Critics who define "anti-sf" have often struck me as short-sighted if
not downright hostile to soft sciences like psychology and theology.
I maintain that anti-sf does not exist -- sf is sf. Classifications
of novels such as C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy and Walter Miller's
CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ as anti-sf have struck me as bigoted. By the
definitions of anti-sf I've read, most apocalyptic literature would be
classified as anti-sf, though it is clearly a subgenre of sf. At any
rate, I've enclosed below an essay I wrote on the apocalyptic CANTICLE
FOR LEIBOWITZ, which I hope listmembers will find interesting.
Cindy Smith
English 806 Literary Criticism
Fall 1997
Presentation
The End of the World:
A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ
and
Northrop Frye's Apocalyptic Archetype
The End of the World is one of the most popular themes in science
fiction and fantasy literature -- it is so popular, in fact, that it
has its own name: Apocalyptic Literature. Some of the earliest known
examples of apocalyptic literature include the epic of Gilgamesh, the
Genesis Flood story, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Book
of Daniel, and the Revelation to John. More recently, apocalyptic
science fiction stories often deal with the nature of societies that
develop after a major disaster such as war (including a nuclear
holocaust or an invasion) or natural disasters (including floods,
earthquakes, asteroid collisions, climate changes, plagues, fires,
famines, or problems in the space-time continuum). Apocalyptic
stories appeal to the survival instinct in human beings,
the subconscious desire to be liberated from the fear of a major
catastrophe (let it happen, come what may), and the subconscious
desire to sweep away our technologically sophisticated but socially
strait-jacketed society and start fresh (Clute and Nichols 337-338).
As a result of this last, post-holocaust stories often picture human
beings cast adrift because of their sudden disconnection from their
social structures. Therefore, some of the best stories depict human
beings clinging to what social structures are left after the
catastrophe.
Because humans in apocalyptic stories often become anti-technological,
the social structure they cling to is often the culture of their
religion. Such is the case with two classics in the apocalyptic
genre: THE LONG TOMORROW by Leigh Brackett and A CANTICLE FOR
LEIBOWITZ by Walter M. Miller, Jr. While THE LONG TOMORROW features
the Mennonites as the people who restore order to civilization while
vehemently opposing the technology that brought about the destruction
of the world, A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ features the Catholics as the
people who salvage what technological information they can in a
monastery named after a pre-Deluge scientist named Leibowitz.
For those who are not famililar with the story, here is a brief
synopsis of the novel A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ:
A monastery of the Albertion Order of Leibowitz preserves scientific
and technological knowledge from before the nuclear holocaust in
Texarkana. In the first third of the novel, "Fiat Homo," a novice
named Francis discovers pre-Flame Deluge documents belonging to
blessed Leibowitz including a schematic and a grocery list. The monks
attempt to derive from the grocery list, a second class relic, a
deeper meaning than the surface writing. Using the relics, the monks
of Leibowitz Abbey attempt to have their patron canonized. Brother
Francis spends 15 years of his life making an exquisite copy of the
schematic which no one understands. Because the Pope had long ago
issued a decree against the practice of killing deformed newborns, the
mutants who often live in bands and attack travelers are called "the
Pope's Children." On his journey back from visiting the Pope in the
cause of canonizing Blessed Leibowitz, Francis Gerard of Utah is
martyred by the Pope's Children and later canonized a saint himself.
In the second section of the novel, "Fiat Lux," when the Abbey of
Saint Leibowitz hears rumors of war from a nefarious leader named Mad
Bear of the Plains, one Thon Taddeo travels to the abbey seeking
documents and relics preserved for twelve centuries containing
knowledge vital to the advancement of science. Brother Kornhoer
astonishes the theoretical Thon Taddeo by demonstrating how to flood a
room with light from a artificial light bulb. Science is once again
on the march, but so are the nomads of the Plains who drink animal
blood and worship many gods. An eloquent argument takes place about
which is more important, science or theology. The answer seems moot
when war comes. Miraculously, the abbey survives.
In the third and final section of the book, "Fiat Voluntas Tua,"
spaceships again fill the skies, but then so does knowledge of nuclear
war. Mutants are still fairly common, but people do not seem to learn
the lessons of history. After the war begins, Dom Zerchi of the
Monastery of Saint Leibowitz agrees to let the abbey grounds be used
to treat the wounded, but forbids medical personnel from recommending
the suicide allowed by secular law. The argument between Dom Zerchi
and Doctor Cors about the ethics of suicide is eloquent and poignant,
given the intense suffering of the victims of radiation burns,
including a mother and her tiny daughter too young to understand why
she must suffer. In the end, the second originally lifeless head of
Mrs. Grales comes to life when the first head of Mrs. Grales dies in
the nuclear attack, Abbot Zerchi baptizes the newborn Rachel head, and
a starship from the Monastery of Saint Leibowitz heads for the stars.
