 "Photo: Photo courtesy of Chloe Robins")
Sitting on a platform in a small room in Kresge Hall Saturday, Weinberg senior Alex Robins attempted to recite from memory Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451."
Before the event, on Thursday afternoon, he had said he fully expected the attempt to be "a complete and utter failure."
"The truth of the matter is, I don't know it perfectly and there are going to be huge gaps," Robins said. "But at every turn, I'm interested in this not necessarily as a demonstration of mental acuity but one of a gesture, sort of like an ethical gesture that this is something one should try to do, to try and know as much as possible and that goes even to the level of books."
And a failure it was - at least as a flawless recitation. Robins' small and inconstant audience witnessed not a perfect display of memorization so much as his process of memorizing the novel, which features a future totalitarian state in which books are banned.
At the end of the novel, the protagonist joins a renegade group who memorize books as a form of resistance.
For his own recitation, Robins sat on his wooden chair with the book on a table beside him, referring to it often when he found himself unable to continue from memory.
When faced with a passage that escaped him, Robins did not simply read the text and continue, but furiously and fervently repeated the words, testing different inflections on the dialogue and occasionally pausing as if to convey that the true meaning of words had become clear.
"I think in some ways it's staying true to the book in that, in the end, people who remember books practice reciting them," said Weinberg senior Chiara Montecchi, who attended about an hour of Robins' performance. "So I think part of this is not so much for him to perform it flawlessly from beginning to end, but his process of learning the book by heart."
Robins said his audience was never more than "one or two people trickling in and out" and that he wasn't surprised, due to the content of the performance.
Medill sophomore Elliot Reichert said he came and went from Robins' performance throughout the day, seeing Robins progress from a fluid recitation to a struggle at the end, when Robins began to skip around and finally ending at the six-hour mark.
"It was intense and sometimes kind of dull because the content didn't change very quickly, but I really appreciate his artistic endeavor in doing this because it's a complex artistic statement," Reichert said. "He was supposed to have recited the whole thing in six hours without referring to the text … He really struggled to do what he set out to do, but I think the failure is more poignant that a simple six-hour recitation would have been."
The project was conceived as part of a class Robins is enrolled in called "Art and the Archive." Robins said he was especially interested in the idea of destroying archives, specifically book burning - a study that brought him to "Fahrenheit."
"I was always fascinated with how, at the end of the story, there's that group of book people living in the forest," Robins said. "I've been enchanted by that idea for so long and it seemed like something that didn't require waiting for a totalitarian regime that was burning all the books to do. It is, in its own right, a significant gesture to do even now."
KayleighRoberts2007@northwestern.edu
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