For enlivening the soul

Doctrine & Covenants 59:16 – 19:

16 Verily I say, that inasmuch as ye do this, the fulness of the earth is yours, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and that which climbeth upon the trees and walketh upon the earth;

17 Yea, and the herb, and the good things which come of the earth, whether for food or for raiment, or for houses, or for barns, or for orchards, or for gardens, or for vineyards;

18 Yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart;

19 Yea, for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body and to enliven the soul.

It occurs to me that a tertiary point one could make about these verses is that food and raiment, which are the core things humans create from the natural resources that constitute the “fulness of the earth,” definitely “please the eye,” and “gladden the heart,” and “enliven the soul.”

That is: although in verse 19 food and raiment are part the whole series, the rest of the items in the series are also what those two items can lead to.

And this means that both are important to any system of or claims about Mormon aesthetics and also that if we are going to extend these notions of pleasing the eye, gladdening the heart, and enlivening the soul to other spheres of human creativity, we can’t completely divorce those from these two primary connections to the human body: what we eat and what we wear.

Now part of me pointing this out is selfishness and self-justification on my part: descriptions of food and clothing are important to the fiction I write and like to read.

And, of course, there are plenty of parts of scripture that condemn gluttony and pride and point to rich food and fine raiment as negative things or go further and use them as indicators and/or metaphors of the overall sinfulness of a people/nation.

But based on the verses above, it seems to me that it’s not the food and raiment per se that is a problem, but rather the selfishness of not sharing the fulness with everyone and instead hoarding it and using it only for your own pleasures.

Or to put it another way: please, gladden, and strengthen are all important aspects to the pleasures that mortal life can bring us. But all of those need to culminate with the primary purpose of life: that we enliven our soul.

That phrase deserves further unpacking. But for now I just want to point out that in Mormon theology (or at least folk doctrine), the soul is the mind, body, and the spirit, all three together. And to live (to be enlivened) is to progress.

The structure of Chase Westfall’s “Toward a Latter-day Saint Contemporary Art”

The first essay in Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader I want to look more closely at in relation to Mormon aesthetics is the last one: Chase Westfall’s “Toward a Latter-day Saint Contemporary Art.” That’s not only because it’s the piece that is more directly about aesthetics, but also because I was struck by how it is structured.

Here is that structure in very brief form (more in-depth engagement with the ideas in the essay will happen in future posts):

Opening: Mormon visual art tends to be formal, polite, and anachronistic [as evidenced by the work featured in the Immediate Present exhibition] (Wm notes: the word I would use is belated, a term I borrow from Gregory Jusdanis)

Further Development: when it does engage with current politics and artistic modes, most Mormon visual art does so in a positive/polite/restrained manner

Exceptions: Esterbend by Levi Jackson and Seer Stone by Casey Jex Smith from Immediate Present

Complication: In spite of his indictment of Mormon art, Westfall still “sees reasons to be encouraged”

Further Development: four reasons for that hope (these will be detailed in a separate post)

Contrast: 15-Year Expanse (the same curator—Laura Allred Hurtado—as Immediate Present but with a different remit and result)

Further Development: in contrast to Immediate Present works that are more playful, contemporary, active, candid

The Conclusion: the two exhibitions are contrasted to show “a move from a didactic to a parabolic mode” (602)

The Turn: pivoting from the descriptive and comparative to the polemical

The Zoom Out: invocation of broader statements by LDS leaders on art and the fact of “two separate but equally demanding standards”—those of “the world” and those of “the gospel” (605)

The Repudiation: of Mormon exceptionalism

The Answer: “revolutionary Mormonism” (608)

Further Development: several artist mentioned but two primary examples are offered and examined in detail

Example 1: Jason Metcalf’s Hie to Kolob

Example 2: Rachel Thomander’s I Love People

The Call: to “the prophetic” and “new canons”

I’ve noticed there is a tendency in works on Mormon aesthetics and culture to structure one’s argument in a particular way.

It starts like this:

This is What We Have Had/Currently Have & It’s Bad/Mediocre & Our Culture is Impoverished/Still Immature/Stifling

And then either moves to:

But I’m Here to Tell You That if We Do This Our Culture Will be Awesome

Or to this:

But We Do Also Have These Amazing Cultural Works & They Should Be More Popular Than They Are & There Should Be More of Them

This is a valid approach. One I have used myself. And one that is also used outside the world of Mormon art.

And yet I wonder if we’re more susceptible to it—that whole “slowly flowering” thing I’ve discussed in the past where we avoid grappling with current art in order to look towards a Utopian future—and if there’s a danger to it. This desire to see art as the fruits of restoration, which Westfall does even as he shows awareness of the issues with Mormon exceptionalism.

Indeed, what makes Westfall’s entry a level above many of the essays and talks on Mormon aesthetics I’ve collected is that he provides in-depth analysis of specific works to frame and bolster his larger arguments. Granted, he gets almost thirty pages in which to do so. But I’d say that even though he uses a familiar structure, he does so more ably and convincing than the norm.

This is not to say that he fully escapes the dangers, however, of this structure. In particular, while the contrast between the two exhibits Hurtado curated helps Westfall detail which Mormon art and artists has higher aesthetic value in his eyes, focusing on what the art that he sees as unsuccessful does means those who disagree with his judgement of which art is more impactful/interesting/important, etc. can then dismiss his larger arguments because he, as a critic, doesn’t share their taste (and, yes, that’s part of the point—the essay is not just about the Mormon artists but also the Mormon audience; however, much of the aesthetic work the essay is doing rests on which artistic works you prefer).

Meanwhile, even if you do share his preferences for the works he uses as positive examples, his larger argument rests on if you agree with the ideological priorities that inform Westfall’s aesthetic judgement. That is: not only must you value the works that Westfall values in the essay, you must value them for the same reasons he values them in order to find his larger argument of what Mormon art should be convincing: Not Just These Works & Artists, But These Works & Artist & For This Reason.

I’m not saying this a bad thing.

I am saying this is a thing that writers and speakers on Mormon aesthetics often do.

Westfall could have chosen strictly to do a compare and contrast of the two Hurtado-curated exhibitions and held up the works he valued most as exemplary without tying them into broader issues related to Mormonism and art (and to the larger debate over Mormon aesthetics).

Thankfully, he did not: I’m interested when Mormon critics and artists make larger points about the field. That’s the whole point of this Mormon aesthetics project.

At the same time, I’m distrustful of the urge to the prophetic Westfall ends his essay with even though I engage in it myself and do think his approach has more substance to it than many.

This is just an opening look at the essay. I thought it important to step back and really examine its’ structure before engaging too closely with the text itself.

We’ll see where things go, but at the moment, I’m thinking it makes sense to write a post about the four reasons for hope next, followed by one for the move from the didactic to the parabolic. And then we’ll see if there’s more worth writing about or if it’s time to move on to the next essay Latter-day Saint Art: A Critical Reader I want to explore in depth (which one that is is still to be determined).

Mormon Literaturstreit Echoes: Joanna Brooks

Joanna Brooks responds to the Mormon Literaturstreit by arguing for a Mormon-ness–for Mormon literary studies as cultural studies

I was perusing Dialogue’s website recently and ran across an echo of the Mormon Literaturstreit that I had previously not been aware of. The Spring 1997 issue (V. 30, No. 1) features an essay by Joanna Brooks titled Prolegomena to Any Future Mormon Studies, which seeks, like other entries in the Literaturstreit, to chart out a future for Mormon literary studies. Brooks specifically addresses Mike Austin’s How to Be a Mormo-American; Or, the Function of Mormon Criticism at the Present Time, which I wrote about here, agreeing with his basic argument that Mormon literature should fight for a place in the academy/broader literary culture but arguing that it should take a different form, one that aligns itself with and/or situates itself within cultural studies.

Here’s where I remind you again that Austin definitely has different opinions now than those he expressed way back then, and Brooks may have undergone similar transformations in her thinking, although I’d say that of all the entries in the Mormon Literaturstreit, this is the one that holds up best these days, even if cultural studies as it was defined at the time when this essay was published has undergone further complication and transformation (and even if you disagree with the essay itself).

Brooks also layers her arguments in a way that even more than any of the other entries requires experiencing the original text, so I encourage you to read it rather than relying solely on this post.

She begins her essay by relating experiences she’s had and attitudes she’s encountered that show how the academy has a horror of anything that smacks of religious belief in scholarship (even if it’s simply the personal beliefs and practices of the scholar and doesn’t show up in the work they produce) and how Mormon institutions have a horror of forms of Mormonism that don’t match their paradigms.

For Brooks, the solution is for Mormon Studies “to find a vocabulary, a way of talking about ‘Mormonism’ that is both sufficiently learned and sufficiently invested in mutuality.”

To put it in the terms of the Literaturstreit: Brooks not only rejects Cracroft’s narrow definition of what counts as Mormon, but she also wants Jorgensen and the big tenters to be more rigorous and wide-ranging in their efforts.

Breaking the provincial/cosmopolitan paradigm

However, Brooks doesn’t speak directly to Cracroft or Jorgensen, rather she tackles Austin’s vision for an inclusive, but centered Mormon criticism, one that challenges the academy to find a place for Mormon Studies, but, in Brooks’s point of view, positions Mormons as a “model minority.”

