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.

Look for part two sometime Thursday.

* * * *

Beyond Prescription? Problematizing Mormon Identity and the Future of Mormon Literary Studies

[T]he multiplicity of religious and irreligious practices engaged in [...] by those who lay claim to the nominations “Mormon” and “post-Mormon,” much less “Jack Mormon,” [...] boggles the mind.

-Bryan Waterman

Confluences

These past several months I’ve been wrestling with myself, with the Heavens, trying to gain some hold for my intellectual desires and work in a broader conceptual universe. This struggle has really just been an extension and intensification (due to the academic path I’ve been negotiating recently) of my continuing quest to find what Wayne Booth might call “a plausible harmony” between “my many selves.” Among others, the believing Mormon, who seeks greater communion with God by trying to live by His laws as voiced by His prophets and to serve with faith in what he considers God’s church (no matter the institution’s flaws); the husband, who has obligated himself through what he considers unbreakable promises to honor his bride, her potential as a human being, their combined potential as wife and husband, and the fruits of their eternal marriage; and the poet, teacher, and literary scholar who is compelled by the incessant prodding of vocation to share his rhetorical gifts with the world—you know, the whole don’t-hide-your-light-under-a-bushel deal.

My continued challenge is learning to balance these passions, to engage with each in an honest, quality, pleasing, even—ideally—transformative experience for the parties involved. In short, I yearn to make a positive difference in the world (though I admit the intangibility and the potential “O, that I were an angel” discontent of that desire), to create a space in which I can identify with and influence others, in which I can allow their voices, their stories, their selves, to gather, to mingle, to develop, to expand into and revise the stories I came from.

I stole that last phrase—the stories I came from—from James Goldberg’s recent Mormon Artist interview with Nicole Wilkes. When asked how he came up with a name for the protagonist who wanders through the amalgam of mythologies he’s gathered in “Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg,” Goldberg cites his unique ethnic heritage—his many selves—as inspiration. Says he,

When I decided to write a story in which I was free to use the stories I came from, I came up with the name “Teancum Singh Rosenberg.” It was almost a joke at first: I’m going to create this guy with a first name so Book of Mormon I’ve never actually met anyone with it, the middle name all Sikh men take, and a sort of stereotypical Eastern European Jewish last name.

So Teancum Singh Rosenberg, as his creator, stands at the confluence of at least four overlapping cultural traditions: Mormon, Indian, European, and Jewish. He thus represents a multi-faceted identity constructed from the rhetorical material of Goldberg’s multi-faceted self.

My appropriation of Goldberg’s language seeks to borrow something of this pluralism, even as I subtly—perhaps somewhat radically—recontextualize his phrase, revising its intended meaning in order to suit my own rhetorical need, which at present is twofold: 1) to initiate a critical narrative knit around my many selves and our experience with the varieties of Mormon narrative art; and 2) to problematize the notion of a coherent and prescribed Mormon cultural identity, an assumption around which many Mormon critics have constructed their theoretical paradigms and critiques and upon which much of Mormonism’s critical energy continues to be spent (see the litany of links in my note as a small sample).

Reading through the Stories I Came From: A Critical Autobiography

A number of years ago when I happened upon the Mormon literaturstreit of the 1990’s and began considering the possibilities of and for a Mormon literature and criticism, I started to frame my own theoretical paradigm around what I thought were the essential matters at stake in the world of Mormon letters: the teachings, rites, and ordinances of the Restored Gospel. I think I titled or sub-titled my attempt “The Rites of Mormon Criticism” because it was centered (if I remember correctly) around the sequence of rituals required for entrance into the Heavenly City. The effort was born of my imagined position as the next great Mormon literary critic and, looking back, I see it was meant to suggest that for a critic to rightly judge Mormon literature and for a writer to truthfully create Mormon literature, s/he needs to have been initiated into the literary ministry through the proper gospel rites. Only when dressed in the billowing robes of this priesthood should they be qualified to write by, for, and about the Mormon experience.

I abandoned that effort soon thereafter 1) because I didn’t know where I was going with it, probably because I was still wet behind the ears when it comes to having engaged much—if any—Mormon lit beyond the scriptures and Mormon devotional texts; and 2) because it never quite sat right with me. I see now that one reason for my uneasiness was the exclusivity of the framework: not only does it deny the varieties of Mormon cultural experience that exist outside of Church Headquarters (even those, admittedly, that exist within church headquarters), it also betrays a bias toward a masculine worldview, especially because those invested with priesthood authority and the stewardship to judge in institutionalized Mormonism are men and the framework parallels that investment. Another reason I think I never got on board with myself was because I couldn’t be satisfied critically with such a culturally exclusive, boys’ club mentality. And though I probably couldn’t have articulated this reasoning then, I can trace the roots of my present theoretical narrative to that (inter)textual experience with Richard Cracroft, Bruce Jorgenson, and Gideon Burton.

