Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  I hesitate to use the word “comedy”—though comedy it is—because that implies simply a funny book, and this novel is a great deal more than that. A great rumbling farce of Falstaffian dimensions would better describe it; commedia would be closer to it.

  It is also sad. One never quite knows where the sadness comes from—from the tragedy at the heart of Ignatius’s great gaseous rages and lunatic adventures or the tragedy attending the book itself.

  The tragedy of the book is the tragedy of the author—his suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two. Another tragedy is the body of work we have been denied.

  It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing. But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers.

  1980

  Rediscovering A Canticle for Leibowitz

  THIS BOOK, ACANTICLE for Leibowitz, is recommended, but not without certain qualifications. That is to say, I would not want my recorded enthusiasm for it and the fact that I have read it several times to be taken as a conventional literary ploy to call attention to an underrated work of literature. Thus, I am not setting up as a Malcolm Cowley rehabilitating a neglected Faulkner. For the fact is, the peculiar merit of this novel is traceable to virtues which are both subliterary and transliterary. For one thing, it is science fiction—parts of it appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which I take to be a high-class sci-fi pulp—and its prose, while competent, is not distinguished. So it is not as “good” as, say, Katherine Mansfield. Yet it is of more moment than Katherine Mansfield. It is also of more moment than the better-known sci-fi futuristic novels, 1984 and Brave New World.

  Another reason for not recommending it is that it is not for every reader. Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is like a cipher, a coded message, a book in a strange language. From experience I have learned that passing the book along to a friend is like handing The New York Times to a fellow passenger on the Orient Express: either he will get it altogether or he altogether won’t.

  Like a cipher, the book has a secret. But, unlike a cipher, the secret can’t be told. Telling it ruins it. But it is not like “giving away” a mystery by telling the outcome. The case is more difficult.

  A good indication of the peculiar nature of the secret is that the book cannot be reviewed. For either the reviewer doesn’t get it or, if he does, he can’t tell. My first inkling of this odd state of affairs occurred when I read a review of Canticle after receiving a review copy. I had read the book with the first of the pricklings of excitement I was to feel on successive readings. But I could not write the review. Why? Because when I tried to track down the source of the neck-pricklings, my neck stopped prickling. Then I read the review, which was written by a smart man, a critic. It dawned on me that the reviewer had missed it, missed the whole book, just as one might read a commonplace sentence which contains a cipher and get the sentence but miss the cipher.

  To say that the book is a cipher and that some readers have the code and some do not makes it sound like a gnosis, something like Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, which only an elect lay claim to understanding. But it’s not that, either.

  Rather has the mystery to do with conflicting anthropologies; that is, views of man, the way man is. Everyone has an anthropology. There is no not having one. If a man says he does not, all he is saying is that his anthropology is implicit, a set of assumptions which he has not thought to call into question.

  One might even speak of a consensus anthropology which is implicit in the culture itself, part of the air we breathe. There is such a thing and it is something of a mishmash and does not necessarily make sense. It might be called the Western democratic-technological humanist view of man as higher organism invested in certain traditional trappings of a more or less nominal Judeo-Christianity. One still hears, and no one makes much objection to it, that “man is made in the image of God.” Even more often, one hears such expressions as “the freedom and sacredness of the individual.” This anthropology is familiar enough. It is in fact the standard intellectual baggage of most of us. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter that this anthropology is a mishmash, disjecta membra. Do you really mean that God made man in His image? Well, hm, it is a manner of speaking. If He didn’t and man is in fact an organism in an environment with certain needs and drives which he satisfies from the environment, then what do you mean by talking about “the freedom and sacredness of the individual”? What is so sacred about the life of one individual, especially if he is hungry, sick, suffering, useless? Well, hm, we are speaking of “values”; we mean that man has a sacred right and is free to choose his own life or, failing that, a creative death. And suppose he is incompetent to do so, may we choose it for him? Well—

  So it goes. At the end of an age and the beginning of another, at a time when ages overlap, views of man also overlap and such mishmashes are commonplace. We get used to a double vision of man, like watching a ghost on TV.

  Or, put mathematically, different ages locate man by different coordinates. In a period of overlap, he might be located by more than one set of coordinates. Culture being what it is, even the most incoherent anthropology seems “natural,” just because it is part of the air we breathe. The incoherence is revealed—and the reader experiences either incomprehension or eerie neck-pricklings—only when one set of coordinates is challenged by the other: Look, it is either this way or that way, but it can’t be both ways.

  The anthropology in A Canticle for Leibowitz is both radical and overt. Accordingly, the reader is either uncomprehending, or vaguely discomfited—or he experiences eerie neck-pricklings.

  The time is ca. A.D. 2600. The place is Arizona perhaps, Or where Arizona was. Brother Francis Gerard is making his Lenten fast in the desert. Far away, on the broken interstate, a stranger appears, a pilgrim. Brother Francis, unused to strangers, hides and waits for him in the rubble of some ancient buildings left over from the holocaust of the twentieth century. Brother Francis belongs to the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, whose abbey is close by. The stranger approaches, speaks to the novice, writes two Hebrew letters on a rock, and goes his way. The rocks cave in and Brother Francis falls into an ancient fallout shelter. There he finds an old toolbox and a memo: “Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels—bring home.” He also finds a circuit design with the signature I. E. Leibowitz.

