Conceptual Fiction: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. - Page 2

Taddeo is one of those who “fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth,” yet too often “seize the error hungrily because it has a pleasanter taste.” This type of epistemological musing is all too typical of Miller’s book, which takes ideas very seriously. In fact, A Canticle for Leibowitz takes them seriously in a way that few contemporary novels do. The long drawn-out discussions of concepts that once served as the centerpieces of big books (The Brothers Karamazov, The Magic Mountain, or perhaps most pronouncedly The Man Without Qualities) went out of fashion around the time Moses Herzog started writing crazy letters to dead people. Instead of encountering something like the Grand Inquisitor, we are more often treated to bad sex scenes nowadays. But as Dostoevsky reminds us, we all get what we deserve: angels enjoy a glimpse of God’s throne, while insects are given sensual lust. Miller, for his part, clearly aspires to the latter, and is proud to be part of this once vibrant tradition of novelists who incorporate serious Socratic dialogues into their fiction.

The concluding section of this tripartite novel is dominated by a debate between an abbot and a doctor on the morality of mercy killing. When is it valid to terminate a life in order to limit the risk of future suffering? Is pain the greatest evil (as the doctor insists), or is the desperation with which the sufferer responds to pain (as the abbot counters) the real tragedy here? You might be tempted to dismiss this part of A Canticle for Leibowitz as a dry, theoretical matter—until you learn that author Miller was a Roman Catholic who later committed suicide. His life, and its termination, embraced both sides of the debate . . . and as much more than an intellectual query.

Miller’s novel focuses on the members of a monastery who are pledged to preserving knowledge and culture in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. They are inspired by a murky tradition of a scientist named Leibowitz (later Saint Leibowitz). Leibowitz himself—or at least his alter ego—seems to linger on in the flesh, a post-nuclear realization of the myth of the Wandering Jew. (Miller lived for a while in the 1950s with sci-fi writer Judith Merril, and her Judaism interacts with his Catholicism in the pages of this novel.) The monks emulate Leibowitz and his quest to save some remnant of learning during the new Dark Ages, when all books and ideas are suspect. Miller's novel is divided into three separate stories, self-contained novellas set in the same locale but at different time periods, but each revolving around the same over-arching themes.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.

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