Writers have always feared and worshipped the most perilous ironist of all — the restless, consuming, and merciless fire.
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
Few first lines have scorched themselves so deeply into memory. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury gave us a world where firemen set fires instead of putting them out. One particular fireman, Guy Montag, gave us one of the greatest ironies in literature – the book burner who begins by deriving pleasure from burning forbidden books is ultimately awakened by the flames of rebellion. Prophetic of Bradbury to predict how books would be perceived as dangerous by the power wielders just because they can make people think, feel and be more real. Go back a few millenia and the fire of rebellion blazes a dichotomy of pleasure and destruction, knowledge and censorship, to the very beginning of myth itself, when the impudent titan Prometheus literally steals fire from the sky and gives it to mankind shivering in the dark. Afterwards, his rebellion is punished gruesomely when he is chained to a rock and his liver daily pecked at by an eagle. Not the kind of ending he deserved for his act of courage and generosity but when has fire ever promised mercy? Writers have assigned the extremest of emotions to this element- the fire of rebellion, retribution, desire and longing, that’s probably why fire, in my opinion, is the most dangerous ironist of all.
The fire that burned Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre brought to the fore ugly truths of repression and restraint that the society prefers to forget. Bertha Mason, locked away in her attic sets the house alight, burning through the line of respectability. And amidst that fire, also emerge flames of passion and freedom when Jane says, “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me.” A big thing to say (and write) in the nineteenth century. The fire of defiance doubling up as the fire of self-discovery.
James Baldwin writes about the fire of reckoning when he borrows the Biblical lines, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign,” and quotes from a song by a slave spiritual, “No more water, the fire next time!” He invokes the fire of conscience when he writes, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” For Baldwin, love is fire in its purest form. Revealing and redemptive. Across these stories, fire keeps changing masks but the essence remains constant. Prometheus’s gift, Bradbury’s fear, Brontë’s passion, Baldwin’s truth.
Every time we play with fire, it tests us on whether we can withstand the heat. Our civilizations started with fire and fire also marks the end of most. We light candles for prayer, love, death; we burn bridges, calories, time; like moths, we chase the light and every time we encounter it in any form, each spark reminds us how sacred, volatile, consuming and unforgiving this ironist is. Even when Prometheus stole it, we learnt to our peril that the flames cannot be conquered, that fire can never entirely be ours.
