recyc

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Recycling the texts of the culture: Walter M. Miller's 'A Canticle forLeibowitz.'

David Seed7,668 words22 September 1996ExtrapolationEXTPp257ISSN: 0014-5483; Volume v37; Issue n3English

Copyright 1996 Information Access Company. All rights reserved. COPYRIGHT 1996 Kent State University Press

* Introducing his survey of novels dealing with nuclear holocaust,Paul Brians writes: "nuclear war in fictions seems to signal the end ofdemocracy, not of humanity as such. Whereas the authors shy away fromdepicting racial death, they are fascinated by the prospect of thepostholocaust social collapse" (69). One of the most original treatmentsof this theme was Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959),which avoids the cliches of barbarism by presenting the aftermath ofnuclear war as a rerun of the Dark Ages and which traces out ahistorical sequence through its three books until the novel ends at apoint where nuclear war breaks out afresh. It is not unique to dramatizethe aftermath of a disaster as historical repetition. Richard Jefferiespursues this tack in After London (1885), where a vast lake hassubmerged the metropolis and the population has reverted to pastoraltribalism. Nor is it unique to use historical repetition as an ironiccomment on the present.

Philip K. Dick does as much in The World JonesMade (1956), which describes the rise to power of a demagogue as areplay of political events in the Germany of the 1930s. Miller, bycontrast, establishes a whole series of historical resemblances in hisnovel in order to examine how meaning is transmitted and how the natureof texts shifts from period to period. Critics of the novel have tendedto concentrate on Miller's religious themes at the expense of thenovel's textual intricacies. W. A. Senior, for instance, sees distortioneverywhere in the narrative and infers a rather bland message, namelythe "uncertainty of life in this world" (330), but scarcely gets togrips with the rhetorical nature of that uncertainty. A Canticle is avery rare example of the postnuclear genre where the cataclysm has adirect impact on the novel's own textual condition.

Miller's 1952 story "It Takes a Thief" (retitled "Big Joe and the NthGeneration") anticipates some of the central themes of A Canticle indepicting a postholocaust world where books have disappeared, survivingonly as "memorized ritual chants." Earth has been destroyed, and theprotagonist, a member of the scattered Mars colony, has been nailed upas if in crucifixion for stealing one of these chants. When he isunexpectedly released, he attempts to penetrate the lost archive (Fermi,


Einstein, and others have become a pantheon of "ancient gods") housed invaults guarded by priests and a monster named Big Joe. The latter turnsout to be a robot programmed to attack anyone who steps on certain floortiles before the entrance, therefore avoidable. Once inside the archivethe protagonist finds the records of the "Blaze of the Great Wind," andthe story ends with an expectation that this force can be recreated.(1)On a small scale here we encounter themes that Miller was to expand anddevelop in A Canticle: the loss of knowledge, the tenuous preservationof literacy by oral transmission, the priests' guardianship of thearchive, and the privileging of technology within that body of lostknowledge.

A Canticle opens with a discovery. The context is a new Dark Age whereone Brother Francis, a novice from the nearby Leibowitz Abbey, isperforming a lenten fast. An aged man appears out of the desert andshows him a rock that will complete the shelter he is building. When heremoves this rock, a "cave," which proves to be the remains of a falloutshelter from an earlier era, is revealed within which Francis finds ametal box containing a number of documents: a shopping list, a racingform, a note to a friend, and a blueprint. Francis is a member, weshould note, of a monastic order devoted to preserving the traces of aliteracy that has been lost. Other members of this same order have beencommitting works to memory, the so-called "bookleggers." In Fahrenheit451 (1953), which this detail recalls, the memorizers are evading thedominance of a centralized state, and for Susan Spencer the ending ofthat novel suggests that the text will prevail. By contrast, in ACanticle "the monks' painstakingly reconstructed `literacy' turns out tobe a world of signifiers with no corresponding signifieds to give themconcrete meaning" (Spencer 337). Furthermore, the "bootleggers" areacting in opposition to a popular wave of hostility against literacy.Although their title punningly associates them with illegality, they areacting within a world where civic order has broken down, indeed wherethey, and the Catholic remnant in general, are attempting toreconstitute some sort of order.

The contents of Francis's box can be construed as an enigmatic andperhaps random collection of metonymies, parts of a whole narrative andculture that have disappeared. Umberto Eco has discussed the"inferential walks" that readers take in constructing a fabula,interpretive exercises based on the possibilities opened up or excludedat any given point in a text (Role of the Reader 32).(2) Francis'documents tease the reader toward such an act of interpretation, buttheir narrative context--how they came to be left in the shelter--isnever recovered. Instead, the blueprint, which is signed by one I. E.Leibowitz, becomes incorporated into the abbey's archive by being copiedand "illuminated"--another pun, since no light is shed on the meaning ofthe document itself. Cut off from the culture that produced what mightbe no more than a box of junk, Francis assumes a "fallout" to be somekind of monster, a comic example of the incomprehension Susan Spenceridentifies. The blueprint accordingly remains a puzzling textual object,and a considerable part of Books I and II of the novel revolve aroundpossible processes of interpretation. It is first a double entity withwriting on its reverse, and when Francis makes an illuminated copy thelatter becomes a mirror image of its original. However, the copy isstolen by robbers since its apparent value is greater. Then in Book IIThon Thaddeo demonstrates the new discipline of rational analysis byexamining texts, considering that the Leibowitz documents are "probablyforgeries."


