Page 194 →Epilogue

Late in Walter M. Miller Jr.’s apocalyptic cold war novel A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Abbot Jethrah Zerchi addresses the Brethren of the Order of Leibowitz, a group of Catholic monks devoted to preserving fragments of documentary knowledge from a previous age. Outside the monastery’s walls, an international incident threatens to once again unleash nuclear weapons, eighteen hundred years after the “Flame Deluge” that nearly eradicated human life from the planet and precipitated the Order’s mission. Miller’s novel ambiguously presents the monks as both martyrs in the fight against (self-)destructive ignorance and custodians of information that allows the seemingly inevitable cycle of mass destruction to repeat itself.¹ Dom Zerchi’s speech provides a context for a retrospective reading of A Canticle for Leibowitz in the context of all the cold war fictions that expressed a combination of fear, anger, perplexity, and strained faith in humanity—which would include most of the works mentioned in this study: “Brothers, let us not assume that there is going to be war. Let’s remind ourselves that Lucifer [that is, nuclear weapons] has been with us—this time—for nearly two centuries. And was dropped only twice, in sizes smaller than megaton. We all know what could happen, if there’s war. . . . Back then, in the Saint Leibowitz’ [sic] time, maybe they didn’t know what would happen. Or perhaps they did know, but could not quite believe it until they tried it—like a child who knows what a loaded pistol is supposed to do, but has never pulled a trigger before. They had not yet seen a billion corpses. They had not yet seen the still-born, the monstrous, the de-humanized, the blind. They had not yet seen the madness and the murder and the blotting out of reason. Then they did it, and then they saw it” (255). He is still hopeful that a recurrence of the previous disaster can be averted in this situation, in part because the technological ability to wage all-out nuclear war is this time coupled with firsthand knowledge of the consequences of such behavior: “Now—now the princes, the presidents, the praesidiums, now they know—with dead certainty. They can know it by the children they beget and send to asylums for the deformed. Page 195 →They know it and they’ve kept the peace. Not Christ’s peace, certainly, but peace, until lately—with only two warlike incidents in as many centuries. Now they have the bitter certainty. My sons, they cannot do it again. Only a race of madmen could do it again” (255–56). The novel’s ending would indicate that humanity is a race of madmen, since they do in fact scorch the planet a second time with nuclear fire despite knowing the inevitable consequences of such an action.

Miller’s novel fictionally addresses a question that recurs nonfictionally twenty years later in Carl Sagan’s book and television series Cosmos (1980). Sagan states that “there are not yet any obvious signs of extraterrestrial intelligence and this makes us wonder whether civilizations like ours always rush implacably, headlong, toward self-destruction” (318). He doubts that even a remnant of human society would survive a nuclear war, writing, “Full-scale nuclear war has never happened. Somehow this is taken to imply that it never will. But we can experience it only once. By then it will be too late to reformulate the statistics” (330). A Canticle for Leibowitz makes the claim (in many ways more grim that Sagan’s) that humanity might be able to experience the horrors of nuclear war and its aftermath more than once. However, it presents the survival of the species as the ultimate pyrrhic victory, given the inexorable repetition of past mistakes. Miller essentially argues that “reformulat[ing] the statistics” would make no difference if “a billion corpses” are not compelling enough reasons by themselves.

Miller and Sagan both wrote during times—the late 1950s and late 1970s, respectively—at which the ideological tensions of the cold war seemed increasingly likely to touch off a cataclysmic nuclear exchange.² That likelihood remained remote even during the most tense moments of the cold war, but as McGeorge Bundy stated in downplaying the severity of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the “objective risk of escalation to the nuclear level may have been as large as 1 in 100 . . . [but] in this apocalyptic matter the risk can be very small indeed and still much too large for comfort” (quoted in Gaddis 269). Thus Sagan’s contention that “the development of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems will, sooner or later, lead to global disaster” (328) arises from a similar cultural context as Miller’s grim prediction that experience only forestalls self-annihilation instead of preventing it. Both argue that the mere presence of weapons of such unparalleled destructive power is neither the calculated risk nor the bargaining tool that strategists and politicians on both sides made it out to be, but a powder keg of epic proportions waiting only to be lit.

