Since the underlying concern of this series has been with the ways in which Mormons—especially Mormon critics—read or misread Latter-day Saint literature, culture, and theology, I turn now to the “or” of my tragically long title, “An Ethics of Latter-day Saint Reading” and attempt to infer some conclusions about where I think the Mormon reader/critic stands in relation to our letters. (After reading William’s series on the distinction between the terms Mormon and LDS, I’m not sure what my usage here says about me and my particular terminological inclinations. But I sure am self-conscious about them now. Thanks for that, Wm…)

V. Assuming Responsibility

The ethical implications and textu(r)ally redemptive possibilities of the rhetorics people use to explore human experience and to communicate with and to persuade others center in the acts of reading, a series of unique performances that exist only in the intersection between writer, reader, and text and that flow from the ethos of each transactional party. This ethos, as Booth has it, emerges not only in a person’s moral integrity, but it’s further expressed in the patterns or “habits of choice” we fall into in every domain of our lives.¹ The way we read, then, as the way we habitually choose to live is a complex extension and expression of our character.

In terms of “[e]thical criticism,” as I’ve been attempting and asserting here as the primary mode of Mormon reading, this suggests that the writer is not solely responsible for how his or her text is read. Of course, they are responsible, as I observe in part four, for gaining their rhetorical balance before making their work public—for truthfully empowering their words with the essence particularities* of human experience, even if the truth of that experience is captured in the conduit of fiction or, in other words, told in a lie. Doing so invests the text with what Patricia calls “a meaningful vision of others’ accountability,” a vision that arises unconsciously from the text’s foundation in experience and through the writer’s desire to “get [something] across” to readers, even if that something is simply a shared experience with humanity.

Through this inferred vision, which ultimately boils down to the writer’s avowal of another’s agency, the inherently ethical burden of evaluating and interpreting the text transfers to the reader. In this ethics of reading, as J. Hillis Miller asserts, the reader has the obligation to “respect [the] particularities” of the text by subjecting themselves to that which makes it “different, unique, [or] idiomatic” and the associated opportunity to engage with and thus to experience the power of the text’s alterity.² We may, however, shut ourselves off from this experience with otherness by passing hasty or uninformed moral judgments on a text. As Booth observes, “Too often in the past, ‘ethical’ or ‘moral’ critics have assumed that their only responsibility was to label a given narrative or kind of narrative as in itself harmful or beneficial—often dismissing entire genres, like ‘the novel,’ in one grand indictment.”³ Under the guise of maintaining certain black and white moral standards, this mode of reading severely limits the company we might keep and thus the range of experience we might gain by learning to entertain the stranger, to listen to their stories, as Bruce Jorgensen suggests the truly Christian reader should.⁴ Only by allowing the self to be penetrated by the stranger’s otherness or, alternately, by expanding the boundaries of the self such that it might include, understand, and even embrace and integrate (to a degree) the other’s difference can we collapse the distance between Self and Other (including God) and unite as the race of God in any communally redemptive and healing way.

This isn’t to suggest that we should invite every stranger in that comes a-calling, for while some may be angels incognito, others may well be devils. And still others may be, well, both. That is, depending on our level of literary maturity, on our ability to deal with and to dwell in the ambiguities of moral paradox, a text may prove redemptive and soul-expanding to one person while at the same time proving destructive to another. Laura explores this concept in her post “Virginia Sorenson: the Book Club edition?” in which she describes the different reactions the ladies in her ward book club had to Sorenson’s A Little Lower than the Angels. While she left the novel, she says, “with a heavy, but invigorated, heart,” some, like the recent convert who struggled to accept Joseph Smith and our polygamous past, never entered it at all; and others, like the woman who felt spiritually impressed “that she shouldn’t read it,” never made it past the front hall. William remarks that, in his eyes, each of these varied reactions “are valid” in the sense that “Mormons can have different reactions to a work of art—and all those reactions are Mormon” (italics mine). In other words, because all of us stand at a different line and embody a different precept on the continuum of lines and precepts that move us toward Godhood, we each need to acknowledge that this difference exists and validate our fellow travelers for what and where they are in this developmental process we call exaltation.

I’m not suggesting with this that we should be content with where we stand, individually or as a diverse community of Saints. While the Church’s bureaucratic organization thrives by maintaining a certain degree of contentment, by reinforcing the status quo, the process of eternal progress embodied by Mormon theology is one of continual subversion, reevaluation, and reconstruction of the central system motivating that organization’s growth: the eternal self. In this light, we must, while beginning where we are, push ourselves and our fellow saints to adhere to Mormonism’s true theological standard, a dynamic system that pushes us against our psychological, spiritual, intellectual, even our physical boundaries; that pushes us against the boundaries of the universe and our understanding of the universe as God deems to make us as he is—an exalted being that will progress and learn, pressing at the boundaries of an ever-increasing knowledge for the eternities.