In Book II of A Canticle, Miller lines up a series of dialoguesbetween the spokesman for the new science and representatives of thetradition of preservation. The tension here lies between the rivalapproaches of analytic use and a reverential reification of texts aspious objects. This opposition closely resembles the confrontationbetween William of Baskerville and the authoritarian librarian in TheName of the Rose, which similarly describes events on a culturalwatershed: the period when literacy is threatening to extend beyondchurch control. One could say, following Edward Said, that the textswithin each of these novels are firmly situated within a system ofpreservation, interpretation, and controlled access. Thon Thaddeo makesa utopian claim for an era of enlightenment he sees as imminent:"Tomorrow, a new prince shall rule. Men of understanding, men of scienceshall stand behind his throne, and the universe will come to know hismight. His name is Truth. His empire shall encompass the Earth" (175).But this claim is naive, since Thaddeo ignores the political systemsthat will embody this supposed truth, and Miller makes this irony clearby presenting the rising prince in Book II as an illiterate cynic.

Miller demonstrates an attitude toward the media similar to thatadvanced in Harold A. Innis's Empire and Communications (1950), in whichthe latter argues that each medium of communication tended to createmonopolies of knowledge and therefore of power. The ecclesiasticalmonopoly depended on parchment, for instance, and was then undermined bypaper.(3) A Canticle does not refer to trade so much as the network ofcommunications that underpins the Church's authority in Book I, theprinted promulgation that symbolizes secular political authority in BookII, and the jealous control of information by the modern state in BookIII. Here a polylinguistic printing machine, an "Autoscribe," constantlygoes haywire, producing a typographical jumble or a reversed text. By aJoycean play on words, the culture of the letter only produces litter.And as if to deny any technological progress, the machine is describedin exactly the same terms as Francis's blueprint, as a collection of"squiggles" and "thing-umbobs." ibis section of the novel again andagain discredits the official news media as actually concealinginformation from the citizens. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, theprevailing regime maintains a permanent state of crisis and only makesannouncements when a leakage of information has made them unavoidable.These announcements constitute a narrative that is viewed withconsiderable scepticism because of the credibility gap between officialstatements and private experience, an irony common to much Americanscience fiction of the 1950s. The discourse now is characterized by coldwar polarities between power blocs, "us" against the enemy: "In asurprise attack, the space forces of the Atlantic Confederacy last nightstruck at three concealed Asian missile sites located on the far side ofthe moon, and totally destroyed one enemy space station known to beinvolved in a guidance system for space-to-earth missiles. It wasexpected that the enemy would retaliate against our forces in space, butthe barbarous assault on our capital city was an act of desperationwhich no one anticipated" (229).(4)

At every point of its narrative, A Canticle demonstrates an awarenessof how texts are constituted, circulated, and validated. The radioannouncements of Part III in a sense parallel the papal declaration onLeibowitz's sainthood, but the latter only occurs after a prolongedinterrogation of Brother Francis's "visitation," while the former occurafter decisions inaccessible to the average citizen. Miller's novel thenis not only postmodern in its fictional chronology but also in itsmethodology, which anticipates that fiction of the 1960s and beyond


named as "historiographic metafiction" by Linda Hutcheon. For Hutcheonthis fiction--exemplified in the U.S. by the writings of Coover, Heller,Pynchon, and others--situates itself in "the "world" of discourse, the"world" of texts and intertexts" (125).

Walker Percy has been one of the few critics to recognize thisdimension to the novel, which he has compared to a "cipher, a codedmessage, a book in a strange language" (263). Decoding is an importantactivity in Miller's short stories as well as in A Canticle. In "DumbWaiter" (1952) an American city's central computer goes on functioninglong after an atomic war has emptied it, and the robot cops thatmaintain a grotesque semblance of civic order can only be stopped oncethe central computer program has been identified. In "Dark Benediction"(1951) the shells of meteorites that have brought plague germs to Earthcarry an encrypted account of the evolution of these neurodermparasites. The very text of A Canticle, however, is charged withhalf-concealed meaning. Interestingly, this intricacy seems to have beenadded to the text of Miller's original novellas when he was revisingthem for publication as a novel. In the original version of Book IMiller limits his wordplay to a rather forced realized passage ofV-words where the initial letter carries a clear symbolism for BrotherFrancis: "The parting words of the pilgrim tumbled back to him: `May youfind a Voice, as y'seek.' Voice indeed, with V capitalized and formed bythe wings of a descending dove and illuminated in three colours againsta background of gold leaf. V as in Vere dignum and Vidi aquam, at thehead of a page of the Missal. V, he saw quite clearly, as in Vocation"(158).(5) The passage is too explicit for the character who inflates theevent, metaphorically at least, into a repetition of Christ's baptism,signaled in Matthew 3:16 by the descending dove of the Holy Spirit. Inthe novel Miller reserves such symbolistic cross-references to the moreintellectual analysts and builds a comedy of incomprehension aroundFrancis.