At around this same time, I met Dialogue, Irreantum, and AMV, each of whom introduced me to writers and critics whose ideas have had a significant impact on the development of my own theories of language and literature. Among others:

Eugene England, father of my intellectual engagement with Mormon culture, whose short poem, “The Firegiver” (which I’ve explored elsewhere), and short essay, “The Possibility of Dialogue,” invited me into the rhetorical space and potential of intra- and inter-cultural discourse—of the possibility that I could profitably “speak with sensitivity to [another’s personal] framework or ability to hear and speak in order to communicate for each other’s welfare, not to justify or exalt [myself] at [their] expense” and that I could “truly listen to other[s], respecting our essential” kinship as part of God’s family “and the courage of those who try to speak, however they may differ from [me] in professional standing or religious belief or moral vision.”

Patricia Karamesines, whose award-winning essay, “The Rhetoric of Stealing God,” persuaded me, not just into AMV’s fold of regular readers, but into the power and authority of responsible and sustainable language use—into rhetoric that “questions itself as thoroughly as it questions Other, and when it finds itself lacking, it takes upon itself the responsibility to find the next best thing, the revelatory metaphor, the liberating paradox, the ever-expanding symbol, thereby crossing boundaries established by less productive, less creative, less pro-active, and less kind words.”

William Morris, whose “In Memoriam: Laraine Wilkins” justified my decision to study literature over sociology:

Wilkins [...] articulated an inclusive, diverse, unabashedly literary view of Mormon letters. To quote from a recent e-mail: “I’m interested in seeing more dialogue happen—*dialogue* in order to have some groundwork for Mormon culture to enjoy more respect, or at least better understanding, from the outside community. Such dialogue requires both insiders and outsiders. I’d like to see AML do more of this. I think literature has great—perhaps even better—potential than history (though history is where most work is being done) or sociology to achieve this. Literature, although an expression of cultural identity in many respects, ultimately addresses individual experience…”

And whose continued insistence that Mormon literary criticism should focus on specific examples from Mormon narrative art has kept me from circling (too far) into theoretical abstraction as I engage the growing body of Mormon letters and try to find my niche in the field of contemporary literature.

And Laura Craner, whose titillatingly short post “If You Can ‘Queer’ a Book Can You ‘Mormon’ a Book?” poses a question (about what it might mean to read as a Mormon) and a correlation (between gender/sexuality studies and Mormon studies—my main research interests) that, eventually, led me to Bryan Waterman and new ways of considering Mormon literature as an expression of diverse cultural and personal identities and experiences.

And what might those new ways be? Tune in Thursday as I lean heavily on Waterman (specifically this article he published in Dialogue 30.1 (1997)) and some others to take up the problem(atizing) of Mormon identity and what that might mean for Mormon literary criticism.

And yet, sometimes he just rubs my believing-Mormon-skin the wrong way with his cursory engagement with Mormonism, something that’s simply secondary to and arising from his academic interest in literature, faith, and culture. Since he’s a newcomer to the still-blossoming field of Mormon studies* and an outsider to the LDS faith, I can’t fault him for this engagement and for getting some things wrong every now and then. Heck, cultural Mormons are a peculiar lot with an equally peculiar history. Putting things together about the religion can be difficult even for those with a lifetime commitment to it.

But as I was catching up on some FHS Professor posts I’ve fallen behind on, I felt compelled to chime in this morning and to set the record straight, as it were (though I’m sure my straight is still fairly skewed), by referring the good doctor to Reading Until Dawn. Of course, this has something to do with the need for self-promotion. But, it also has something to do with my faith in the strength of Mormon literary scholarship, especially, in this case, Eric’s “Saturday’s Werewolf” (a revised version of which, by the way, will be published in a forthcoming issue of Sunstone [get your teaser here] along with a revised version of “Toward a Mormon Gothic“).

The setup: In his November 18 post in response to Stephenie Meyer’s answer to a fan’s question about the source for her imprinting werewolves (”Stephenie Meyer New Moon Q&A: Imprinting“), Granger suggests two sources beyond the one Meyer gives for this peculiar, primal relationship between imprinter and imprintee (read the post for her answer): (1) the institution of polygamy’s overabundance of man/child relationships and (2) the notion of premortal coupling. He ties Meyer to the first by suggesting that Twilight is a response to John Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, a book published, as Granger is quick to point out, “the month Mrs. Meyer had her [series-inspiring] dream and [... that] is filled to the brim with nightmare stories about polygamist crimes against young women as well as the nightmare of the Mountain Meadows massacre.” He continues—and this is what provoked my response: “Twilight is, I suggest, on several levels a Mormon woman’s response to Krakauer’s attack on her faith.”

Here’s what I said:

How so? Unless you’re privy to more information about Meyer than I am (i.e., that she’s read or is even aware of Krakauer’s narrative, something, in my mind, she’d have to do/be aware of in order to so specifically respond), this seems like something of a jump to me, like you’ve already formed an opinion on the issue and are stretching to find evidence (however thin) to support that opinion. Sure, Meyer is aware of Mormonism’s polygamist past and I’m sure she’s struggled with it in one way or another, though I don’t know how that struggle has influenced her personal understanding of the faith or, more apropos to this post, her work as a novelist.