To the extent that Mormon Studies has succeeded outside of Mormon institutions almost three decades after this essay was published, it has largely been as just that.

Brooks has other ambitions, ones she sees as more in keeping with the radical project of early Mormonism.

She writes:

“Too much fixation on the local leaves us quibbling over caffeine and arcane points of doctrine, and I give this movement more credit than that. That we have a legacy of dissent, that we believe that common people can be heirs to all of metaphysics, that we conceive of world revolution in co-operative, practical terms, this ideological heritage could, I believe, in form a more generous scholarship and a more rigorous criticism. Do we consider our ‘Mormon-ness’ a fascinating feature of ethnography with which to buy fifteen minutes of fame on the academic stage? Or do we use it to ground ourselves, to locate our project where it has historically been—in the boondocks, on the margins of civilization? Do we join other academics on the margin in a critical re-examination of the project of modernity? Do we scrutinize Mormonism’s complicated—sometimes profitable, sometimes oppositional—relationship to modern concepts like ‘identity,’ ‘property,’ ‘history,’ ‘race,’ and ‘nation’? Do we link our critique of what has heretofore passed for ‘civilization’ to a practical vision of a mutually flourishing community, that is, Zion? What if we were to position ourselves as scholars in such a way as to, in the words of President Gordon B. Hinckley, ‘stand with the victims of oppression,’ to be ‘militant for truth and goodness’?”

Here I would ask readers to set down for a moment any baggage they may have with Brooks and/or with whatever they understand cultural studies to be and simply focus on the position she is asking Mormon scholars to take.

Personally, I find this notion of moving past the provincial/cosmopolitan dichotomy quite compelling. It’s too easy to be provincial and talk to your own in the language they are accustomed to or to adopt the language and attitudes of the cosmopolitan and skirt around your own culture unless it’s to critique it in the exact terms those in power prefer.

Since the turmoil of the culture wars in BYU’s English department in the late ’80s and early ’90s (which Brooks witnessed firsthand), the department’s approach has, at least until recently, been to not focus on Mormon topics. The idea, I suppose, was to gain credibility/respectability by showing that Mormon scholars can, you know, be normal and do normal scholarship. Meanwhile, scholarship in Mormon Studies has focused more on history and doctrine than culture, including literature. This doesn’t mean that Mormon scholars have always played it safe, of course. But where Mormonism is present in scholarship, it’s mainly as a model minority, and where it has touched on difficult topics—race, feminism, queerness—it’s mainly been pointing at Mormonism itself, its doctrine and history and, sometimes, culture, rather than positioning itself against the project of modernity or late capitalism or the technocracy or whatever you want to call it. Not always, of course. But most often because, to be frank, that’s the type of work where there are resources available (and resources are required to do good scholarship).

We haven’t built the legacy of critique of power, of modernity, of national politics that, for example, African American, feminist, and queer scholars have.

Not that doing so would be/will be easy, of course.

As Brooks notes: “we have much to contribute to wider critical conversations, and the price of admission will be some consciousness raising. Our colleagues will want to know how ‘they’ figure into ‘our’ stories. And we ought to be able to discuss this with them. Elsewise we cling to a reified, precious sense of our own ‘weirdness’ and, frankly, squander our birthright.”

It’s a very good point; and something I’m in danger of myself: retreating into weirdness/peculiarity as a way to avoid more difficult questions, although I would hope that my weird work twists and oddly refracts more than it reifies.

Cult or Culture?

Brooks ends her essay with a section she titles “Mormon-ness’: Cult or Culture?”

She talks about growing up in Southern California during a time when Christian fundamentalism spent a lot of resources on warning folks against the Mormon “cult.”

She, in classic cultural studies fashion, decides to play with that label:

“Let’s take ‘cult’ as a keyword for a new type of discourse about ‘Mormon-ness.’ I suppose that we have been called a ‘cult’ in part be cause our theology informs and is informed by the way we live our lives. … Likewise, ‘Mormon-ness’ itself has been a cultivated phenomenon. More than a static set of received doctrines, our theology has been articulated over time—this is the source of its vitality and its self-generative power. Our understanding of what it means to be ‘Mormon’ and the way we articulate this through social practice have also developed over time, and not always so evenly. Movements of population, instinctual syncretism, and historical necessity have made Mormon culture a many splendored and sometimes divergent thing. ‘Mormon thought’ engages these fertile sites, the places where the ideal intersects the material, the dialectic of spirit and matter.”

Brooks goes on to suggest that Mormon scholar should reflect such a culture of “Mormon-ness”: “Thinking about ‘Mormon-ness’ as culture can have significant impact on the way we do “Mormon Studies”—where the clerics of civilization and the keepers of great books use their academic capital to grant or deny others access to ‘truth,’ workers of culture (try to) see themselves as a part of an ongoing process. Thinking about ‘Mormonness’ as culture, and putting aside a proprietary sense of our ‘peculiarity,’ we can engage our ‘Mormonism’ in more self-conscious, critically aware ways.”

But she also acknowledges that it’s not easy to do so, quoting the Marxist scholar Raymond Williams who sees culture as a site that remains contested even as other sites of modern life—politics, economics—are abstracted and removed from the influence of all but the most powerful individuals.

As Brooks notes: “The civilizing mission proposed by thinkers like [Matthew] Arnold claims to seek universal understanding; in practice, it seems to have satisfied itself in pseudo-objective cosmopolitanism. This doesn’t leave much room for abiding and engaged Mormonism.”

From her point of view, cultural studies provides that room.

Although she also cautions:

“I do not intend to infer a causal relationship between a certain school of thought and better scholarship, better living, or better ‘Mormon-ness.’ I do believe, however, that Mormon Studies done as Cultural Studies will mean less dogmatism and more conversation. If this assertion seems dogmatic in itself, consider the situation out of which it is born: the defenders of an ‘essential’ Mormon-ness make no place for feminism; many who speak the pretty, open-ended sentences of postmodernism, Mormon style, shift their feet. I am hungry to identify with others who share my concerns; my very work depends on it. I am hungry for a vocabulary more adequate to discussions of this complex movement, hungry to read ‘Mormonism’ as a ‘noun of process,’ and to do it in good fellowship.”

Much valuable conversation has happened in the field since then. Some of it engaged in by Brooks herself.

And yet, for a variety of factors, and as I’ve noted before, something as seemingly simple as more conversation with less dogmatism has certainly not been the prevailing mode even if we did see an initial burst of it during the early years of Mormon blogging. What conversation there is remains as fraught as ever, often fragmented, increasingly polarized.

And, when it comes to Mormon literary studies, isn’t really happening that much at all.

This is not to dismiss the work that’s been done since the late 1990s (including by me). All I’m saying is that you don’t have to squint too hard to see other timelines where just a bit of institutional support here and there, just a bit of commitment to Mormon studies as “cultural studies,” just a bit more conversation could have led to more than we now have.

At the very end of her essay, Brooks asks a bunch of questions she thinks would be fruitful for Mormon studies to pursue. What I like about them is that now that Brooks has, like previous voices in the Mormon literaturstreit, outlined her vision for Mormon studies, including Mormon literary studies, she takes things a step further and suggests specific directions to explore:

“What can we say about the ideology of the ‘nation-state’? Consider the Missouri extermination order, the Utah War, our turn-of-the-century drive for assimilation, the subsequent, sometimes excessive performances of American patriotism, bombings in Peru, the ‘downwinders,’ anti-Mormon sentiments among emergent nationalist factions in the former Soviet Union, and insurgent claims to sovereignty by Mormon affiliated or Mormon-friendly groups throughout the intermountain west. What can we say about the structural inequalities of the economy? What about Orderville, water rights debates, Cleon Skousen, and the growing disparity between rich and poor in our own population? There are many questions to ask about Mormon ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nativity.’ Can we contribute to critiques of ‘whiteness’? What made it possible for a nineteenth-century Missourite to insist that ‘the Lord intends that WHITE FOLKS, and not Mormons shall possess that goodly land?’ At century’s end, we were caricatured alongside laundry-washing Chinese, simian-like Irish, and cigar-smoking Indians. A 1904 cartoon showed a Mormon polygamist father with African-American children; one 1905 minstrel song was titled ‘The Mormon Coon.’ When did we get ‘white,’ and how? Where and how do residual racism among Mormons and the Christian Identity movement cross paths? How and why have our cultural constructions of gender changed so radically over time? How can Mormonism produce both Sonia Johnson and Rodney Turner? How has Mormon polygamy been represented in literature and pop culture? How have these representations inflected Mormon sexuality and how do they continue to do so?”

These are all questions—good questions—I have/have had as well. The intervening years have only added to them or complicated them further.

The problem with both the conditions that led to the Mormon literaturstreit and the fallout from those conditions is that our belatedness grew even later. Or to be even more blunt: by falling prey to our version of the cultural wars, we remained in a state of arrested development, wasting time and talents that could have served us well as the 21st century progressed.

Meanwhile, the conditions for answering questions like the ones Brooks outlines above have not been sufficient, let alone ideal. That is: the ability of Mormon literary scholars to receive financial support to work on Mormon topics and the ability of independent Mormon scholars and artists to have access to the resources needed to do their work has not only not improved, but has worsened and looks to be worsening even more.