The end of the cold war undoubtedly lessened the threat of all-out nuclear war both by eliminating the direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union (and their corresponding nuclear arsenals) and by accelerating the nuclear arms reduction process. However, the capability for nearly instantaneous large-scale devastation will continue to exist just Page 196 →as long as the bombs and missiles do. Furthermore, as A Canticle for Leibowitz eloquently illustrates, the knowledge of how to make such weapons alone presents a threat that cannot be eliminated, only managed in a reasonable fashion. Lifton and Mitchell suggest in Hiroshima in America that such management involves “properly stigmatizing the weapons” so that their use becomes inherently and incontrovertibly absurd. They argue that such a perspective would also allow a more genuine appraisal of the influence nuclear weapons have had on the development of society: “We can return to human agency in controlling our lethal technology. And we can ‘disenthrall ourselves’ from the nuclear deity and from the Hiroshima narrative that has so long shielded and promoted that deity. We can come to recognize the extent to which that Hiroshima narrative has blunted our senses and subverted our moral imagination” (354–55). The satires discussed in the preceding chapters questioned the effects of the “Hiroshima narrative” amid numerous other cultural narratives that (de)formed U.S. and Soviet culture of the cold war era. The overriding aspiration of this collective effort was to subvert the jingoistic philosophies that promised either a capitalist or a Communist utopia that they could not (and perhaps never intended to) deliver.

Because the historical reality of the cold war was predicated on fictional constructs presented as truth—that is, Derrida’s “fables” or Iser’s “non-literary fictions”—it is only through scrutiny and, if necessary, renunciation of such dishonest cultural fictions that humanity can again achieve some measure of serenity and assurance that living with the knowledge of the bomb is not simply a matter of waiting for the end. Lifton and Mitchell’s prescription for “renewal” reveals the significance of a candid attitude toward the past, an element that they, like Russian and American subversive satirists, argue has been missing. They offer this prognosis: “It can enable us to emerge from nuclear entrapment and rediscover our imaginative capacities on behalf of human good. We can overcome our moral inversion and cease to justify weapons or actions of mass killing. We can condemn and then step back from acts of desecration and recognize what Camus called ‘a philosophy of limits.’ In that way we can also take steps to cease betraying ourselves, cease harming and deceiving our own people. We can also free our society from its apocalyptic concealment, and in the process enlarge our vision. We can break out of our long-standing numbing in the vitalizing endeavor of learning, or relearning, to feel. And we can divest ourselves of a debilitating sense of futurelessness and once more feel bonded to past and future generations” (356). Lifton and Mitchell contend that the end of the cold war should not simply occasion a celebration of survival akin to the sigh of relief that follows a successful turn at Russian roulette, especially since continued participation in either situation dramatically increases one’s odds of eventually losing. Rather, it should lead to solemn and honest reflection on the reasoning that unleashed the nuclear genie with which the world must henceforth contend.

Page 197 →This process of reflection is abetted not only by a review of past expressions of dissent, but also by study of artistic engagements with the cold war that are afforded the perspectival benefits of hindsight. In the decade since the end of the cold war, novelists such as DeLillo, Heller, Lydia Millet, Pynchon, Phillip Roth, Gerald Vizenor, Vonnegut, Aksyonov, Mark Kharitonov, Vladimir Makanin, Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, and Svetlana Vasilenko have collectively produced a substantial body of work that continues to reexamine the assumptions of recent history with a skeptical eye in order to avoid repeating the missteps of the past. Makanin’s Laz (1990; Escape Hatch) and Dolog nash put’ (1991; The Long Road Ahead), Kharitonov’s Linii sud’by (1992; Lines of Fate), Pelevin’s Omon Ra (1992) and Zhizn’ nasekomykh (1994; The Life of Insects), Heller’s Closing Time (1994), Sorokin’s Norma (1994; The Norm), Pelevin’s Chapaev i pustota (1996; Chapaev and Void),³ DeLillo’s Underworld (1997), Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997),⁴ Vonnegut’s Timequake (1997), Aksyonov’s Novyi sladostnyi stil’ (1997; The New Sweet Style), Vasilenko’s Durochka (1998; Little Fool), Roth’s I Married a Communist (1998), Voinovich’s Monumental’naia propaganda (2002; Monumental Propaganda), Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi (2003), Millet’s Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), and Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006) are just some of the post–cold war works that fit this description. I can readily foresee a study that continues the comparative analysis of this project by examining the variety of techniques that American and Russian writers have used as part of a wider cultural convalescence after the cold war. For the time being, however, such a project remains a scheme for the future; in other words, it is the kind of prospect that the authors of the cautionary tales and darkly satirical diatribes dealt with in these pages hoped to ensure for their descendants. Humanity has been granted a reprieve—perhaps temporary, perhaps not—from self-extinction. In light of this, we cold war survivors have a communal responsibility to recognize that, as the banner at the end of On the Beach proclaims, there is still time to learn from the errors of the past in order to create a future world that ends with neither a bang nor a whimper of our own devising. Page 198 →