Here’s why the whole idea is completely misguided:

1. The Great American Novel idea is dead. It’s worn out cliche that barely anybody has the energy for anymore and for Mormons to take up the idea is for us to prove yet again our status as belated moderns. And to play in to the discourse of the literary elites, of the critics and academics and editors and book reviewers who trot out the trope every so often simply to generate energy for their own decrepit ideas is to bow to an authority that Mormons shouldn’t and don’t need to acknowledge. No one is going to tell me what I should be worrying about when it comes to the production of Mormon narrative art.

2. The novel itself is almost dead. Or to restate: the novel as the great documenter and supporter of bourgeois life, as the polyphonic captivator of discourse in text and the great indoctrinator in to the norms of the emergence of the modern, democratic state is dead. For anything to be “the” and “Great” it would have to unify and receive acclaim (even if it’s years after it was published) from most of society or at least most of reading society. I don’t know that novels can do that anymore. As I have mentioned in the past, if there is going to be a “Great Work of Mormon Narrative Art” it’s more likely to be a film, game, graphic novel, or some new or hybrid form (perhaps one with collaborative authors/creators) that those of us with a literary bent may misunderstand or miss out on entirely.

3. We don’t and won’t and can’t know genius. A few of us perhaps can (or can get in early enough in the game as fans to boast about it after the fact). But genius is rare and making any claims about it (and one would have to be a literary genius in order to write the Great Mormon Novel) is a sucker’s game. Who could have predicted a lawyer working for an insurance company from a middle-class background could do what Kafka did? Or that one of the greatest works of literary fiction of the 20th century (and one of the greatest works of Christian fiction ever) would be secretly written by a depressed Russian playwright and former doctor and not emerge until a quarter of a century after his death as The Master and Margarita did? Or that two of the best sensual poets of the 19th century would be a Jesuit priest and a reclusive spinster? I could go on, but I think you get my point.

4. The whole excommunication thing is simply stupid. I would submit that since we can’t predict what form a genius work of Mormon art would take, we can’t predict who the creator is going to be, nor how the LDS Church is going to react, nor how the broader American society is going to react. And even if we want to extrapolate future returns from past results, well, Orson Scott Card’s work is scandalous, absolutely scandalous if you really look closely at it, and as far as I know he’s kept his membership intact (and in spite of the letters that I’m pretty sure have been sent in to the Church Office Building). What’s worse, I think the whole excommunication thing is an unnecessary distraction a way for LDS fiction folks to justify non-literariness and a way for Mormon fiction folks to justify disaffection with the institutional church and a way for non-Mormons to put us in a box.

5. This trope also needs to be ignored because it distracts from the minor victories in Mormon narrative art. The major frustration I have had with the Mormon arts/studies (and I share some blame here) community over my 10 years in it is how much excellent, praiseworthy work comes out with very little recognition. We’re good at engaging in the Big Discussions; we’re not so good at digging in to the minor lovely moments here and there that capture something cool or interesting or breathtaking or tragic or comic about Mormon doctrine, practice, culture and life. Everybody wants to be a theorist or a Svengali or a critic; nobody wants to be a (literary) critic. And there’s no shame in being a minor literature. Wear it like a badge because in this post-modern world, everybody is minor.

6. Don’t be distracted by Orson F. Whitney. Whitney’s pseudo-prophecy is neither a true prediction nor a goal to be aimed for. It’s a piece of post-Romantic wishful thinking and belated modern political positioning. Now, this is not to dismiss Whitney. I think that he is a fantastic, seminal Mormon writer whose works need to be paid more attention to. And yet I would submit that most people who invoke him only know him by that one quote or at most that one essay the quote came from.

7. And finally, and I’ve said this before but it can not be repeated enough, Mormonism doesn’t need a literary genius. It already has one. His name is Joseph Smith. Yes, I am aware that there are all sorts of complications that arise from this claim. Isn’t that cool? It leaves open a hundred avenues for exploration through narrative art. Could you imagine being saddled with a Shakespeare or Homer or a Dante or Milton or a Tolstoy or an Eminescu or a Cavafy or a Neruda, etc.? Joseph Smith has given Mormon artists a great gift — he has removed the need for a writer to be a foundational genius, but did so without creating “great narrative art.” We don’t have to worry about the anxiety of influence because our influencer provides amazing bits of language and huge grand narratives, but he didn’t set a language and a mode of writing as solidly as “pure” literary geniuses did. And yet he didn’t leave us without anything to work with. I have read Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard (it’s a long story — but the short version is a non-Scientologist friend gave it to me as a graduation gift) and I gotta say that it’s a big relief not having to work within that literary tradition. Joseph Smith as our founding genius creates a pretty sweet space for us, and I wonder some times if we’ve been so assimilated by American culture that we forget how much there really is to work with and how its inherent messiness (cause the Prophet’s literary and theological legacy is messy) cries out for a multitude of dramatizations and interpretations. I mean, how cool is that? Would you trade it for some pallid suburban or pseudo-urban white middle/upper class 21st American literary legacy? I wouldn’t. And yet so often we do.

