Wading through Segullah’s archives some time ago, I found a poem that really caught me off guard: “Spindrift” by Marie Brian. The thing that struck me first about “Spindrift” is its (Emily) Dickinsonian style: seemingly random, mid-sentence capitalizations, the hyphens, the brevity. The tone, however, is considerably more hopeful, more reverent as the poet’s mind reaches through the sea spray, contemplating redemption, contemplating God.

The opening image, punctuated as it is by alliteration, is especially striking, setting the stage for the rest of the poem:

Harpooning—the Undoubtable
Shot from your sea-swept eyes,
Frothing mouths—
Bobbing, billowing
On the world’s flood tide (lines 1-5).

I take this Undoubtable stare of the sea to be the gaze of God shooting, harpoon-like, from the windswept waves. This “spindrift” (6) cuts to the marrow with its chilling mist, its clarifying ambiguity. Divine paradox this, that the “good news” (6) often comes to us most clearly, often catches us with its barb, in the moments when we’re wading (faithfully, perhaps) into the darkness of the unknown. I think of Lehi wandering through the mist of darkness before an angel parted the black veil and led him to the Tree of Life. I think of Boyd K. Packer’s commentary on “the leap of faith”: “the moment when you have gone to the edge of the light and stepped into the darkness to discover that the way is lighted ahead for just a footstep or two.” I think of the piercing insights that sometimes come through the disorder of sleep.

While these piercings may at times wound us, they also, I think, mark us (as we come unto Christ) as the fruits of His wounded body, leaving their imprint on the soul, a place where the “tissue thickens, binds / Fast-barnacled hooks / Of scarring Divine” (18-20) that tells us we’re God’s, that labels us heirs of His Being, of His Place. Maybe such Divine scars are part of what it means to have His image engraved upon our countenances.

Just maybe.

In addition to “Spindrift,” Brian has at least two other poems online: “Pangaea Lost” and “Orisons.”

Happy reading.

Note: I thought a post to honor Linda Sillitoe and her encounter with Mormon letters would provide a suitable launching point for the series. She passed away April 7, 2010. Exponent II has published a tribute for Sillitoe in their latest issue.

One of the most striking poems I’ve read recently is Linda Sillitoe’s unrhymed sonnet “Encounter” (link to PDF from Dialogue 35.1 [2002]), which takes as its lyric province the intergenerational relationship between people, places, and possessions. The poet, born of goodly parents (at least it seems so from the pleasant cache of memories stirred in this sensory experience), begins by formally and lyrically binding this relational triad and expanding and deepening the connections between them from there.

The poem’s form serves as both a binding agent and a vessel for these connections and the poet’s experience of them by providing a matrix around which she could embroider and in which she could offer her words, ideas, and emotions and thus keep them from spinning into chaos and sentimentality. It’s a mark of her poetic achievement and the poem’s success that she refrains from an exhibition of unearned emotion (exhibitionism and unearned emotion being marks of sentimentality), something immature poets often slip into when writing in forms and when writing about personal relationships.

And while the purist might complain that from a strictly technical and historical standpoint this isn’t an out-and-out sonnet, I would argue that it is a sonnet in a modern, more subtle variation of the form. I say this for two reasons: one, it’s divided into an octet that sets up a question—”Has she kept everything?”—and a sestet that begins to answer that question, though the answer, in true (post)modern form and in a way reflecting the complexity of human relationships, just breeds more questions. And two, as any traditional sonnet has and as any sonnet, I think, must, in the words of poets Mark Strand and Eavan Boland, it “suggest[s] narrative progress through its sequence structure, while, in single units, it is capable of the essential lyric qualities of being musical, brief, and memorable” (The Making of a Poem 58; Amazon ).

Notice in particular the alliteration at work as binding agent in the first five lines (as through the entire poem): the /n/’s, the sister sounds /b/ and /p/, /d/ and /t/, the /s/’s, the /g/’s, all grouped variously throughout, then combined in the last clause of line five: “I glanced behind me.” I read this mixture as the lyric medicine the poet finds in this cabinet of wonders (even though she claims she was just “searching for a comb”): as she turns toward her past, toward (I presume) her father’s presence in the room, in her life, she finds a “genie”-like granting of the wish that smolders beneath the surface of the poem—that she could remember her father, “[t]wo years” gone, but always a defining presence in her being and in her connection to her mother and to the past, and thus to her present and future.

This desire surfaces—and ripples through subsequent readings of the poem—in the last three lines, the denouement in which the poet wonders about her mother and, beyond that, about the fusion of time and person, place, thing, and sense as this union moves to draw lucid experience, even ecstasy (as suggested by the narcotic-effect the sudden encounter has on the poet: “The room wavered like my knees”), from memory’s cistern and to immerse us in melancholy wonder over the duration, strength, and will of human connection.

Such is an appropriate sentiment to keep in mind, I think, as we strive to “summon” presence and experience from kith and kin past to help and heal us in our present and our future relationships with person, place, and thing.

Since April 2009, as part of my (meager) commitment to raise the profile of Mormon poetry, I’ve been investing off and on in what I’ve called my Mormon Poetry Project, offering short readings of poems by Mormon poets on my personal blog. My ground rules: 1) the poets should be Latter-day Saints (of whatever stripe) and 2) the poems should be accessible online to provide my (meager) audience the chance to read for themselves and talk back with my interpretations, to the end—says the idealist in me—of sparking greater awareness of, interest in, and conversations about poetry by poets who are also Mormon.

Because I think these poets deserve exposure and because the traffic at my blog is a trickle—okay, maybe a slow drip—I’m giving those readings a new beginning (and in most cases, expansion and revisions) here at AMV under the series title “Mormon Poetry Now!” I’ll also be posting additional readings of poems (not included in the original list) and poetry reviews as I see fit. This introductory post will also serve as the new home of the Poets Roll: the list of poets, poems, and reviews I’ve posted so far.

Before I dive in, though, a note about the title: Twenty-five years ago, Dennis Clark, then poetry editor for Sunstone, began a four-part series for the magazine called “Mormon Poetry Now!” In his column published in four installments between June 1985 and August 1989 (1985, 1986, 1987, 1989), he set out, according to his purpose stated in the series opener, to survey “the state of the art of Mormon poetry,” to examine “the best of what Mormon poets [were] trying to publish” at the time. I’ve deliberately tied myself to these efforts to highlight the new Mormon poetry by stealing Clark’s title for my own and by following his example of close reading (though his readings are likely far more astute than mine promise to be). My hope is that migrating this ongoing project to AMV’s more fertile blogging grounds will reveal something of the varieties of Mormon poetic experience and open the way for our continued harvest of the field.

* * * *

Mormon Poets Roll

Marie Brian: “Spindrift”

Linda Sillitoe: “Encounter”

The contrast between these two paintings and the Edenic mythos their marriage evoked struck me as a tension that might work well in a poem. So I set out to lyrically critique the one in terms of the other (I’ll let you decide which one is which) and to extrapolate connections between images that are removed from one another by over five centuries.

As always, comments are welcome.

* * * *

No Botticelli, This—

No ginger virgin, hands modest to sex and breast,
flesh fallow, fecund as sky gone to seed in the sea:
her father’s cerulean stones sickled into primordium,
become pit to her emanant pith. No escort ashore
on the zephyr’s hymned gestures toward Paradise,
wafted with rose hips come like souls wanting skin.
No velvet robes ready to sop up her mythology, to
keep her from burning her first day at the beach.