So what does this imply about an ethics of Latter-day Saint reading?

As with any intellectual/artistic venture (within or without the aegis of Mormonism), this pressing of boundaries is the expectation we extend to ourselves—our writers, our scholars, our artists, and even our readers. And while, as Pratt has suggested, one thing that binds Mormon arts and letters up is the insistence on measuring everything against the standards of Mormon culture/theology, against the letter of God’s laws—something that becomes especially taxing or de-nobling, even unnerving for the writer/artist when it comes to depictions of moral paradox, sin, and evil—I believe that this expansive view of Mormonism and its eternal implications is one thing we must read within and against which we might fruitfully measure our artistic/intellectual endeavors, especially since art can provide such a profound and redemptive conduit to self-understanding, self-expression, self-expansion, and personal/communal healing. Such a view is faithful to the very foundations of Mormonism and the Prophet’s life and work and, as Pratt also remarks, “expansive enough to include all kinds of Mormons and their art” and their readings of art, Jack and Peter—hell, even Jerry Johnston—included.

Footnotes:

1. Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep. Berkely: U of California P, 1988. 8.

2. Qtd. in Booth The Company We Keep 9.

3. Booth 9.

4. Jorgensen, Bruce. “To Tell and Hear Stories: Let the Stranger Say.” Tending the Garden 49-68. Also found here.

* See comment #6 for my emendation of the post.

As I conclude, “This vision of doctrinal expansion and spiritual cooperation as acts of theological creativity ties very closely to Mormonism’s cultural and artistic development because 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.”

IV. Maintaining Rhetorical Balance

Karl Keller insists that Mormon culture’s literary immaturity arises from three distinct delusions, conventions we cling to that keep us from fully experiencing words and with which we have historically “denied ourselves a literature.”¹ To begin with, he cites “our puritanism,” by which he means that, by and large, we have a cultural “suspicion of literature” that stems from our puritanical “fear that to delight in anything imaginative is to give oneself over to one’s senses, and of course one’s senses could lead to sensuality, sexuality, and sin.” These “puritan condemnations”, as Keller calls them, result in a certain “paranoia” about literature, a psychological state in which we see literature as nothing more than a tool in Satan’s arsenal and that leads us to “domesticate,” to “bowdlerize,” or to Mormonize the best books (including “the bawdy Shakespeare and the ambiguous Hawthorne and the skeptical Robert Frost”) in our efforts to keep ourselves morally clean and mentally straight.

Taking these together, Keller asserts that the “puritanism and paranoia in us culminate in a kind of apocalypticism in which we see the productions of the world—literature and the arts in particular—as evidence of the final end of this dispensation in time.” In other words, because the world’s literature is crude and immoral, because it supposedly “attacks […] the things of God” and “attempts to undermine the lives of moral people”,² we must on principle abstain. After all, as the cliché goes, we must live in the world, but we don’t have to be of it.

And if that’s the case, we might as well take the moral high ground and watch our neighbors (both literary and actual) burn.

As Keller implies, these positions—and I add to them our consumer-/rewards-based view of Mormonism—are merely symptomatic of this refusal to engage the world (which is ultimately our means to exaltation) and Mormon theology and thus to bear what England calls the “difficult burden” of “describ[ing] a unique set of revealed truths and historical and continually vital religious experiences and to do so both truly and artistically”. Mormon writers face this paradox in particular as they strive to be “at once artistic and orthodox”, to produce “a literature that […] can both teach and delight as the best literature always has, that is realistic, even critical, about Mormon experience but profoundly faithful to the vision and concerns of the restored gospel of Christ.”³ While some Latter-day Saints may give in to the temptation “to assume [that in literature] a good ‘message’ is enough”—leading us to uncritically receive and propagate “a ‘faith-building’ story or one based on ‘real experience,’ however badly written or sentimental in its appeal” whereas, with regard to the other arts, we might “see right away that a painting of Joseph Smith’s first vision done badly would demean the experience or that a clumsy or sentimental musical score on the suffering of Christ in Gethsemane would be a kind of blasphemy”—there is indeed a segment of the Mormon population sensitive to the aesthetic and moral development of our arts and letters, one faithful to the vision and strength of our forebears and intent on seeing our “religion succeed[...] in an aesthetic way,” as Keller puts it.⁴

In England’s words, these “faithful Latter-day Saints are developing the skill and courage to write well in all the genres,” confronting the paradoxical challenge, “which must be faced as well by their readers, both Mormons and others[,] […] to find ways to reach out and unite the extremes of experience President Kimball recommended and to accept the role of art in assisting in the central human purpose Brigham Young described”⁵ and which I’ve been exploring here as the central witness and ethical burden of our theology and of all good literature: “We cannot obtain eternal life unless we actually know and comprehend by our experience the principle of good and the principle of evil, the light and the darkness, truth, virtue, and holiness, also vice, wickedness, and corruption.”⁶ I use the word “burden” to describe the difficulty of this Mormon epistemology very deliberately: with its implication of both “obligation and opportunity”,⁷ it captures the largely untapped eternal source of intelligence and experience outlined by President Young and inherent in Mormonism’s covenant theology and in the human experience with language.

