to suffer so that
they might
be cleansed.
(I
am
certain, however,
that
Bradbury
did not
consciously
think these
things
as he
wrote.)
The
fantasy
stories,
on the other
hand,
allow the readers'
spirits
to
expand
rather than to
contract,
as is the effect in the horror tales. The
thrust of his effort seems to lie in the
creation of a
mood, and,
lost in this
mood,
the readers can
escape
to a
Secondary
World. This
ability
to create a
Secondary
World of
fantasy
J.
R. R. Tolkien calls
"sub-creation" and claims it is the most
potent
and most
"nearly pure"
form of
art.5
THE
first
story
of
Bradbury's
in which
the element of
fantasy
far out-
weighed
that of horror was
"Jack-in-
the-Box"
(1947).
In this tale he creates
a
complete Secondary
World
in
which
the characters move and
speak,
and
only
at the
very
end does the
Primary
World
intrude to break the
spell.
A
young boy
has never been outside the house and to
him it is the entire universe. He has been
told that his
father,
whom he
regards
as
5
J.
R. R.
Tolkien,
"On
Fairy
Stories,"
in
Tree and
Leaf (London:
George
Allen & Un-
win, 1964),
p.
44.
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RAY BRADBURY AND FANTASY 1311
God,
was killed
by
"Beasts" in the
gar-
den,
and that for him to
go
outside
would mean a similar death.
Through
this universe of hushed rooms he wan-
ders
alone,
or with his
mother-teacher,
a
fragile
creature of
pathetic
innocence.
From the
highest
stair he
gazed
down
through
four intervals
of
Universe.
...
Father
(or God, as Mother often called
him)
had raised its mountains of wall-
papered plaster long ago.
This was
Father-
God's
creation,
in which stars blazed at
the flick of a switch. And the sun was
Mother,
and Mother was the
sun,
about
which all the Worlds
swung, turning.
And
Edwin,
a small dark
meteor, spun
up
around
through
the dark
carpets
and
shimmering tapestries
of
space.
You saw
him rise to vanish on vast comet stair-
cases,
on hikes and
explorations
(The
Oc-
tober
Country,
p.
158).
But Edwin's world is
suddenly
shat-
tered. He comes downstairs one
morning
to find his mother
lying
on the
floor,
completely
cold and silent. She does not
respond
to his efforts to arouse
her,
and
finally
in
desperation
and
despair
he
leaves the
house,
an act which for him
amounts to
committing
suicide. In the
garden
he finds a
Jack-in-the-Box
with
which he had been
playing
inside the
house a few
days
before. He had
flung
it out the window in a fit of
anger
when
the
top
refused to
open.
Now the box is
broken and the
Jack
doll lies on the
grass.
"Freckles of
sunlight quivered
on
the broken lid and touched
tremblingly
over and over the face of the
Jack,
jumped
out and
sprawled
with its arms
overhead in an eternal
gesture
of free-
dom"
(p.
171).
The
boy
is
free,
and the
story
closes as he runs in a
frenzy
of
delight through
the town outside the
walls of his
house,
astounding
the local
people by
his constant
cry,
"I'm
dead,
I'm
dead,
I'm
glad
I'm dead"
(p.
173).
B
RADBURY
here
clearly
demon-
strates his
ability
to fantasize, or sub-
create. The
story
is out of the main-
stream, however,
even when
placed
in
the context of later
Bradbury fantasy
tales,
for
"Jack-in-the-Box"
depicts
a
"you-go-there"
situation rather than a
"they-come-here"
one. The author is
transporting
his readers to a self-con-
tained
Secondary
World,
which he
gives
"the inner consistence of
reality,"
to
quote
Tolkien
again (p.
43).
That
is,
the author makes his
Secondary
World,
for the time
being,
the
only
world
there is. Fantasies which would be of
this
type
are works such as Tolkien's
Lord
of
the
Rings
trilogy,
James
Stephens'
Crock
of
Gold, James
Branch
Cabell's
Jurgen,
George
Macdonald's
Lilith and
Phantastes, James
Thurber's
Thirteen
Clocks,
and of
course,
many
fairy
tales,
medieval
romances,
and
stories written for children. In this kind
of
fantasy,
the author must convince his
readers that what is
happening
is what is
supposed
to be
happening,
even if the
laws which
prevail
are
contrary
to those
which function in the normal world.