Just this Eve and her Adam, curling down currents
of dawn like leaves slipped from the knowledge tree,
flesh converging to vessel the easterly sighed down-
canyon when God realized they’d grown restless
waiting for his newly charged cherubim to doze,
drop their swords, spill the tokens and signs
of his mystery as they dreamed. So the pair
streaked through asphodel fields instead, emerged
from under cover fig leaves into the blush of blossom
against bodies gnawing, gnawing at the edges of sky.

* * * *

[Added 8/12/2010]: If you’d like the full aural experience of the poem, click here for an audio version that you can read along to.

* * * * *
Across the Ironic Distance: Negotiating the Narrative Gaps

Each of the ten stories in Where Nothing Is Long Ago deals with the protagonist’s (Budge’s) efforts to negotiate her way into this awareness and through or into some aspect of life in a tight-knit, largely orthodox Mormon community and with the narrator’s attempts to bring order to her younger self’s experience and to mediate between this experience, her continuing participation in/observation of this community, and the reader’s world. The title story—the sequence’s opening narrative—centers on a fictionalized murder over water rights as committed by Brother Tolsen, one of the early twentieth century Danish Mormon village’s most respectable and orthodox men. The story opens with the narrator quoting from something her “mother wrote [her] recently”: “You’ll probably remember Brother Tolsen and that awful thing that happened when you were a little girl.” Then the narrator offers this exposition, “Her fat script traveled the whole way around the photograph and obituary she had clipped from our Mormon newspaper,” and another statement from her mother: “The killing wasn’t even mentioned at his funeral. All the speakers just said what a good man he always was” (3) This interaction between the narrator, her community (through her mother’s “script,” which is “fat” with implications), and her past frames not just the story, prompting wonder over who Brother Tolsen is and what awful thing he may have been involved in, but the entire sequence of stories, episodes that ripple outward from this fundamental interface (between narrator, community, and memory) and that embody the semiotic systems of this community, especially its maintenance and perpetuation through the acts of remembering, including story-telling and ritual.

From here the narrator slips into reminiscence, recalling where she was “the morning the Tolsen trouble happened” and her “absolute[. . .] certain[ty] for years” (3) after the event that, in her words, the “two piles of bloody rabbit ears I saw on the courthouse lawn at the time of Brother Tolsen’s trial had something to do with the killing he was being tried for.” “They hadn’t,” she continues, slipping, it seems, into the protagonist’s voice as she tries to convince herself that these “tokens” of the currents of passion and violence flowing beneath humanity’s communal experience were “merely” symbols that “the annual county rabbit hunt had gone off according to schedule” (4). However, her repeated reference to these signs (they come up twice in the story) and the detail with which she lingers on their presence (the second time she mentions them, they are “being counted” “on the courthouse lawn” [13], the center of community justice and activity) suggests that the community’s efforts to rewrite the tale into a more favorable telling have failed.

But that the narrator sees the triumph of voice over silence as a means to community healing is apparent in the story’s final scene: “One other memory [of this experience] remains,” the narrator says. “I recall an evening months after the trial was over, when my parents and I were driving along the road where [Brother Tolsen’s] fields lay and saw [him] working with the little streams [of irrigated water] that were running among his young corn. Dad and Mother waved and called to him,” gesturing their inherent connection to and compassion for the man. “He lifted an arm to answer and I saw that he held a shovel in the other hand. ‘I wonder if he bought a new shovel,’ I said suddenly,” referring to the fact that he had killed the water-thief, another member of this community, with a shovel to the head. Then she offers this: “For a minute, the air seemed to have gone dead about us, in the peculiar way it sometimes can, which is so puzzling to a child. Then Mother,” the representative voice of decorum, “turned to me angrily. ‘Don’t you ever let me hear you say a thing like that again!’ she said. ‘Brother Tolsen is a good, kind man!’” And the narrator rounds the story out with this: “So until this very hour I never have” (14). This short statement, coming as it does from an experienced narrator looking back on the means through which she has gained that experience, implies that the act of remembering is ultimately incomplete without moments of critical reflection—times when we question our community’s weaknesses, the language we use to interrogate and to expose those weaknesses, and the motives underlying those interrogative and expository attempts.

She continues this participant/observer critique through the remaining nine stories of Where Nothing Is Long Ago as she negotiates the ironic distance between her younger and older selves, between narrative past and narrative present, and between her narrative of community and the modern world. In “The Darling Lady” she considers her community’s ostracism of a one-time polygamous wife, a woman “left alone after the [Mormon church’s] 1890 Manifesto ostensibly banned such marriages” (Howe xii), relegating second- and third-wives to community borderlands. Here, the Darling Lady—so-named by Budge and her sister, Helen, because, with her “deliberately oversweet” voice (16), “[s]he called [them] ‘darlings’ in almost every sentence she spoke to [them]” (17)—lives by herself in the backroom of the corner store, though the “small shed perched at the corner of [the] block” (16) can hardly be called either a store or a home. When called upon, the lone woman emerges “through a dark-curtain hanging over a door behind the counter” (17) to ceremoniously trade her wares with customers. “[H]er mysterious existence there troubled us, sometimes,” the narrator comments, “and we asked each other, ‘Where are her folks?” (18), suggesting that they sensed her imposed solitude at the corner of town could be remedied if someone—“her folks,” her people by tradition and ritual—would invite her into this Mormon community’s still vibrant way of life. And the story ends with this subtly reproachful realization—reproachful for both the narrator and for her community—as Budge and Helen pretend to invite the Darling Lady into their room where they watch her “rocking and sipping [hot milk] and getting her feet dry, with her slippers by the stove” (28), an act of compassion and community that can never happen here because the Darling Lady has disappeared, almost unnoticed.

In “The White Horse,” Sorensen’s narrator takes a different tact, negotiating the hard realities of World War I by engaging the tenuous relationship she once had with the white stallion of a soldier who never came home. This “wonderful creature,” “wild as he could be,” “seemed to be forever fighting a war of his own” (29) even as the war raged on the other side of the world, she relates, a negotiation she tried to assuage by “stamp[ing]” the horse for luck: “You wet the forefinger of your right hand on the tip of your tongue and set the spot of wet on your left palm for a second. Then, quickly, you stamp the place [on your hand] with your right fist. It’s rather like wishing on a first star,” she observes, and is meant here to convey the connection between an individual and the interdependent network of persons (human and non-human) of which she is an integral part. To deny this connection, the narrator implies by focusing on the absence created in the community and in the horse’s existence by a soldier’s death (the horse becomes increasingly angry due to a lack of interpersonal bonds and must be sold), is to sow the seeds of violence in increasingly destructive relationships with one another and with the non-human world.

“The Apostate” engages this failure to connect in human terms by exploring the relationship between Budge, her maternal grandmother, and their religion, an imposing and sometimes dogmatic patriarchal system from which Grandmother considers herself apostate and with which Budge must learn to reckon as she matures into increasingly critical reflections on the world. This maturation process is furthered here with her negotiation of her grandmother’s falling away from Mormonism—something that shakes Budge’s naïve and impressionable soul because she sees it as deeply self-contradictory for a deeply spiritual woman to deny her religion—and her grandmother’s death.