What Northrop Frye means by the word "Apocalypse" and "Apocalyptic" is
sometimes different from and sometimes similar to the sense in which
the expression in used in the phrase "Apocalyptic Literature."
Following is one of his comments:
What the Apocalypse proves to be is not a summary of biblical
doctrines or even a summary of its historical narrative. It
is primarily a vision of a body of imagery, where the images
of every category of being, divine, angelic, paradisal, human,
animal, vegetable, and inorganic, are all identified with the
body of Christ. That means that all the images are
metaphorically related, metaphor being expressed as a
statement of identity, in the form 'this is that.' Whatever
is not part of the body of Christ forms a demonic shadow, a
parody of the apocalyptic vision in a context of evil and
tyranny. This ultimate separation of vision from shadow, the
heaven-world and the hell-world, is alluded to in the Gospel
parables as a separation that human society cannot attain to
in a world of time, but will see as the revelation that comes
with the ending of time. Meanwhile, every unreality that the
vision of hope in the mind perceives in the world around us is
part of an apocalyptic judgment on that world" (Frye, MYTH AND
METAPHOR: SELECTED ESSAYS 1974-1988, 101).
I gather Frye tends to combine the destruction and rebirth of the
world into one word: the Apocalypse. Frye seems to believe stories
depicting events from creation to apocalypse represent what might be
termed apocalyptic cycles (Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, 316-317). Many
such cycles are depicted in the Bible: Creation in Genesis 1 to the
apocalyptic banishment of Adam and Eve to the birth of Seth, the
apocalyptic destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the rebirth of a
cleansed world even as the descendants of Lot become the enemies of
Israel, the apocalyptic Flood to the rebirth of humanity on the
mountains of Ararat, the apocalyptic destruction of Israel and the
rebirth of Israel from a remnant in the rediscovery of the law, the
apocalyptic destruction of the Temple and its rebuilding, the
apocalyptic death of the Messiah and his resurrection, etc. In other
passages from other works, "it appears that he views the Apocolypse as
the final separation of The Light from the shadows. Like many
separations, it will be both violent and painful. We know this because
it is occurring today, has always occurred today, and has always been
violent and painful. One day it will be final" (John C. Medaille,
email, 11-8-97). Similarly, for Walter Miller, the apocalyptic
imagery in the novel A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ does not mean the final
end of the world, but is rather, in accordance with the apocalyptic
cycle, a violent and painful precursor to it. For Miller, the
apocalypse is part of the apocalyptic cycle of the destruction and
rebirth of the world in the Messianic Age. Hence, I will often use
the novel's expression Flame Deluge to refer to the apocalyptic
imagery of A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, meaning the period of time during
the destruction of the world but prior to the restoration of heaven.
The expression Flame Deluge is in keeping with the idea that the novel
is not an "Apocalypse" in the religious final destruction of the world
sense of the term, despite the popular name of the genre, but is rather
another Deluge story of apocalyptic destruction and rebirth on the order
of Gilgamesh and Noah's Ark and Sodom and Gomorrah.
I have read several literary critics who claim A CANTICLE FOR
LEIBOWITZ by Walter M. Miller, Jr. is a satire or a dark comedy, but I
read the novel as very serious literature. Admittedly, there are some
comedic elements to it, as with any good novel, but the overall thrust
of the novel is a serious examination of what might happen in a post
nuclear holocaust world. Miller struck me as a serious Catholic. I
have the impression, reading some of these critics, that they think
Miller is satirizing the process of the canonization of saints who are
often feckless sinners. Miller seems profoundly aware, it seems to
me, that God often chooses "the foolish of the world to shame the
wise...the weak of the world to shame the strong, and...the lowly and
despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to
nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast
before God" (1 Corinthians 1:27-29). Admittedly, the holy grocery
list is humorous, and some of the beliefs the people of the Abbey have
about the pre-Deluge world are funny, but Miller's point may well be
that these are probably the reactions of many of the saints in heaven
who gaze upon people of the Church Militant in the modern real world
trying to understand the ways of their ancestors before the industrial
age. Indeed, he may be subtly poking fun at scholars who have written
volumes speculating on the philosophy of the pre-Socratics based on a
very few fragments of writings, or literary critics who try to derive
depths of meaning from trivia. The underlying message of the novel
is, as Northrop Frye might comment if he ever read it, highly
Biblical: that humans have a dark nature, we learn nothing from
history because we repeat the same mistakes but there is hope because
we always rebuild, and the Church remains a bulwark against evil and a
haven for the faithful.
In THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION's biography of Walter Miller,
Clute and Nicholls say:
The novel is full of subtly presented detail about the nature
of religious vocation and the way of life of an isolated
community, deals ably with the questions of the nature of
historical and scientific knowledge which it raises, and poses
and intriguingly answers ethical questions about mankind's
proper relation to God and the world....While A CANTICLE FOR
LEIBOWITZ can be read as a work of Christian apologetics, WMM
(like Gene Wolfe after him) clearly responds mythopoeically
to the holy story -- and to the institutions -- of his Church,
with effects both ambiguous and ironic. At the same time,
however, his central commitment (like Wolfe's) is unwavering,
and the cyclical pattern of the tale reads as anything but
defeatist -- for the moment of Christ's Coming is not a matter
of dead history" (582).
Indeed, Northrop Frye would suggest that Miller regards the Body of
Christ as the central archetypal figure of living history around
which humanity's survival revolves. The journey of characters in
the novel from feckless sinners to martyrs is a shadowy imitation of
human history's journey from dark to light, which is a shadowy
imitation of the Messiah's journey from incarnation to apotheosis,
which is the ultimate reality of the apocalyptic cycle. Northrop Frye
suggests that the cycles move up and down from dark humanity to
redeemed humanity, from dark world to redeemed world (Frye, ANATOMY OF
CRITICISM, 316-317). For Miller, the cycles move up and down from
dark to redeemed to dark and back again, the cycles ever repeating,
suggesting, again, that no one learns anything from history but there
is hope since we continually rebuild, and the Church continues her
fight against the forces of evil and continues her practice of
offering refuge to people beaten by the same forces of evil.
Miller's epic may well embody what Frye calls the "contrast-epic,
where one pole is the ironic human situation and the other the origin
or continuation of a divine society" (ANATOMY OF CRITICISM 317).
Within the contrast-epic of Miller's moving from dark society to the
re-establishment of light in the Abbey is the salvation of humanity
concurring with the salvation of martyrs. For Miller, the myth of how
the Flame Deluge occurred, as related on pages 171-173, is on one
side, while the contrast of the Church living in a post-apocalyptic
world is on the other. Thon Taddeo's search for scientific knowledge
takes him to the abbey where he listens to an account of the end of
the natural cycle, which is symbolized, as in the Bible, by a Deluge
(albeit a Flame Deluge), and ends with the beginning of the divine
cycle, which is symbolized by the establishment of the abbey of
Leibowitz:
"And a great stink went up from Earth even unto Heaven.
Like unto Sodom and Gomorrah was the Earth and the ruins
thereof, even in the land of that certain prince, for his
enemies did not withhold their vengeance, sending fire in
turn to engulf his cities as their own. The stink of the
carnage was exceedingly offensive to the Lord, Who spoke
unto the prince, Name, saying: 'WHAT BURNT OFFERING IS
THIS THAT YOU HAVE PREPARED BEFORE ME? WHAT IS THIS SAVOR
THAT ARISES FROM THE PLACE OF HOLOCAUST? HAVE YOU MADE ME
A HOLOCAUST OF SHEEP OR GOATS, OR OFFERED A CALF UNTO GOD?'
"But the prince answered him not, and God said: 'YOU HAVE
MADE ME A HOLOCAUST OF MY SONS.'
"And the Lord slew him together with Blackeneth, the betrayer,
and there was pestilence in the Earth, and madness was upon
mankind, who stoned the wise together with the powerful,
those who remained.
"But there was in that time a man whose name was Leibowitz,
who, in his youth like the holy Augustine, had loved the
wisdom of the world more than the wisdom of God. But now
seeing that great knowledge, while good, had not saved the
world, he turned in penance to the Lord, crying:"
The mythic elements in Miller's novel make up an irony in terms of the
future's continuity with the past. At the same time, Miller's
characters have a profound discontinuity with the past which is only
gradually repaired as the novel progresses. The characters in the
story are connected to their past via their common humanity (including
humanity's dark side) and common myths (including the myth of the
Flame Deluge and the myth of Christ, not to mention the myth of the
Church), but disconnected from national social structures (although
new nations develop) and political structures (royalty redevelops in
North America). In every culture, different myths survive; these are
the myths that survive in the culture Miller has developed for his
novel. The overarching myth of the entire story is, of course, the
apocalyptic cycle mythic system.
The cyclic history of the apocalypse can appear lunatic, which may be
what Miller has in mind, but it is also very human and very Catholic,
for it seems as though just as we approach a happy ending, tragedy
strikes every time. However, every tragedy reflects the Catholic
character of the story, as every good Catholic story ends in death in
accordance with the myth of resurrection. Hence, every individual
character in the story experiences his or her own apocalyptic cycle --
birth, death, resurrection (often with canonization thrown in for good
measure).
