There had to be men and women saints of all kinds. And today. . . we ought perhaps to have saints of yet another kind. — Charles Peguy, The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc
Call her Jehanne la Pucelle, Jeanne d’Arc, or St. Joan, The Maid of Orleans has inspired countless artists over the past six hundred years. Joan has appeared in every conceivable medium—art, print, film, television, music, song, theater, dance, comic books, computer games, and even commercials. That whirling kaleidoscope of images ranges from reverent drama (Carl Theodore Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc) to disgusting erotica (Philip José Farmer’s 1968 novel The Image of the Beast).
One reimagining of St. Joan’s life that is both hauntingly original and thematically faithful is “The Dead Lady of Clown Town”, a science fiction novella by Cordwainer Smith (1964). It is a grand spiritual romance of redeeming love laying siege to a loveless world and patiently dying to conquer it.
The author behind that pen name was Paul Linebarger (1913-66), Professor of Asiatic Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the leading authority on psychological warfare. Because he worked with U.S. intelligence agencies, his science fiction writing had to be done in secret while he lived. He produced only one science fiction novel, Norstrilia1, and all his short fiction has been collected as The Rediscovery of Man.2
Nearly all of Smith’s science fiction work is set in a universe called The Instrumentality of Man. Although critics have tried to codify it, this is not the usual kind of future history with clear connections and neat chronologies. Instead, Smith offers flickering glimpses of aeons since nuclear war devastated Old Earth, followed by a slow return to civilization, expansion into space, the rise and fall of regimes, and finally, about 15,000 years in the future, humanity is ruled by the near-immortal Lords and Ladies of the Instrumentality—the ultimate interstellar nanny-state.
With ruthless benevolence, the Instrumentality protects “true men” from all pain and stress. Humans are genetically programmed, artificially gestated, institutionally raised, and given numbers rather than names. Very beautiful and very healthy, they spend their allotted 400 years of life being very bored: “They live in a stupor and they die in a dream.”
Meanwhile, society’s difficult and dangerous tasks are performed by “underpeople,” animals genetically enhanced and shaped—more or less—into human likeness. (Even robots run on imprints of animal brains.) Dogs, cats, rats, mice, cattle, goats, elephants, bison, monkeys, bears, birds, and snakes are among the species enslaved this way. Regardless of their appearance or behavior, legally, they are mere beasts, kept apart from humans by impenetrable webs of law and custom. “When underpeople got sick, the Instrumentality took care of them—in slaughterhouses. It was easier to breed new underpeople than repair sick ones.”
Both slaves and masters are sorely in need of liberation. At long last, that is on its way, thanks to a most unusual cognate of St. Joan.
When “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” opens, a group of outlaw underpeople on the planet Fomalhaut III has been hiding underground for a hundred years. They have been listening to messages of hope proclaimed by a computer uploaded with the personality of the dead Lady Panc Ashash and by a “non-adjusted man” called the Hunter, an animal executioner who kills with love. Both the Lady and the Hunter promise that someday a dog girl named D’Joan will come to save them. So, the community has reared one D’Joan after another to await deliverance. Each D’Joan is ready to accept her role as the “bridge-to-man” whenever Elaine, the human “misplaced witch” arrives to complete her initiation. Arrive Elaine does after an impossible computer malfunction creates her and an improbable impulse to explore brings her down to the secret refuge Clown Town.
Now the parallels between St. Joan and D’Joan begin marching together. Fifteenth-century Frenchmen are underpeople in their own land after the ravages of the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, and the English occupation. They, too, await the virgin an old legend promises will restore their country. The saints who summon St. Joan to her destiny are Catherine of Alexandria, Michael the Archangel, and Margaret of Antioch. The women were virgins martyred in antiquity and were highly popular in the Middle Ages.
Lady Panc Ashash is wise like St. Catherine, the intellectual princess and patroness of scholars. Her computerized function, Travelers’ Aid, could fit the intercessory role of any saint. The Hunter who only kills with love is, like St. Michael, a foe of dragons. The dragon is also the emblem of St. Margaret, symbolizing the temptations she overcame. She was invoked in cases of difficult childbirth, which approximates Elaine the healer’s midwifely role, growing little D’Joan to full size overnight in a tank.
St. Joan set forth with equipped with armor, weapons, blessed banners, and the counsel of her heavenly “voices;” D’Joan is imprinted with the fused personalities of her mentors. St. Joan was wounded in her first action, raising the siege of Orleans. D’Joan likewise is wounded during her first action, raising the siege mentality of her fellow underpeople. “’I am Joan,’ said the child, ‘and I am dog no more. You are people now, people, and if you die with me, you will die men.’” Trying to persuade her fellows that they are equal to humans provokes an attack from an underperson who rejects her message. St. Joan’s public career lasted roughly a year; Joan’s only six minutes.