Now, of course, Mormon creators of narrative art may feel part of these other literary traditions. That’s fine. And I do. But I also say that a little Joseph Smith-style iconoclasm in the face of such traditions may be in order for some of us.

So I have no worries about this whole Great Mormon Novel thing. I suggest you drop them too. The opportunity to create Mormon narratives, Mormon aesthetics, Mormon discourses, Mormon criticism is the only “great” thing we need to worry about. And I would submit that should there some day be a great Mormon artist, a true genius, the best thing we can do is cut and polish a bunch of minor gems so that he or she will have some glows and radiances to play off of.

III. The (In)Convenience of Mormon Letters

The dangers of taking or enabling this commodified position are evident in the spiritually and ethically crucial dialog that occurred between Christ and Satan just after Christ walked from the wilderness, having fasted forty days and forty nights in an effort to commune more closely with his Father. In these inaugural moments of his mortal ministry, Satan tempted him to conveniently satisfy his gaping hunger by making bread of stones and, when that enticement failed, to prove his messiahship to a growing crowd of temple worshippers by leaping from the building’s pinnacle into the protection of the angels bound to do his bidding. Once these persuasions fell short, however, Satan became desperate: following Christ to the peak of “an exceedingly high mountain” from which was seen in vision the glory of “all the kingdoms of the world,” the tempter said, “All these things will I give unto thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.”¹ Jeffrey R. Holland (then president of BYU) says of this moment that

Satan [made] up for lack of subtlety here with the grandeur of his offer. Never mind that these kingdoms [were] not ultimately his to give. He simply ask[ed] of the great Jehovah, God of heaven and earth, “What is your price? Cheap bread you resist. Tawdry messianic drama you resist, but no man can resist this world’s wealth. Name your price.” Satan [thus] […] proceed[ed] under his first article of faithlessness—the unequivocal belief that you can buy anything in this world for money.²

The true irony of this proposition could not have been lost on Lucifer, son of the morning, one of God’s brightest sons who fell eternally from grace because his vision and intellect were clouded by pride. Was this mere posturing, then, an adversarial drama enacted by Satan to illustrate and overturn the demands of redemption; to show Christ that this process of saving souls wasn’t going to be child’s play, that it would eventually require the last full drop of someone’s infinite and eternal blood in exchange for the unremitting and embittered deference of evil; and to offer Christ the convenient course to his Messianic throne as rightful King of the Jews?

Perhaps.

If so, and I’m convinced that’s just what it is (and more), then this episode illustrates and, in Christ’s response, provides a resolution for the central contraries I’ve been speaking of, namely the dilemma between public responsibility and private integrity, between identifying completely with the Other and using one’s powers to benefit and preserve the group and identifying completely with one’s ego and using one’s powers to benefit and preserve the self.

In his attempts to give away that which wasn’t his to give, Satan revealed deep desperation and selfishness, seeking, as he has from the beginning, to use and manipulate others for his personal gain. And so, knowing that for Christ to give in would assure his own victory and anticipated failure notwithstanding, Satan extended his series of increasingly irresistible (or so he hoped) propositions; and Christ, beginning to grasp in body what he likely knew in mind, confronted Satan, beginning the process of atonement by giving himself, for a brief moment and to a small degree (this time), to the depths of human evil, temptation, and suffering. To foolishly compromise in this confrontation with paradox by buying into Satan’s scripture-speckled philosophy would only have served Christ’s immediate need for physical nourishment, have satisfied the Jews’ desire for a Messiah manifest in a miracle, or briefly fed the human lust for wealth, power, and fame, a platform from which he might make a great difference, at least for a time, in a historically troubled part of the world

But at what cost would this short-sighted focus have come, however selfless the intentions?

