Now
that the cold war is over, it’s possible to reflect
on some of the positive, if indirect, benefits of the standoff.
On the one hand there were incredible advances in the pure
sciences and technology. On the other hand, the Cold War
fired the imaginations of an entire generation of painters,
sculptors, novelists, screenwriters, musicians, and playwrights.
From Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey, countless artists tapped into, reflected
upon, and excoriated the paranoia and the propaganda that
resulted from the Communist threat. While some of this material
now seems dated, one work to come out of the Cold War with
all of its power intact is the 1959 novel A Canticle
for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller.
A
haunting tale of post-apocalypse America, A Canticle
for Leibowitz chronicles the struggles of a small
community of monks living in the Western desert as they try
to preserve a library of books salvaged from “the flame
deluge.” While Miller offers a fatalistic view of our
prospects for avoiding such a catastrophe, the mere writing—and
reading—of this tale reminds us how high the stakes are
in these games we call politics. Miller,
who was born in Florida and raised in the South, was 19
when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He quickly signed up
for the Army Air Force and came of age flying bombing missions
over Italy and the Balkans. By all accounts, a major turning
point in his life was participating in the sortie that targeted
the Catholic monastery at Monte Casino—the monastery
that was founded by St. Benedict, the father of Western monasticism.
After the war, Miller converted to Catholicism and began
writing stories. A Canticle for Leibowitz, the novel for
which he is best known, is informed by a love for the minutiae
of Catholicism, the kind typical of a convert to the faith,
and its main action takes place in a monastic setting. Much
of the novel’s satisfying sense of otherworldliness
can be attributed to Miller’s knowledge of the details
of pre-1960’s Catholicism. The larger
setting of Leibowitz is post-nuclear-holocaust America.
The first part of the story begins 600 years after
modern civilization is wiped out by nuclear war and its after-effects.
In Miller’s scenario, late twenty-fifth century humanity
has reached a status roughly equivalent to the Dark Ages
and is starting its long ascent back toward technological
sophistication. Bands of uncivilized mutants roam the land
making travel treacherous and preventing the kind of communication
that makes any renaissance possible. The main repository
of human culture is a monastery that was founded by Leibowitz,
a Jewish engineer who survived the cataclysm. In the opening
scene we meet a young postulant to the monastery who has
been forced to build a shelter in the wilderness outside
the monastery in order to test his vocation as a monk. He’s
required to live there during the 40 days of Lent. Although
the young monk is considered by his superiors to be something
of a dunce, he has a vision in which an old man points out
to him the resting place of some papers that are eventually
confirmed as having belonged to Blessed Leibowitz. Ironically,
the papers found are nothing more than a grocery list and
a simple electrical diagram, yet the monk eventually devotes
his life to copying them in a florid illuminated style. The
following two parts of Leibowitz, which were originally
published as short novellas, give snapshots of the monastery
during a period of renaissance and one roughly equivalent
to our own. Because the monastery houses so many books
salvaged from the 20th century, it serves as a focal point
as the world begins to reinvent such things as electricity
and nuclear technology. Creating a mirror image of our
own society, Miller reflects on the current state of our
world. Like any moralist worth his weight, he clearly takes
a dark view of our prospects
in a nuclear age. Reading Leibowitz reminds us that the
specter of nuclear annihilation is a permanent fixture
of human
existence.
Some
science fiction critics believe Leibowitz to be our
finest exemplar of the genre. Unlike most other practitioners
of sci-fi, Miller
did not feel compelled to fill a whole library
with his li
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