“First Love” returns to the ecology of human/non-human interactions stirred up in “The White Horse,” though this narrative deepens the engagement by focusing on Budge’s increasing stewardships at home and in the community. After she gets a cat she calls “Jiggs” (75)—a name representative of the cat’s growing discontent and the dance Budge must learn in her negotiation of community ties and an explicit relationship with the non-human world—she must learn to balance her new responsibilities as pet-owner, sister, daughter, student, and member of community that expects her active engagement in community rituals. Yet, when she’s asked to perform in a community pageant, her balance tips to one side and Jiggs falls victim to the relational failure: he runs away and, as the story ends, we learn of his unfortunate death.

The remaining five stories of the sequence—“The Ghost,” “The Other Lady,” “The Face,” “The Vision of Uncle Lars,” and “The Secret Summer”—continue the engagement deepened in “First Love” as Budge learns to negotiate a place for herself as a participant/observer in her community and in the modern world at large. In “The Ghost” she confronts her community’s racism, exploring the allure of the Other as she longs to bridge the gap between her experience and, first, the life of a black waiter she encounters on a train ride from Manti to Salt Lake, then in the experience of “a black family from Tennessee, directed to Manti by one of the town’s missionaries” (Howe xii). Because this family’s father’s voice brings such resonance to the Mormon choir, Budge senses that their presence could resonate deeply with the come one, come all underpinnings of her faith; but this desire is frustrated when the family leaves town, though not without opening space in Budge—and by extension, the story’s narrator—for the expansive otherness of the world.

“The Other Lady” and “The Face” explore the painful and far-reaching effects of breaching social contracts, the first as Budge’s family learns of “the other lady” in their paternal grandfather’s life, the one he divorces his wife for and marries just before he dies, and the second as Budge deals with the violence of a voyeur who peaks in the bathroom window as she steps out of the bath. Yet, there is even the possibility of redemption here as, in “The Other Lady,” Budge’s mother moves to comfort Grandfather’s new wife, to “s[i]t down and cr[y]” with her after his funeral as the family boards the train that will carry them home (142).

“The Vision of Uncle Lars” takes up the supernatural connections between community members and their origins as the narrator relates, in her Great-Aunt Anegrethe’s words, the “strange story” of how she and Uncle Lars met (161): While in Denmark, as he was approaching a family cottage, he saw a vision of her walking down the front steps. Later, when Lars and Anegrethe met for the first time, Lars understood this vision as a preternatural token of a relationship to come.

To round off the sequence, Sorensen offers “The Secret Summer,” a narrative in which Budge comes of age, negotiating the difficulties of pre-adolescent longing in games played across the neighborhood on summer nights, in secret notes passed between best friends, through participation in a community pageant, in bickering between girls who are chasing the same boy and then between girls and the boy once the boy gives up the chase, and in the longing stirred by her first kiss. Here Sorensen revisits many of the themes carried throughout the book, most significantly by focusing on the semiotic layers of this community and in showing how Budge—and the narrator of the sequence—settles into this system, centering the world within and without this narrative of community through a restorative commitment to community, a redemptive movement reflected in the book’s final words: Having spent the night performing in the town’s pioneer story-focused pageant (a nod to the depth of the town’s collective past) and then playing with her friends in the pageant’s carnival, in the narrator’s words, Kirk, her first crush,

lean[s] toward me and I [feel] the brush of his lips on my cheek. Dozens of times I had been kissed at parties, nobody thought anything about it; everybody watched and laughed and counted the forfeits. Yet this [i]s the first time in my life [I’ve been kissed with feeling] and the moon seem[s] to swell in the sky. (212)

Amidst her family’s smiles, she enters the house and makes her way to her room where, looking out the window, she notices that “even the Lady in the Moon [is] smil[ing at her] through the screen,” “center[ed]” in the “magic cross” of her window’s lattice (213), holding this narrative of community together with her vision of collective life and the restorative gravity of human connection and continuity as manifest through Sorensen’s critical engagement of memory.

* * * * *

Works Cited

Harde, Roxanne. Acknowledgments. Narratives of Community: Womens Short Story Sequences. Ed. Harde. New Castle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. vii-ix. Print.

Howe, Susan Elizabeth. Foreword. Where Nothing is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood. By Virginia Sorensen. Salt Lake: Signature Books, 1999. v-xiv. Print.

Iser, Wolfgang. “Interaction between Text and Reader.” The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980. 106-19. Print.

———. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” The Critical Tradition. 3rd ed. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007. 1002-14. Print.

Sorensen, Virginia. Where Nothing is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood. Salt Lake: Signature Books, 1999. Print.

Zagarell, Sandra A. “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre.” Signs 13.3 (1988): 498-527. Print.

Instead of engaging one of the texts we read in class for my paper, I decided to apply myself toward a reading of Virginia Sorensen’s Where Nothing Is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood, which, as my introduction details, has variously been read as a collection of short stories (though not a short story sequence/cycle, which, among other things, presupposes a greater degree of connection between the cycle’s narratives) and as a collection of personal essays. Rather, I make a case here for the book as what Sandra A. Zagarell calls a narrative of community (sorry for the lack of accessibility to Zagarell’s article; this front-page view is the best I can do with what the web gives me).

So in short, I’m using this venue as a trial run for my critical (re)exploration of Sorensen’s text.

* * * * *

The (Re)Identification of (Collective) Memory: Virginia Sorensen’s Where Nothing Is Long Ago and/as the Narrative of Community

* * * * *

“A Dream Dreamed Out of Memory”

Virginia Sorensen’s 1963 collection of short stories, Where Nothing Is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood, has been variously categorized as a compilation of personal essays and as a memoir. Eugene England claims the former when he observes that “the myriad judgments of people, acts, choices, etc., which establish a recognizable shape of belief [and community] in Where Nothing Is Long Ago have to do directly with real people, including Sorensen herself.” Sorensen’s “real” presence—the presence of her “realness,” her lived reality—oversees the narratives of the book, England claims, because she inserts herself here as the implied author, as the voice of authority and experience through which each textual movement must be mediated and understood. Thus standing between narrative and flesh and blood reality, England continues, “she [. . .] reveal[s] her present self through the fiction of revealing her past self,” a rhetorical act through which “she also [. . .] creat[es] herself anew before our eyes and hearts” by enacting “the power of the recreated truth of real experience in the past.” In this light, the only fictions at work here are the acts of memory Sorensen claims for herself—and these “recreated truth[s],” as England implies, fall within the acceptable limits of memory and the faults thereof (qtd. in Howe x).

For England, then, the personal essay trumps the short story as a label for the narratives in Where Nothing Is Long Ago because “our ethical response” to the tales is likely to be different “if we believe that at least a major part of the [retold] experience was really real—that it indeed happened in real time and space to people like us” (qtd. in Howe x). In short, we’re more likely to trust Sorensen and to be persuaded of the narrative authenticity of her “memories” if the material she offers is presented in terms we can recognize and acknowledge as true to her childhood experiences. Giving the text the generic designation “collection of personal essays” thus saves us from feeling deceived by Sorensen. If she says these stories are “memories from a Mormon childhood” and if we know they’re offered as personal essays, they must be what they claim to be—memories gathered from actual, lived experience in the real world. Any deviations from reality in these recreated truths must therefore be due to the natural inconsistencies of memory, not to the author’s deliberate attempts to distort and exaggerate her past.