Yes, as Christ likely understood, he was (and is) the rightful heir of this world and others and, if he could hold out, he would, in the end, “govern every principality and power” in them; he would be “the King of kings and Lord of lords.” But, as President Holland observes, “not this way. Indeed, to arrive at that point at all, [Christ] [had] to follow a most inconvenient course. Nothing so simple as worshiping Satan or for that matter nothing so simple as worshiping God. At least not in the way some of us think worshiping is simple.” His journey to “the throne of grace [was] to lead through travail and sorrow and sacrifice,” through the depths of full engagement with the contraries inherent in the physical and moral universe. By enduring Satan’s temptations, he was therefore able to enter more deeply into humankind’s fallen situation, an experience he comprehended in every particular as part of his redemptive task and could thus transcend in the combined acts of the Atonement that ultimately open endless glory for us, for his created universe, for his Father, and for him.

Applying the immediate inconvenience leading to this Messianic climax to our lives, President Holland asks in quick rhetorical succession, “Should earning our place in the kingdom of God be so difficult as that? Surely there is an easier way? Can’t we buy our way in? Every man or woman does have a price, don’t they? Can’t you buy anything in this world for money”, even (for present purposes) a Latter-day Saint audience or a place in the LDS literary canon? Then just sentences later, he answers his rapid-fire inquisition with this: “No, not everyone does have a price. Some things can’t be purchased. Money and fame and earthly glory are not our eternal standard. Indeed these can, if we are not careful, lead to eternal torment.”³ By throwing caution or covenants to the wind, in any degree, as we move to accept and experience the glory of God—his intelligence, his light, and his truth—we open ourselves to the tempter’s ideology of self-righteousness, a system of self-worship in which the end justifies the means, as long as that end is the immediate gratification and exaltation of the individual (and not as in their reception into eternal life) and their ultimate and unforgiving misery.

By essentially, however unwittingly, representing the covenant as commodity and by elevating a single form and simplistic, tidy, money-making content as the (stereo)type of Mormon literature, Johnston perpetuates this idolatrous ideology, shaping a consumer-based theological system founded on the exercise of priestcraft and on the simple worship of an ethically shallow God who presides over an expansive round of morality plays (the logical extension of this shallow theology) in which the Mormons will prevail and good will finally and decidedly overthrow the forces of evil

Aside from minimizing the battle between good and evil, forces which, as all opposition, are co-eternal with God and must stand side-by-side for existence to continue, this ideology interprets life and good literature, including good Mormon literature (which should maintain as high a literary as Mormonism’s true theological standard), too cheaply, too simply. It’s too focused on what the audience wants, on what they’ll purchase en-masse, and is thus too economically-rooted to place high demands on its disciples. Hence, by and large, its literary fruit doesn’t necessarily lead us into or through the largely rhetorical process of self-realization. Because of this, it in effect keeps mainstream Mormon readers and writers from really rocking the theological boat—for the expanding self is the risky self, the one prone to push, prod, shift, and overturn the status quo or, to be more scriptural, the one likely to “shake” “the kingdom of the devil” in their efforts to stir those who “belong to it” (including themselves and some of God’s saints) out of “carnal”, theological, and ethical complacency.⁴

And yet these disruptors (as it were) are the disciples Mormonism most needs, as Elder B. H. Roberts argues, those not content to simply and repeatedly “expound and defend” the faith and its doctrine by one formula, but who thoughtfully strive to bring to the Faith and its teachings “their own personal contribution” and who, in so doing, “develop its truths[,] and enlarge it by that development.” Since “[n]ot half—not one-hundredth part—not a thousandth part of that which Joseph Smith revealed to the Church has yet been unfolded, either to the Church or to the world,” Elder Roberts concludes that

[t]he work of the[se] expounder[s] has scarcely begun. […] The disciples of ‘Mormonism,’ growing discontented with the necessarily primitive methods which have hitherto prevailed in sustaining the doctrine, will yet take profounder and broader views of the great doctrines committed to the Church; and, departing from mere repetition, will cast them in new formulas; cooperating in the works of the Spirit, until they help to give to the truths received a more forceful expression and carry it beyond the earlier and cruder stages of its development.⁵

This vision of doctrinal expansion and spiritual cooperation as acts of theological creativity ties very closely to Mormonism’s cultural and artistic development because, I believe, the depth and breadth of our theological and experiential perspective and the vigor with which we explore, express, and develop it in our lives, our writing, and our reading (often an unconscious act) determines the vitality and the efficacy of our community’s literary testimony. Because of my belief in this vision, I sense that Mormon literature and criticism haven’t yet grown past the awkwardness of adolescence into a full and necessary articulation of their essential greatness, a mature literary and critical character founded in Mormonism’s theological complexity and prophesied, promised, and hoped for by LDS prophets, seers, writers, and critics alike.