Bradbury
has written few of what I
would call
"you-go-there,"
or what Tol-
kien calls
"nearly pure"
fantasies. There
are at least two with an Oriental mood
and
setting,
both
published
in
1953,
"The
Golden
Kite,
the Silver Wind" and
"The
Flying
Machine." "Death and the
Maiden"
(1960)
is
definitely
another of
these,
and
"Perhaps
We Are
Going
Away"
(1962)
might
also be called
pure
fantasy.
Aside from these
few,
the re-
mainder of
Bradbury's fantasy pieces
are
what I have called the
"they-come-here"
type.
Here the
Primary
World with all
of its rules and laws is considered the
norm,
and the
fantasy
involves some kind
of intrusion
by
creatures or ideas which
ordinarily
would be confined to a Sec-
ondary
World. Most often there is no
real intrusion-no
green
monsters
pour-
ing
down from the
sky-but merely
a
temporary
distortion of the
physical
principles governing
our known world
or a shift in
perspective
which allows
the reader and/or the characters to view
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1312 ENGLISH JOURNAL
their world
through something
other
than a
plain glass.
IN
a rather
ingenuous
statement in 1968
during
an interview with
Mary
Hall,
quoted
earlier,
Bradbury
described the
nature of his
fantasy writing.
"I wrote a
love
story recently,"
he
said,
"with
just
a little twist on
reality" (p.
31).
Almost
without fail
Bradbury
cannot resist the
use of a "little twist" to
keep
his stories
from
being straightforward
narrative ac-
counts of events as
they might appear
to
the
average person. Examples
of these
milder fantasies would be "Shoreline at
Sunset"
(1959),
"Come into
My
Cellar"
(1960),
"Forever
Voyage"
(1960),
and
"A Miracle of Rare Device"
(1962).
But
sometimes the "little twist" becomes
much
stronger.
A hole is torn in the
fabric,
and
something
unauthorized
gains
temporary entry
to
upset
the normal
order of
things.
This becomes the
"they-
come-here"
type
of
fantasy
referred to
above. A classic
example
would be
Charles Williams' The Place
of
the Lion.
Bradbury's
best
example-and probably
the finest work of
fantasy
he has
yet
done-would be his novel
Something
Wicked This
Way Comes,
published
in
1962.
In this work the invaders from the
Secondary
World are the
"autumn
people,"
who function in darkness and
are the stuff of which Evil is made.
By
this
writing Bradbury
has left behind
the summer of
nostalgia
and has entered
the autumn of
fantasy.
The novel is a
good example
of the fusion of
fantasy,
horror,
and
nostalgia
which he
manages
so well.
Nostalgia
seems to function best
for him in
summer,
horror and
fantasy
in
the fall. His Aunt Neva instilled in him
an awe of and fascination with autumn.
The October
Country
is the title he
chose for an
anthology
of his
early
hor-
ror
tales,
many
of which are set in the
fall,
and The Autumn
People
is the title
of another of his
anthologies. Bradbury
was born in summer, August 22, but
close
enough
to fall so that its evidence
could be
subtly
felt. He has said
that,
if
he had his
choice,
he would have been
born in October.6
THE setting
for
Something
Wicked
This
Way
Comes is
October,
just
before
Halloween,
in the same Green
Town, Illinois,
which was the back-
ground
for Dandelion Wine. Two
boys,
Will
Halloway
and
Jim
Nightshade,
and
Will's father are the chief characters.
Through
the
eyes
of the
boys, Bradbury
allows his
imagination
to create an eerie
nightmarish
mood which he sustains
throughout
the book.
Through
Mr.
Halloway,
he
expresses
his own
philoso-
phy. Although
the
story
takes
place
in
the same town which is the
setting
for
the
nostalgic
Dandelion
Wine,
and in-
volves two adolescent
boys,
there the
resemblance
stops.