Yet, Sorensen was annoyed with her designation as a personal essayist because, above all, she “considered herself [. . .] a fiction writer” and felt the claim that she was a personal essayist “wrenched her work out of its authentic genre” (Howe xi), disrupting the power of intention and (re)created identity flowing through her fictionalized experiences. As she confessed in a 1980 interview, “All my life I was escaping into poetry and stories and liked to embroider everything even if I told something.” Also: “I am busy with fiction all the time. Nobody must every use my books historically” (qtd. in Howe xi). This confession that she enjoyed embroidering experience and that her narratives should not be read as exactly historical suggests a reexamination of Where Nothing Is Long Ago’s categorization as a collection of personal essays and as a memoir. For while the collection does toy with the notions of autobiography and memory typically associated with the personal essay and the memoir, Sorensen readily admits in the book’s dedication that “so much [of her fictional world] is ‘made up’ it is scarcely memory at all, but a dream dreamed out of memory”—a rich collection of fictions embroidered from the dynamic and interactive threads of the unconscious and the conscious minds.

I submit that this layering of dream upon memory, of memory upon dream, of perception upon an individual’s recollection of and experience with the past and with the world and community of her past, binds Sorensen’s stories together in an episodic sequence of fictions such as Sandra A. Zagarell calls the “narrative of community,” a tradition of texts that “take as their subject the life of a community (life in ‘its everyday aspects’) and [that] portray the minute and quite ordinary processes through which the community maintains itself as an entity” (499). Assuming Sorensen’s text as not just a collection of stories, but as a cycle of stories framed by and arising from the author’s personal community experience allows for a fruitful exploration of the text’s recursive movement in and out of time as the narrator attempts to understand and to come to terms with the community of her childhood. Through this movement and in the ironic distance she maintains between the field of childhood selves and the Mormon community she discovers/(re)creates in her stories and the meaning she finds in those stories, the narrator constructs an “ethically complex and sympathetic” identity (Howe xii) through which she mediates the reader’s experience with the text, inviting us into her community of narratives as she negotiates the gaps, connections, and mythos of memory. And all this to the end of presenting and preserving “the patterns, customs, and activities” through which the community of her childhood is “maintained and perpetuated” and of “nurturing a commitment to community in [her] readers” (Zagarell 500).

Negotiating Minute and Ordinary Processes: The Narrative of Community as Phenomenological Event

In her discussion of women writers’ use of the episodic narrative sequence to represent the feminine experience, Sandra A. Zagarell sets down a theory of a woman’s genre—“a matrix of interpretation,” as Roxanne Harde calls Zagarell’s work (viii)—that focuses on the ethos and subject matter of a text, that privileges community values over the autonomous individual, and that is more concerned with process over the conflict or progress intuited by linear narratives. Zagarell’s coinage, “narrative of community,” aptly describes the ways in which women, as Sarah Orne Jewett and her The Country of Pointed Firs, have “take[n] as their subject the life of a community” and set out to capture the “minute and quite ordinary processes” of community maintenance. These are no grand narratives in which an epic hero—autonomous, alone—leaves his community in search of something greater and returns transformed. Rather, such story structures focus on the self as one part of an “interdependent network” of selves (as each story is part of a network of episodes) and take as their program a response to—even, at times, a critique of—“the social, economic, cultural, and demographic changes” brought on “by industrialism, urbanization, and the spread of capitalism” (499). As such, narratives of community are “built primarily around the continuous small-scale negotiations and daily procedures through which communities sustain themselves” in the face of potential dissolution and rapid social change.

As Zagarell has it, “narratives of community represent [and mediate] th[is] contrast between community life and the modern world directly through participant/observer narrators” who “typically seek to diminish this distance in the process of giving voice to it” (503). Such voiced negotiations of “the patterns, customs, and activities” through which each community is “maintained and perpetuated” (500) are thus meant to raise awareness of the potential of and for communal life as an emancipatory alternative to the fragmented nature of modern societies. Through this increased awareness—facilitated by the presentation and examination of the everyday details of community life, which details are “integral parts of semiotic systems of the community” (503)—readers can gain access to the community’s means to meaning and enter the mythos and enjoy the connections of a shared communal past.

Wolfgang Iser posits a possible theory for this kind of reading event in “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach” when he observes that, “[a]s a starting point for phenomenological analysis[,] we might examine the way in which sequent sentences [and by extension, larger textual bodies, as paragraphs or stories] act upon one another” (1003)—that is, the cumulative effect they generate or produce in terms of 1) the unfolding narrative itself and 2) the interaction between the text and the reader. As a means of theorizing the intersection of these relationships, Iser suggests two principles by which the “virtual dimension” of a text—the semantic space in which perception marries language and creates meaning—“may be brought into being”: anticipation and retrospection—or in terms of this essay, the acts of critique and memory. He explores the affect these principles produce in readers by turning to Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, who, Iser comments, “has […] drawn attention to” the regenerative yet halting relationship between the two, “ascrib[ing] a quite remarkable significance to it” in the process (1005). Ingarden writes:

Once we [as readers] are immersed in the flow of Satzdenken (sentence-thought), we are ready, after completing the thought of one sentence, to think out the “continuation,” also in the form of a sentence—and that is, in the form of a sentence that connects up with the sentence we have just thought through. In this way the process of reading goes effortlessly forward. But if by chance the following sentence has no tangible connection whatever with the sentence we have just thought through, there then comes a blockage in the stream of thought. This hiatus is linked with a more or less active surprise, or with indignation. This blockage must be overcome if the reading is to flow once more. (Qtd. in Iser “The Reading Process” 1005)

Iser comments that, from Ingarden’s perspective, this “hiatus that blocks the flow of sentences is […] the product of chance, and is to be regarded as a flaw.” This is so because if a “sentence sequence”—and by extension the movement between paragraphs or narrative scenes—is supposed to be “a continual flow,” the hiatus halts the textual (inter)action by refusing to gratify “the anticipation aroused by one sentence” and that a reader expects “will […] be realized by the next.” Textual gaps thus “arouse feelings of exasperation” in readers that may disintegrate (to a degree) any relationships that have developed through the reader’s engagement with the text (1005).

Iser postulates a more productive view of the textual hiatus, however, when he suggests that this “frustration of [readerly] expectations”—as can happen when a text is between genres, as Where Nothing Is Long Ago, and when a text contains an episodic narrative structure, as narratives of community—these interruptions of the narrative flow, can lead us “in unexpected directions,” giving us the “opportunity […] to bring into play our own faculty for establishing connections—for filling in the gaps left by the text itself” (1005). In this view, the disruptions between sentence- and narrative-level relationships encourage readers “to make [their] own decision[s] as to how the gap is to be filled” (1005). By so minding the gaps that occur “in each articulated reading moment,” during which “only segments of textual perspectives are present in the reader’s wandering viewpoint” (“Interaction” 112-3), readers are “ma[d]e […] aware of the nature of our own capacity for providing links” between phenomenological events (as ideas, experiences, perceptions, bodies, texts, etc.) (“The Reading Process” 1005-6). In this light, the virtual dimension of the text becomes a dynamic hypertextual space defined by the perceptions and experiences we bring to our reading—and the expansive “‘spectrum’ of connections” made possible through those constantly evolving perceptions (1005)—and in which our humanity is affirmed in the quest to engage in “infinitely richer” readings of the text at hand (1006).

