In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

cultural cycles in a canticle for leibowitz 95 We have seen in the fiction of Philip Wylie the fascination with the “prospect of the postholocaust social collapse.”1 Indeed, without making any of his works overtly religious, Wylie’s favored stance as a writer was that of a latter-day Jeremiah , grimly warning the nation of its shortcomings. For an explicit engagement with religious issues we turn to Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which avoids the clichés of barbarism by presenting the aftermath of nuclear war as a rerun of the Dark Ages and which traces out a historical sequence through its three books until the novel ends at a point where nuclear war breaks out again. A Canticle for Leibowitz was composed as three novellas: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1955), And the Light Is Risen (1956), and The Last Canticle.2 It is not unique todramatizetheaftermathofadisasterashistoricalrepetition.Postnuclearnarratives by many authors ranging from Aldous Huxley to Neal Barrett Jr. show how the population has reverted to pastoral tribalism. Nor is it unique to use historical repetition as an ironic comment on the present. Philip K. Dick does as much in The World Jones Made (1956), which describes the rise to power of a demagogue as a replay of political events in 1930s Germany. Miller, by contrast, establishes a whole series of resemblances in his novel in order to describe how the history of the West evolves in cycles. Critics of the novel have tended to concentrate on Miller’s religious themes at the expense of the novel’s textual intricacies. William Senior, for instance, sees distortion everywhere in the narrative and infers a rather bland message, namely the “uncertainty of life in this world,” but scarcely comes to grips with the rhetorical nature of that uncertainty.3 A Canticle is a very rare example of the postnuclear genre where the cataclysm has a direct impact on the novel’s own textual condition. chaPter 6 Cultural Cycles in Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz 96 under the shadow Miller’s 1952 story “It Takes a Thief” (retitled “Big Joe and the Nth Generation ”) anticipates some of the central themes of A Canticle in depicting a postholocaust world where books have disappeared, surviving only as “memorized ritual chants.” Earth has been destroyed, and the protagonist, a member of the scattered Mars colony, has been nailed up, as if in crucifixion, for stealing one of these chants. When he is unexpectedly released, he attempts to penetrate the lost archive (Fermi, Einstein, and others have become a pantheon of “ancient gods”) housed in vaults guarded by priests and a monster named Big Joe. The latter turns out to be a robot programmed to attack anyone who steps on certain floor tiles before the entrance: “A creature of metal . . . he had obviously been designed to kill. Tri-fingered hands with gleaming talons, and a monstrous head shaped like a Marswolf, with long silver fangs.”4 Once inside the archive contained within the computer, the protagonist finds the records of the “Blaze of the Great Wind,” and the story ends with an expectation that this force can be re-created.5 On a small scale, here we encounter themes Miller would expand and develop in A Canticle: the loss of knowledge, the tenuous preservation of literacy by oral transmission, the priests’ guardianship of the archive, and the privileging of technology within that body of lost knowledge. ACanticle openswithadiscoverywithinawastelandaroundtheyearad2600. The context is a new Dark Age where one Brother Francis, a novice from the nearby Leibowitz Abbey, is performing a Lenten fast. An aged man appears out of the desert and shows him a rock that will complete the shelter he is building. When he removes this rock a “cave” is revealed that proves to be the remains of a fallout shelter from an earlier era. Within the cave Francis finds a metal box containing a number of documents: a shopping list, a racing form, a note to a friend, and a blueprint. Inside the lid is a message with the following postscript: “I put the seal on the lock and put top secret on the lid just to keep Em from looking inside.”6 Here the reader is positioned as a vicarious recipient of a message posted during wartime, where the sender was trying to keep a loved one from disturbing information. Opening this Pandora’s box thus carries connotations of the release of dangerous knowledge. Francis is a member...

Share