Not that higher ed is, or should ever have been, the only answer to Mormon culture making and study, of course.

But if questions like those that Brooks ask (and more that we could ask, some of which I have been asking in the fiction I’ve been writing over the past ten years, and especially, more recently) can barely find purchase in higher ed, then what hope is there for the larger Mormon culture?

What is it that we really want?

What is it that we think the current major players in the culture that Mormons consume (most of which is not Mormon even if it has the veneer of Mormon-ness) is going to do for us?

Mormon Literaturstreit Echoes: Eugene England

Although Eugene England didn’t weight in on the Mormon Literaturstreit directly, two of his works speak to the core debate.

One of the questions I have about the Mormon Literaturstreit is this: what role did Eugene England play in it? Like, where was he?

Given the timing of it, it seems very likely he would have been at some if not all of the conferences where Cracroft, Jorgensen, Burton, and Austin presented their thoughts, and even if not,

As far as I’m aware—and that awareness is certainly not very thorough, given that i didn’t attend BYU and haven’t done research in his papers—England never directly weighed in.

Perhaps he didn’t want to get embroiled in the situation. Perhaps he wasn’t interested. Perhaps he was focused on other things.

I do wonder, though, if some of what he published during the 1990s isn’t an attempt to address the core issues of the Mormon Literaturstreit—which works “count” as Mormon literature, what Mormon literature should focus on, what approach Mormon critics should take.

I’m specifically thinking of his essay “Danger on the Right! Danger on the Left! The Ethics of Recent Mormon Fiction,” which was published in the Fall 1999 issue of Dialogue and his use of the term radical middle to outline his position in relation to Mormon fiction/culture, and as a descriptor for the 1992 short story anthology Bright Angels and Familiars he edited in contrast to two later anthologies:Turning Hearts: Short Stories on Family Life (Bookcraft, 1994) and In Our Lovely Deseret: Mormon Fictions (Signature Books, 1998).

For a more detailed look at England’s use of the term “radical middle,” see my series here at AMV on it: Origins | The Middle | The Radical

But from this essay, I think we can glean that whether or not England took the time to grapple directly with what Cracroft and Jorgensen said in their AML presidential addresses, he probably didn’t fully agree with either of them.

He writes (quoting his introduction to Bright Angels and Familiars): “I claimed that the stories I had been able to choose each give “a new vision of life, filtered and energized through a believing, moral intelligence as well as a gifted and disciplined artistic sensibility.””

Note that he’s looking for a “new vision” and not an account of the LDS experience. And that it will from an intelligence that is both believing and moral and an artistic sensibility that is both gifted and disciplined.

In reviewing the short story anthologies that came after his, England is unsparing in his criticism. claiming that he is “not as optimistic—about either the esthetic or the ethical quality of the Mormon fiction now being published” as he was when his anthology was published.

He goes so far as to say that Mormon fiction “is in some danger—for quite similar reasons—from both the right and the left.” That “the very division itself” is partly to blame.

But it’s not just the division that’s an issue. It’s what that leads authors on either side of it to do when they write fiction.

Indeed, England, echoing the tactic Richard Cracroft used in his review of Harvest that kicked off the Literaturstreit, is not afraid to specifically point to stories from both anthologies that he sees as flawed. In his opinion, “many of the stories in both anthologies are so driven by didactic purposes that the complexity and compassion of good ethical fiction are missing—and the esthetic quality suffers as well.”

What England Wants

England, characteristically, is not shy about what he’s looking for as a reader (and a critic). His approach to literary criticism is one that focuses on literature as a major pillar of both humanism and his preferred type of Mormonism, as best practiced by showing the humanity and the godly potential in everyone.

He writes:

“Good ethical fiction, it seems to me, comes about when ethical people, with inborn and well-trained literary ability, engage the world artistically and openly. When this happens, characters are created who are allowed—even encouraged—by their authors to take on a kind of in- dependent existence. Through the essentially mysterious process of imaginative creation, they can thus appear actually to have independent existence, a kind of moral agency, and thus make surprising, unprogrammed, ethical moves and discoveries.”

He is allergic to the didactic, but while all critics (and all Mormon critics) always provide that caveat (“of course, it shouldn’t be didactic”), England is willing to be precise about what it means to avoid the didactic.

I recommend you read his essay/review because his specific readings of the stories in the two anthologies he is criticizing provide a fuller picture of what he likes and dislikes than I can summarize here.

And while the quote above about good ethical fiction could apply to writers from any background, England also has something to say about Mormon writers. Returning to this idea of the radical middle, he ends his essay bemoaning the fact that the political divide in Mormon culture has led to the fact that “too many of those writers in what might be called the radical middle, who have no simplistic pro Mormon or anti-Mormon agenda, but try to practice their craft with careful esthetic skill and ethical insight, can’t seem to get themselves published to a Mormon audience. It’s a shame. I might even say, if I were an extremist, a damn shame.”

A Manichean Card

Although I see “Danger on the Right! Danger on the Left! The Ethics of Recent Mormon Fiction” as England’s most direct engagement with the Mormon Literaturstreit, there is one other essay of his that also has some echoes, I think. As you may recall, one of Cracroft’s bits of line drawing was to place works and authors into the Mantic vs. the Sophic.

In 1997, England presented a paper at the Life, the Universe, & Everything convention titled Pastwatch: The Redemption of Orson Scott Card.

He begins the paper by identifying Card as a radical Mormon (non-pejorative). As we saw above, he’ll return to that word radical just a couple of years later, but with the word “middle” attached to it. He also believes Card is the closest Mormon culture has come so far to fulfilling Orson F. Whitney’s “Shakespeares and Miltons of our own” pronouncement.

Then he says: “But lately I’ve been a little worried about Scott. I’ve wondered if his theology hadn’t begun to show itself not so much radical Mormon as conservative Christian, even Manicheistic, that is, inclined to see all existence as divided between the competing and nearly equal forces of good and evil. And I’ve wondered if Card had lost some of his courageous outspokenness on the central Gospel issues, his willingness to be, at whatever cost, a speaker for the dead and different. So, it was with both pleasure and relief that last year I read Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (TOR 1996). I had been thinking Orson Scott Card (the writer, not the Latter-day Saint) needed some redemption himself, and I found it in this remarkable novel.”

He goes on to point out where he sees Card engaging in Manichean thinking (such as in the Alvin Maker series), but then from there goes into depth on Pastwatch and why that novel gives him hope that Card is abandoning the Manichean, and, specifically, although not overtly due to his audience, bringing his radical (non-pejorative) Mormonism into the novel.

I think many readers today view Pastwatch as not quite as much of a triumph as England did back when it was published. Part of that may be the text itself. Part of that is also where Card went with his fiction and, especially, non-fiction since then, which was to lean heavily in the Manichean.

But the point of this post is not to litigate Card’s career and body of work. We can leave that for another time.

Instead, I think that, while not specifically referencing the Mormon Literaturstreit, England’s remarks on Manichean thinking act as a rebuke of Cracroft’s attempts to divide Mormon culture into the Mantic and the Sophic. At the same time, when combined with “Danger on the Right! Danger on the Left!”, I think it’s also clear that England didn’t buy into Jorgensen’s more squishy, big tent approach either. He was after something more specific.

Something more radical middle.

And for that reason, whether these two pieces are a direct response to the Literaturstreit or not, I think they’re important echoes.

At the very least, they’re foundational to my own thinking about Mormon literature.

On Gerrit de Jong Jr.’s “An Approach to Modernity in Art”

William takes a look at a 1959 essay by Gerrit de Jong Jr. on modernity in art in relation to Mormon aesthetics.

Mormons have had a belated experience and engagement with Modernism (not to mention Postmodernism), especially when it comes to aesthetics. Indeed, I don’t know that we’ve reckoned all that much with modernism artistically, even as it’s shaped our culture and society, and the pressures it creates have led to many of the policy, administrative, and doctrinal interpretations, changes, and reassertions in the LDS Church in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Instead, when it comes to aesthetics, we’re, essentially, a bunch of post-Romantics.

Orson F. Whitney certainly was—his pronouncement about Mormons having Shakespeares and Miltons of our own is linked not only to a late 19th project of nationalism (you prove your worth), but is also rooted in his aesthetic philosophy which is made up three parts Joseph Smith and one part Byron. That is, his sense that Mormon literature should represent an aesthetic approach that melds the prophetic and poetic, or rather one that sees no difference between the two where the Muse is replaced by the influence of the Holy Ghost, and where all the issues of modernism that modern art attempted (and failed in more and less interesting ways) to address those issues is short-circuited or remedied by art created out of inspiration—the hollow of modernity filled up with literature created by “genius” of the Holy Ghost. Thus for Whitney, art is not an attempt to grapple with the disenchantment of the world, rather it is the work of having the world revealed to the artist through the Spirit.

I bring this background up because much of the work I’ve found on Mormon aesthetics—most of which was done in the 1970s and 1980s—follows on from Whitney’s ideas, and so I was both suprised and delighted to find that Gerrit de Jong Jr.’s essay “An Approach to Modernity in Art” published way back in an early edition of BYU Studies [volume 02, issue 1; Autumn 1959/Winter 1960].