A Canticle repeatedly foregrounds certain signs as if to promise thereader meaning and then destabilizes those signs through ambiguity andrepetition. The old man who meets Francis is described naturalisticallyin the original version as one of the "black specks" shimmering in theheat. The novel's text revises this image into an unstable sign, a"wiggling iota of black," which punningly plays on the letter-sign and"iotax" as denoting the smallest distinguishable item. Furthermore,Miller stresses such differences as those between old and new Englishthat revolve around vocabulary, Hebrew and English, and the specialstatus of Latin. When the old man writes two Hebrew letters on Francis'srock at the beginning of the novel, the action establishes the motif ofthe cryptic nature of signs. Russell Griffin has given one of the mostthorough accounts to date of the interconnections between signs in ACanticle, which he explains as Miller's medievalism. Thus he has shownhow Miller glosses most important names in the novel, develops parallelsbetween Joshua and Jesus "often ironically," and so on. Griffin veryhelpfully identifies the textual density of A Canticle but does notbring out the problematic nature of such connections. As often as not,the latter raise more questions than they answer. For example, theritual of sacrifice and the role of the scapegoat is clear in the OldTestament as a symbolic atonement for guilt. In chapter 15 a steer'sblood is drunk by a tribal chieftain as a sign of his military prowess,to the disgust of the Christian observers. In that same section of thenovel, a goat with a bald head might just be a mutant but is latercrowned--i.e. converted--into a religious effigy. While the Poet seesLeibowitz as the scapegoat, the abbot wonders at the old Jew'sidentification with the fate of his people. In other words, the


symbolism of images and rituals is open-ended and frequently a matter ofdebate within the text. The most complex example of this self-analyzingprocess occurs with a central complex of light imagery.

Miller plays on the figural opposition between light and darkthroughout A Canticle to articulate the limits of human understanding.The master narrative lying behind Book I is the story of the redemptionwhereby mankind is led out of darkness to a "place of light," as BrotherFrancis imagines it. The latter's excavation of the battered metal boxfrom the radiation shelter is at once an act of salvage and ametaphorical saving of the documents it contains, which anticipates theultimate salvation. Therefore, in this section of the novel lightsuggests the possibility of cultural change and carries retrospectivelapsarian ironies of loss. The historical inset explains that thepresent age is an "inheritance of darkness" where humans are caught in alimbo "between dusk and dawn." The light/dark opposition is one of themost deeply embedded metaphors in the language, extending into a wholerange of domains of experience; and Miller sets up the following pairsin Book I, which will then be destabilized later in the novel: beliefvs. paganism, civic order vs. barbarism, understanding vs. ignorance. Asthe saving remnant on the American continent, the monks see themselvesas the guardians of the light of faith, but light is also used to definetheir social group against the threatening nomads that surround them.

In Book II the analogy between the novel's present and the Dark Agesestablishes an expectation of cultural change, a new Renaissance; butexpectancy is written into the opening chapters negatively as theimminence of war or--even worse--of "the remorseless, the mindless."Most of the action in Book I takes place in bright, clear light, whereasnow many scenes occur in semi-darkness. The metaphors of "enlightenment"now figure as mundane metonyms in the repeated action of kindling aflame. The climax to this motif comes when a scholar visits the abbeyand witnesses the invention of electric light. This scene is shotthrough with symbolism. The lamp has replaced a crucifix in the onlyappropriate niche. It is demonstrated one morning (suggestive of thedawn of a new era) and possesses a brightness to rival the sun's (thefirst character in Book II is a priest named Marco Apollo). The trialtakes place in a basement, and one observer exclaims that the effect is"hellish." But the ironies of this scene are even sharper. In order tosituate the event within the rituals of the abbey, the monks recite thefirst verses from Genesis as they are beginning the experiment. Thelatter thus straddles the sacred and the secular as a culturalwatershed, partly a travesty of the primal creation narrative and partlya recovery of lost knowledge. As usual in this novel Miller signals suchambiguity by wordplay. An incautious monk who gets a shock from themachine exclaims "Lucifer!"--for Russell Griffin a sign for "destructivetechnological knowledge," since its literal meaning of "light-bearer"has become overlaid with satanic connotations (114). By Book III thephrase "Lucifer is fallen" has become a coded signal for the detonationof a nuclear device.(6)