But Eric Jepson (in the essay Sharon mentions in comment one) makes what to me is a more compelling connection between Meyer, Mormon doctrine, and Mormon (literary) history: imprinting as a manifestation of the premortal romance. This narrative trope is based in the LDS doctrine that we existed as spirits in the presence of God prior to mortal birth, an official teaching that gave rise to the folk doctrine of premortal coupling (i.e., that male and female spirits promised to find one another on Earth and to marry for eternity), which is conveyed in a sampling of non-official LDS narrative art. Jepson takes up two of these—Nephi Anderson’s 1898 novel Added Upon and Douglas Stewart’s 1973 musical Saturday’s Warrior (the latter is still a popular cultural reference in Mormon circles)—though I’m aware of at least two more: Susa Young Gate’s 1909 novel John Stevens’ Courtship (which was serialized before Anderson’s Added Upon was published; which may have been a source for his own, more expansive treatment of the premortal romance; and which was a response to the LDS Church’s [1890] manifesto putting an official end to polygamy) and Carol Lynn Pearson’s 1977 musical My Turn on Earth[, though this one is more simply about keeping premortal promises in general than it is about realizing a premortal romance].

This folk doctrine (which has been shot down by LDS Church leaders, most notably, as Jepson points out, by Spencer W. Kimball) seems a far more likely source for Meyer’s notion of imprinting than Krakauer’s discussion of Fundamentalist Mormon polygamy. (And though they share common roots, Fundamentalist Mormon does not equal Latter-day Saint.)

I’m likely to come back to this idea of Twilight Studies meets Mormon Studies in the not-too-distant future with a post on my RMMLA experience (it’s been on the backburner for over a month) and a post in response to one of Granger’s recent interviews (on the backburner for a couple of months). But I felt this interaction was worth copying here, if only to show more of how non-Mormon critics are engaging the Mormonism of Twilight; to suggest, perhaps, ways Mormon scholars can (fruitfully?) respond by referring to our own literary and cultural history; and to solicit your feedback on any/all of the above.

———-

*I place him in this position (something he may not do himself) because he takes up issues of Mormonism as they relate to Twilight.

There’s been a lot of talk in the past about the Great Mormon Novel, but we don’t hear much—if anything—about the Great Mormon Poet (or Mormon poetry or poetry in general, for that matter). I’ve accepted the fact that I’m practitioner of an art that’s fallen on hard times, if it was ever not on hard times, that is, but I’m doing my best to work that system and to broaden the (Mormon) audience for poetry in whatever nominal way I can—a task I find as necessary as love.

Hence, I’ve decided (finally!) to do my dissertation (pending approval) on the poetry/poetics of Lance Larsen. Of all the verse I’ve read over the past however many years, his has stuck with me most. It doesn’t wallow in the postmodern condition, doesn’t refuse tradition and values and the strength of community (especially the family). It doesn’t flounder in self-pity over the failures of language (though Larsen is aware of that trend) and, by extension, it’s not mere wordplay. On the other hand, it doesn’t reach for some type of transcendence beyond this world, refusing to engage the ordinary, the mundane, the familiar in some attempt to move beyond the immediate. Rather, it’s firmly rooted in mortality, in the family, in the possibilities of communities and the “small disturbances” that cumulatively make up a life and that bind humans of all stripes in lasting connections, including those made possible through language.

As I see it, the strength of Larsen’s poetry makes him one of Mormonism’s best—if not the best poet currently writing in/from the Mormon tradition. And though he doesn’t specifically write for a Mormon audience, his Mormonism permeates and grounds his verse in, dare I say it?, hope for a better world. That and he can turn a beautiful, even sublime, line, something that places him among America’s best poets (as I’ve just discovered, though the preceding link’s a month old; hence this quick post).

And that, I think, is an achievement worth mentioning, even applauding, on AMV.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a paper at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) Convention at Snowbird, Utah (a rundown of my experience at the AML session will come in a later post that I’ve got halfway worked up; yes, I’ve been lazy—so sue me) and over the weekend I did some revising to incorporate some of the feedback I received and posted it on Reading Until Dawn. “Toward a Mormon Gothic: Stephenie Meyer’s Vampires and a Theology of the Uncanny” takes its place in the blossoming field of Twilight studies beside RUD’s inaugural essay, Theric Jepson’s “Saturday’s Werewolf: Vestiges of the Premortal Romance in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Novels.” Link over and have a read. That’s what all the cool kids are doing (or so they tell me).

While you’re there, you might also notice that I’ve made some subtle changes to the site design (I’ve tweaked the header) and that I’ve updated the articles. The inconsistent layout was bugging me, so I took down the HTMLs until I can get them to look how I want them to look, reworked my document template slightly, and incorporated the new MLA citation standards into the notes. Hopefully this gives the collection a more consistent and professional feel.

