Laughter and Freedom in Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes

As the author of The Martian Chronicles, The October Country, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury is familiar to most people as someone who, since the 1950's, has introduced more young readers to horror and the macabre than almost any living writer. His energetic fantasies, usually centered around pre-adolescent boys, have won him a huge readership in America and abroad. Something Wicked This Way Comes, the subject of this article, was not originally published as a children's book, but over the years (it was first published in 1962) it has steadily found an audience among young readers. Recently, Bradbury turned his book into a screenplay for Walt Disney productions. The filmed version of the invasion of idyllic Green Town, Illinois, one night in late October by a supernatural carnival has revived interest in the book which has been reprinted in a hardcover edition.

With this growing readership have come critics who have examined the book in relation to genre. They are divided into those who want to read it as a Christian allegory and those who want to read it as bearing Freudian symbolic or archetypal meanings (see discussion in Mogen 119-127). The one exception to this rule is Stephen King's deft appreciation of the book in his Danse Macabre, which manages to weigh the merits of both readings while providing another, more complex way of discussing it. King claims that his first experiene with real horror came when he heard a radio broadcast of Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven!" (one of the stories collected in The Martian Chronicles) in 1951. Although he now finds Bradbury's style, so attractive to him as an adolescent because of its rhetorical excesses, to be a bit oversweet, he still finds Something Wicked This Way Comes a powerful book of childhood remembered in myth. King's analysis tries to understand this myth in terms of Nietzsche's aesthetics, which allows for a dynamic tension between Apollonian norm and Dionysian transgression. I do not propose to repeat the details of King's analysis here, but surely this kind of reading of Bradbury's fantasy is an advance over other readings which try to "decide" on the book's meaning in terms of one interpretive scheme or another, as if a fantasy novel were a monologue expressing only one point of view, usually identified as the author's.

Yet King's reading, while acknowledging the role that "admiring laughter" plays in the book with regard to the adult understanding of the myth of childhood, and while recognizing the capacity of Bradbury's "myth-children" to enjoy their terror, does not analyze the role of laughter in this fantasy. Nor does it examine the ways in which laughter might be related to a Nietzschean reading of the transvaluation of values. King is content to call the book a "moral horror tale" not so much different from Pinocchio's scary encounter on Pleasure Island, where boys who indulge in their baser desires (smoking cigars and playing snooker, for instance) are turned into donkeys (King 329). For King, as for Bradbury's "myth-children," the carnival represents a false freedom, a taboo land made magically portable, traveling from place to place and even from time to time with its freight of freaks and its glamorous attractions.

Beyond the obvious appeal of the book's temptation theme and the father-son relationships which are strong in it, I think that laughter, which has such a primal, visceral function for Bradbury as a sign of the capacity to affirm and to enjoy life, may be the key to understanding its success among young readers, for laughter is the primary means by which the fearsome carnival with its evil sideshows is unmasked, defeated, and transformed. Still, and however much we may laugh along with the story, it is also important to understand the truth of laughter on the adult, and supposedly more intellectual, level. Laughter is also the means by which we experience a transvaluation of values in which our notions of bad conscience and...