  Could it be a relic of the Blessed Leibowitz, founder of the order? And who was the old pilgrim who wrote the two letters, which read from right to left, ZL?

  So opens Canticle and already the reader, if he is going to, shall have experienced the first of his agreeable-eerie pricklings. It is a cross-vibration. These good vibes come two directions.

  First, Miller has hit on the correct mise-en-scène for the apocalyptic futuristic novel. The setting is the desert. An old civilization lies in ruins. There is silence. Much time has passed and is passing. The survivor is alone. There is a secret longing in the reader either for the greening of America, vines sprouting on Forty-second Street, or for the falling into desert ruins of such cities as Phoenix. Phoenix should revert to the lizards.

  Such is the ordinary stuff of good end-of-world novels, a sense of sweeping away, of a few survivors, of a beginning again. Here is the authentic oxymoronic flavor of pleasurable catastrophe. Shibah destroys, but good things come of it.

  But the neck-pricklings, the really remarkable vibes, come from another direction in Canticle and set it apart from every other novel in the genre.

  For the good vibes here are Jewish. The coordinates of the novel are radically Jewish-Christian. That is to say, the time line, the x coordinate, the abscissa runs from left to right, from past to future. But the time line is crossed by a y axis, the ordinate. What is the y axis? It is Something That Happened or Something That Will Happen on the time line of such a nature that all points on the time line are read with reference to th
e happening, as before or after, minus or plus. The Jewish coordinates are identical with the Christian save only where y crosses x.

  To apply Jewish-Christian coordinates to a sci-fi novel is almost a contradiction in terms. Because all other sci-fi novels, even the best, 1984 and Brave New World, are written on a single coordinate, the time line. There is a Jew in Brave New World, Bernard Solomon, but his Jewishness is accidental. He could as easily have been a Presbyterian or a Sikh.

  In all other sci-fi fiction, the abscissa extends infinitely in either direction and is not crossed by a y axis. When a starship lands on a strange planet and intelligent beings are encountered, one’s questions have to do with the other’s location on the time line. Have you split the atom yet? Can you dematerialize? What is the stage of evolution of your political system?

  For Jewish coordinates (I say Jewish because for our purposes it doesn’t matter whether the coordinates are Jewish or Christian, since both have an intersecting y axis, and, after all, the Jews had it first) to be applied to the sci-fi genre is a radical challenge of one set of coordinates by another. It is either absurd—and some reviewers found it so—or it is pleasantly dislocating, setting up neck-pricklings. It is something like traveling to a habitable planet of Alpha Centauri and finding on the first rock: “Kilroy was here.” Or it is like turning on a TV soap opera and finding that the chief character is Abraham.

  In Canticle, the great Fire Deluge fell upon the earth in the ancient twentieth century and the maimed and misbegotten survivors were so enraged by the scientists who encompassed their destruction that they set in motion the Simplification: the complete destruction of technology, books, and whatever. An order of monks was founded to save what they could of the ancient twentieth-century civilization and they did, as they did in another Dark Age. They became “bookleggers” who either rescued books from the bonfires of the Simplification or committed them to memory. If a booklegger was caught, he was strung up on the spot. So, indeed, was Blessed Leibowitz martyred. Here, for one thing, was an alliance which baffled some reviewers: Jews, Catholic monks, and atomic scientists.

  So passed the years and the Abbey of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz kept its little horde of precious documents out in the desert. In one of his best strategies, Miller shows how it is that keeping a few books is not enough to save a culture. When one age dies, its symbols lose their referents and become incomprehensible. The nicest touch of all: the monks copy blueprints, illuminating them with gold leaf, scrolls, and cherubs, filling in most of the space with ink “—even though the task of spreading blue ink around tiny white letters was particularly tedious.”

  At length, in another six hundred years, the thirst for knowledge revives and the new savants (from Texarkana Empire!) come to visit the abbey to see what can be salvaged from the wisdom of the ancients.

  Miller uses this new renaissance adroitly to dramatize the perennial conflict, not between science and religion, but between the new adherents of x axis, the single time line, and the keepers of the old coordinates. The hotshot physicist addresses the monks on the subject of the new science.

  After some discussion of the phenomenon of refraction, he paused, then said apologetically: “I hope none of this offends anybody’s religious beliefs,” and looked around quizzically. Seeing that their faces remained curious and bland, he continued for a time, then invited questions from the congregation.

  “Do you mind a question from the platform?” asked the abbot.

  “Not at all,” said the scholar …

  “I was wondering what there is about the refrangible property of light that you thought might be offensive to religion?”

  “Well—” The thon paused uncomfortably. “Monsignor Apollo, whom you know, grew quite heated on the subject. He said that light could not possibly have been refrangible before the Flood, because the rainbow was supposedly—”

  The room burst into roaring laughter, drowning the rest of the remark.