Also: though I’ve published “Toward a Mormon Gothic” on RUD, I’m still open to feedback. So if, while you’re reading, you notice a typo or some such faux pas or notice that I’ve missed something you deem vitally important to the conversation, either email me or comment here. That or work up your own essay and submit it for publication. I promise I won’t complain.

Author(s): Melissa G. Moore with M. Bridget Cook
Publisher: Self-published through Cedar Fort, Inc. (Springville, UT)
Release date: 8 September 2009

I. Speaking the Truth

I must begin this review essay, which I had great difficulty writing (for reasons that I hope become clear in my rhetorical wanderings), with a series of caveats, beginning here: I make no claims to represent the literary conscience of America or, for that matter, of Mormo-America—neither do I feel the need to make such claims, simply because I don’t believe I represent the mainstream American/Mormo-American literary consciousness or even, perhaps, that there is such a mainstream way of reading and thinking about the world. As a poet first, I’m attracted to language that, among other things, is lyrical, visceral, and deeply honest to human experience; that draws me toward deeper connection with my inner self/ves, with others, and with God. In short, I like words and combinations of words that cut to the quick, that don’t simply affirm my version of reality (though sometimes that’s nice, too), but that disrupt it, that persuade me to reevaluate what I know—or think I know—about myself and the moral universe I inhabit.

While this union of disruption and connection might seem contradictory, I believe that connecting with our deepest selves and with others, including God, requires a constant reappraisal of where we stand in relation to them. And that’s one thing literature does: in the words of Mormon poet-critic Karl Keller, as an “essentially anarchic, rebellious, shocking, analytical, critical, deviant, absurd, subversive, destructive” rhetorical force, literature “attempts to destroy institutions; it challenges individual settled faith; it will disrupt all life.” For this reason, Keller continues (and I echo his confession), “I have to admit that I hate starting the study of a new novel, a new poem, or a new play, because I know that one or another of my religious/moral/intellectual assumptions may be questioned, challenged, disproved, destroyed. To read sensitively is to come under serious attack. In wrestling with each new work of literature […], I have to shift the grounds of my belief, and I find this painful but productive” because, though it’s essentially “faith-destroying, not faith-promoting, […] the destruction of flabby assumptions is nonetheless a strengthening process” (20). Disruption, then, can ultimately lead to a more grounded, though paradoxically dynamic, sense of self and to deeper connection with and understanding of the universe.

And that’s one reason I keep reading and one reason, I think, why writing this review has proved more difficult than I anticipated when I first found a review copy of Melissa G. Moore’s memoir Shattered Silence: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer’s Daughter in my inbox—because writing, a sister process to reading, is just as disruptive a force. Like reading, to borrow from Keller, it prompts “self-examination/world-examination/existence-examination, the search for self, the persistence amid discovered meaninglessness, a ‘destructive’ reexamination of the grounds of one’s own belief.” And like the reader, the writer should be “constantly reexamining his [or her] faith and learning where it is insubstantial and superficial” in order to create a properly disruptive, compelling, and spiritually real experience for readers (21). The specific challenge for writers in this arises in the notion that to speak the truth of experience—and to speak it well, as readers expect them to—requires more than mere self- or world- or existence-examination. It takes real rhetorical effort, including responsibility to the truth of one’s experience, to one’s audience, and to language itself.

In terms of my experience with Shattered Silence, I’ve tried to hold myself accountable to these rhetorical principles by keeping myself open to the truth of Moore’s experience as daughter of Keith Jesperson, a.k.a. the Happy Face Killer; to find or create spaces where shared language (or the approximation thereof) might open opportunities for me to connect to and reconcile my words with the realities of her sometimes grisly world. This has been no easy prospect since, first, I’m not female and I’ll never really know what it’s like to be one (though that doesn’t keep me from trying to understand); and second, the only experience I’ve had with serial killers has come through the movies or episodes of CSI and Criminal Minds. Nonetheless, I consider myself a willing learner and I’ve hoped I could meet Moore on some common rhetorical ground so she could show me, in a manner of speaking, how the other side lives.

Through this process, I’ve also thought a great deal about the desires, needs, and intellectual/rhetorical demands of my audience here at AMV and, by extension, Moore’s potential readers, wondering with what critical/rhetorical focus and what language I might best honor Moore’s intent (she is, after all, part of my audience and I feel some responsibility to her and her words); the complexity of her psychological landscape; and the intellectual, psychological, and rhetorical demands her narrative might make (or fail to make, as the case may be) on that audience.

Now, caveats (perhaps too) thoroughly expressed, time to dive into Moore’s text.