Now, de Jong Jr. doesn’t directly address Mormon art in this essay. But I still thinks it’s of interest to my Mormon Aesthetics project because of the author and the venue it appeared in.

So what does he have to say?

Modern Art as the Unfamiliar

In a move the comes across as naive in a post-postmodernism/post-culture wars world, de Jong Jr. claims people don’t like modern art because they don’t know what to look for in it—it’s unfamiliar to them. Of course, this is slightly more gracious positioning than those who accuse folks of not liking a work because they just don’t get it, man.

Perhaps less graciously, de Jong Jr. also ascribes to the normies (what he terms “laymen”) some ugly attitudes, including: “It is not infrequently suggested by otherwise discriminating people that excessive drinking and addiction to dope are often the motivating causes of modern artistic expression.”

His response to these atittudes is to stand up for artists and the critics. He wonders: “Isn’t it strange that in the field of art, in religion, and in literature numerous uninitiated laymen feel perfectly capable of judging quality without ever having had any technical training, instruction, or experience in these fields?”

After all, we don’t do the same to engineers and surgeons (he would have really hated the internet where everyone has somehow become an expert in everything and has strong opinions on things).

He sort of has a point. It’s true that understanding the technical aspects of a field can help one better appreciate works, especially avant garde or cutting edge ones. However, art, religion, and literature aren’t the same as open heart surgery or running electrical current in a building. They are all storytelling and, ostensibly, are meant to be approached and appreciated by everyone.

But I’m getting distracted here: de Jong Jr’s main point is that all art that is truly art arrives on the scene as modern. Almost no art that is new is embraced by society, and what the normies of any given time see as safe and familiar was seen as scandalous and/or incomprehensible by their great great grandparents.

He writes: “Most of the artistic practices that originated in former periods were short-lived. Relatively few of them become well enough established to be regarded as conventional today. How many of the art forms now called modern will endure to strike root and gain general acceptance, no one can predict with assurance.”

While history proves this to be true, this doesn’t really answer the question of why someone who is not a critic or artist should engage with “unconventional” art. Wouldn’t it be better to be belated to the game and spend what limited time you have here in mortality on works that have stood the test of time?

U.S. Mormons seem to like that idea—see for example, the “Out of the Best Books” project of the mid-20th century (although also note that it was, like much Mormon culture has been and is, a knock off of a larger cultural phenomenon [this is not necessarily a critique of knock offs—what’s interesting or not about them is not that they are a knock off, but rather the form they take within the Mormon cultural sphere]) or the enthusiasm for “classical education” among home school/charter school parents, and while I don’t want to get too sidetracked here, one of the key weaknesses of many attempts at Mormon aesthetics is to ignore where the sociopolitical intersects with the aesthetic, which is to say, perhaps the Mormons of de Jong Jr.’s time (and earlier and later) eschew “modern” art because they’re more interested in becoming acceptable or even respectable in middlebrow/middle class society. That is, while there are certainly Mormon aesthetic arguments to be made against avant garde art, embracing art which society has already deemed acceptable is one of the easier moves one can make in the process of assimilation (a study of what non-hymn works the Mormon Tabernacle Choir has chosen to sung and when those works first enter their repertoire would be fascinating).

Form vs. Content

Where de Jong Jr. really finds his footing is in his argument against focusing so much on the meaning of challenging art works. I encourage you to read his explanation of tone and harmony (unsurprisingly, he’s better at making his points when talking about music rather than visual art).

Although it’s interesting to me how far he takes it, his response to the straw layperson he sets up who rejects a work of art because they doesn’t understand it is:

“As a matter of fact, there is nothing to understand, at least not in a logical sense of the word. For art addresses itself primarily to the emotions, not to the intellect. A good painting, a fine musical composition, an exciting redecoration of our living room is not expected to bring us knowledge or give us information. Art puts no premium on being understandable in the sense of being logical or even reasonable; it would rather stimulate intuition or awaken the imagination. That is its only mission. Art should be made to provide a feast for the senses but should not, and does not, try to furnish food for thought.”

I don’t entirely agree that art is solely a feast for the senses, but this emphasis on the sensory pleasures of art is refreshing in the context of Mormon aesthetics, which tends to fret a lot about the effect of art on understanding (albeit nodding, often cursorily, to the dangers of pedanticism).

Even more than that, I find de Jong Jr.’s defense of form to be refreshing and important.

He writes, with a nod to Kant (and Santayana and Dewey): “Purely from the aesthetic point of view it may be well to remark here that the beauty we try to see in art lies principally in the form, the shape, the appearance of the work of art.”

And: “In general it may be said, therefore, that art, including modern art, tries to make a sensuous appeal, not a rational appeal. To the creative artist the form he gives his productions is of far greater importance than their content. Hence—it follows that, in our attempts to appreciate art, we should look mainly for the manner, not the matter.”

Implications for Mormon Aesthetics

The passage just above is followed by this claim:

“Hence—it follows that, in our attempts to appreciate art, we should look mainly for the manner, not the matter. We are less concerned with what an artist paints, and more concerned with how he paints. A book review should be more than a reduced version of the story that can be told in forty-five minutes. Far more important aesthetically is the philosophic and linguistic treatment the author has given his fundamental ideas.”

It’s a shame that de Jong Jr. doesn’t ground his arguments more firmly in Mormon ideas or apply them to works of Mormon art, but even so I think his point is a good one: as we saw with the Mormon literaturstreit, too often discussions of Mormon art focus on content—on appropriateness, on depiction. When they are focused on form, it’s often to dismiss the form itself (as avant garde, decadent, frivolous, post modern, not suitable to the grandeurs of the story of the Restoration, etc.).

And this is where de Jong Jr.’s openness to the modern in art and his emphasis on familiarity comes into play. To be able to fruitfully engage with the form and the “philosophic and linguistic treatment” of a work, one must have some familiarity with the field in which it situates itself. Certainly, there is always the danger of falling too much in love with novelty. But one would hope that this is where engaging art within the context of Mormonism helps: one has a solid worldview, a grounding from which to approach art, and one that is both more firm and more expansive than one might think. Too often, I think, we see art as threating that worldview rather than being something potentially interesting to helpf refine it.

In this way, a large part of the value in de Jong Jr.’s essay is his modeling of a Mormon who is interested in all kinds of modern art.

Modernity/Modernism

To wrap up, I’m going to encourage you to go read the final paragraph (you’ll have to scroll down) of de Jong Jr.’s essay.

I like that he starts with idea that the material of art doesn’t change—humanities experiences and concerns are pretty consistent throughout history—but that personal reactions to these experiences change and that when turned into art, they can help us see ourselves and our current time “in a new light”, that that requires us to have the patience to “grasp the meaning of new forms of expression”, and also that as time continues on those new forms become the standard forms, which require new ones to be created. This ties art into a locking together of generations and the notion of applying what we have access to (art, the scriptures) to our own times and is the most Mormon part of the whole essay even if not explicitly labeled as such by de Jong Jr.

I really like this idea of the ever-evolving process of art. One that isn’t necessarily progressive (in the always improving sense of that term more than the political one) but is responsive to the contemporary (to modernity).

However, I can’t end this analysis without bring up what’s missing from this essay: the idea of modernism itself.

Although de Jong Jr.’s view of the dialectical process of how art changes over time—artists turning the familiar into the unfamiliar which then over time becomes the familiar again—is correct, I think.

But we also need to open up room for specifics in that process, and especially modernism. Because the modern art movements and artists de Jong Jr. mentions in his essay aren’t simply a reaction to human experience—they’re reactions to the specific human experience under the conditions of modernity: increasing speed of communication, transporation, and technological and social change; industrialization and urbanization; world wars, fascism, totalitaraianism, large scale techno-utopian projects; massive leaps in science that impact everything from public health to our very understanding of the how the universe works; colonialism and post-colonialism; and due to some or all of the previous factors much broader and more intensive cross-cultural exchange, etc.

All of this adds up to not just artists reacting to their particular times, but also to them reacting at faster rates and with more urgent needs for innovation, especially new forms of expression.

This is not to chastise de Jong Jr—this essay is from 1959—and he was primarily a musician, linguist, and academic administrator.

But I think it’s telling that even when someone writing about Mormon aesthetics writes about modernity and modern art and artists, they elide the modernism of it all and instead situate it in a sort of aesthetic universalism. Of course, it’s still more forward thinking than some of the later BYU English professors (as much I love them) who simply refuse to engage with post-modernism.

All this matters for several reasons, the primary one being that the story of Mormon literature cannot be mapped cleanly onto the story of literary modernism, nor can it be situated solely in 20th century attempts at aesthetics, including postmodernism. At the same time, however, we do ourselves no favors when we confine that story solely to the Mormon sphere. Not just for the more obvious reason that Mormon artist, writers, and critics don’t confine their influences and output to the Mormon sphere, but also because the Mormon sphere itself is embedded within and intertwined with the larger forces of modernity/modernism.