(Next Thursday’s Post: “Part IV: Maintaining Rhetorical Balance“)

Footnotes:

1 Matthew 4:8, 9.

2 Holland, Jeffrey R. “The Inconvenient Messiah.” BYU Speeches 1981-82. 27 Feb. 1982. 7.

3 Holland 7.

4 2 Nephi 28:19, 21.

5 Qtd. in England Dialogues 170.

II. In Exchange for the Soul

One of the most tragic of these paradoxes, as Eugene England points out, is “the struggle to maintain individual integrity, to be true to ourselves”² in the face of the demanding responsibilities and expectations laid on us through our chosen affiliation with and participation in Christ’s Church. Denying this paradox its place in our discipleship and our arts and letters, even if ignorant of our refusal, we ultimately subvert the work of God as he moves to convert us into his own exalted lifestyle, to mold us into his own glorified image.

Many Mormon writers and critics have confronted and, I believe, will continue to confront this dilemma between community and individual values and preservation head on, transcending it in their personal and vocational lives, as did Joseph Smith, by “anxiously, bravely grappling with those paradoxes” in word and deed, faith and works, and by heroically, if at times tragically, consecrating their lives to the Truth in a “courageous blend of loyalty to [their] covenant people, [their] covenanted Savior, and [themselves].”³ Samuelsen seems to have found his platform on which to prove or to exercise these contraries in the Mormon theater; and England found his, by and large, in the personal essay, a genre in which he discovered deep private, literary, and religious implications because, in his words, Mormonism’s

theological emphasis on life as a stage where the individual self is both tested and created and our history of close self-examination in journals and testimony-bearing provide resources that […] increasingly find expression in powerful informal essays and personal and family storytelling.⁴

Here I find an earlier echo of Samuelsen’s witness that “Literature is testimony” and that, through the acts of language—of writing and, by inference, reading—we are tested by an author’s and their text’s essential otherness and we become vulnerable to ourselves and others (including God) in profoundly redemptive and spiritually real ways.

The province of such spiritually real literature, as Lavina Fielding Anderson has it, isn’t so much to capture and embrace the ephemeral nature of spiritual knowledge—though that does seem to be part of the exercise of “spiritual realism”—but to be an act of literary faith, an “intelligent affirmation” of and engagement with the moral universe.⁵ This word intelligence, when used within the doubled context of literary form and Mormonism (as Anderson uses it), carries its more general sense of knowledge, yes, but even more so of knowledge or truth born of experience and coupled with integrity. Since language is central to way we process, organize, and express this experience, our literary acts of affirmation become textu(r)ally embodied representations of truth and character. And how influential this representation is depends a great deal upon the authenticity, the clarity, and the rhetorical appeal of our words. To be truly effective, then, as “a catalytic aid in our own search for self,”⁶ literature’s formal and aesthetic features can’t be separated from its ethical functions.

In other words, as we attempt to reach out and make a mark on the world even as we try to embrace and understand the other—a vital and extremely difficult movement that helps us develop a balanced sense of eternal selfhood and to receive God’s glory “grace for grace”⁷—we “need to listen to and imitate” “the special voice” England describes here in his introduction to Anderson’s “exercise in spiritual autobiography”: “clear, elegant but witty, contained, noble but unselfconscious, afraid neither of pain nor proper piety, clearly witness both to the hard surface of life and to its deeper mysteries, attuned to both the body and the spirit”.⁸ Just as body and spirit combine to become the human soul⁹, such a voice courageously attunes self to other and other to self in an act that transcends the dilemma between public responsibility and private integrity to become a powerfully and gracefully embodied witness for the truth of experience.