II. Living Unpleasant Realities

In the opening scene of Shattered Silence, Moore describes a moment of violence from her childhood that characterizes the “unpleasant realities” of her life as daughter of an abused and emotionally abusive father turned serial killer (231). Narrating for her younger self, Moore begins, “August of 1983: I squinted into the bright blue morning sky and couldn’t help the shudder that rippled through my little body” (1). But at just five-years-old, she’d shrugged off this foreboding sense that danger was on the horizon (Moore’s older self calls these impressions “knowings”) because, in her words, “It was a lovely day, and I had a secret” (1): a barnyard home built on respect and compassion in which she was partnered with a stray mother cat in the nurturing of four kittens to independence.

But her secret was shattered when one kitten was drawn from her small circle of security by her father’s taunting call: “Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty! […] I won’t hurt you. I promise.” Moore reflects, “At that moment, I wanted desperately to believe that promise. But I had heard it before. It was not a real promise, it was a lie. It was a lie every single time” (3). As the child begged for her kittens’ release, her father gathered them from her helpless grasp, took them to the clothesline, and, in a moment of appalling cruelty, hung each body, biting and scratching, with a clothespin fixed to the scruff of each neck. Running for her mother’s help, little Melissa replayed memories of her father’s violence toward cats—memories that recalled the deep hurt and pain afresh. But she found no willing partner in her mother, who simply pulled from her daughter’s grip, and, blank-eyed, “turned back to folding the laundry into neat little piles and neat little rows” (5), a manifestation of her efforts to create some order in her otherwise unstable existence as an emotionally and mentally battered wife.

Moore returns to and analogizes this moment later in her memoir when she relates how, as a teenager, after being raped by her boyfriend and realizing she was pregnant, she wondered whether abortion was the answer. Her boyfriend’s family, she says, would have paid for the procedure. But she was looking for support beyond financial, for some human connection that could whisk her away from past abuses and mistakes—a relationship that could save her from herself and her father’s crippling influence. In short, she confesses, she wanted “a knight in shining armor—someone to slay my dragons and allay my fears. Someone to fix everything and make it all right” (155). Yet, she continues, in Sean (her boyfriend’s pseudonym) “[n]o knight had come. There was no soldier to fight my battles, slay my dragons, kiss away my fears, and chase the demons away from inside my mind” (155-6). She was alone, in her words, “[l]ike my baby kittens on the clothesline, […] suspended in mid-air, beaten back by life” (156).

So drawing this connection between her father’s violence, the deformative power it had over her development, and the string of unpleasant realities from which her life was hung—broken familial bonds, neglect, abuse, rape, teenage pregnancy, and more—Moore points to her own perpetuation of the attitude of non-action, fear, bitterness, and blame that enabled her passive engagement in the intergenerational cycle of abuse. And as becomes clear in her memoir: it took many years, much grief and pain, and maturity born of deep introspection before she could bear this cross, which had somehow fallen to her, in hope.

III. To Pretend Someone Else Did It; or Giving the Devil His Due¹

I trace strains of the helpless and blame-riddled attitude Moore had developed and the rhetoric derived from it directly through her father’s pointing finger. In his own voyeuristic engagement with his past, as found in Jack Olsen’s journalistic and disturbingly vivid “I”: The Creation of a Serial Killer,² Jesperson repeatedly casts himself in the “self-designated role as habitual victim” (124), passing the buck for his violence to his father, an alcoholic who verbally and physically abused his kids and who in turn blamed his behavior on the “might makes right” culture of his upbringing (Moore 224); the women he killed, who had just used him, he says, for sex or drugs, a ride across country or money; his ex-wife, because he hadn’t been ready to marry, but did anyway and thus, in a sense, gave up his freedom and his personal potential; his peers, siblings included, who brutalized and taunted him throughout his troubled youth; also his ex-girlfriend, the justice system, his penis, the devil—any person (or part thereof), social system, or religious idea that he feels slighted his good-natured soul. Yet, he even denies himself the prospect of this essentially pure nature when he comments that, from an early age, he was possessed of two selves: “Mr. Nice Guy and the demon” (Olsen 26), the one to whom he attributes (or on whom he blames, as the case may be) his essentially human acts of kindness, the other on whom he blames his grotesque acts of violence.

In his more honest moments he does come close to shouldering the blame for murdering eight women—close, but not quite. Discussing his first kill, he admits that the act “had come straight from my fantasies” (17), a near confession that, in the end, only buffers him from the weight of conscience because the moments surrounding the murder were essentially like moving through a fantasy, an elaborate dream: the place where the subconscious subverts the conscious mind, where we can’t really be held responsible for what we think or do. He further justifies this blame-bending charade by observing that “I tried to forget the details of what I’d done, to pretend someone else did it” (17). Just as we often forget the details of dreams, painting them in broad strokes on the walls of memory as we move beyond the pretense of fantasy into and through consciousness, here Jesperson works to slough off his reality for a more favorable lie, one that he rationalized further when he learned that two drifters had claimed responsibility for his crime, which, in his words, thus “wasn’t my problem anymore” (18). He’d found a pair of willing scapegoats and absolved himself of guilt as he watched them bear his wrongdoing across the public stage into prison.