So, for example, Doug Thayer’s white, middle-aged, educated male Mormon protagonists aren’t just some dudes longing for a long gone community-centered, more rural, more isolated, more ward-focused, more pioneer-tinged Mormonism (of their youth or that the never quite knew)––they’re also moderns, alienated in ways similiar to all of the alienated dudes found in 20th century American literature. But also different ways or, at least, differently shaded ways. And it’s those differences and similiarties that make both the expression of Mormonism through art and criticism about that art so potentially interesting.

In chapter 2 of Gabriel Josipovici’s Whatever Happened to Modernism?, he reminds us that there’s a danger in confining modernism to a specific time period (say, 1850 – 1950) because “seeing it like that” turns Modernism “into a style, like Mannerism or Impresisonism, and into a period of art history, like the Augustan or the Victorian age, and therefore as something that can be clearly defined and is safely behind us” (11).

This tendency is particularly easy to fall into when it comes to Mormon aesthetics, which has tended to avoid the whole issue of modernism and either loudly ignore or rail against postmodernism.

Josipovici argues: “Modernism needs to be understood in a completely different way, as the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore as something that will, from now on, always be with us. Seen in this way, Modernism, I would suggest, becomes a response by artists to that ‘disenchantment of the world’ to which cultural historians hae long been drawing our attention” (11).

Certainly, scholars, ciritcs, and artists have pushed back against the notion of disenchantment as the prevailing aesthetic influence of the 20th and 21st centuries, and that debate becomes even more interesting in a Mormon context (although, I would say we overemphasize it [even when not talking directly about it] when it comes to art).

But to push back is to acknowledge rather than elide. And the act of reenchantment (or avoidance of disenchantment) is not one that is wholly successful for most any contemporary Mormon. And, for all that de Jong Jr. and he few others like him––Hugh Nibley, in particular—defend the unfamiliar in art and modernist work, their overall impact in that aspect of Mormon culture seems to be minimal.

And yet: it’s nice to know one has predecessors.

Mormon Literaturstreit Echoes: Richard D. Rust

Although in my view the Mormon Literaturstreit ends with Michael Austin’s entry, there are further reverberations of it that either directly or indirectly continue the argument.

One included on the Mormon Literature Website, although, again, that site doesn’t frame this as a Literaturstreit—it simply groups the set of texts as On Mormon Criciticsm—is “‘Virtuous, Lovely, or of Good Report’ Thoughts on a Latter-day Saint Literary Criticism” by Richard D. Rust.

Richard Dilworth Rust was a professor of American Literature who had a long career at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His passion bended more towards the 19th century, including the works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. He is most known in Mormon Studies for his work on the literary aspects of the Book of Mormon.

His lecture was presented at the Literature and Belief Colloquium held in March 1995 at Brigham Young University, March 31, 1995, which is a year after the Burton and Austin entries in the main run of the argument. According to the Mormon Literature Website the remarks were given in a panel on “Toward a Latter-day Saint Literary Criticism.”

What’s notable about Rust’s essay is that he brings up Hugh Nibley’s Mantic/Sophic binary, thus echoing Richard Cracroft during his second entry to the Literaturstreit (and, again: a reminder here that Hugh Nibley was a fan of Joyce’s Ulysses and didn’t think it should have been banned from publication in the U.S.).

But it doesn’t seem like Rust was aware of Cracroft’s use of the Mantic/Sophic in the context of Mormon literary criticism because he begins his remarks in this way: “When I saw the call for papers for this Colloquium, the topic ‘Toward a Latter-day Saint Literary Criticism’ immediately caught my attention. This was an entirely new idea for me; somehow it had never occurred to me that there was or could be such a criticism.”

This is both understandable—I didn’t think about Mormon literature as a category until I discovered the Mormon Literature Website and the AML list—and boggles my mind—did he really have no interaction at all with any of the faculty of the BYU English Department? Did he not read Dialogue? The answer I would bet is: probably not. This was (and is) not all that unusual: Mormons have been spectacularly good about compartmentalizing their professional and religious lives, especially those of Rust’s generation.

What this means, though, is that we’re going to get a rather naive take on Mormon literary criticism. That doesn’t mean it’s not valuable; it does mean that it’s rather surface level.

Criticism as Discernment

What’s fascinating to me, even if it’s fairly obvious, is that Rust decides to derive his notion of Mormon literary criticism solely from his frame of reference for Mormonism—that is, his involvement in the LDS Church.

This is not unusual. In fact, it’s a time-honored tradition in Mormon aesthetics and something even those who bring in more sophisticated ideas fall back on from time-to-time, including Eugene England and Marden J. Clark.

Which is not to say, that Rust relies soley on that: he begins by invoking ideas from George Steiner’s Real Presences and David Walsh’s in After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom, two works that fall into the category of anti-secular aesthetics.

This seems, in fact, to be what Rust thinks Mormon literary criticism is and should be: a method of combatting secularism (and that ever-present bugbear of the time: post-modernism).

He writes: “The words ‘critic’ and ‘criticism’ have root meanings of ‘discernment,’ ‘decision,’ and ‘judgment.’ Criticism involves ’the analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and classification of literary works, or, in Matthew Arnold’s words, ‘a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.’

As I see it, the concepts of Latter-day Saint, literary, and criticism are linked together. ‘Judge righteous judgment,’ the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible says (Matthew 7:1). Life, from my perspective as a Latter-day Saint, involves constant evaluation and the making of meaningful choices.”

There is something interesting here that I wished Rust had developed further: this idea of discernment and what it is and how it can be developed and how it is best used. He does talk a bit about agency and also acknowledges that depicting evil does not, necessarily mean the artist is endorsing it.

But much of the essay is about avoiding the “Sophic.”

Virtuous, Lovely, or of Good Report

I will give Rust credit for this: he is not afraid to wade in to the culture wars and give specific examples rather than keep things abstract.

That’s not entirely fair—he does give us some positive examples after reminding us of the 13th Article of Faith (a classic move: I’ve done it myself)—“If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, [I] seek after these things.”

He also notes that “Good literature is an important thing I seek after” and makes the important point that there is “plenty enough in the world of literature” that falls into the “virtuous, lovely, or of good report” category.

Invoking the 13th Article of Faith is a classic move for the Mormon deciding to write/speak on aesthetics (I’ve done it myself).

It’s also one that doesn’t really solve anything because, assuming that one acknowledges, as Rust does, that evil being depicted in fiction is not necessarily a violation of the “virtuous/good report” designation, then there’s a whole lot of room to interpret works as being in concert with or violation of the 13th Article of Faith.

Here is where some specific examples from Mormon literature would be helpful. What Rust does instead is rail against two articles that appeared in academic journals in his field of American literature that fall into the category what we’d call queer studies. He also criticizes the films Erotica (a quick search of IMDB fails to bring up what this referring to, and I’m not inclined to go further in that research) and Silence of the Lambs.

Now, I’m not prepared to defend any of the works he mentions—I’ve not read or seen them (yes, that includes Silence of the Lambs—I don’t watch horror). And with the scholarly articles, there’s certainly a history of queer activism in the humanities—but how good the resulting scholarship and how effective the activism is needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis and in more detail than Rust provides. I should also note that such mixing of scholarship and activism has run the gamut of political, cultural, sexual, etc. identities over the years.

But whether or not Rust is right or wrong in his dismissal of these works is beside the point: extreme examples (and, again, how actually extreme the works he cites are is an open question, albeit one I’m not all that interested in) are always available to the cultural critic.

What’s more interesting and valuable to a field, especially a field like Mormon literary criticism is the cases that require nuance and that are more central to the field itself. For all that I think that Cracroft’s readings of some of the poems in Harvest are off base, at least he’s responding to actual Mormon texts (Sophic though they may [or may not] be).

That being said: this, again, is the danger of wading into discourse while being unfamiliar with the field. Let’s move on to potentially more fruitful territory: the positive expression of what Mormon literary criticism should be.

Rust’s Three Main Principles for Mormon Literary Criticism

Towards the end, Rust restates what he sees “as three main principles in Latter-day Saint Literary Criticism.”

  1. “First, it is inspired criticism based on study and faith. ‘Study it out in your mind,’ the Lord enjoined Oliver Cowdery; ‘then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right’ (D&C 9:8).”
  2. “Second, the LDS critic seeks after the good, the true, and the beautiful–another way of putting the thirteenth Article of Faith.”
  3. “Third, the critic as inspired judge and evaluator would have an obligation to help make his or her insights available to others.”

I think this a decent place to arrive even if I have quibbles about how Rust gets there. In particular, I think the first and third principles are potentially quite interesting. At the same time, how useful they are really depends on adding more context, nuance, and discussion to them. If Rust did elaborate on any of this in future writing/speaking, please let me know. I’d love to read it.

Meanwhile, as an echo of the Mormon Literaturstreit, this doesn’t add a whole lot to the discussion other than, perhaps, item number three, along with (although I have mixed feelings about it) the succinct statement of the critic’s role Rust ends his remarks with:

“In conducting literary criticism, the Latter-day Saint scholar or teacher would pray concerning his or her criticism and would strive to be an inspired intermediary between the literary work and its audience. He or she would willingly grapple with great life issues; the critic would acknowledge Herman Melville’s ‘power of blackness’ and not be limited to William Dean Howells’s ‘the more smiling aspects of life.’”

Now that’s interesting. Maybe that’s what his presentation should have focused on!