"A yearning for the survival of mystery, and an intellectual belief in
the necessity of such a survival if human culture is not to become
sterile and bleak," (Clute and Nicholls 851) pervades A CANTICLE FOR
LEIBOWITZ as the Catholic background of the tale. The apocalyptic
cycle is an intrinsic part of the Catholic Bible, and it is in this
sense that the novel is highly Biblical in character. Miller weaves
his story using an exquisite blend of folklore and mythology and
religion with science and technology to protect society against a
mythless future.
The human nature of Brother Francis's quest for the sainthood of
Leibowitz is one part of the contrast-epic dealing with the novice's
confrontation with his own internal demons and vision of what he
thinks is Leibowitz and ultimate salvation in martyrdom, while another
part is the nuclear holocaust at the end of the novel which reads very
much like the triumph of the Anti-Christ but with a loophole as the
monastery's starship leaves Earth to attempt another beginning.
Miller thus seems to want to have it both ways: The novel ends with
the apocalyptic imagery of death and rebirth in one fell swoop but
with the Beast of the Apocalypse still looming and humanity a victim
of it (cf. Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, 317-318).
Science fiction has oft been touted as the modern world's mythology
and sates our appetites accordingly. James Blish is quoted in
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION as calling myth "static and final in
intent and thus entirely contrary to the spirit of sf, which assumes
continuous change" (849), and Miller's novel certainly embodies that
spirit of continuous change, leaving even the ending of his novel
open-ended. The myth of the Flame Deluge fulfills the purpose of
explaining the way the post-Deluge society thinks. The apocalyptic
tale within Miller's apocalyptic tale re-enacts the archetype much the
same way as Shakespeare's play within a play in "Hamlet" re-enacts the
murder of the king. When the brother reads the apocalyptic myth to
the brothers and guests of the abbey, Miller is trying to lay the
framework for the culture that produced the apocalyptic myth, even
while the abbot rationalizes it, in order to express a truth that goes
far beyond mere history but points to the moment when the apocalyptic
cycle touches the eternal and allows that theme of the novel to be
born. The novel in this moment expresses our humanity touching
divinity in a way that makes the apocalyptic cycle relevant to our own
and any culture (cf. Clute and Nicholls 849).
Mythology in science fiction in general encompasses the idea that
whenever cultures experience upheavals of any kind (whether
revolutionary or evolutionary) that culture carries its past within it
as an integral part of its being, and its past includes its mythical
past as much as its historical past. Nothing is made out of whole
cloth. All cultures are a product of their beginnings. Miller works
through his novel of the future the ancient apocalyptic cycle and
rewards his readers for his pains with a new vision of our own
present. Any culture which destroys or falsifies its past (ala Plato)
is doomed to failure because the emptiness left in its wake will only
be filled with the seeds of that society's own destruction. Such a
society can never experience rebirth but only the creation of
something entirely other, probably based on an entirely different
culture's mythos. For Miller, the archetypal myth of the apocalyptic
cycle is the vision with which he sows the seeds of humanity's future.
Furthermore, the seeds he sows contain both pessimism and optimism:
pessimism that we can never change humanity's dark nature but optimism
that perhaps we can overcome it, for if Miller thought the situation
entirely hopeless, he wouldn't have attempted to instruct us with an
apocalyptic novel of epic proportions.
Why did Miller end his novel so ambiguously with a continuation of the
apocalyptic cycle? Perhaps because there is only one really
satisfying ending to the ultimate apocalypse, and God holds the
copyright. Like most Catholics, Miller is an amillenialist and
realizes profoundly that we human beings must "work out" our "own
salvation in fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12).
Works Consulted
Clute, John and Peter Nicholls. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SCIENCE FICTION.
New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1993. Update 1995.
Frye, Northrop. ANATOMY OF CRITICISM: FOUR ESSAYS. Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Frye, Northrop. THE GREAT CODE: THE BIBLE AND LITERATURE. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.
Frye, Northrop. MYTH AND METAPHOR: SELECTED ESSAYS 1974-1988.
Edited by Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville and London: University
Press of Virginia, 1990.
Frye, Northrop. WORDS WITH POWER: BEING A SECOND STUDY OF THE BIBLE
AND LITERATURE. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990.
SPAWN OF A JEWISH
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Delay not your conversion Woe to craven hearts and drooping hands,
to the LORD, to the sinner who treads a double path!
put it not off Woe to the faint of heart who trust not,
from day to day who therefore will have no shelter!
Ecclesiasticus/Ben Sira 5:8 Woe to you who have lost hope!
what will you do at the visitation
of the LORD?
Ecclesiasticus/Ben Sira 2:12-14
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