Unlike St. Joan. Joan is not betrayed into enemy hands. In a sense, the Instrumentality itself is betrayed: a squad of robot policemen destroy themselves rather than fire on Joan and her companions who have offered them love. Human soldiers must be called in to slaughter the underpeople. Like other holy martyrs across the centuries, they bless their murderers as they die. Beasts have become men while men have become beasts.
Both St. Joan and Joan are tried before hostile, prejudiced judges, but Cordwainer Smith does not attempt to duplicate the historical trial in any detail. Joan could be any unjustly accused prophet. She declares: “’Bit it is the duty of life to find more than life, and to exchange itself for that higher goodness. . . . My body is your property, but my love is not. My love is my own, and I shall love you fiercely while you kill me.’”
The judges might be any insensitive defenders of the status quo: “They were maintaining established order. . . .and they were distressed to see themselves portrayed as casual, cruel men when in fact they were nothing of the sort.” Yet the most hostile judge’s sly question: “’What is a miracle?’” does echo Pilate’s infamous “’Quid est veritas?’” (“’What is truth?’”). Joan’s response to death threats, “’If you light a fire today, my Lord, it will never be put out in the hearts of men,’” does paraphrase the last words of English Protestant martyr Hugh Latimer. Joan’s campaign forces her opponents to confront her and thereby to implicitly acknowledge her humanity, just as Gandhian non-violence did in the 1960s American Civil Rights movement.
Both St. Joan and Joan are executed precipitously and in the same manner—by fire. One judge’s brief suppression of Joan’s reason at the stake corresponds to St. Joan’s enemies’ attempts to trick her into betraying her mission. St. Joan dies crying the name of Jesus. Joan the dog-saint dies proclaiming her love for all beings: “’Loved ones, you kill me. This is my fate. I bring love, and love must die to live on. Love asks nothing, does nothing. Love thinks nothing. Love is knowing yourself and knowing all other people and things. Know—and rejoice. I die for all of you now, dear ones—‘”
The spectators’ grief, the claim that the death was a hoax, and the authorities’ grisly demonstration of its reality are the same on Fomalhaut III as they were in France. Although both victims won immediate popular acclaim, it took almost 500 years for St. Joan to be canonized, and it will take centuries more for the underpeople to gain legal rights.
Despite their seeming failures, both Joans succeed as catalysts. Their deaths propel their people along the path to freedom. As medieval poet Alain Chartier says of St. Joan: “’She raised spirits towards the hope of better times.’” To inject hope into a situation transforms it irreversibly; to proclaim a message of liberation is to initiate its fulfillment. Fittingly, the future Lord of the Instrumentality, who helps free the underpeople descends from a remorseful Lady who condemned Joan.
Critic John Clute praised Smith’s style for its “lyrical and incantatory” language3. In “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” Smith tells his tale the way Picasso reinterpreted Cranach: through deconstruction and reassembly. Authentic details and witty improvisations intersect in a non-linear structure. “You already know the end,” it opens. “But you do not know the beginning.” The narrator, speaking from a vantage point hundreds of years after Joan’s trial, addresses an audience whose admiration is unencumbered by much data. He repeatedly explains the meaning of plot points before they occur. His asides convey background information, historical criticism, and aesthetic judgments on the myriad artworks inspired by Joan. Although Joan is the heroine, Elaine is the viewpoint character. Her origin, call, and commitment are depicted in much more detail than Joan’s to provide an accessible lens for viewing Joan’s heroism. These techniques give the novella the flavor of a legend that has permeated an entire civilization’s consciousness.
After Paul Linebarger started taking his Anglican faith seriously around 1960, Christian elements began popping up in Cordwainer Smith’s fiction, most prominently in “The Dead Lady of Clown Town.” This story is enriched with imagery and allusions beyond borrowings from St. Joan’s life. For instance, the events happen on the third planet of the star Fomalhaut, brightest one in the constellation of the Southern Fish. The fish, of course, is an ancient symbol for Jesus, and earth is the third planet of our Sun. Waterrocky Road recalls the miraculous rock (Christ) that gave the wandering Israelites water (Christ’s Living Water). The underpeople hide in Clown Town, another significant name. The Clown has been a pop-culture symbol for Christ, as in the 1964 film Parable and the 1971 musical Godspell. The underpeople’s catacomb, the Brown and Yellow Corridor, masquerades as a sewer and is reached through an appropriately narrow entrance, the Englok door4.