Miller sets up countless obstacles to reading history as linearprogress by inverting his images, shifting contexts, and introducingreversals. The lamp that rekindles the light of science goes out and isreplaced once again by the crucifix and Miller's choric comment on thatera ("after the generations of the darkness came the generations of thelight") puns on "generation" and erases its creative meaning by endingthat section on a note of war and death. In Book m a travesty revelationoccurs when the "brighter and brighter" light of a nuclear bomb blast


shines through the confessional door at the abbey. It is appropriate atthis stage in the novel for such symbolism to be interrogated: "Fire,loveliest of the four elements of the world, and yet an element too inHell. While it burned adoringly in the core of the Temple, it had alsoscorched the life from a city, this night, and spewed its venom over theland. How strange of God to speak from a burning bush, and of Man tomake a symbol of Heaven into a symbol of Hell" (235).(7) The sense ofsight, privileged organ of understanding, reflects this puzzlement.Characters have driven themselves virtually blind poring overmanuscripts in poor light, and by Book In this physical difficulty hasbecome a collective environmental problem as radioactive dustcloudsdrift across the landscape. The fact that each section of A Canticleends with a death carries obviously grim implications for characters'attempts at coming to understanding in this novel.

Daniel F. Galouye's 1961 novel Dark Universe also describes apost-nuclear holocaust world, but from the perspective of distantsurvivors who live permanently underground. Their visual sense hasatrophied out of existence, and they communicate aurally through"clinks/ones." Sight, however, is not forgotten but has becomeinternalized as a deity and the predicament of the tunnel-dwellers hasbecome rationalized as a second Fall--in other words, as the result of aprimal wrong. The protagonist at one point thinks back to the scripturaltuition he had received from their Guardian of the Way: "Socompassionate was the Almighty that when he banished man from Paradise,he sent parts of Himself to be with us for a while. And he dwelled inmany little vessels like this Holy Bulb"(15). This sort of discoursereplaces the deity with light and the devil with radiation, resulting inan internally consistent version of Christian polarities where thetraces of electronic technology from the upper world (bulbsparticularly) function as icons. The lexicon of references to sightrepresents correspondingly the verbal traces of a lost domain toexperience, inscribed culturally as sacred myth. Dark Universe narratesthe tortuous journey of the protagonist up to the surface. The novel attimes resembles romance in describing Jared's confrontation with the"monsters" that his living conditions entail, for any creature who cancommunicate without "clinkstones" challenges his sense of reality. AsJared explores the links between light, eyes, and sight, the mosthorrifying discovery comes when he reaches the surface and realizes that"Light was not in Paradise" but "was in the infinity of Radiation withthe Nuclear monsters" (150). Solicitous scientists take Jared in hand,teach him how to see, and then reveal the history of his originalsituation underground: a nuclear survival bunker had suffered a seriouselectronic fault, and all lights had gone although it had continued tofunction. The progression in this novel from darkness to light, fromsuperstition to secular knowledge, resembles an individual's gradualrelease from trauma. Although Jared's journey is physical, Galouyeexcels at showing the psychological consequences of missing a crucialfaculty.

Galouye's novel is more comfortable to read than Miller's because itstarts from severely limited perceptual horizons and works its waytoward an end point where, thanks to a happy collaboration betweenscience and psychology, its antecedent narrative can be reconstituted. ACanticle denies any such progress. Although its historical momentschange, the novel never focuses on a single consciousness and alwaysshows comprehension to be a desired goal rather than an achieved state.Foucault's assertion that "manifest discourse is secretly based on an`already said'" (25) can be borne out in the novel's denial oforigination. The most explicit case occurs in the travesty of creation


just discussed. As Northrop Frye has pointed out, the Genesis storydemonstrates the primal power of the divine Logos since forms of lifeare spoken into existence (106). In the novel, however, humanarticulation follows and travesties the divine script, just as thephysical experiment is an exercise in rediscovery. Once again thisfactor is written explicitly into the novel, for example, in therecurrence of representations of a human face with an enigmatic smile.Characters typically ask themselves "where have I seen that before?""Before" does not refer to any individual memory but rather signals acondition of the text itself, which is packed with the traces of earliercultural periods or of earlier phases in its own unfolding.

Biblical metaphors and typology are based on a codified system ofcorrespondences between the worldly and the spiritual or of progressionfrom type to antitype, but we have seen how Miller repeatedlydeconstructs such correspondences. He personifies the duplicitousshifting nature of signs in the bizarre figure of Mrs. Grales, an oldwoman in Book III who sells tomatoes and is virtually the only importantfemale character in the novel. As a mutant she possesses two heads andthus two names. The one just given resembles "grail," while her othername, Rachel, evokes the proverbially beautiful wife of Jacob. Mrs.Grales keeps her second head wrapped; indeed, it is not clear that it isalive until nuclear war breaks out and she seeks its baptism. The fiveslivers of glass embedded in her body by a nuclear bomb blast resemblethe stigmata, but there is no warrant for reading them as spiritualmetaphor rather than metonymy. Similarly, the monk Joshua has a"blasphemous nightmare" of this woman where a surgeon has threatened tocut off the Rachel head:

And the Rachel face opened its eyes and tried to speak to Joshua, buthe

could hear her only faintly, and understand her not at all.

