Whether the apocalyptic tale portends the future to be a hoary wasteland or a human trial bristling with possibility, a careful treatment of history marches in lockstep.  Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is no exception.

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In the aftermath of worldwide nuclear war, a populist wave surges across the globe that urges a cultural cleansing, a purge of all knowledge and disassemblage of machinery building up to the production of fissile uranium.  Six hundred years after the catastrophe, the monastic order of Leibowitz carefully preserves the few remaining shreds (literally) of first-wave human thought.

Chinua Achebe employs the rich oral history of the Igbo people in Things Fall Apart, Roberto Bolaño’s annals in 2666 are written in the fact-laden style of police reports and governmental memos, and similarly Miller portrays the monks as nearly the last bastion of knowledge and memory in a lawless land.  And as the critical faculty of humankind slowly returns, skeptical “natural philosophers” question the validity of a history remembered absolutely by a non-secular body.  The philosopher’s critical lens, necessary to his vocation assuredly, can not comprehend the virtuous duty and devotion inherent in monastic record keeping.  Skepticism catalyzes the pursuit of secular knowledge, and disregard for sacred motivation turns A Canticle for Leibowitz into a protracted examination of history repeating itself.

Structurally, A Canticle for Leibowitz suggest a few things about how we perceive history.  The three sections of the novel all take place approximately six hundred years apart from each other.  By locating certain events within a span of two millenia, we place an undue emphasis on arbitrary action rather than the complex array of circumstances, trial and errors that led up to it.  This attention to history, spotty and narrow, is another factor in the repetition of history.  Interestingly, secular knowledge jives quite well with narrow-history.  Points of data based on calendrical year, cause and effect, action-reaction-consequence, rather than intuition and moral accounting of history.  Also, each rise and fall of human civilization spans about 2000 years, as if scientific progress has, alongside primal human nature, a dreadful destiny.

Throughout the three sections, a few tireless actors remain: buzzards and Benjamin.  Satisfied in a cycle of consumption and reproduction, taking what is given, the scraggly avians thrive against the wear of time.  Benjamin, an old colorful hermit, seems to represent the entire legacy of the Jewish faith, and lives futily and perpetually, yet patiently.  Miller suggest two more scourges that will live eternally in spite of any fantastic curve of history, and those are Latin subjunctive verb conjugation and beguiling computer affliction.