Instrumentality stories from the 1960s hint at remnants of Christianity—belief in the man on the Two Pieces of Wood—surviving into the far, far future among underpeople and their friends. In “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” note the Hunter’s Trinitarian invocation: “’In the Name of the First Forgotten One, in the name of the Second Forgotten One, in the Name of the Third Forgotten One’” before the “daring sharing” when Joan, Elaine, and the Hunter merge telepathically. The three voices they hear during their union signify a triune theophany and are followed by visions of Pentecostal fire and baptismal water. Therefore: “People and underpeople meet on the terms of love.”
Like Christian witnesses of all ages, Joan and her fellows joyously find their lives by losing them.
It is nevertheless an extraordinary fact, it is one of the greatest proofs, it is one of the greatest tokens of God’s goodness that there should be for all that;. . .as many martyrs as executioners; . . .as many victims as required;. . . executioners will grow weary before victims and martyrs. — Charles Peguy, The Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc
(Editor’s note: A different version of this essay appeared in the magazine Algol 20, 1973.)
Endnotes:
1 Norstrilia. 2nd ed. NESFA PRESS: Boston (2020).
2The Rediscovery of Man. Ed. James A. Mann. 2nd ed. NESFA Press: Boston (2023).
3 John Clute, “Cordwainer Smith” in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Ed. John Clute and Peter Nicholls. St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1993. p. 1122.
4 Although Englok sounds like the German Engloch (“narrow hole”), it means “fifty-six” in Cantonese. For some unknowable reason, the names of Lady Panc Ashash, three judges, and a robot in this story all mean “fifty-six” in various languages. Cordwainer Smith loved multilingual wordplays.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
About his 1964 fiction book, and about novelist Cordwainer Smith as also with U.S. Intelligence agencies, and then about Meisel’s footnote #4 involving the curiously symbolic number 56, let’s try this….
In February 1950, a still-green Senator McCarthy outed 57 officials as supposedly “card-carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party,” and whom he claimed had infiltrated the federal government. In a detailed recounting analysis of the entire historic flareup, including key parts of Senate hearing transcripts, William F. Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell make the case that remembered history could have turned out differently—if only McCarthy had charged less dramatically the danger of “security risks” (“McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and its Meaning,” Henry Regnery: 1954, bios for the McCarthy list are included as Appendix C).
About the 57 accused (and still only halfway through the book) we have this reported exchange involving General Snow of the State Department’s Loyalty Security Board, during the 1951 McCarren Committee Hearings:
“You have just finished telling us in another connection, Mc Carthy reminded Snow, that 54 disloyal cases were allowed to resign under investigation and that three other individuals had been found to be disloyal or are in the process of appeal. That, by a strange coincidence makes 57, does it not? Could it be, McCarthy wondered out loud, that these 57 tally with the 57 on the original McCarthy list? No, answered General Snow, they were ‘not the same individuals’–which might have been well enough had he not, a few seconds later, confessed that he did not know the ‘names’ of the 54 who had resigned!” (. p. 226, with followup transcript).
Well, the agent/novelist’s 56 is not quite the same as 57, but is it still “close enough for government work” and for a Meisel’s curiously symbolic footnote?
Especially exactly “close” and accurate if only one of the three final cases on appeal was successful, as in 54 + 2 = 56.
Er, no. I don’t thing the recurring “56” has anything to d with McCarthy. “Cordwainer Smith” was much too subtle for that. Unfortunately, I don’t have the NESFA Concordance to his work at hand to offer more enlightenment. But I do urge readers to seek out his stories, available in several recent collections. They are so weird and wonderful.
This has similar problems to Narnia.
1. The talking creatures of Narnia do not inherit Original Sin from their ancestors the way we do from Adam and Eve. They are just as subject to sin as we are, as we see with Nikabrik, but without a primordial state of grace. Ditto for the underpeople.
2. The talking creatures of Narnia have no family relationship with Aslan. Aslan not only has no children; he has no mother. What is not assumed is not redeemed, though. (In fact, the “redemption” in Narnia seems only to apply to Edmund, not the dwarfs, talking animals, etc.) Ditto for the underpeople; they have no family relationship with Jesus Christ.