After finishing part 3 with a reading of Timothy Liu’s short poem, “The Tree that Knowledge Is”—a reading based in and flowing from a nodal model of Mormon culture—I fully intended to move into an extended exploration of Waterman’s suggestions for Mormon criticism: 1) read with an eye toward the plurality of modern identity, focusing particularly on the tensions this multiplicity creates within the text and between the text and the culture it springs from (which opens the way to engage Terryl Givens’ critical taxonomy from People of Paradox) and 2), “[i]nformed by cultural studies/new literary historicism methodologies, [...] place [...] [Mormon literature] in conversation with a number of other contemporary texts to examine ways [...] [this literature] help[s] explain Mormon—and [...] [any other aspect of cultural identity]—experience at a certain historical moment.”

But my intentions have changed, partially because of several Twitter-sations I’ve been involved in lately with MoJo (@MoriahJovan), Theric (@thmazing), and William (@motleyvision) about Mormon lit. In fact, Saturday I came to this realization (in a series of Tweets): after wondering how the Mormon literary community has “been having the same critical conversation for 30 years,” I pursued the thought that part of this may stem from the relative invisibility of the community’s non-prescriptive critical cache—that is, the offline venues through which Mormon literary criticism has developed/been presented and published. Dialogue, Irreantum, and Sunstone contain some of this work, but I sense I’m missing something because I don’t have access to the thirty years worth of proceedings from the AML annual meeting.

As a corollary to this epiphany, I realized that, for some reason, much of the online conversation about Mormon lit centers on drawing boundaries for the enterprise rather than on discussing specific works in a critical way. And, more importantly, that I need to spend more time exploring specific works of Mormon lit. So with this in mind, I’m springboarding into that renewed commitment today by (re)posting a short reading I offered on my own blog of Emma Lou Thayne’s poem, “The Rose Jar,” a text ripe with the tensions of memory and community and that I’ve read against another text of similar ripeness.

And with that: on we go.

* * * *

Disturbing the dust on a bowl on rose leaves…

-T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” line 17.

In the opening section of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” the poet muses on the interconnections and “unredeemab[ility]” of time (line 5): “What might have been,” he says, “is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in the world of speculation” (6-8), the business of imagination and memory. He opens the door to this possibility when he hears

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind. (11-5)

The poet’s job, then, this implies, is to pursue the footfalls of memory into places we’ve never been. “But to what purpose,” he asks, does “[d]isturbing the dust on a[n imagined] bowl of rose-leaves” serve (16-7)? Why pursue these “echoes / [that i]nhabit the garden[?] Shall we [indeed] follow” them “through the […] gate” of meaning; “[i]nto our first world, shall we follow / The deception of the thrush?” (17-8, 20-2). And yet the voyage into and through deception, he suggests, is the end “which is always present” (48). So perhaps, though the past is ultimately “unredeemable,” we can redeem ourselves, our identities, as the poet’s efforts suggest, in the myriad possible passageways of and rhetorical passages written by memory.

Emma Lou Thayne takes this poetic cue in “The Rose Jar” wherein she quite literally (if we can take her at her word) disturbs the dust in her grandma’s jar of rose petals, stirring up the fragrance of rose and memory as she runs her fingers and her mind over the intricate surface of the “four inch cloisonne [jar] on pointed golden legs / fat as a Buddha tummy” (lines 9-10). Finding this jar in the “cedar drawer” of her “Grandma’s standing metal trunk” (1-2), she enters the intersection of several memories, some her own, some others’. The cedar musk reminds her of “some Arabian tale read by Father / in the hall between bedrooms to say goodnight” (5-6); the rose petals call forth “five generations of fragile crinkles” in lives “once supple, fresh,” but now only “fragile” memories (7-8); the jar itself inspires visions of “centuries of Chinese hav[ing] their way” in an intricate culture, their “careful hands [...] pluck[ing] each [intricate] piece in place” (18-9); and the fragrance of it all, of this “holy mash,” becomes “tiny gusts / of history waft[ing]” community rituals—”the gatherings of births, graduations, / weddings, funerals, celebrations”—”into decades collecting / but never filling [the jar] to the top,” instead infusing the space of life, of memory with the “subtle, still surprising breath of God” (20-7).

And that, I think, is one reason we disturb the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves: because doing so draws us together in bonds of imagination, kinship, and shared memory, such that, like Adam and Eve, we are infused with the breath of God and so become living souls, living communities.

And that, I think, is one thing poets and poetry, critics and criticism are for.

Discuss at your leisure.

Either way. On to Part 3.5.

Roughing Out a Theory and a Course in Mormon Lit

i. The Theory

As I was scripturing this morning in Jacob 5, I was struck (as I’ve been struck before) by verse 48: After the master of the vineyard laments over having done so much for his trees that have, nonetheless, been corrupted, “the servant said unto his master:”

Is it not the loftiness of thy vineyard—have not the branches thereof overcome the roots which are good? And because the branches have overcome the roots thereof, behold they grew faster than the strength of the roots, taking strength unto themselves. Behold, I say, is not this the cause that the trees of thy vineyard have become corrupted?

And then by verse 66:

For it grieveth me that I should lose the trees of my vineyard; wherefore ye shall clear away the bad according as the good shall grow, that the root and the top may be equal in strength, until the good shall overcome the bad, and the bad be hewn down and cast into the fire, that they cumber not the ground of my vineyard; and thus will I sweep away the bad out of my vineyard.

Today’s reading of these two verses in particular brought to mind two things: 1) the nodal model of Mormon religion/culture that I sketched out in Beyond Prescription? Part 3 and 2) a line from my patriarchal blessing that encourages me to pursue a vocation that will parallel my mission for the Father on Earth.

In reference to the latter, I’ve been considering lately that my (increasing) professional commitment to Mormon Studies, as part of the broader academic package I’m pursuing, is at least a partial answer to that encouragement, as is my commitment to teaching. But as I worked my way through part 3 of Beyond Prescription, I started to think about the parallel relationship this posits between Mormonism as a religion and Mormonism as a culture less linearly. In an earlier draft of the post, I wrote that the religion and the culture plot parallel paths through the rhetorical field of mortality, sometimes intersecting, sometimes trailing each other, sometimes at cross purposes, etc., etc. That was too limited, though, too linear. Then I sat through my folklore seminar and the professor glossed over a model that explained culture/s, texts, and contexts in terms of nodes and networks—and my thinking on the relation between Mormon religion/Mormon culture shifted to a more complex organismic model, one that I’m still trying to work out.

And that brings me back to Jacob and my patriarchal blessing, which both led me to ask, “What if my professional/spiritual development and (more apropos to the theory I’ve been tinkering with) the Mormon religion/culture relation are like one of these trees—an interdependent system of roots and branches connected in a sprawling human (eternal?) network such that, as in a healthy, cared for tree, growth in one parallels/presupposes growth in the other?” This accounts, I think, for inextricable link between Mormonism’s dual aspects and, as a corollary, to the connection I sense between (my) discipleship and (my) scholarship.