In Johnston’s attempt to discuss and embody this ethos, his rhetoric falls short in some essential ways. First, as explored earlier, his binary favoring tidiness over ambiguity tragically reduces the Mormon quest to know God through the workings and weaknesses of language into nothing more than an immature attempt to avoid the discomforts of Mormon theology and of existence in a moral universe. Second, in his assertion that “the natural art form for Mormon writers”—that which our best and brightest naturally select because it offers the greatest potential for them to highlight and examine the spiritual realities and ethical implications of Mormon theology and culture—is “the morality tale”, not (in his words) as “[t]he late Eugene England once said [….] the essay”,¹⁰ he misreads England. Indeed, England’s appraisal of the personal essay as something Mormon’s would do well to embrace doesn’t necessarily spring from the form itself but from the ethos driving and deriving from the form: its introspective and aesthetic confrontation with experience.

This misreading seems coupled with Johnston’s additional observation, made just sentences later, that “Mormons tend to be doers, not navel-gazers”—one point on which Johnston and I actually agree. And yet, the implication of his observation when read in light of his definition of a morality tale—“a story, fact or fiction, that keeps our interest, has some lessons to share and leaves us with a feeling that in the grand battle between good and evil, good is holding its own”—is that we need an easy literature able to support minds often not accustomed to sustained mental exertion (could our scattered attention spans be a result, perhaps, of religious hyper-activity and not enough introspection?); a literature focused plainly, didactically, without equivocation, and perhaps a bit lazily, on the middle ground of religious experience and on sharing cheap and painless lessons about living better lives; a literature that we can walk away from with a burning in the bosom or at least with warm-fuzzies that we haven’t wasted our time reading or with a religion that can’t hold its own against Satan and his minions and that doesn’t place too great a demand on our emotions or our intellects.

Inherent in this reading is also the assumption that we Mormons can’t or don’t take our literature seriously or indulge in the sometimes difficult and painful, even tragic process of reading or participating in the experience of good literature—and by good I mean carefully crafted, persuasive, and ethically challenging, genre notwithstanding. To read seriously, Johnston seems to assert, to engage with a text on ethical, personal, psychological, rhetorical, and spiritual levels might just require more introspection, self-absorption, and concentration than the believing Mormon could or should possibly engage in. To do so would risk our faith, putting our souls in jeopardy because, as many of us might think, the devil lurks behind the pages of literature and we shouldn’t be giving ourselves to realms of the imagination when there’s so much work to be done in the practical world.

We’ve got souls to save, Zion to build. And in our quest to “be honest, true, chaste, benevolent, [and] virtuous” and to “do[…] good to all men” and women; in our search for “anything virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy,”¹¹ we can’t waste our time with books, including those considered the “best”,¹² that take us away from our millennial mandate. Give us a service to perform and we’ll gladly do it at least before the end of the month. But ask us to watch a play or read a short story, a poem, a novel, or an essay that challenges our worldview or isn’t initially easy to understand or emotionally titillating; that doesn’t give us a clearly defined resolution, a moral to live by, or a dictum to chant across the pulpit; or that contains a word or passage even remotely questionable and many of us will drop it like a chilled [insert caffeinated beverage here].

These failures, however, only lead us into part of our awful realization. The truly tragic tell of Mormon literary morality emerges from the economic subtext of Johnston’s review. After asserting his personal witness of the morality tale as “the natural Mormon art form,” he points to four revealing scriptural episodes that, supposedly, support his claim that our literary heritage is “laced with” or bound up in and held together with such narratives: “the golden calf, the brass plates of Laban, the 30 pieces of silver of Judas and the widow’s mite.” Aside from taking issue with the assumption underlying this that Mormon literature should be akin to scripture and despite not completely agreeing that these stories stand up to the black and white simplicity of Johnston’s own definition of a morality tale (I’m thinking especially, for example, of the complex ethical dilemma faced by Nephi when commanded to take Laban’s life or by Aaron after learning that his attempt to lead Israel in the pagan worship of the true and living God was, to say the least, the wrong thing to do), I see something more subtly dangerous in the choice to punctuate his reading of the state of Mormon literature with such pecuniary examples. Waving this gold, brass, silver, and bronze around, no matter the original form or how small the quantities, and speaking as he does of theatrical “fare” (a doubly loaded term) and the success (a word implying both economic and popular achievement) and chosen genres (popular, money-making fiction) of today’s most widely read LDS writers, Johnston seems to suggest that the price of admission into the Latter-day Saint mind, conversation, and canon, or at least into our meetings and lessons and onto our bookshelves, is to capitalize on and, in the process, to commodify Mormonism’s covenant society and theology.