When he finally began taking responsibility for the murders, it was in taunting jabs leveled at law enforcement officials in graffiti penned on public restroom walls and in letters to newspapers he felt needed to be corrected because they had some details of the killings wrong. His words were thus meant more to stroke his own ego than to actually bear responsibility for his actions and their influence on the world, including on those he claims he cared for most: his children. Indeed, in his imitation and escalation of the violence of his past—developing from an abused boy and young man to an arsonist and a torturer of animals to a defiler and serial killer of women³—he propagated the culture of bitterness, blame, and brutality he had once despised, passing a ruinous and soul-numbing legacy to his posterity because he continually gave control of his life to forces of fear, manipulation, and blame. His choices thus precluded the possibility of influencing his family line for good.

And while I’m perfectly willing to admit that Jesperson’s brutalized past, punctuated with some degree of mental illness, may have severely restricted his freedom to choose, each matter of abuse and murder ultimately hinged on his decisions. In other words, as much as trouble came rushing to meet him as a result of his past, he ultimately chose to tackle it headlong in the middle, fists of desire ablaze.

IV. Metabolizing Blame, Shattering Silence

Born into such a caustic family culture and conditioned early on with and into its finger-pointing and violence-enabling mentality, Moore was destined to fill her parents’ roles as enablers and “habitual victim[s],” to pass this destructive legacy on to the next generation in her family line. That is, she likely would have fulfilled such a role if she hadn’t listened to the series of preternatural “knowings” (1)—still small promptings—that led her away from her father’s influence, that inspired her to reach for something more, and that helped her mature into a woman with strength enough to metabolize this culture of violence and blame by: 1) establishing a support system for herself outside the home, including the building of positive friendships (one of which led to a healthy marriage) and religious affiliation (she joined the LDS Church in her early twenties, though she seems to have been spiritually sensitive from childhood and had fellowshipped with other faiths through her teens); 2) by educating herself in ways to overcome the negative influence of her past; and 3) by choosing to educate others in these possibilities for encouragement and developing the will to overcome.

Moore’s actions in this regard—from heeding the nudges of conscience and instinct despite not understanding why, to forging new friendships and institutional affiliations meant to facilitate sustainable personal and cultural change—illustrate the moral courage required to stand against and ultimately to absorb injustice at any level, including the familial: the relational space we are most intimately acquainted with and thus most vulnerable in. Of those who exercise such courage, the late Carlfred Broderick, renowned Mormon psychologist, family therapist, and marriage and family scholar, observes, “Although [… some] children may suffer innocently as victims of violence, neglect, and exploitation, through the grace of God some find the strength to ‘metabolize’ the poison within themselves, refusing to pass it on to future generations” (38). Elsewhere he calls these individuals “transitional character[s]” because they change “the entire course of a lineage” “in a single generation, […] filter[ing] the destructiveness out” of the family line “so that the generations downstream will have a supportive foundation upon which to build productive lives” (qtd. in Tanner).

Moore observes of this metabolizing process, especially as it relates to the transitional work she’s undertaken in her life and which she means to represent rhetorically in her memoir, that “[i]n order to keep atrocities from happening [at any level], we must learn” from the violence of our collective past; and such personal and cultural education begins, she suggests, with individuals who have “enough courage to shatter the silence” of injustice and violence and to share with others what they’ve learned in their confrontations with “the darkest side” of humanity. Only then, she concludes, “[o]nce we acknowledge [… this darkness] and refuse to sweep it under the carpet,” can we fully overcome our personal and cultural victimhood and live fully in the light (223-4).

V. Having Survived To Tell the Story

Despite these heady claims for shattering the silence imposed on her as a victim of intergenerational violence and her life as daughter of a serial killer—perhaps, even, because of them and the challenge of negotiating complex psychological terrain in a vehicle of words—Moore’s memoir suffers from a tragic rhetorical flaw: while the writing is earnest and offered to readers over the altar of good intentions, there are times when it barely manages to convey more than the tone of a personal diary. The text is very loosely-written (to the point that it could use an extra series of revisions), riddled with grammar, usage, and unjustified time-jumping issues and inconsistent analogies that ultimately undermine her attempts to craft a more affective, universally compelling, and silence shattering narrative, something I believe her unique experience demands, especially when coupled with the generic standards of the memoir itself and of affective language use in general.

Speaking generally to how the memoir’s standards for content, tone, and propriety have developed and expanded over time, William Zinsser comments that “[u]ntil the 1990s, memoir writers drew a veil of modesty over what they wrote. There was an agreed-upon code that you didn’t reveal the most squalid details of your life.” However, with the advent of tabloid TV, “shame went out the window,” Zinsser observes. “No family was too dysfunctional for people to talk about and write a memoir about,” though these memoirists simply “took pleasure in playing the victim,” in heaping personal failures and perceived wrongs on “parents, siblings, and coaches” in order to absolve themselves of responsibility for personal choices gone awry.