Of course, I’ve only just begun to explore the analogy and I recognize its limitations. But I thought I’d share and see what the AMV community thinks…

.

ii. A Course in Mormon Lit

In response to Boyd’s recent post on Mormon Studies through Literature, Drama, and Film and in my effort to create the best possible reading experience for any interested in contemporary Mormon literature, I’m posting the reading list for the course in Mormon lit that I’ve been drafting for a program internship. I’ve decided to lay the course out based on themes I’ve noticed in my reading of late and because I think it would create an interesting reading experience. Though my list is incomplete (specially in light of the anthologies I’ve listed and the poets I still need to include) and though some of the texts obviously cross thematic boundaries, reflect my own reading tastes, and might be changed for something else at any time, this is what I’ve got at present. Feedback (on texts, themes, ambitions, etc.) is most welcome:

Reading the Mormon Experience: Contemporary LDS Literature

Main Course Texts

Anthologies

The Fob Bible
The Best of Mormonism
Bright Angels and Familiars

Family Hi/stories

Short Fiction:

“Ida’s Sunday” Phyllis Barber
“Bread for Gunnar” Phyllis Barber
“The Willows” Eileen Kump
“Clothing Esther” Lisa Torcasso Downing

*

Long Fiction:
Bound on Earth Angela Hallstrom

*

Drama:

“Little Happy Secrets” Melissa Leilani Larson
“The Prodigal Son” James Goldberg

*

Poetry:

“When I Do Go on My Honeymoon” William C. Bishop
“Weary” Sarah E. Jenkins
Other poems from The Fob Bible
Selections from Timothy Liu, May Swenson, Lance Larsen, Philip White

**

Onward to Zion . . . and Beyond: The Clash of Worlds (without End)

Short Fiction:

“The Fringe” Orson Scott Card
“Spirit Babies” Phyllis Barber
“Wild Sage” Phyllis Barber
“Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg” James Goldberg
“The Christianizing of Coburn Heights” Levi S. Peterson
“Where Nothing is Long Ago” Virginia Sorensen
“They Did Go Forth” Maureen Whipple

*

Long Fiction:

Angel of the Danube Alan Rex Mitchell OR
Rift Todd Robert Petersen OR
Lost Boys Orson Scott Card

*

Poetry:

Selections from Michael Collings

*

Non-fiction:

“Confessions of a Secular Mormon” Ryan McIlvain

**

Peculiar (Re)Visions: Variations on an Open Canon

Short Fiction:

“Abraham’s Purgatory” B. G. Christensen
“The Changing of the God” B. G. Christensen
“The Faith of the Ocean” A. Arwen Taylor
“The Book of Job’s Wife” Danny Nelson
“Scattered” Kate Woodbury

*

Drama:

“Adam and Eve” Davey Morrison

*

Poetry:

Excerpts from Psalm & Selah Mark Bennion

**

Voices from the Wilderness

Short Fiction:

“Opening Day” Douglas Thayer

*

Poetry:

Selections from Kim Johnson, Susan Elizabeth Howe (Stone Spirits)

*

Non-fiction:

Excerpts from Refuge Terry Tempest Williams

**

Liberating Paradox(i)es: Nodes, Networks, and Timothy Liu’s “Tree”

I recognize I may be preaching to the choir here (in the radical middle) by advocating such a pluralist view of Mormon culture—one, I should confess, that I hope can encourage more space in the Mormon critical community for the whole spectrum of Mormon identities and literatures, to the end:

a) of fostering critical dialogue that transcends, while leaving room for, prescriptive polemic; that moves beyond, while acknowledging the potential validity of, readings that justify (or not) the virtue, praiseworthiness, etc., of texts that push the Mormon moral envelope; and because such (con)textual expansion exposes critics/readers to varying forms of literary greatness and goodness of character, beyond the Mormon letters almost singular obsession with turning to the historio-cultural singularities of Shakespeare and Milton as the standards against which to judge whether or not our literary community has arrived (will we ever overcome this Mormonized anxiety of influence?);

and b) of legitimizing Mormon letters for engagement in a broader conceptual field. This echoes Michael Austin’s move to promote the academic study of Mormon letters by encouraging LDS critics to turn their professional training toward constructing the stories of Mormonism—as a dynamic religio-cultural system that now extends well beyond the Jell-O-belt—such that, ideally, these narratives can be heard and engaged on their own (Mormon) terms, beyond the (prescriptive) parlance of the Mormon market. As Austin claims, “If enough [Mormon critics] do this, and do it well, Mormonism and Mormon literature stand to become increasingly legitimate areas of inquiry in [the literary critic’s] profession”—as has happened, say, with the academic study of Mormon history and social institutions in the fields of history and sociology.

I also recognize that this pluralist view imposes degrees of distance between Mormonism as a divinely-sanctioned worldwide religious institution—hailed by members as “the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth“—and Mormonism as a closed yet increasingly diverse unofficial cultural system developed and elaborated through certain habits of mind (as influenced by Mormon theology and its institutionalized interpretation and transmission, as well as through its interaction with modern secular thought and mainstream/popular culture) and the “manifestations and permutations [of these habits] across a spectrum of artistic media,” ethnic multiplicities (especially as the religion goes global), and social practices/networks (Givens xiii). Of course, these dual aspects of Mormonism are necessarily bound up in, even made vital by, the other. The culture coexists with and incorporates, perhaps at times revises and subverts, the theology, church practices, and general religious understanding (as, for example, when Mormon folk doctrines mingle with and exaggerate official church teachings—like the popularized revision of foreordination and eternal companionship sanctioned and disseminated, especially, by Added Upon and Saturday’s Warrior). And the boundaries of the religion and the markers of church membership (as church activity, obedience to the principles and ordinances of the gospel, holding an up-to-date temple recommend, the wearing of garments, publicly sustaining church leaders, etc.) are often overlaid as the boundaries and markers of Mormon culture.

Yet, though these systems are inextricably linked—the culture (sometimes dogmatically) infused with and judged against religious tenets and the religion using and, at times, cutting across cultural channels in order to proselytize its message to the world—neither their boundaries nor their structures nor their functions exactly coincide (nor, I think, should they). And neither are they wholly distinct from the “non-Mormon” cultural traditions with which they inevitably interact. Rather they seem to exist in interconnected topologies of networks and nodes enmeshed in the social, rhetorical, and spiritual space of mortality, sometimes sharing points of connection, sometimes running parallel or intersecting processes, sometimes divergent ones, and sometimes working beneath, within, or over the cultural noise of other traditions, though always in the movement, ideally, to expand and ratify—to make efficacious—human experience and being-in-the-world.*

But what might this subtle though dynamic and interconnected difference between Mormonism as a religion and Mormonism as a culture mean for Mormon literary studies? How might the rhetorical paradoxy, the cognitive dissonance, that can come of keeping in mind these similar though separate structures translate into a paradigm for reading Mormon literature and culture and (potentially) for critiquing other cultural/theoretical paradigms? Indeed, how might this pluralist perspective prompt critics to ask different questions (as the ones Waterman asks) about the nature of Mormon identity/ies, culture, and literatures and their relation to and appropriation of other traditions? And even beyond that, how might adding these questions to the Mormon critical vocabulary and to the general American critical vocabulary add to an understanding of and the possibilities for critiquing/theorizing about literature in general?

Re-enter Waterman, who turns to Timothy Liu—gay, Asian-American, Mormon, poet (among other things)—as a test case for his own pluralist critical paradoxy, which can be summarized thus: “whatever ‘Mormon’ identity might mean for a particular author or text, that identity will coexist and possibly be in conflict or competition with any number of other identifications.” These alliterative terms—coexist, conflict, and competition—jibe with the network topology dynamics I gloss over above, highlighting the richly multiple (inter)temporalities of human (Mormon) identity: coextant, sometimes conflicting nodes of personal identification that network into a larger node—an individual’s selfhood—that in turn serves as a point of connection in larger network topologies (e.g., socio-cultural structures like communities, religions, gender, class, race, etc.).

