Ray Bradbury – I Sing the Body Electric!

Finished: December 9, 2011

2011 Book Count: 61

I was just looking at my 2011 Book Count Post-Mortem, and I realized that I hadn’t written about many of the books that made my Notably Excellent Books of 2011 list. Oops. so I thought I should start, seeing as how I liked them so very much, and I thought I would start with Ray Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric!*

I Sing the Body Electric! is a collection of some of Ray Bradbury’s short stories, including the title story, which he adapted into an episode of The Twilight Zone. I really like Ray Bradbury, who is most known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (which I also read in 2011, and greatly enjoyed).

The Electric Grandmother

When I first thought of writing about I Sing the Body Electric! I thought it would be really easy and quick – but then I thoght I had better go and read it again, so I would be all fresh for writing this. Well, I turned on ye olde eReader, and the first thing I saw was that the title is taken from a poem (of the same name) by Walt Whitman – and thanks to my purchase last month, I had the ability to go and look up and read said poem very quickly. Then I remembered the episode of The Twilight Zone (its 100th, in fact), which I had also better go watch if I was to say anything intelligent at all (also you know how I can’t resist a book adaptation on television). I had also better make sure that I read that particular story again very closely. The outcome of all of this is that I’ve been ‘researching’ for some hours now.

So in order not to go on forever, I thought I would just stick with the title story. The story is about three children whose mother has just died, and their father feels they need someone to care for them – someone more than just a sitter or a teacher, what they need is a grandmother. Unfortunately, all their biological grandmothers are dead, so what to do but call on the Fantocchini Company to build one for you. The perfect grandmother built to your specifications. As I mentioned before, the title of the story comes from the Walt Whitman poem of the same name – and Ray Bradbury uses a piece of it in the dedication of the book:

I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

The poem is very beautiful – it’s an ode to humanity as seen in the reflection of the human form itself, which is very much what Mr. Bradbury does so well in conveying with this story.

The Electric Grandmother is a machine, but not a machine because she is in the form of a woman, and not just any women, but the women all children want for her most to be.

Her’s was a mask that was all mask but only one face for one person at a time. So in crossing a room, having touched one child, on the way, beneath the skin, the wondrous shift went on, and by the time she reached the next child, why, true mother of that child she was! looking upon him or her out of the battlements of their own fine bones.

So while the Electric Grandmother doesn’t look like a machine or talk like a machine or behave like a machine and is really and truly more than a machine, it is her very machine-ness that, in the end, really brings her closest to the hearts and minds of the children. The Electric Grandmother, unlike their mother, can never die, can never run away. She can be loved without the fear of loss. She can be loved with the certainty of return.

When all the children are grown, the Electric Grandmother must return to the factory to pass on what she knows and to wait for the time when they will need her again, because when they are old they “shall inhabit the nursery again, never fear”.

The Twilight Zone episode was penned by Mr. Bradbury himself (he wrote several scripts for The Twilight Zone, though this was the only one that ever got produced) and it made me cry. It was a little more sentimental than the story, if that is at all possible – and something about seeing the love of the Electric Grandmother for the children portrayed visually reduced me to a quivering snotty mess. Rod Stirling’s closing narration:

A fable, most assuredly, but who’s to say that in some distant moment there might be an assembly line producing a gentle product in the form of a grandmother, whose stock and trade is love. A fable, for sure, but who’s to say.

*Let it be known that I love it when book titles have exclamation points.