"Accurate am I the exception", she seemed to be saying, "Icommensurate

the deception. Am."

He could make nothing of it, but he tried to reach through to saveher.

There seemed to be a rubbery wall of glass in the way. He paused andtried

to read her lips.

I am the, I am the--

"I am the Immaculate Conception" came the dream whisper.(228)

This fantasy contains a message that only emerges through a kind of


verbal slippage from "exception" through "deception" to "conception.""Deception" increases the ambiguity of the communication that is anywaygrimly ironic, since a mutant is claiming the quality of transcendentbeauty possessed only by the Virgin Mary, "immaculate" signifying"spotless." As soon as Rachel utters her words, she is killed, therebyinverting "conception"; and Miller leaves the door ajar to reading thisepisode as a travesty vision of death rather than life by synchronizingit with the outbreak of war.

Joshua's nightmare can be read on a number of different levels then:psychologically, as a fantasy of guilt; as symbolic of the tensionbetween medical and clerical power; or as a travesty of mysticalvisitation. Umberto Eco has explained the medievalism of Joyce in termsdirectly applicable to Miller since they clarify the shifting andambiguous nature of signification in both writers: "In the medievalsymbol, the signifying--signified relationship is clear because of ahomogeneous culture. The homogeneity of a unique culture is lacking inthe contemporary poetic symbol as the result of a multiplicity ofcultural perspectives" (Middle Ages of James Joyce 45). How much moremust this be the case for a novel likes Canticle, which spans a seriesof historical periods where quite different cultural conditions prevail.

One important consequence of Miller's method is that his maincharacters all become readers but all suffer from a lack of competencein varying degrees. The deity provides an ideal standard for contrast asthe "inscrutabilis Scrutator animarum" (the inscrutable scrutinizer ofsouls). Such total access is unavailable to the mere human figureswithin the novel who, as we have seen, are constantly found in theposture of examining signs and texts for their meaning. In the chaptersfollowing Brother Francis's experiences in the desert, he engages indialogues with others about hermeneutics (was it natural orsupernatural?) and narrative accretion (the result of oral transmissionand inflation). In other words, once again the novel foregrounds thedifficulties of processing and stabilizing texts. There are obviousmetafictional implications in such episodes, which Miller focuses inBook II by introducing his only explicit allusion to other sciencefiction. The scientist Thon Thaddeo is examining the documents of thearchive to try to understand the origin of mankind. He stumbles across a"fragment of a play, or a dialogue" describing the creation of a servantspecies that revolts against its own creators and jumps to theconclusion that present humanity is descended from this new species.Clearly the work referred to is Karel Capek's play R.U.R., but the monksdo not know how to classify the fragment ("probable fable or allegory").Thaddeo sees its importance as opening up speculative thought--and hereMiller in turn opens up a function for his own novel--whereas the abbottakes it to be a scurrilous attack on the past, and the scene collapsesinto a nondialogue where Thaddeo's assertions of the need for scientificprogress alternate with the abbot's recitation of the temptation fromGenesis. The contrast between scripted and open utterance seems clear atthis point, but embedded within the intertext is another work that formsa connecting link between twentieth-century science fiction and theBible. Frankenstein describes a scientist's attempts to rival theprerogative of God in creating a new species, shadows the Genesis story(particularly as retold by Milton), and stresses the destructiveconsequences of pride in terms very similar to Miller's own account ofthe holocaust. Each speaker in the scene just described is bounded byhis own historical and cultural horizon, whereas Miller's allusioninvites the reader to speculate about the genre of A Canticle itself.