The mood in the sec-
ond book is
distinctly
autumn,
even
without the actual fact of its
being
Oc-
tober. There is a conflict
here,
a threat
to be dealt
with;
for the "autumn
people"
who have come to Green Town threaten
to
engulf
it with terror. Mr.
Halloway
describes them:
"For these
beings,
fall is the ever normal
season,
the
only
weather,
there be no
choice
beyond.
Where do
they
come
from? The dust. Where do
they go?
The
grave.
Does blood stir their veins? No:
the
night
wind. What ticks in their head?
The worm. What
speaks
from their
mouth? The toad. What sees from their
eye?
The snake. What hears with their
ear? The
abyss
between the stars.
They
sift the human storm for
souls,
eat flesh
of
reason,
fill tombs with sinners.
They
frenzy
forth. In
gusts they beetle-scurry,
creep,
thread, filter, motion,
make all
moons
sullen,
and
surely
cloud all clear-
run waters. The
spider
web hears
them,
trembles-breaks. Such are the autumn
people.
Beware of them"
(p.
142).
The autumn
people
are
represented
6
"A Portrait of
Genius,"
Show
(December
1964) 53.
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RAY BRADBURY AND FANTASY 1313
here
by
a small
travelling
carnival which
comes to town in the middle of Hallow-
een
night
and sets
up
its dark tents out-
side the town.
"Cooger
and Dark's Carni-
val" it
is,
and
right away
the
boys recog-
nize that it is more than it seems on the
surface. The
hall
of mirrors lures
people
in and shows them reflections of a
part
of
themselves that
they
once were and can
no
longer
be,
so
they
are
plunged
into
aching despair.
The carousel behaves
normally during
the
day,
but at
night
it
runs at
supernormal speed,
and whoever
rides it adds
years
to his life
within
minutes,
or turns from a man into a
squalling
babe. The Dust Witch travels
around in a balloon
searching
for "Good"
people
to
destroy,
for the aim of the
autumn
people
is to
slowly
leach out the
forces of Good from
everyone
in the
town so that Evil can claim its own.
Only
the two
boys
and a
quiet, scholarly,
mid-
dle-aged janitor
stand in their
way.
The theme
running through
the book
is that Evil is a shadow: Good is a real-
ity.
Evil cannot exist
except
in the
vacuum left when
people
let their Good
become not an active
form,
not a
pump-
ing
in their
veins,
but
just
a
memory,
an
intention. As
Bradbury
has indicated in
other stories and
articles,
he feels that
the
potential
for evil exists like cancer
germs,
dormant in all of
us,
and unless
we
keep
our Good in fit condition
by
actively using
it,
it will lose its
power
to
fight
off the
poisons
in our
system.
Mr.
Halloway,
late in the
story,
realizes
that the
presence
of
"Cooger
and Dark's
Carnival" has caused the darkness in him-
self to wax.
"The stuff of
nightmare
is their
plain
bread.
They
butter it with
pain
..."
(p.
147).
"All
the meannesses we
harbor,
they
borrow in redoubled
spades. They're
a
billion times itchier for
pain,
sorrow,
and
sickness than the average man. We salt
our
lives with other
people's
sins. Our
flesh to us tastes sweet. But the carnival
doesn't care if it stinks
by moonlight
in-
stead of
sun,
so
long
as it
gorges
on fear
and
pain.
That's the
fuel,
the
vapor
that
spins
the
carousel,
the raw stuffs of
terror,
the
excruciating agony
of
guilt,
the
scream from real or
imagined
wounds.
The carnival sucks that
gas, ignites
it,
and
chugs along
its
way" (pp.
148-9).
Then he
goes
on to admit what
every-
one in Green Town feels but does not
know
why:
"Maybe
I've
always
dreamt about such
carnivals,
and was
just waiting
for it to
come
so's
to see it
once,
and nod. Now
that tent show
plays my
bones like a
marimba.
"My
skeleton knows.
"It tells me.
"I tell
you" (p.
149).
