Source
for photograph:
https://static.posters.cz/image/1300/art-photo/dandelion-i83243.jpg
Ray
Bradbury, described as
Midwest surrealist, is
author of well-known
science fiction novels such as
Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
Yet, he did not accomodate to the label himself as he believed that
science-fiction was a possibility of the real in the future and not a
fantasy. Fantasy is
deemed unreal.
A
childhood encounter with Mr. Electrico on a Carnival (funfair)
inveigled him with the power of eternity. See
anecdote here. Anointed with this power, he truly believed the
prophecy and decided that his destiny had been written when he was
twelve. He, indeed, became eternal through the immanence of his
writing.
Dandelion
Wine Ray Bradbury’s
semiautobiographical novel, set in the summer of 1928 in the fictional Green Town, based on his
home town Waukegan, Illinois, “packs all the joys of summer in a
bottle”:
“Dandelion
Wine is nothing if it is not they boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the
fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst
of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under
the trees to seed the blood” (intro ix)
The
locale nostalgia of childhood dreams and fantasies, of endless
counting of ritual actions, freeze the destructive power of things
to pass. Revisiting Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” where old
age is a “paltry thing” and the poetic voice veers from mortal
affairs by hankering to be turned into an artifice of eternity in the
unending and repetitive circles of history, gyres,
Bradbury hoists sails to a simpler world of childhood joy and fears
“old
gods’ marmalade;” “the porch calm and bold;” “my
grandfather, a myth indeed” who supersedes Plato; “Grandmma
sewing the raveled sleeve of care;” “uncles gathered with their
smokes;” “Yets still we knew ourselves. The sum? Byzantium,
Byzantium”
On
a first summer ritual, Douglas Spaulding and Tom Spaulding venture
into the forest to pick fox grapes and wild strawberries with their
father. Douglas is exhilarated with the first grand revelation of
being alive, something he says “he mustn’t forget.” A parade
of characters and town affairs interlude as short stories that conform the thread of that summer. Thus, the
landscape of the novel is contoured by rituals and revelations:
Rickety machines that have lost their purpose, the tour-de-force of
the new versus the old, untimely encounters of unrequited love, the
attempt to scaffold the understanding of the world through the eyes
of the children: a happy ending is a “good night sleep,” “I
did not know old ladies had first names,” things and people Douglas
cannot depend on:
“YOU
CANNOT DEPEND ON PEOPLE BECAUSE….
….They
go away.
…Strangers
die.
...people
you know fairly well die.
...friends
die.
...people
murder people, like in books.
..your
own folks can die.
IF
ALL OF THIS IS TRUE ...THEN… I, DOUGLAS SPAULDING, SOME DAY
….MUST...”
On
a visit to the funfair, Douglas holds the belief that some questions
might be answered through
the Tarot Witch machine.
The tarot machine runs out of ink, and the "Fates and Furies"
do not assuage his curiosity. A fantasy of trapped princesses
and knight- in- cuirass overpowers him with the belief that there is a hidden message
in the blank card. He sets to liberate the broken machine / trapped
lady from the foul mistreatment of the villainous Mr Black. Lemon
juice might have done the trick of blankness, and a hidden message
might lurk:
“the beautiful blank but promising white card” (page 204)