  But the abbot has a sinking feeling about the thon. My God, he asks, are we destined to repeat the same cycle of renaissance, triumph, cataclysm?

  The peculiar virtue of the novel lies in the successful marriage of a subliterary pop form with a subject matter of transliterary import. Literature, in one sense of the word, is simply leapfrogged. Katherine Mansfield is bypassed.

  Canticle is an agreeable battle of coordinates. The eerie neck-pricklings derive from the circumstance that the uni-axis time line of futuristic fiction has never been challenged before and so has become one of those unquestioned assumptions which form us far more firmly than any conscious philosophy. Miller lays the old coordinates over the uni-axis—like one of those clear plastic overlays in mathematics texts—and the reader experiences a slight shiver, or annoyance, or nothing at all.

  When Miller’s starship, which leaves the earth in the second holocaust, reaches Alpha Centauri and discovers intelligent beings there, most of the astronauts will ask the strangers the usual uni-axis time line questions: What is the state of your agriculture? Have you split the atom yet? What about your jurisprudence? Etc.

  But at least one of the astronauts will be a fellow like Walter Miller and he will ask a different set of questions—questions which, oddly enough, the strangers may understand better than his fellow astronauts. “How is it with you? Did something go wrong? Was there a disaster? If so, where do you presently stand in relation to a rectification of the disaster? Are you at a Time Before? Or a Time After? Has there been a Happening? Do you expect one?”

  When he finishes Canticle, the reader can ask himself one question and the answer will tell whether he got the book or missed it. Who is Rachel? What is she?

  1971

  The Movie Magazine: A Low “Slick”

  THE MAGAZINE PHASE OF America’s own kaleidoscope of literature has divided itself by a natural evolution into two classes. They are, as their writers and publishers have so aptly dubbed them, “pulps” and “slicks.” This general classification naturally omits such magazines as Harper’s and The Atlantic Monthly, which, though their interiors are of a refined pulpy nature, represent the other extreme in magazine literature. Published largely by Street and Smith, the “pulps” differ little either in dimension or content, concern the activities of every imaginable sort of adventurer, and exist solely to provide amusement for persons incapable of understanding more pretentious literature. “Slicks,” however, are characterized by no such uniformity, their only common trait being the glossy quality of their pages. In appearance they range from the angular Popular Mechanics to the sprawling Saturday Evening Post, in content from Contract Bridge to Popular Aviation, with more general type magazines, such as Liberty, in between, in price from five to fifty cents, and in literary value from A to Z. Somewhere, near the bottom in literary value, near the top in popularity, appears that highly specialized yet numerously represented species of “slick,” the movie magazines.

  Movie magazines represent a unique class of specialty “slicks.” Unlike other arts and sciences, the movie industry enjoys so many devotees that a large number of magazines may be supported. The constant appearance of new magazines in the competitive field and the sustained existence of the most inferior publication indicate a large, easily satisfied patronage.

  It is in the quality and nature of its readers that the movie magazines differ so curiously from other “slicks” dealing with particular subjects. Readers of Contract Bridge undoubtedly constitute the intelligent minority of bridge players. But the percent of moviegoers who read movie magazines certainly do not represent the intelligent minority interested in moviemaking as a fine art. The reader of Scientific American is in a small way an explorer in the field of science. But the steady reader of Silver Screen knows very little about the production of movies and cares less. She, for he is outnumbered three to one, is incapable of distinguishing a projector from an extra; yet she buys her copy or copies of Hollywood magazines and reads them till they fall apart. She is to be found only in Ame
rica and is possessed with a neurotic curiosity which demands knowledge of every intimate detail of her idol’s life. She does not know acting from arm waving, yet she writes countless letters of praise and criticism to both actor and magazine. She is not satisfied with seeing a Hollywood actor perform; she must know his love life and his spinach recipe. Careful research has unearthed as possible steady movie-magazine readers lovelorn old maids, high-school boys and girls, romantic working girls, and fanatical movie-scrapbook keepers. College students may be included as a possible type, but their motives in reading are entirely healthy and transient.

  The emotional unbalance of these types is admirably exploited by the movie magazines. The romantic yearnings of the female class and the hero worship and sex consciousness of the males are granted blissful satisfaction. The first movie magazine so successfully met the demands of its readers that its formula has been retained to the present day. There have been only slight changes in the methods of formula application, and with the exception of two quite different and almost independent movie publications, the comic movie magazine and the fiction movie magazine, the growth of this magazine has been a profuse but unprogressive multiplication.

  The usual motion-picture magazine, typified by such publications as Hollywood, Movie Mirror, and Screenland, follows well-defined conventions in its makeup. All are products of a program providing for various departments which, though they studiously masquerade under many titles, differ but little in content. The ever-present gossip column may be called Hollywood Keyhole by Screenland and Movie Detective by Silver Screen, but both contain the inevitable alternating light-and-dark print paragraphs parading the idiosyncrasies and domestic infelicities of the stars. Equally institutional are the interviews and features, the confidential editorial comment, the letter boxes, and the movie reviews.