S
INCE Evil thrives on the vacuum left
by
lack of
Good,
Mr.
Halloway
con-
cludes that
by reactivating
the
positive
force within himself he
might
have a
chance to drive it
away.
But it is touch-
and-go,
for
already
the Dust Witch has
come and frozen the hearts of
Jim
and
Will,
sewn
up
their ears and their
eyes,
gummed up
their
lips,
so that now
they
are like
walking
zombies,
unable to exer-
cise their own wills. He too will become
that
way
if he doesn't work fast.
So,
when the Witch comes for
him,
Mr.
Halloway laughs.
He
laughs hysterically,
he
guffaws,
he chokes and hollers with
mirth. And the Witch flees. ".. .
chased,
bruised,
beaten
by
his
laugh
which
echoed,
rang,
swam to fill the marble
vaults,
she whirled at
last,
claws
razoring
the wild air and fled to fall downstairs"
(p.
170).
Making
use of his
unexpected
power,
Mr.
Halloway finally slays
the
Witch with a bullet on which he has
marked a smile. He and Will
bring
Jim
back to life with
hilarious
laughter,
and
the
scourge
of
"Cooger
and Dark's Carni-
val" is lifted from the town.
The mirth which
destroys
the Dust
Witch and
preserves
both Mr.
Hallo-
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1314 ENGLISH
JOURNAL
way
and the
boys
is a
powerful weapon
indeed. But it would not have such force
were it
merely
an
empty
social
laughter
or a malicious snicker. This
laughter
de-
rives its
energy
from its
progenitor,
which is love. With love to
give
it
impe-
tus,
it is as
lightning
in the hands of Zeus.
Love is the best
humanizing
force man
possesses, Bradbury
seems to be
saying
in
this book. He
expresses
the same idea in a
long
article he wrote in
Life
magazine
the same
year,
1962:
Above
all,
humanity
is an
Idea,
a
concept,
a
way
of
doing,
a motion toward
light
or
dark,
a selection between the will to
destroy
and the will to save. The more
times such selection tends toward the
Good,
the more human we
say
that
thing
is
becoming.
We must seek
ways
to know
and
encourage
the Good in
ourselves,
the
will toward
light.
. ..7
THE
idea of the
healing powers
of
love is
perhaps
most
beautifully
ex-
pressed
in the
story
"A Medicine for
Melancholy"
(1959).
The
story
is almost
a
parable.
A
young girl
in
eighteenth-
century
London is
slowly fading away
7Ray Bradbury, "Cry
the
Cosmos," Life
(September
14, 1962) 90.
before the
eyes
of her concerned
par-
ents. No doctor is able to
diagnose
her
illness,
and
finally
in
desperation they
take
her,
bed and
all,
and
put
her out-
side the front door so that the
passersby
can
try
their hand at
identifying
what
is
wrong
with her. A
young
Dustman
looks into her
eyes
and knows what is
wrong-she
needs love. He
suggests
that
she be left out all
night
beneath the
moon,
and
during
the
night
he visits her
and effects a cure. In the
morning
the
roses have returned to her cheeks and she
and her
family
dance in celebration. The
same situation occurred in Dandelion
JVine
when
Doug
almost died of a fever
and was cured
by
two bottles of air left
in the
night by
the local
junkman.
The
idea,
or
moral,
if that is a better
word,
expressed
in these
two
stories
seems to be at least
implicit
in the
major-
ity
of
Bradbury's
stories from the late
1950s
until the
present.
He did not cease
to be a teacher when he
stopped writing
science
fiction,
but he did
place
a mora-
torium
upon
the more
evangelistic
kind
of
moralizing
which he was
practicing
in the late 1940s and
early
1950s.
Now,
at
last,
his own sense of values seems to
have become
completely
at one with his
art.
To a Student of
Poetry
You tell me that the
poet
Is
imprisoned
on the
page
Behind
neat,
horizontal bars
Of words.
But have
you
never noticed
That the
key
is in the lock
And that
your imagination
Makes it turn?
Eleanor Dalton
Omaha,
Nebraska
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