The Placard Of Law 451 Summary
The placard of law 451-A3H greeted Paul Sheldon as he sat down at his desk in the small, half-lit room. Like the derelict calendar on the wall beside it—somehow perpetually fixed on the image of a boy frozen in February—the cracked ceiling, and the gaping maw of the Royal type-writer in front of him, the sight of the law itself, was a hated but all too familiar feature of the surrounding space. Closing his eyes, he could, without any mental effort, trace the curled and fraying edges of its pages. If he listened carefully, he could detect the rasping voice of every vowel, the catch of every consonant as the stale air in the room shifted the around the sea of government issued syllables. And, if he really focused, as he too often did, Paul could
even imagine a wave of words as “sanctioned by the United Republic,” crashing into the very crevices of his brain, staining them black, so that he would have no choice but to drown in an unrepentant void of ink. The visual was both comforting, gut wrenching, and so vivid (always so vivid) each time that it came to him in these moments. So that, when he again opened his eyes on the otherwise dingy room, he had to wait for this oncoming repressive wave to once again crest, break, and retreat back behind the barrier of his ever-reluctant and restrictive reality.
After all, it had been five years since the government had outlawed Popular Culture and its writing as a crime against the intelligence of the state. A whole 1,825 days in which Paul had folded himself repeatedly into the cracked leather of his office chair and starred at the jagged-tooth grin of his broken type-writer; the similarly rapacious leer of the law biting into him from above. Or, to put it more succinctly, it had been a total of 43,800 hours, 2,628,000 minutes and counting since he had lost his access to legitimate Authorship and become nothing more than a tool for the use and abuse of Annie Wilkes, and her numerous clients. Since he had been reduced to nothing more than the novel and ‘naughty’ pet writer—Annie’s dirty birdy—hidden inside of the Sidewinder “Library.”
even imagine a wave of words as “sanctioned by the United Republic,” crashing into the very crevices of his brain, staining them black, so that he would have no choice but to drown in an unrepentant void of ink. The visual was both comforting, gut wrenching, and so vivid (always so vivid) each time that it came to him in these moments. So that, when he again opened his eyes on the otherwise dingy room, he had to wait for this oncoming repressive wave to once again crest, break, and retreat back behind the barrier of his ever-reluctant and restrictive reality.
After all, it had been five years since the government had outlawed Popular Culture and its writing as a crime against the intelligence of the state. A whole 1,825 days in which Paul had folded himself repeatedly into the cracked leather of his office chair and starred at the jagged-tooth grin of his broken type-writer; the similarly rapacious leer of the law biting into him from above. Or, to put it more succinctly, it had been a total of 43,800 hours, 2,628,000 minutes and counting since he had lost his access to legitimate Authorship and become nothing more than a tool for the use and abuse of Annie Wilkes, and her numerous clients. Since he had been reduced to nothing more than the novel and ‘naughty’ pet writer—Annie’s dirty birdy—hidden inside of the Sidewinder “Library.”