(Next Thursday’s post: “Part III: The (In)Convenience of Mormon Letters”)

Footnotes:

1 See D&C 1:24.

2 England, Eugene. Dialogues with Myself. Midvale, UT: Orion Books, 1984. 19.

3 ix.

4 “Mormon Literature: Progress and Prospects.” Mormon Literature Website. 28 Feb. 2001. 10 Aug. 2008. Par. 55.

5 Qtd. in Dialogues 162-3. Although Anderson uses the term “spiritual realism” to define a movement of “new [in 1983] Mormon fiction,” England extends this use to include literary nonfiction (as I do here).

6 Dialogues 158.

7 D&C 93:12.

8 Dialogues 163.

9 See D&C 88:15.

10 Johnston, Jerry. “Playwright’s scripts are a departure from Mormon morality tales.” Rvw. of Inversion, by Eric Samuelsen. Mormon Times. mormontimes.com. 23 July 2008. 25 July 2008.

11 Articles of Faith 1:13.

12 D&C 88:118.

(The title’s a mouthful, I know.)

This is the first post in a five or six part series (to run on Thursdays) that explores the ethics of Latter-day Saint literature and criticism. Working within a framework of the redemptive paradoxes inherent in Mormon theology and the moral universe it embraces, the series attempts to probe the place of this ambiguity in the central, recurring conflicts in Mormon letters (particularly in light of the debate between those who think Mormon literature should primarily serve orthodox, didactic purposes and those who think it should provide a more challenging aesthetic), to present an economic reading of why much popular Mormon literature remains in the former camp, and to show how one contemporary Mormon writer has attempted to transcend this paradox—and thus to serve a more deifying need—in their own writing.

I. (Mis)Reading the Mormon Tragic Quest

In his recent review of Eric Samuelsen’s new play Inversion, Jerry Johnston introduces what is and should be a demanding discussion on the ethics of Mormon literature, then bows out before giving the dialog due course or even before acknowledging that he only tells part of the story. Because he takes the easy way out, I have to wonder how much homework he actually did before piecing his Mormon Times article together and posting it on the Web. This failure to really examine or review the subject at hand becomes apparent in his first sentence, ten words that could have been lifted directly from the playbill: “Eric Samuelsen is a faculty playwright at Brigham Young University.” While such a comment may imply that Samuelsen’s work, for all intents and purposes, is Church-sanctioned fare, it doesn’t really reflect, as Johnston suggests it does, the depth of the playwright’s artistic, cultural, and theological “gene pool.”¹ And yet, Johnston may have avoided this initial moment of shallowness by simply throwing “Eric Samuelsen” into Google’s search engine.

With this few seconds of typing and the click of a button, he might have been directed to Mahonri Stewart’s interview of Samuelsen on A Motley Vision. Beyond revisiting here what he already knew, Johnston might have learned that Samuelsen found his artistic inspiration to “write about [his] own culture”² by piggybacking on Spencer W. Kimball’s desire, as articulated in “A Gospel Vision of the Arts”, that “someone [would] […] do justice in recording in song and story and painting and sculpture the story of the Restoration, […] the struggles and frustrations; the apostasies and inner revolutions and counter-revolutions”³ of the Latter-day Saint soul. In this, Johnston might have also discovered that Samuelsen feels a “disconnect with Utah culture,”⁴ with the conservatism, both in culture and politics, that pervades the Beehive State and its predominant religious institution and way of life. Knowing this, Johnston might have been able to add a little depth to his reading of Samuelsen and not have been so stunned that this non-conservative professor from a deeply conservative university had joined with “a Salt Lake [theater] troupe with a penchant for mounting plays that would make a lumberjack blush” to stage his “bizarre”⁵ new play, especially since Inversion is not the first union of this playwright and the players of Plan-B.

With a bit more digging, Johnston could have also uncovered Samuelsen’s 2008 Association for Mormon Letters’ Presidential Address in which Samuelsen discusses his present view of Mormon arts and letters, including his fears about the corporatization and commodification of word and image and his assertion “that Literature is testimony. It’s a writer telling us what the world looks like from where he’s standing, or even better, imagining how it would look if he were standing somewhere else.”⁶

In the end, this few minutes of directed reading might have helped the reviewer better understand the avant-garde creator of such an avant-garde world as Inversion, according to the review, presents. Instead, Johnston spurts a few sketchy lines about the play’s sketchy plot and its inconclusive conclusion, then tries his hand at something of an interpretation, though, as he admits, he “can’t be sure” about his reading. (But really, when can we ever be sure?) Not having seen the play, I can’t dispute with him on interpretive grounds. I might guess, however, that the title has more to do with inverting our assumptions about certain things (including American/Mormon culture and the moral dilemmas of the universe) than with just the temperature inversion that smothers the “mountain rescue station [in which seven young people are trapped] […] in fog.”