Yet, Zinsser continues, a few great writers “turned things around” with psychologically and rhetorically demanding memoirs that “dealt with childhoods every bit as terrible as those written by the whiners and the bashers,” but that were instead “written with love and forgiveness.” These writers didn’t pass the buck for personal weaknesses or present failures; in fact, Zinsser asserts, they “were as hard on their younger selves as they were on their elders.” And with this acknowledgment of their own accountability, they refused to engage in and thus absorbed the prevailing rhetoric of blame, saying, in effect, that, yes, “we come from a tribe of fallible people and we have survived to tell the story.”

Though I’m fairly certain Moore is unaware of this movement of memoirs written with an eye toward the fallibility of one’s elders and one’s younger self yet all the while grounded in the virtues of courage, love, and forgiveness (an unfortunate lack on her part, which, if filled, could have infused her narrative with greater rhetorical stature and influence), she does acknowledge, however unconsciously, the space created by such writers when she claims that she lives “in the perfect place at the perfect time” to tell her own story of survival (xv). And that, I believe, is the singular merit of Moore’s book, formal inconsistencies and weaknesses notwithstanding: having survived her childhood amidst a tribe of fallible, bitter, and violent people, she’s found a way to metabolize the rhetoric of blame and to ground herself and her story in the possibilities of personal and rhetorical growth and change, of forgiveness, and of a world that yearns together for a way out of violence into “[h]ealing, temperance, tolerance, charity, love, and joy” (224).

Notes:

1. Since Moore is enrapt in her own psychological journey here, she doesn’t spend much time discussing her father’s. In fact, unless the two treks unavoidably cross paths, i.e., when Jesperson’s cruelty immediately affects his daughter, she sidesteps any discussion of his past and the impact it may have had on his choices and his psychopathological development, though she does hint at the complex relationship he had with his own father. However, because I felt that confronting Jesperson’s language would provide insight into his violent behavior, I turned to his biography (which Moore admits she “didn’t want anything to do with” [208]), written by Jack Olsen and smothered with Jesperson’s words, as a means to this end. (See my longer, though still quite brief, take on “I”: The Creation of a Serial Killer, in this post on my personal blog.)

As regards this confrontation, I must confess some debt to Patricia, who commented in a brief discussion we had elsewhere on Moore’s book that “[s]omehow, the killing act takes shape first in killing language. I want to understand what killing language is and how it works, if I can.” As I read Shattered Silence with Patricia’s words in mind and noticed how Moore refers to “[b]lame [… as] a language [… she] heard all the time” in her home (12), I began to consider how blame turns language violent and how this rhetorical violence escalates into and is often used to justify violent behavior, including killing. This section is my effort to situate Moore’s text, her psychological development, and her freedom to choose in relation to the rhetoric of blame embedded in her family line.

2. Warning: this book is not for sensitive readers.

3. While I’m loathe to claim a causal link between Jesperson’s ascent up each tier of violence, I’m convinced his expansive pursuit of increased risk and passion was one factor feeding his psychopathology.

* * * *

Works Cited

Broderick, Carlfred. “I Have a Question.” Ensign (Aug. 1986), 38-41.

Keller, Karl. “On Words and the Word of God: The Delusions of a Mormon Literature.” Tending the Garden. Ed. by Eugene England and Lavina Fielding Anderson. Salt Lake: Signature Books, 1996. 13-22.

Moore, Melissa G. and M. Bridget Cook. Shattered Silence. Springville, UT: Cedar Fort, 2009.

Olsen, Jack. “I”: The Creation of a Serial Killer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.

Tanner, Kristi. “Becoming a Transitional Character: Changing Your Family Culture.” Forever Families. Aug. 2002. 8 Aug. 2009.

Zinsser, William. “How McCourt Rescued Memoir.” “Memoirs and McCourt.” The New York Times. 24 Jul. 2009. 8 Aug. 2009.

Today, I’m taking on the faulty analogies often used to convince people away from movies or books that may be good, “except for one little part.” Notice, first off, that I don’t intend to deal with the idea of keeping our entertainment clean or with the varying degrees of readerly sensitivity, i.e., individuals’ varying capacities to endure evil in the fictions they frequent. (So keep that in mind in the comments, if you will.) Rather, I’m approaching the language itself and intend to judge its merits in purely rhetorical terms—that is, I’m more concerned with what work the language is actually doing than with what it’s intended to do* or with whether or not we should watch this movie or read that book because of this steamy scene or that profane word.

Now for the analogies (the first two come from the same paragraph of the same source):

Faulty Analogy #1: Of Mice and Pizza

“Suppose the hot pizza you ordered arrived with all your favorite toppings- plus a tiny little mouse that had crawled onto it before being popped in the oven. Would you eat this pizza that was perfect except for one little mouse? […] Few people would choose to eat something that contained a small dead mouse […]. Yet many choose to fill their heads, often repeatedly, with movies that have ‘one little part’ that’s disgusting and possibly dangerous” (ref).