As Waterman continues, “To address Liu’s texts as ‘Mormon’” through this many-selves paradigm “requires us to refuse the idea” that Mormon cultural identity is essential and, therefore, the dominant factor in every Mormon’s every personal experience; “in doing so,” Waterman says, “we recall [Liu's] eligibility for ‘other’ identity categories—an approach that could be taken with any literature we are tempted to discuss as ‘Mormon.’” By using any of these multiple nodes of identification—”Mormon” or “gay,” for instance—as a “point of departure” for discussing Liu’s poetry “rather than as a totalizing identity” for the poet, Waterman offers the possibility of “view[ing] Liu’s subjective Mormonism as a point on a spectrum”—or in my present model, as a node within interconnected network topologies—that would also include the full range of Mormon literatures and criticisms, from those adhering to thirteenth article of faith literary theories to those (like Waterman) allowing for a broader range of Mormon literary identities. In this view, Liu’s Mormonism is just one node of his personal topology in a cultural field that extends around the (neo-)orthodox faithful and the post-Mormon—and everything in between—and that overlaps and connects with multiple cultural traditions.

Waterman concludes that viewing Liu’s poetry as part of such dynamic cultural space “is, perhaps, the only practical way of approaching [it],” simply because to deny such multiplicity is to subsume the writer’s agency in rigid (hence, unreal, simplistic, and impractical) representations of human identity.

As an example of the “benefit[s]” “[b]oth ‘Mormon’ and larger American audiences” might take “from [the ...] added angle[s] of explication” available when reading through such a “practical” pluralist lens, Waterman offers the double-voice (“gay” and “deeply religious”) of Liu’s short poem, “The Tree that Knowledge Is”:

I do not want to die. Not for love.

Nor a vision of that tree I cannot 

recollect, shining in the darkness 

with cherubim and a flaming sword. 

All my life that still small voice 

of God coiled up inside my body. 

The lopped-off branch that guilt is

is not death. Nor life. But the lust

that flowers at the end of it.

Waterman’s reading of the poem is instructive of how Mormon critics might approach the task of interpretation sans prescriptive moralizing and while keeping in mind the multiplicities of modern (Mormon) identity: “A number of signifiers here resonate with a Mormon audience: God’s ’still small voice’” “a favorite Primary phrase” with considerable cache in the Church’s pedagogical culture; “the ‘vision of that tree’ protected by ‘cherubim and a flaming sword,’ meaning the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden,” though Liu’s language recalls a) the prominent visions of Mormon history, specifically Lehi’s dream, and b) the role this Tree and the cherubim charged to protect it play in the LDS endowment ritual, which, in Brigham Young’s well-known words, is “to receive all those ordinances in the House of the Lord, which are necessary for you, after you have departed this life, to enable you to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels who stand as sentinels [before the Tree of Life], being able to give them the key words, the signs and tokens, pertaining to the holy Priesthood, and gain your eternal exaltation in spite of earth and hell.”

That the poet rejects the merit of such institutionally mediated spirituality is suggested by the poem’s negatives (four nots, two nors) and in the image of the “lopped-off branch,” which, Waterman observes, not only “brings to mind New Testament imagery, but also the allegory of the olive tree in Jacob 5 in the Book of Mormon.” Here the poet seems to engage Zenos’ figuration of the House of Israel in terms of the allegorical pruning/dissemination process: healthy and diseased branches (lineages) are cut off of the main tree (parent lineage) and scattered throughout the vineyard (racial/ethnic diaspora) where they’re grafted into other trees in order to preserve the branches’ potential to bear fruit (inter-ethnic assimilation to the end of salvation). Yet Liu asserts a revision of this schema in his “recollect[ion]” (which, he admits, is really a failure to recollect—or at least to recollect properly, i.e., in a way sanctioned by the residual Mormonism he engages again and again in his work): even though he has “lop[ped]” himself off from the religion’s hierarchical network of eternal-life-granting rituals by openly acknowledging and pursuing his “lust,” he now stands in a shadow of that Tree, neither dead nor fully alive without the communion wrought through some degree of fellowship with the network and “love” that Tree represents, holding the corporeality “guilt[y]” for the break—his phallic “branch,” his homosexuality—as a witness of the validity of his experiential multiplicity and of a continued virility borne of the “lust / that flowers” in somatic associations, tensions, and realities through mortality’s “end.”

Waterman points out that “the tension between the two voices” competing for our attention here—the gay voice and the Mormon voice—”accounts for [the poem's] vitality”; that is, as each identity brushes against and overlaps the other, the text becomes increasingly and fruitfully complex, an intricate layering of tones and metaphors that would be incomplete without due consideration of Liu’s multiplicity, including—perhaps in this case, especially—his Mormon identity and experience.

———–

*While a visual of this model would work well here to explain my explanation, that may have to come in a later post (though not necessarily one in this series) once I’ve had time to frame/revise the theory a bit more.

———–

Next week in part 4—more liberating paradox(i)es.

More or Less Mormon? The Problem(atizing) of Mormon Identity

In his 1997 Dialogue article, “‘Awaiting Translation’: Timothy Liu, Identity Politics, and the Question of Religious Authenticity,” Waterman interrogates the notion of a coherent Mormon cultural identity, a religious sense of communal self constructed around nineteenth century Mormonism’s flirtation with nationhood and ethnic identity separate from that of the nineteenth century American mainstream. This “incipient nationality,” Thomas F. O’Dea observes, was born of the “combination of [Mormonism's] distinctive values, separate and peculiar social institutions”—as, among other things, its lay ministry and its insistence that humans can receive direct revelation from God—”and [its] geographic segregation” from the rest of America (qtd. in Mauss 291 [from this]). Such “protonationality,” as Armand Mauss labels it, was “strengthened by three ‘Mormon wars’”—the 1838 conflict with neighbors in northwest Missouri, the 1844-46 conflict with neighbors in west Illinois, and the 1857-58 conflict with the Federal Government over Utah Territory—and “‘constant … conflict’ with the [world] outside [Mormonism] to produce a total Mormon cultural environment and worldview that became ‘progressively more distinct’” (291).

Yet this distinctness faded some as Mormonism made inroads into secular American culture, assimilating, to a degree, in order to accommodate the organization’s need for expansion: if the culture of the saints had stayed too peculiar, refusing engagement with what O’dea labels “modern secular thought” in order to be wholly separate from the world, the institution may have remained indefinitely stagnant and small.

Such accommodation, even in the midst of—perhaps even in spite or as a result of—the church’s continuing growth and church leaders’ efforts in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s to return this “new” Mormonism to its earlier theological and cultural distinctness (most notably through the continuing effort to correlate church policies, programs, and teachings under a single banner) has had a profound influence on Mormon cultural identity. For instance, though some may lament the religious culture that has room enough for the church headquarters bureaucrat and New York Doll, the minivan-driving at-home mom and the powersuit-wearing business executive, the tatoo-toting-former-drug-dealing Maori and the long-bearded caucajewmexdian, the writer of YA love stories and the writer of erotic romance novels populated with flawed-enough-to-be-human Mormon characters, I find such cultural pluralism a mark of contemporary Mormonism’s growing vitality.

