The original 1952 UK publication of The Illustrated Man omits four stories (and has done since its first printing), and replaces them with two others. Interestingly, the content of the British version of The Illustrated Man, which I read on my most recent revisiting of these tales, differs significantly from the American original. His short stories had been appearing in a variety of magazines since 1946, and although his first collection of stories, Dark Carnival (1948), published by the famously esoteric firm of Arkham House, had not brought immediate success, his reputation would be cemented in 1953 by the time of the publication of Fahrenheit 451. When The Illustrated Man was published in 1951, Bradbury had one success under his belt already: the series of interconnected tales of the human colonization of Mars, The Martian Chronicles (1950). The stories, for the most part, had been previously published rather than being written specifically for the book, and there is no particular unifying theme. When the tattooed man falls asleep, the narrator studies him, and recounts the stories told by the moving pictures through the book. He then explains why they drive others away: after a certain hour, the illustrations, tattooed on him by an old witch, come to life and tell stories. The tattooed man reveals his illustrations, and briefly tells the tale of their creation. The trick played in The Illustrated Man is closely akin to that used in The Martian Chronicles, in which a number of stories are tied together by one loose narrative, in this case, that of a tattooed wanderer who meets the narrator, who is camping during a walking tour of Wisconsin. And I think that I may have traced the root of my aversion down… to Ray Bradbury’s 1951 classic, The Illustrated Man. They make me vaguely uneasy when I see them in the wild.
Despite their proliferation among certain strata of society, and their historical root (I’ve read that upper class late Victorian ladies used to get them, including Winston Churchill’s mother, who had a “discrete snake” tattooed on one wrist), I think I’ll be happier in the distant future not having ever had one. I’ve never really seen the point in them. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury (HarperCollins UK, 2008)
0 kommentar(er)