I suppose mostly I’m just struck by the key metaphor there.

Because sometimes it seems like grappling is all I do, and I’m not sure I’m quite getting anywhere—still waiting for the blessing of angels, I guess.

But, of course, the wrestling is really all there is. One can only hope that one learns something from the effort.

More echoes on the way soon.

Mormon Literaturstreit: Michael Austin asks “Why not the Mormons?”

William discusses Michael Austin’s attempt to put forth a vision of Mormon literary criticism that is expansive but still uniquely Mormon.

Presented (and then published in Dialogue) in the same year as Gideon Burton’s “Should We Ask, ‘Is This Mormon Literature?’ Towards a Mormon Criticism”, Michael Austin’s “How to Be a Mormo-American; Or, the Function of Mormon Criticism at the Present Time” takes a different approach. Where Burton attempts a synthesis of the Cracroft-Jorgensen argument, Austin offers a kaleidoscopic approach, specifically situating Mormon literature within the idea of the Mormo-American and thus as analgous to other minor/ethnic literatures active in the United States. He notes that Mormonism is not just a religious community, but that Mormons “represent a cultural entity whose traditions, heritage, and experience deserve to be considered a vital part of the American mosaic. We are claiming, not just that we are Mormons, but that we are ‘Mormo-Americans,’ that ‘Mormo-American literature’ should be considered an important part of American literary studies.”

Although I’m quite confident Austin wouldn’t express everything in this essay now in the same way he did back then (especially the term “Mormo-American”), this focus on Mormon literature as part of Amercian literature and specifically in a hyphenated Mormon-American way is pretty much how it—and Mormon Studies more generally—manifests itself now, even if the old Mantic-Sophic tensions and inward-looking-ness persist. For various reasons, both internal to the culture and external, Mormon Studies, and especially literary studies, hasn’t quite cohered in the way that other minor/ethnic studies have. And due to both cultural and economic changes, such programs have been greatly diminished at university campuses over the past two decades anyway (the Mormons are, once again, belated in their cultural efforts). However, insofar as Mormon Studies, including literary studies, has any academic or cultural currency it is within a model of seeing Mormons as a distinct culture that exists with the U.S. but that also intersects with larger culture forces. Thus: Mormo-Americans.

I should note that this model, which I take from Austin but also derived, in part, from my experience attending UC Berkeley and SF State in the late ’90s and early 2000s and learning about fields such as (and what were then called) Chicano Studies, Queer Studies, African American Studies, Modern Greek Studies, etc., is a major influence on my own thinking about Mormon literature. I even went so far as to title my first story collection Dark Watch and other Mormon-American Stories. And my creative work continues to be haunted by and interrogate the place of Mormons in the United States and the way the hybridity of this Mormon-American-ness plays out in the experiences of individual Mormons.

And so, just as I have in previous installments of this series, Austin begins his essay by rejecting dichotomous thinking.

The “Blotnik dichotomy”

He does so by citing a Philip Roth short story (not so subtly setting up his “Mormo-American” point): “Yakov Blotnik, an old janitor at a Jewish Yeshiva who, upon seeing that a yeshiva student was standing on a ledge threatening to kill himself, goes off mumbling to himself that such goings on are ‘no-good-for-the- Jews.’ ‘For Yakov Blotnik,’ Roth tells us in an aside, ‘life fractionated itself simply: things were either good-for-the-Jews or no-good-for-the-Jews.’”

Austin dubs this the “Blotnik dichotomy” and notes that it has become prevalent in discussion about Mormon Literature with pairings “such as “‘mantic’ versus ‘sophic,’ ‘faithful realism’ versus ‘faithless fiction,’ or ‘home literature’ versus ‘the Lost Generation’” that can be boiled down into two camps: “books that are orthodox, faithful, inspiring, and testimony-building–good-for-the-Mormons; and books that are apostate, faithless, demeaning, and testimony-destroying–bad- for-the-Mormons.”

Now, this dichotomy is quite common in other hyphenated studies fields. The question of whether a work of art is worthy of attention in other minor literature often centers whether it is good or bad for the community—or even more often, whether it brings positive or negative attention to the community from those outside it.

So in one sense, Mormons are not exceptional in succumbing to the “Blotnik dichotomy.” And yet, there are complicating factors, including the presence of the LDS Church (and activity in it) in the cultural sphere and the relative newness of Mormons and the Mormon experience.

Austin would like Mormon literary scholars to reject that dichotomy, stop fighting among themselves, and instead fight to claim a place within the broader culture, especially academia: “Mormon students and Mormon professors should be able to use university time and resources to study, write, and teach about our own culture and our own literature.”

Austin notes that one of the major barriers to this fight, isn’t just the in-fighting represented by the Mormon Literaturstreit, but also that Mormon scholars diminish/deflect from their Mormon-ness and pass as “normal, cynical, liberal academics.”

What he wants isn’t just legitimacy for Mormon literary scholars—he is not asking scholars to chase acceptability—but rather a fought-for legitimacy on the terms of scholars actual Mormon-ness.

Indeed, Austin warns that “[u]nless we act decisively to place Mormonism and Mormon literature in the larger critical context, others will offer the definitions for us, and we will be increasingly stuck with the professional consequences of belonging to a version of ‘Mormonism’ that we had no part in constructing.”

And, of course, it follows that in order to construct Mormon literature credibly and thoroughly and specifically within the broader world of scholarship, Mormon literary scholars need to take an expansive view of what Mormon literature is and proposes five categories for it that are all equally deserving of attention.

Before I get to the categories of Mormon literature, Austin identifies, I should note that while Mormon Studies has seen certain gains, including at non-Utah-based campuses, in the thirty years since Austin wrote this essay, the dire prophesies he makes in relation to Mormon literary studies have mostly come true. Mormon literary scholars, whether at BYU or elsewhere, tend to engage in scholarship that does not focus on Mormon texts. Or if it is (including and, perhaps, especially, work on popular Mormon authors like Stephenie Meyer), it isn’t situated solidly in a tradition of Mormon literary studies. Many Mormon literary scholars are not only “passing” as “normal” literary scholars, they are actively encouraged to do so (by a variety of sources/pressures).

This is not to say the good Mormon literary studies work doesn’t exist now. But the structure to support it is limited and weak, especially when it comes to the kinds of efforts that specific departments, institutes, and endowed chairs dedicated to Mormon literature could provide—lecture series, scholarships, awards, journals, databases, newsletters, special conferences, etc.

As I’ve alluded to before, the cultural clashes at BYU out of which this Mormon Lituraturstreit arose led to the English department shrinking the resources it allocates to Mormon literary studies, and no other higher ed institutions have come close to filling that lack, let alone the expansion that Austin envisioned—and acknowledged would need to be fought for. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is larger funding issues in the humanities brought on by the corporatization of U.S. academic institutions, most especially including the shifting from tenure-track positions to adjuncts.

And this is not to say that BYU has completely abandoned Mormon literary studies. But rather than the English Department, it’s the Harold B. Lee Library that has take up the torch, which means that while (thankfully and heroically) published works and archives are being collected, there are not many resources put towards it being studied and disseminated.

This may not seem like a big deal. Who cares if Mormon literary criticism is thriving so long as Mormon literature is still being written, published, and archived?

But before we get to Austin’s answer to that question, let’s look at his categories.

The five types of Mormon Literature

Austin claims that in order to break free of the “Blotnik dichotomy”, Mormon literary studies should acknowledge and give attention to five types of Mormon literature:

  1. Books by Mormons Written to Primarily Mormon Audiences
  2. Books by Mormons Written to Non-Mormon Audiences (about Mormons)
  3. Books by Mormons Written to Non-Mormon Audiences (not about Mormons)
  4. Books by Mainstream non-Mormon Authors (about Mormons)
  5. Books by Mainstream Authors (not about Mormons)

This is essentially what the Association for Mormon Letters has taken as its’ mandate in the 21st century, with a definition of Mormon letters (and thus the scope of AML) that lays claim to any works of narrative art that are “by, for, and/or about Mormons.” To be sure, there’s been somewhat less attention paid to items #5 and #3 from the AML over the past three decades (unless #3 supports interesting, often thematic Mormon-centric reading, such as Meyer’s Twilight books or the works of Brandon Sanderson; and #5 has begun to change more recently with the online journal Ships of Hagoth and the podcast Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree). But the the angst around what counts as in or out is not what it was during the Mormon Literaturstreit, especially when it comes to the organization’s yearly awards.

I highlight these five items not only because it’s a key part of Austin’s essay or because it’s where the AML ended up, but also because the fact that he’s proposing this list at all suggests that up to this point, Mormon literary studies had a more narrow focus back then (specifically #1 and #4).

By providing this taxonomy and claiming that every text in every category should be considered part of the field—or to put it another way: by broadening the potential territory that Mormon lit scholars can traverse—Austin seeks to invigorate Mormon literary criticism.

As Austin writes: “Every text that we eliminate from our canon is a text that we can no longer use as part of our critical discussions.”

What Mormon literary criticism can actually do

Now it’s all well and good to propose a broad territory for Mormon literature. But everyone knows critics don’t really matter.