“The Dead Lady of Clown Town” might be “science fiction”, but it must be science fiction of some parallel universe like Narnia — or else, if it is supposed to take place literally in our universe (not as a parable like Animal Farm), it is problematic from a Catholic perspective. Maybe this could be “solved” by assuming underpeople were created by the addition of so much human DNA that they count as descendants of Adam and Eve and relatives of Christ; let us hope this never becomes a real issue.
Even setting all this aside, a “saint’s life” that does not mention Jesus or even God in any sense (at least to judge from this review) MISSES THE WHOLE POINT of what it means to be a saint. If that’s what you want, you might as well read stories about Buddhist “saints” and bodhisattvas, and you could post your review on Buddhist World Report.
In re Narnia: Lewis, like all fiction writers, gets to set the foundation principles of his stories. Narnia is not Earth and therefore has its own Salvation History where the Second Person of the Trinity walks among them as a lion. Aslan created Narnia and gave sentience–which implies souls–to some animals who passed that on to their descendants. He also set a human couple brought from our world to rule over Narnia and people it with humans. When Old Narnia ends, the good talking animals as well as good humans go to New Narnia, which is their section of heaven.
If there actually is sentient life on other planets, each would have its own unique Salvation History. cf “Judgment Night” by Alice Meynell
Cordwainer Smith imagines our Earth and universe in the far, far future thousands of years after global nuclear war devastated our planet. The Underpeople are genetically engineered from Earth’s animals and are sentient, with the ability to love and exercise free will although the human authorities don’t realize that. How did they acquire souls? Presumably by direct intervention of God, since the Underpeople are keeping the Old Strong Religion alive. Jesus isn’t mentioned because his name has been forgotten; he’s the Man on the Two Pieces of Wood. To see how this plays out and renews humanity, read Smith’s other stories.
Lewis does not seem to have agreed with you. No; he makes it clear that Aslan IS Jesus, that the Holy Trinity is exactly the same in Narnia as on Earth. For that matter, he did write a space trilogy, and, again, the Incarnation was not just a local disguise, but a hypostatic union with universal consequences. Lewis was not trying to incur the wrath of St. Paul by preaching any other gospel, not in our universe and not in Narnia.
The problem was that Lewis was a Protestant. It is not surprising that what he wrote is at odds with Catholic theology; Lewis rejected Catholic theology. It is not at all surprising that the Protestant discomfort with the Blessed Virgin Mary leaves her totally absent from both Narnia and his Perelandra trilogy but also, to the best of my recollection, all his writings. It *is* surprising that Catholics pretend that he is a Doctor of the Catholic Church. It *is* surprising, and not a little disturbing, that Catholics are desperate to turn to pop culture in search of deep meaning.
So, the name of Jesus has been totally forgotten in Cordwainer Smith’s books? And you see nothing impossible in this. Yes, I mean IMPOSSIBLE. If the Gates of Hell really did prevail over the Church, then all of Christianity is a lie; at most you could have some near-Christian religion, like Mormonism or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or, for that matter, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. But if you believe that is possible, you are already venturing into heresy.
Just to be clear, I did not choose the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses as random examples. These really are examples of “Restorationists” who believe that the original teachings of Jesus were lost (usually due to the supposed nefarious actions of the Catholic Church and/or the emperor Constantine), only to be restored by some special prophet or researcher. So much for, “Lo, I am with you always,” to say nothing of the Nicene Creed! Islam also fits this mold, which is why it has often been considered a Christian heresy.
Of course the Church might be completely eradicated in some locations — a household, a city, a nation, or even a continent. However, a story in which the Church fails everywhere is no more suitable for recommendation by a Catholic than a story in which Christ fails to rise from the dead.
In my time writing for the Catholic press, I’ve been called a pagan, an atheist, a Communist, and a Muslim. Why not a heretic? Be warned that I once published a fantasy based on esoteric Tibetan Buddhism. Writers can build whatever worlds they want. This is called “fiction.”
Cordwainer Smith was a High Church Anglican who was using Christian themes in stories sold to a niche market generally unfriendly to same. His stories are snapshots scattered across 15,000 years of human history in this galaxy. It isn’t a systematic “future history.” Perhaps in some obscure corner, a few Catholics are still celebrating the Tridentine Mass. Every element of Christian theology may exist somewhere deep in the computers of the Instrumentality, unknown to living beings. But according to what’s shown, the Underpeople and some True Men just know a crucified Savior and a Triune Forgotten One. This doesn’t make them Mormons, Witnesses, or Moonies but something like the “hidden Christians” of Japan.
Excellent article Mrs. Miesel i also read the Corwainer Smith’s Stories