The Catholic Church has been referred to so often that it must beclear by now that it occupies a privileged position within the novel.Even the title denotes a "song or prayer derived from the Bible. whichis used in the liturgical worship of the Church" (Cross 235).(8) Thetitle thus situates us within a set of cultural practices, and, sureenough, Book I shows a world structured chronologically by the Catholiccalendar, hierarchically by the monks and clergy, and ritually by theliturgy. The Church is the "caretaker of human society" (Walker 67). Thesurvival of the abbey from one historical era to the next is paralleledlinguistically by the persistence of Latin as a universal language ofthe sacred, a possibility difficult to maintain since Vatican II. Justas the canonization of Leibowitz in Book I leads to his inclusion in theChurch calendar, so the holocaust has become incorporated within thelitany of the saints ("from the curse of the Fallout, O Lord deliveryus"). As the novel progresses, the power of the Church graduallydiminishes, a change signaled at the beginning of Book III by one of themost ironic sections of the novel, a "liturgy of man." This Audenesquesequence reduces the liturgy to a secular performance where the voice ofthe centuries is delivered from a high-kicking chorus line. The humanlife-span is compressed into a couple of brief lines and mythic figuresare diminished--Eve to a farm girl in a bawdy joke and Lucifer to atraveling salesman. Desire becomes a recurrent infantilism, a pursuit ofutopian dreams that can never admit change: "Generation, regeneration,again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-tornhands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve,forever building Edens--and kicking them apart in berserk fury becausesomehow it isn't the same" (200).(9) Each book of A Canticle carriesscenes that raise the question of the Church's authority: thecanonization ceremony in New Rome; the lighting of the lamp wherescience and religion jostle for precedence; and finally a debate betweenthe abbot and a doctor on the ethics of euthanasia for war casualties.The abbey in the novel does not function as a location of value so muchas offering a site for a continuing debate about truth.

The novel's title, then, should not be taken to imply a privilegedstability in the Catholic liturgy. Nor could it, since it incongruouslylinks the liturgical term with a Jewish name. Canonization does nothingto reduce the ambiguities surrounding Leibowitz and his "relics." Asimilar ambiguity obtains in Anthony Boucher's 1951 story "The Quest forSaint Aquin," which evokes a postholocaust scenario with strikingresemblances to Miller's novel. The world is now ruled by theTechnarchy. The pope commissions one Thomas to set out on a quest forthe saint of the title, which he does riding a "robass" (a robotic ass).As in A Canticle, Boucher juxtaposes ancient and modern and draws outresemblances between his narrative and the Bible. Thomas thus notesparallels between himself and Christ, and even more so with Balaam, butthe latter story remains an enigma, "as though it was there to say thatthere are portions of the Divine Plan which we will never understand"(379). An extended dialogue between Thomas and the robass raises theissue of means and ends: why not tell the lie that Aquin has been foundif that results in greater belief? When Thomas finally locates the bodyof the saint, it turns out to be a robot. The story thus can be read asa parable of spiritual inquiry that shows the search as physical action,while Miller frequently casts inquiry in the form of dialogue.

In the Boucher story and in Miller's novel, recovery promises aconfirmation of meaning but proves to be virtually impossible. Thesituation in A Canticle is particularly complex because of how Millertreats the past. Sections of the novel shift into a different register


when Miller writes as a chronicler from notional points in the future.Book I, for example, gives an account of the holocaust in a kind of newscripture scrupulously free of vocabulary with specific historicalreferences. The narrative includes pastiche biblical phrasing andrhythms, and describes the holocaust through analogies with the Flood(explicit) and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (implicit). Thethree main phases of destruction are the Flame Deluge (an "unleashing ofthe hell-fire"), the Fallout ("great clouds of wrath"), and theSimplification (initially a collective revenge against those heldresponsible and then an "insane frenzy of mass murder and destruction").Miller repeats the narratives and imagery of the Old Testament,recapitulating the fall of Babel by showing the sequel to disaster as astate of linguistic division: "In all parts of the world men fled fromone place to other places, and there was a confusion of tongues"(52).(10) Miller names his new scripture the Memorabilia, the archive ofsurviving texts and narratives from the past. But one rhetoricalprinciple involved in Miller's use of the trilogy structure is that nosegment of his text stays exempt from modification by other segments.Thus, although the tone of this narrative mimics the authority of theBible, it is radically altered in Book II as a more drawn-out study ofpolitical ambition. This account, which exists, we are told, indifferent versions, purports to describe the past but is actuallypredicting the possible consequences for humanity of princely ambitionsthat are being realized in that section of the novel. Finally, in BookIII Miller rhetorically distances himself from humanity, giving asymbolically external and quasi-scientific description of the new era:"There were spaceships again in that century, and the ships were mannedby fuzzy impossibilities that walked on two legs and sprouted tufts ofhair in unlikely anatomical regions" (199). Miller cleverly offsets thepossibility of technological progress by describing mankind as afreakish species carrying only a verbal trace of humanity ("manned").