Austin acknowledges this early on in the essay when he states his disagreement with Richard Cracroft’s view that Mormon authors should primarily “speak to the Saints”: “Certainly the majority of Mormon readers want faith-promoting books, and as long as they are willing to spend millions of dollars a year at LDS bookstores, they will get them. However, decisions about what to write stem from the imaginations and motivations of individual writers, who are much less affected by critical discourse than we literary critics care to admit. Great writers have always produced great works, and mediocre writers have always pandered to the popular prejudices, no matter what scholars and intellectuals have written in academic journals. Good intentions aside, literary critics have rarely been an important direct factor in the production or consumption of any type of literature.”

This is absolutely true. Although, given this, it’s both ironic and apt that Austin has gone on to be a direct factor in the production and consumption of Mormon literature by becoming the driving force behind BCC Press.

But yes, it’s true, and it’s exacerbated by the presence of LDS bookstores. Or I should say by Deseret Book since the independent bookstores and publishers of the time when Austin was writing this have either been acquired by Deseret Book or have folded or are in a much diminished state. That is, Deseret Book attempts to fill the need for culture and by doing so dominates the vacuum that culture always attempts to fill with its’ own mostly empty space. This is not to say that Deseret Book doesn’t publish or sell Mormon literature (it sort of does) or that other efforts don’t exist (they sort of do). But it does not serve the function other bookstores and publishers have served for other hyphenated literatures.

Nor have Mormon literary critics quite filled the role that Austin thinks they should fill. He continues from the quote cited above:

“However, literary critics have always been an important indirect factor in the production and consumption of literature. Such indirect influence comes, not as critics and theorists attempt to encourage or proscribe different kinds of literary production, but, instead, as they have used literature as a starting point for commenting on, critiquing, and helping to construct the cultures that produce and consume books. In the past twenty years or so literary scholars of all stripes have used the tools of literary criticism to build platforms from which to argue that certain groups, subcultures, classes, or peoples should have more representation in, and more recognition by, the larger national or international cultures to which they belong. These critical discourses have joined with larger political movements to create curricular and publishing environments that have helped to move traditionally underrepresented groups to the center of the academic stage.”

He’s not wrong.

And it’s not just in the U.S. This is also true of other minor literatures across the world, stretching all the way back to belated proto-nationalist movements in the 19th century.

Why Mormons, including Mormon literary critics, haven’t stepped up to create this same construction of culture is a huge topic, albeit one that is an undercurrent of both this series on the Mormon Literaturstreit and AMV as a whole.

However, I think, sitting here in September 2024, this hopeful vision is like so many of the hopeful, liberal democractic visions of the early to mid-1990s, including the multicultural ones: faded so much as to seem like it couldn’t possibly have been believed to have any power even back when it was fresh.

That’s a bit depressing.

But even if a vision seems impossible now, it can contain principles that are of use in the present and the future.

Which brings me to the last part of the essay.

What Austin is saying and not saying

Having covered as much ground as he did, Austin wants to be clear as he wraps things up what is and isn’t saying about Mormon literature. In doing so he seeks to defuse the Mormon Literaturstreit by shifting emphasis towards a more academic bearing and bid for legitimacy for the field while at the same time, à la Burton’s synthesis, not giving up on the power of combining faith and scholarship.

First, he rejects the notion that Mormon literary scholars need to concern themselves with Orson F. Whitney’s idea of “Shakespears and Miltons of our own.”

Then he wants to be clear that he is not advocating that “Mormon literary critics should be missionaries or uncritical apologists for all things Mormon.”

Nor does he believe that Mormons should position themselves as victims in their bid to have a place at the table alongside other minor literatures (this is a complicated topic that is somewhat clumsily expressed in the essay, but deserves more attention in the field of Mormon letters).

And, finally, he’s also not saying that only “only faithful Mormons can or should criticize Mormon literature.” For him, it’s all “fair game.”

What Austin is saying is “that only faithful Mormons can criticize Mormon literature as faithful Mormons. We do not have the only critical perspective on Mormon literature. Perhaps we do not even have the best. But we do have access to a unique viewpoint, and no academic discussion of Mormon literature can be considered complete without hearing what we have to say.”

And also: “We know that, like any other large group of people, Mormons can be ignorant, blind, and wicked; but we also know that they can be insightful, inspired, and magnificent. And we know that all of these attributes together constitute the story of Mormonism that the rest of the world needs to hear.”

The strength of Austin’s argument is that he puts forth an actual material and cultural goal that he’d like Mormon literary criticism to work towards, along with models of how to do that, an approach that is big tent while still focused on the unique aspects of Mormonism, and an awareness of both the possibilities and difficulties in doing so.

Thus, unlike Jorgensen’s big tent call, which buys into the dichotomies and is expressed rather vaguely, Austin’s vision better fits into the world that was back then and, to a certain extent, which was to come.

The problem is that individual Mormon literary scholars and cultural institutions close to Mormonism lacked some combination of the desire, temerity, sophistication, and power to bring it about before other forces eroded the main methods by which it could accomplished (and previously had been by other cultural groups).

This is because, by and large, Mormons prefer to have the yet unfulfilled promise of a brighter future (which is a lot less scary than the realpolitik of bringing that future about) and/or the legitimacy conditionally granted to us by larger cultural entities when we’re willing to tamp down our Mormon-ness (and this is true for both conservative and progressive cultural institutions).

Since the post-WWII era Mormons have been quick to choose assimilation and respectability and shift our cultural battles so that they line more cleanly up with the larger political and cultural battles and the story of the decades since Austin’s essay is the story of that process playing out.

But here’s the good news: although the result of such a failure has been less Mormon literary criticism and less influence on both Mormon and American culture than if the Austin aproach had been fully embraced, the techonlogical and cultural changes of the early 21st century upended all that anyway and created new territory for the Mormon literary critic and for the Mormon artist who is interested in criticism.

Not only because the internet creates new avenues for distribution and discussion, but also because BYU’s relative absence from the scene means they have very little of the indirect influence Austin describes above.

I have one bone to pick with Austin, though. While I get and agree with what Austin is saying here—“Mormons can be ignorant, blind, and wicked; but we also know that they can be insightful, inspired, and magnificent”—it’s expressed in a similiar dichotomy to what he decries in the first part of his essay.

How about we just say this: Mormons can be human, but the Mormon-ness of how they are human is what makes them interesting and worthy of literary attention.

Mormon Literaturstreit: Gideon Burton argues for both rootedness and openness

As the previous entry in this series discusses, by dividing approaches to Mormon Literature into the Mantic and the Sophic, Richard Cracroft forecloses a broad swathe of texts and critical approaches from the field. The following year two younger critics from the same department Cracroft and Jorgensen taught in—Gideon Burton (later to also become a professor in BYU’s English Department, but one who was not encouraged to focus on Mormon literature) and Michael Austin (later to become a professor outside the Intermountain West then enter academic administration and end up as Provost at Snow College and the driving force behing BCC Press as well as a prolific blogger and writer on Mormon literary topics)—made attempts to synthesize or, if not reconcile the two poles of the Literatsreit, at least broaden the overall discourse.

Burton did so in a presentation at the AML conference later published in the annual for that conference as well as in Dialogue. I don’t know the exact timing, but since his essay is the first one listed on the Mormon Literature Website (which Burton himself created), I’m going to tackle it next.

“Should We Ask, ‘Is This Mormon Literature?’ Towards a Mormon Criticism” is what Burton titles his essay, a title that specifically challenges the litmus test Cracroft has proposed. He starts his essay by talking about the idea of restoration (and The Restoration) and situates Cracroft and Jorgensen—and Mormon literary criticis generally—in it as those who feel a void in the discourse and seek to fill it: “Sensing some apostasy from truth, the critic rectifies this falling away through an act of restoration.”

After summarizing the argument of the two older critics, Burton writes, “To me the conflict between Jorgensen and Cracroft is resolved at one remove, at the point at which we see them both practicing Mormon criticism.”

He also notes that his restoration metaphor is useful not only in validating the motivations of both Jorgensen and Cracroft, but also because the Mormon vision of restoration is one of an ongoing, continually unfolding process.

It is, perhaps, a nice way of saying, “hey, the two of you made some nice points, but you’re both wrong.” But that’s me being uncharitible. Burton himself is careful with his wording—not because he’s afraid to ruffle feathers, but because it’s inherent to the ethos he builds into his argument. He proceeds with a certain active (not passive) humility, an enthusiasm and openness for further truth that channels the spirit of Joseph Smith, and both validates and is born out of framing the project of Mormon criticism as an ongoing act of restoration.

Burton also links this project to a blossoming of the field itself. He claims (and warns): “So concerned about the development of our own culture, we sometimes forget that its greatness will in no way be proportional to its insularity. Having Miltons and Shakespeares of our own means providing new Miltons and Shakespeares for the entire world. After all, it wouldn’t be Mormon to horde up truth and beauty for self-consumption like a two-year cache of unground wheat. In keeping the vision of Mormon letters alive we must keep alive its complete breadth.”

He also reminds the audience (and readers) that critical discourse was something early leaders of the Church—including Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Orson F. Whitney—valued and that literature is something they saw as a potential contributor to the project of Zion.