I’m convinced, however, that the most damaging and damning aspect of Johnston’s review is not this failed reading of Samuelsen and his play, but rather the way his failure to read and write carefully results in overgeneralizations about and misrepresentations of Mormon culture and theology. Because of this and because of my belief that lazy, unkempt, patronizing, or shallow scholarship, even if masquerading as journalism, is intellectually dishonest and thus fails to fully serve its audience, I really take issue with what Johnston does next. With this comment, “What I am sure about is Inversion is not the kind of fare Mormons will flock to,” he launches into a excusive discussion of the reason why he didn’t like the play (as evidenced by the language and tone of his review) and why most Mormons won’t—or at least why they perhaps shouldn’t—like it either: because, he says, “Mormons, for the most part, like their theater tidier. They like a story that has a message.”⁷ While I agree that we Latter-day Saints, above most others, are obsessed (and perhaps rightfully so) with the quest for meaning and truth and that as humans we generally like our path to understanding straight and broad, without much risk laid against our hard-won (or not) faith, I don’t agree with the implication of this tidiness: that the moral universe and Mormon theology can (let alone whether or not they should) be tied up in a little bow and distributed as lesson favors at church to our friends and even to some of our enemies or that Mormon writers should maintain a clean and comfortable platform if they want to keep their audience engrossed or even if they want to keep an audience in gross. Such attempts, in my mind, trivialize and in effect undermine the tragic depths to which our forebears, including Christ and Joseph Smith, moved in their efforts to establish and redeem the truth by examining and reexamining, in action and in thought, the central contraries of existence and of the Mormon religious experience.

By reducing the Mormon tragic quest into such shallow and simplistic assumptions about the nature of the paradox driven universe, Johnston (my scapegoat for the impulse of cultural Mormons to strain at an ethical gnat even as we swallow a theological camel by failing to consistently engage with our own mythos) negates or at the very least underestimates the power and influence of Mormon theology and the Mormon God to persuade us into productive engagement with the eternal ambiguities of existence. Indeed, by essentially denying the demands of paradox their well-earned though sometimes culturally neglected place in Latter-day Saint literature, history, and theology, Johnston undercuts the tragic doctrinal insistence of Lehi that, without opposition,

righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore if it [existence] should be [reconciled into] one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility. […]

And if these things are not there is no God. And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; […] wherefore, all things must have vanished away.⁸

Johnston’s shallow review thus discredits the work of the many Mormon artists like Samuelsen who don’t blatantly “include a lesson or two in [their] work,”⁹ who see literature as experience, as a witness of life (which, at least in my experience, is never written in black and white and absolutely ripe with meaning) and who strive to capture the opposition inherent in all things in their literary worlds without blasphemously moving to reconcile one side with the other (an attempt, as William Blake also concedes, that would stop our progression and ultimately “destroy existence”¹⁰) or to maintain a devoted following.

(Next Thursday’s post: “Part II: In Exchange for the Soul.”)

Footnotes:

1 Johnston, Jerry. “Playwright’s scripts are a departure from Mormon morality tales.” Rvw. of Inversion, by Eric Samuelsen. Mormon Times. mormontimes.com. 23 July 2008. 25 July 2008.

2 Stewart, Mahonri. An Interview with Eric Samuelsen. A Motley Vision. www.motleyvision.org. 2 May 2006. 8 Aug. 2008.

3 Kimball, Spencer W. “A Gospel Vision of the Arts.” Ensign. July 1977.

4 Stewart.

5 Johnston.

6 Samuelsen, Eric. “Towards a Mission, Minus the Statement.” Presidential Address given at The Association for Mormon Letters Annual Meeting. 8 Mar. 2008. http://www.mormonletters.org/events/AMLprezaddress.htm. (For some reason the link has gone dead. It was there, I promise.)

7 Johnston.

8 2 Nephi 2:11, 13.

9 Johnston.

10 Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Major Authors Edition. M.H. Abrams, et al, eds. New York: Norton, 2001. 1384.