A key term in the passage just quoted is "again," one of the countlessindicators of recurrence that fill A Canticle. This aspect of the novelprevents it from fitting comfortably into the science fiction genre asdefined by Darko Suvin: "Science Fiction is distinguished by thenarrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional `novum' (novelty,innovation) validated by cognitive logic" (63). He then goes on toexplain this key term as follows: "a novum of cognitive innovation is atotalizing phenomenon or relationship deviating from the author's andimplied reader's norm of reality" (64). If we drop the terminology ofnovelty here, Suvin is essentially describing an effect of incongruity."Novum" can be seen as signifying an anachronism or other disruption ofthe prevailing world of any given novel. The norm of reality he refersto is a rhetorical effect that, at the very least in a trilogy novellike A Canticle, will involve the reader in revising his/her sense ofthe real at the beginning of each section. At the beginning of Miller'snovel we have a pretechnological world evoked through the descriptivedetails of the desert, which is then disrupted by Francis's discovery ofdocuments familiar to us from contemporary technology. Our assumptionsabout history invite us to read the Dark Age as a distant precursor ofthe latter era; but the fact that the documents are the traces of avanished civilization forces us to reverse this perceived sequence. Timetherefore functions in a variety of different ways in this complexnovel. Dates give us linear time; recurrences and resemblances suggestcycles; and the constant presence of the old Jew adds anotherpremessianic time-scale again. As if that weren't enough, early scenesrecede into the past of the text itself, undergoing a constant processof revision and modification. The Poet, a satirical commentator in Book


II, has become Saint Poet of the Miraculous Eyeball by Book III, andthis example is typical of a process at work throughout the novel.

In A Canticle we must therefore read among a whole series ofhistorical resemblances. The popular wave of anger manifested in theSimplification represents an attempt to wipe the Historical slate cleanand has been shrewdly compared by Dominic Manganiello to Hate Week inNineteen Eighty-Four (161). The regime in the latter novel manipulateshistory by reifying information and disposing of it down the "memoryhole." In A Canticle, however, the mob wants to erase the past and startover, making the world anew in an ironic echo of one of America'scherished slogans. This attempt is exactly what the novel as a wholeresists, hence its privileging of terms of recall and resemblance. WhenBrother Francis takes his document to Rome, the pope praises him foracting as the memory within the body of the Church. Throughout ACanticle Miller strikes a fine balance between the need to retainhistory and a recognition of how history is subject to a constantprocess of revision and distortion. The artifacts and texts from earlierperiods can only be assessed within specific sign systems (what Millerwithin the novel calls "knowledge systems") that are themselveshistorically bounded. The construction of three narratives dealing withquite distinct periods and the allusions to other eras thus foregroundsthis historical relativity. The reader is then led to make a series ofrecognitions in the novel without which many episodes would lose much oftheir particular resonance. To take two examples: in Book II a princeproclaims himself supreme head of the state, taking on the title of"defender of the faith," an echo of Henry VIII; or again, toward the endof the novel monks demonstrate against the use of euthanasia machines bycarrying placards which read ABANDON EVERY HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE. Thesewords from the portal to Dante's Hell encode the machines as devilishand implicitly assert the Church's unique role as an asylum. Secondly,the use of colored stars to identify the war casualties clearly echoesthe Nazis' genocide. We should remember that the novel's setting isAmerica, specifically the Utah desert, on which the entire history ofthe West is replaying itself.

The grimmest implication of repetition in the novel is the suggestionthat history consists of a cyclical script determining human behaviorfrom era to era. As the abbot in Book III reflects with despair, "Are wedoomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to playthe Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?" (217). And herehearses a list of empires that have since disappeared into oblivion.Many critics have noted this emphasis on repetition, but Walker Percyadds the crucial consequence for the traces of these worlds: "when oneage dies, its symbols lose their referents and become incomprehensible"(267). The "fallen" nature of human discourse emerges as a directcontrast between the divine Logos and the "objective logos of Nature"(119). Each section of the novel returns to the latter by ending outsidehuman action with buzzards and finally a shark surviving in season. Eachsection carries as its penultimate ending a death; in Book III it may beof humanity as a whole. To conclude with other natural creatures drawsour attention to mankind as a species uniquely cursed with a deathwish.(11) In his introduction ("Forewarning") to his 1985 anthology ofholocaust stories, Beyond Armageddon, Miller develops this implicationby revising the notion of "logos" as a rationality that displaceshumanity: "Logos does, in a way, create the object-world, as a darkmirror between us and the One" (13). Miller makes it clear that he wasdrawn to this Taoist position in recoil from the apocalyptic foreignpolicy of the Reagan years and criticizes Marxism and Christianfundamentalism alike for having as agenda the destruction of the other.


A Canticle for Leibowitz achieves much of its impact by relativizingsuch agendas and destabilizing the signifying systems that underpinculture.

Notes

(1.) This story is collected in View from the Stars (1964). The bestcritical discussion to date of Miller's short stories is Samuelson 3-26.

(2.) A monk in Book I of A Canticle painstakingly works out amathematical formula for recovering lost texts from fragments but diesbefore he can put it into complete practice. After working on a text forforty years, he only succeeds in restoring four pages.

(3.) Innis writes: "The parchment codex was adapted to large books inemphasizing facility of reference and consequently lent itself toreligion and law in the scriptures and the codes" (140). In contrastwith the indiscriminate preservation of the archive by Miller's clerics,the copying of material involved choice and thus became a political act:"Since the material of an earlier culture must be required, an extensivecensorship emerged in which material smited to religion and law wasgiven enormous emphasis" (Innis 141).