Because language is essentially compressed or “refined” experience, it offers the perfect medium through which to absorb, expand, and complete our own life experience to “the n^th power” and to fulfill the obligation and opportunity placed on us by our reciprocal theological and cultural relationship with Mormonism, but only if we’re willing to leap into and vicariously and empathically explore alternate, rhetorical lives. Tory C. Anderson explores this particular conception of good literature and its potential to get at “the heart of the meaning of life without ever talking about it” by leading us through a reading of Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. In his gloss of the story, which, he testifies, “is good fiction,” he illustrates how the skilled and conscientious wordsmith, like Flaubert, can help us feel and understand how another feels and understands by moving us through a fictional life, a “refined life”, as Anderson calls it. In this way, he says, we can “understand something like the ugliness of unchastity without experiencing it”, much like Christ can understand everything we’ve felt and done without actually doing it himself.⁸

Samuelson points to this idea when he concludes that literature is “a writer […] imagining how [the world] would look if he [or she] were standing somewhere else.” For a reader to carry this burden with the writer, they must open themselves to the writer’s reality, as expressed through the demanding realities of language, and allow themselves to increase in understanding vicariously. If we deny our ourselves the vitality of such vicarious experience in our venture toward Godhood, especially as it relates to gaining understanding of “vice, wickedness, and corruption” without falling prey to these principles of evil, it may just take us, as Anderson observes, “four billion earth lives (give or take a million) to experience what we need to experience to become like God.”⁹

But the reader can’t fully participate in this process if the writer hasn’t invested in it themselves. Wayne Booth¹⁰ observes of this failure that much writing falls short of persuading others of the truth of human experience because the writer hasn’t first gained their rhetorical balance. In other words, they might lean too heavily on a pedantic crutch, writing to their congregation from some Rameumptom-like will toward cultural authority; or they allow the marketability of their words to outweigh the real significance or sensibility of those words, offering a gaudy, thin, or shallow linguistic vessel rather than a well-wrought cistern that could preserve the living waters of existential paradox; or they engage in rhetorical acrobatics, endlessly trying to amuse their audience while putting their textual body in evermore precarious positions in order to maintain the thrill factor as they build to what may easily become a sensational and textually unjustifiable end.

In terms more directly related to my discussion of Johnston’s commodified theology, many Mormon writers (and many Mormon readers, for that matter) throw themsleves off of rhetorical balance by leaning toward the convenience of “official” LDS texts—those that seem to reflect Mormon culture’s popular and widely accepted and acceptable view of morality, conflict, contradiction, experience, God, and the universe. And they do so for those very reasons: convenience and acceptance. It’s much easier to earn a culture’s marks for success, economic and otherwise, by working within culturally inscribed formulas for acceptable performance and production than to “cast them in new formulas” as Roberts suggests must be done for the Kingdom—its disciples, doctrines, and culture—to expand in deifying ways. Indeed, we sometimes seem too busy fearing or ignoring the world and language and consuming, and in the process reinforcing and propagating, popular Mormon culture and our sometimes damning misrepresentations of Mormon theology to spend time actually exploring or experiencing the depths of that world, of our humanity, and of Mormon theology in redemptively textu(r)al ways.

(Next time: Part V: Assuming Responsibility)

Footnotes:

1. Keller, Karl. “On Words and the Word of God: The Delusions of a Mormon Literature.” Tending the Garden. Ed. Eugene England and Lavina Fielding Anderson. Salt Lake: Signature Books, 1996. 13. Although Keller’s essay was first published in 1969, the trends he recognizes continue to plague our efforts to articulate a Mormon literature.

2. 14-15; italics mine.

3. “Mormon Literature” par. 44.

4. Keller 19.

5. “Mormon Literature” par. 68.

6. Qtd. in “Mormon Literature” par. 68.

7. Mulder, William. “’Essential Gestures’: Craft and Calling in Contemporary Mormon Letters”. Weber Studies 10.3 (1993). 14 Aug. 2008.

8. Anderson, Tory C. “Just the Fiction, Ma’am.” Tending the Garden. 73.

9. 73.

10. Booth, Wayne. “The Rhetorical Stance.” Teaching Composition: Background Readings. Ed. T.R. Johnson. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008. 163-71.

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.