And I’m convinced Waterman would agree, though, as he implies throughout his essay, this increased plurality has been a source of anxiety and concern for others, especially those with a vested interest (for whatever reason and however justifiably from a theological standpoint) in correlating and perpetuating a fairly rigid cultural identity.

Working from similar assumptions about the dynamic making of Mormon identity, Waterman takes up the efforts of many Mormon literary critics (specifically England, Cracroft, and Jorgenson) and (as an aside) of those reviewers adhering to what he calls “the thirteenth article of faith school” of Mormon criticism. He positions the latter as an attempt to codify and perpetuate aesthetic standards of moral “loveliness, etc., [that can be] as difficult to pin down as the word ‘Mormon’ is to define.” And he concludes that this difficulty—which begs the question, “[I]f ‘we’ base our literary tastes and canons on prescriptive categories such as ‘virtuous, lovely, or of good report,’” then “What authority polices these categories?”—”only increases the muddiness of the ‘Mormon’ critical pool,” bogging the critic down in the murky work of trying to fix, patrol, and/or defend relatively dynamic and diffuse cultural, aesthetic, and (increasingly) market boundaries, something I don’t consider the literary critic’s job.

Yet, this is where much of Mormonism’s critical energy has been spent: on prescribing, policing, and defending boundaries. To be fair, Waterman does acknowledges “that ‘Mormon’ criticism’s tendency toward prescription [...] has been paralleled in the early stages of many ‘minority’ literatures and criticisms.” As an example, he cites Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong’s 1993 observation that “critics [of Asian-American literature] have not reached any agreement on how their subject matter is to be delimited. Prescriptive usages exist side by side with descriptive ones; some favor a narrow precision, others an expansive catholicity.” The question of critical approach, then—whether it’s best to outline what makes a text (and by extension, a writer) more or less part of the tradition in question or to allow descriptive categories and theories of literature to “grow [...] out of a body of work already recognized as belonging to the tradition”—is not unique to Mormon letters. In fact, the expense of such critical energy seems necessary in the initial stages of canon formation, allowing early critics (and on) a position from which to build/expand the tradition.

In this light, Waterman recognizes the value of England’s call for a Mormon literature that “contain[s] elements derived from Mormon experience and history,” tropes formed around “a certain epic consciousness,” around “mythic identification with ancient peoples and processes,” even as he (Waterman) wants to move beyond such categorization. Indeed, he observes that, “Rather than allowing one pat label [...] to pretend to unlock all the secrets of a text, we can use such categories (if we want or need to) as starting points” for discussing a text, always “recognizing the primacy of individual experience over the group identity of the author.”

The Primacy of Individual Experience

Waterman thus calls for a movement in Mormon criticism beyond the cataloging of tropes—a taxonomic effort that belies, not so much the desire to facilitate identification with a distinct Mormon cultural identity (although that does play a role here), but to pre-scribe the texts of Mormon writers. That is, to write or to order them before they’re written. Or more accurately, to dictate the standards against which a text—written or to-be-written—ought to be judged worthy of the community’s sanction and, by extension, its intellectual and literary attention and investment. He calls for Mormon critical discussions to move beyond the essentialism of group identity, beyond asking only, “Is this literature Mormon?” or “Is this author faithful?” to recognizing the problems of group identity—to wondering, “How can this literature be profitably read as coming out of a Mormon tradition?” and “What does it have in common with other work that is recognized as ‘Mormon’ in some way?” His focus, then, is less on preemptively excluding texts from the Mormon canon based on how Mormon the writer and the text is or is not and more on the process of reading as a Mormon, of attending to the Mormon aspects of a text “without seeking to quantify or define Mormonness.”

As a case-in-point, Waterman points to Susan Elizabeth Howe’s insightful exploration, “‘I Do Remember How It Smelled Heavenly’: Mormon Aspects of May Swenson’s Poetry,” which opens by admitting Swenson into the Mormon canon by virtue of her lifelong engagement with the Mormon experience:

Any discussion of Mormon culture or doctrine in the work of nationally prominent American poet May Swenson must begin with the caveat that Swenson, for virtually all of her adult life, was not a believing Mormon. She rejected Mormonism when she was in college, moved to New York City a few years after graduating from Utah State University, and never looked back. Nevertheless, she was raised in a devout Mormon family, her parents having emigrated from Sweden to live with the Saints. She learned Mormon teachings at home and attended church meetings weekly throughout her childhood and youth. She maintained lifelong affection for her parents and eight brothers and sisters, and occasionally came to Utah to visit them. Mormonism shaped her attitudes and perceptions both consciously and unconsciously. And because her poetry rises directly from her life experience—her interests, her study, her thought, her travels—she could not help but respond to Mormon culture and beliefs in some of her poems.

Poet Javen Tanner mirrors Howe’s observations about the lasting influence of early life experience in his 2007 interview with Meridian Magazine’s Doug Talley. When asked how “[his] religious sensibility inform[s] and guide[s] [his] work,” Tanner responded by referring to Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who writes his poems “first in Polish and then translate[s] them into English” because, Milosz observed (according to Tanner’s paraphrase), “you must write in the language you learned as a child,” the principle being that the experience we’re socialized into when young has a profound influence on how we perceive and respond to the world for the rest of our lives, even if we drift away from that experience as we mature. And since “Mormonism is the language [Tanner] learned as a child,” he affirms that, while “[his] poems are not overtly religious, [...] the language of [his] experience [as an active Mormon] is in them,” an unconscious inclusion that can add another layer to any critical interpretation of Tanner’s poetic corpus. (Of course, it’s not the only thing to consider about Tanner’s identity and work, even though a person’s religiosity/spirituality can inform most every aspect of their lives.)

However, as Howe and Waterman imply, every Mormon-ism is not constructed equally and the critic should attend to these differences by considering the possible ways a text might, yes, acknowledge, but also revise or subvert conventional Mormonisms according to the writer’s degree of (self-)identification with Mormon culture and theology. Howe provides an excellent example of such critical consideration in her discussion of the Mormon aspects of Swenson’s work, which includes an exploration of Swenson’s poetic critique of (among other things) Mormon conformity to unquestioned cultural norms and of Mormonism’s rigid patriarchy.

Howe also provides here an excellent example of the politics involved in canon-formation and of the fluid matter of (group-)identity construction. By claiming Swenson as one of Mormonism’s own (though I’m sure Howe wasn’t the first to make this claim and she definitely isn’t the last), she radically challenges the decision made by Eugene England and Dennis Clark, editors of Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems, to exclude Swenson from the main body of their anthology—and by extension, of Mormon literature—by sitting her at the “friends and relations” table, which, though an amenable place of (relative) acceptance and honor, is still a place apart, an-other place: a place of Otherness. Constructed as an outsider, it becomes easier, I think, to dismiss her pointed critique of Mormonism and to gloss over a sexual identity not in keeping with the Mormon theological or cultural standards of her time or, for that matter, of ours. But to dismiss either aspect of Swenson’s identity is to deny the agency of her experience, is to make less valid and compelling her position on the fringes of cultural Mormonism.

And what does the Mormon literary community lose by opening space in the canon for those speaking from the fringes? Or to phrase that more positively: how might the community be enhanced, made more rich, more meaningful, even more transformative, by recognizing the validity of Swenson’s experience–or anyone else’s–as a “post-Mormon”?

So where to from here? Find out next week when I confess my personal agenda and search for Mormon criticism’s liberating paradoxes.