(4.) Hostilities in the novel are clearly linked to American foreignpolicy of the 1950s through such contemporary euphemisms as the phrase"police action." And in the World Court of Nations, Miller was glancingsardonically at the impotence of the United Nations.

(5.) A Canticle for Leibowitz was first published as three novellasunder the following titles: "A Canticle for Leibowitz" (1955), "And theLight is Risen" (1956), and "The Last Canticle" (1957).

(6.) The spiritual statement has thus become entirely secularizedwithin a military system of signs but still bears the traces of itsoriginal mythic signification. Exactly the same device is used in thetitle of Pat Frank's 1959 novel of nuclear war, Alas, Babylon. Thephrase in Revelation 18:10 signifies impending judgement: "Alas, alasthat great city babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thyjudgement come." The phrase is then appropriated for use as a privatecode between friends to signal the outbreak of war, but again withoutentirely losing its original biblical meaning.

(7.) Northrop Frye has similarly argued that in the Bible fire cansignify both life and death (161).

(8.) David Dowling ingeniously glosses this term as a Joyceancompositional metaphor suggesting a short discrete narrative unit (194).

(9.) While the style of the passage partly echoes Auden's "Spain," thespecific allusion here is to Tennyson's poem "Merlin and the Gleam," amonologue by the dying Merlin on a whole lifetime spent pursuing awill-o'-the-wisp, a fluctuating and fugitive goal that always lies just"over the margin."


(10.) Miller's Flame Deluge conflates two biblical accounts ofdestruction and was probably influenced by Stephen Vincent Benet's 1937story "By the Waters of Babylon," which describes a world laid waste bythe "Great Burning." Miller respected this story enough to include it asa postholocaust narrative before the fact in his 1985 anthology BeyondArmageddon.

(11.) Nevertheless, the desire for happy endings persists. On the lastpage of the novel a shark instinctively avoids the fallout ofradioactive ash and heads out into the deeper cleaner area of the ocean.Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin argue that this conclusion is quitehopeful because the shark is a survivor, the sea is the matrix of life,and the fish is a traditional icon for Christ (225). The latter point isa particularly curious one to make, since Miller has shifted thenarrative outside any such sit signifying system so that the shark canscarcely be anything other than metonym.

Works Cited

Boucher, Anthony. "The Quest for Saint Aquin." Science Fiction Hall ofFame. Vol. I. Ed. Robert Silverberg. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970.

Brians, Paul. Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, 1895-1984.Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1987.

Cross, F. L. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. London:Oxford UP, 1974.

Dowling, David. Fictions of Nuclear Disaster. London: Macmillan, 1987.

Eco, Umberto. The Middle Ages of James Joyce. London: HutchinsonRadius, 1989.

--. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts.London: Hutchinson, 1987.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. SheridanSmith. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977.

Frank, Pat. Alas Babylon. 1959. New York: Bantam, 1976.

Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.

Galouye, Daniel F. Dark Universe. 1961. London: Science Fiction BookClub, 1963.

Griffin, Russell M. "Medievalism in A Canticle for Leibowitz."Extrapolation 14 (Summer 1973): 112-25.


Herbert, Gary B. "The Hegelian `Bad Infinite' in Walter M. Miller's ACanticle for Leibowitz Extrapolation 31 (Summer 1990): 160-169.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction.New York: Routledge, 1988.

Innis, H. A. Empire and Communications. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950.

Manganiello, Dominic. "History as Judgement and Promise in A Canticlefor Leibowitz." Science-Fiction Studies 13 (1986): 159-169.

Miller, Walter M., Jr. "A Canticle for Leibowitz." The Best ScienceFiction Stories and Novels: 1956. Ed. T. E. Dikty. New York: FrederickFell, 1956.

-- A Canticle for Leibowitz. 1959. New York: Bantam, 1968.

Miller, Walter M., Jr. and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. BeyondArmageddon, Survivors of the Megawar. 1985. London: Robinson, 1987.

Percy, Walker. "Walker Percy on Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle forLeibowitz." Rediscoveries. Ed. David Madden. New York: Crown Publishers,1971.

Samuelson, David N. "The Lost Canticles of Walter M. Miller, Jr."Science-Fiction Studies 3 (1976): 3-26.

Senior, W. A. "`From the begetting of monsters": Distortion as Unifierin A Canticle for Leibowitz." Extrapolation 34 (Winter 1993): 329-39

Spencer, Susan. "The Post-Apocalyptic Library: Oral and LiterateCulture in Fahrenheit 451 end A Canticle for Leibowitz." Extrapolation32 (Winter 1994): 331-42

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics andHistory of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

Walker, Jeanne Murray. "Reciprocity and Exchange in A Canticle forLeibowitz." Renascence 33.2 (1989): 67-85.

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