Faulty Analogy #2: Of Narcotics and Yogurt

“[W]hat if someone put just a little date-rape drug into a serving of fat-free frozen yogurt? It doesn’t matter that this would otherwise have been a healthy dessert if “one little part” was not a scary drug that could fog a person’s brain and wipe out control. Few people would choose to eat something that contained {…] a little date-rape drug. Yet many choose to fill their heads, often repeatedly, with movies that have ‘one little part’ that’s disgusting and possibly dangerous” (ref).

Faulty Analogy #3: Of Toilet Water and Orange Juice

One Sunday afternoon we were just finishing our family dinner when somehow the conversation turned to popular movies. One of my daughters mentioned a very popular movie that had one of those very objectionable scenes in it. And she said something like this, “Dad, what’s so wrong with that movie? I’d really like to see it. We can always fast forward that two minute part.” Now, she knew about the bad part in that movie. She knew it was wrong, but the rest of the movie had captured her imagination and she wanted to see it.

[…]

Well, instead of arguing with my daughter, I remembered something a friend of mine had done in a class. Sitting on the table was a pitcher of orange juice with just one cup left in the bottom. I poured that last cup, held it up, and asked her if she wanted it. Now, my children love O. J., and of course she wanted it.

Okay then I said, follow me. With most of my children curiously following, I took the glass of orange juice and walked into the bathroom. I reached into the toilet with another cup and dipped out some toilet water. Ever so carefully, I poured just one tiny drop of toilet water into the orange juice. I held it out to her. “Here you go,” I said.

She screamed ­and ran out of the bathroom. “But, honey,” I said as I held it out to her. “It’s only one little drop.” “I don’t care!” she yelled. “It’s yucky!” You know, I could not get her to come within ten feet of that glass of orange juice. I finally had to pour it out […] you know where. (ref).

Again, my problem with each of these isn’t mainly the message they convey (though I have my quibbles there, too), but that each analogy is overdrawn, something the authors—supposedly expert teachers—ultimately fail to acknowledge. While to some they may seem ingenious teaching aids, in my book they suffer a tragic rhetorical flaw: You see (or I do anyway), entertainment does not have the same molecular framework or effect on the human body as food. Sure, I know we’re talking different bodies here—the physical used to analogize the spiritual—but there are some telling differences that essentially make the analogies moot.

As Bruce Jorgensen puts it in his case for a Mormon erotica, “We are frequently, duly, and properly warned, over the pulpit in general conference, against the evil of pornography—an attitude […] I share, though [… I] also value and wish to allow a place for the erotic. But all too often, that evil is referred to in terms of poison, disease, or wounds,” as we have, in part, happening here. He continues, “I will call this the fallacy of overextended or overcredited metaphor. Yes, pornography is dangerous, as are poison, disease, and wounds. But right where we most need clarity for any genuinely moral discussion of the problem, the metaphors cloud the issue” (italics mine). Indeed, such reckless rhetoric, as I’ll call it, makes it difficult to engage in dialogue over this important issue, which falls into the “as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books” category (ref).

And while, as Jorgensen comments, “reading a Silhouette Special Edition romance or watching bare bodies simulate copulation on a screen is a kind of taking-in, […] it is not the same thing as ingesting botulism toxin from a can of vegetables or catching a cold by a kiss or breaking skin on sharp glass” or eating pizza tainted by mice or eating yogurt laced with narcotics or drinking a toilet water/OJ screwdriver. As Jorgensen concludes, “Each of these events begins a biochemical or physiological process that, unless decisively interfered with by other such processes [i.e., some degree of medical care], will proceed inexorably to its end: illness, bodily damage, death. But reading [or viewing a film] is an act of consciousness, a work of the spirit, a free act of a free agent; its consequences are not deterministically predictable, as far as my experience has shown” (italics mine). That is, reading a book or watching a movie, as opposed to ingesting poison, etc., will not follow the same course for each individual, especially according to that individual’s development of their agency. Indeed, in Jorgensen’s words, “I may ‘ingest,’ by reading, a false analogy like the ones I am talking about; I may ‘eat’ error. Yet I do not necessarily become erroneous; I can analyze and judge and even use the error to get nearer to the truth” (italics mine).

So how to break through the reckless rhetoric? What language, what analogies (if any) might best offer the clarity needed for us (meaning, Mormon culture generally) to engage in a genuinely moral discussion of the issue? Rhetoricians of the radical middle, what do you think?

* * * *

*Though the distinction here is subtle and intentions often can’t or shouldn’t be divorced from the words themselves, especially in real-life rhetorical situations, there is a difference between what words were intended to do and what they actually do (responsible rhetoric, I think, implies making every effort to wed the two aspects in our attempts to persuade others) and I’m drawing that line for my purposes here.