Openness/Rootedness

Having outlined the grand picture of how Mormon literature, including literary criticism, as a process of restoration that fits into the call to build Zion, Burton returns to the Cracroft/Jorgensen argument and outlines how both of their views fit into this view.

In fact, he goes further, and claims that they are the “twin requirements for Mormon literature and criticism.”

He writes:

“Cracroft urges us to be grounded in the Mormon mythos in both our criticism and our literature. He is right, for if our roots are not deep in the soil of Mormon experience and the spiritual reality of the Restoration, we are only voices in the relativistic maelstrom of modern Babel and Babylon.”

But then caveats that with: “But to be grounded thus is to be willing to journey into the unknown with faith that in entertaining the stranger, as Jorgensen urges us to do, we might be entertaining veiled angels, messengers of truth who require our patient listening before we know them for who they are. The production and analysis of literature is insufficiently narrow if these activities are viewed only as means of disseminating or shoring up what we already have or know.”

Likewise, he both endorses and caveats Jorgensen’s view: “But just as our Mormon roots enjoin openness to the stranger, that same religious heritage constrains the nature of that openness. ‘Entertaining the stranger’ does not equate to ‘pluralism’ or ‘diversity’; acknowledging and seeking truth in all realms isn’t tantamount to relativism.”

Here is where I remind you that all of the essays included in this series represent a snapshot in time and may not reflect later or current views of the participants. I don’t know for sure in this particular case, but I strongly suspect that both Burton and Austin both agree and disagree with what they wrote when they were grad students.

And one way in which Mormon literature (and American culture as a whole) has changed over the years is that words like “diversity” either no longer need scare quotes around them or have become even more of a bugbear. The ground has shifted for how we talk about and define Mormon literature—something that also came up in the deep dive on Marden J. Clark’s Liberating Form.

That’s a discussion that would take many words to tease out, but this points to the overall weakness with not just Burton’s essay, but essays like this, in particular: what do we really mean by rootedness and openness? Rooted in what? Open to what? And how do those to interoperate (and in what ways for whom)?

One of the strengths of the earlier entries in the Mormon Literaturstreit is that they were are an argument over the reading of specific texts. The more we get away from those readings, the more abstract the argument becomes and the less I’m sure how to interpret what’s being argued even as I find myself agreeing with a lot more in Burton’s essay than the entries by Cracroft and Jorgensen. We can say that it’s best to be both grounded and open in our approach to the field, but that tell us nothing about the actual boundaries and methodologies with which we should approach actual texts, especially those that are challenging in some way.

The limits of Both/And

All of which is to say, that even though synthesis—or more specifically the rhetorical act of both/and—tends to be my default position, I find myself bucking a bit against Burtons reasonable and well-reasoned attempt to bridge the divides.

For example, when he writes:

“Let us view Mormon letters and criticism as means of engaging the world and the Restored Gospel simultaneously. This puts us into a precious and precarious position of participating simultaneously in two worlds which are never wholly compatible. There is always the danger of closing oneself to the other side. More frequent, I believe, are two dangers: misrepresenting one side to another and underestimating the utility of one side to the other.”

I completely agree!

At the same time, I find myself more interested in why/how that simultaneity, that (radical?) middle ground is precious and precarious than I am in the two dangers themselves. That is, the problem with both/and is that while we may think that occupying that ground allows us to avoid the dangers of those living on the extremes, too often it becomes a self-congratulatory act of not being on the extreme rather than a productive, dynamic base from which to push to expand the boundaries of the two sides one is straddled between (or even better: push out in a different direction).

To put it another way: sometimes the misrepresenting one side to another is less a misrepresentation and more that of one side objected to being represented at all or another side refusing to have the other side represented them at all. And sometimes two sides don’t really have utility to each other because neither side possesses quite enough that’s interesting and artful and actually useful to make the effort of trying to bring to the other group worth it. Or maybe it does possess such works, but they’re very hard to find.

I think the simultaneity Burton argues for is a must. It should be a default position for almost every Mormon artist and critic. And I believe it’s what will lead to the best art and criticism.

But it’s a complicated space to navigate. Which leads me to one final point:

A missed opportunity?

Revisiting this essay—which I should acknowledge as being quite influential in my initial thinking about Mormon literature and continues to be a fruitful thing for me to engage with in spite of my complaints above—what stood out to me most was not the meat of the argument, not the synthesis, but rather this tantalizing vision of further work to be done:

“Had I time to expand I would further probe the ways by which the religious and secular realms can prove to be resources to one another and how fruitful could be our role as Mormon critics in exploiting this reciprocal relationship. To be brief, our middle position between two worlds enables us to consider religion in secular terms as a means to better understanding religious realities, as well as to understand secular concerns in religious terms as a means to better understanding those things.”

I don’t know if Burton ever expanded on these ideas. I don’t think he did (if I’m wrong—please link to such work in the comments; I want to read it!). Which is unfortunate because this reads to me as an outline for the kind of work that could indeed be “fruitful” and would lead us back from the abstract argument that characterizes so much Mormon literature discussion into engagement with specific texts. Although we do see nowdays secular thinking brought in to illuminate (or criticize) religious attitudes and also get some religious readings of secular texts, neither move is quite what Burton describes above, and a lot of the activity happens along the cultural and sociological (and sometimes historical) arms of Mormon Studies. I would love to see more of an emphasis on literary criticism.

I also would like to see more of this (and wish Burton had expanded on it):

“Worries over preserving Mormon identity in literature should center less on whether we are reminding readers of our current cultural configuration as whether we are maintaining this vision of an emerging Mormon identity—one in which we come to understand ourselves more fully during that process of reflection and interaction which occurs in making ourselves known to others and making others known to us.”

This sentence, I think, is the articulation by Burton of Mormon literary criticism as an act or restoration that holds up the best, that is the most relevant and interesting three decades later.

I might even argue it’s necessary.

Possibly crucial.

In fact, I might even argue that my entire output of Mormon fiction—everything I’ve written and edited/published—is an attempt to do just that.

Mormon Literaturstreit: Richard Cracroft fires back against the “Sophic Tide”

Richard Cracroft rejects on binary only to invoke another in order to stem the “Sophic Tide” he sees as damaging Mormon literature.

In 1993 (I’m not sure of the exact date), Richard Cracroft used the opportunity of his Association for Mormon Letters to push back against Bruce Jorgensen’s AML address criticizing Cracroft’s review of Harvest.

It’s titled Attuning the Authentic Mormon Voice: Stemming the Sophic Tide in LDS Literature, and is the single work that, in my mind, elevates all this to a Literaturstreit.

And he goes straight into it:

“Elevating to Pearl Harbor status my review of Eugene England’s and Dennis Clark’s important but spiritually bifurcated anthology, Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems, Jorgensen dive-bombs my review, zeroing in with Sophic glee on my attempts to show the presence and absence of the spiritual essence of Mormonism in the works of contemporary Mormon poets”

I suspect that the tone Cracroft used was quite a bit more congenial in person, along the lines of gentle yet still barbed in places ribbing among academic friends, than it comes across in print. But his opening analogy certainly hasn’t aged well.

And what follows is a doubling-down on the opinions expressed in his review and a formalizing of his bifurcated view of Mormon literature.

In doing so, Cracroft claims to be representing the opinion of or acting in concern for the run of the mill Latter-day Saint, the “right-thinking, red-blooded, and sanctified” Mormons.

He goes so far as to claim it as a duty:

“If a work of literature is written by a Latter-day Saint and sails under the title of ‘Mormon,’ it is, I believe, the duty of a Mormon literary critic to point out for the potential readership, which inevitably will be mostly Mormon, the presence or lack of such Mormonness.”

The (potential) audience is a looming shadow that stalks most any artistic enterprise, but it especially seems to do so when it comes to Mormon art, or perhaps a better way to put it is that it’s part and parcel with all minor literatures where part of the project of the art is to both reinforce the self-identity of a people and elevate them with the rest of the society.

This project has overall been a failure in Mormonism albeit for understandable reasons (especially forced–and yet willing—assimilation back into U.S. society combined with advances in technology that erode and dissipate community and identity) and which is not the same as saying that the Joseph Smith’s project of restoration is a failure. I’m talking strictly about a sense of cultural identity, the building of an ethnies.

In other words: Ultimately, Cracroft lost.

But so did Jorgensen.

On Mormon-ness

What’s fascinating to me about the address is that Cracroft begins his definition of Mormon-ness by rejecting binaries, or rather a prominent binary of the time.

  1. He claims that the bulk of the Mormon audience are neither “Iron Rodders” or “Liahonas” but instead are what he, borrowing a term from Jeffrey C. Jacob calls “Charismatics”: folks who seek a “personal relationship with Christ”
  2. He bases this claim on his work in leadership positions in the LDS Church, including “thousands of personal interviews with salt-of-earth, temple-recommend holding, and thus orthodox Latter-day Saints”
  3. He restates the core beliefs that are part of his definition of a Mormon Orthodoxy (see paragraph 8)
  4. He says that this means: “If we who are Mormon writers, critics, and publishers wish to speak to the Saints, we must speak to them through LDS metaphors. We cannot dismiss or belittle or patronize them merely because we have supplanted their metaphors or because they refuse to set their familiar metaphors aside.”
  5. And then expresses what he believes Mormon literature can accomplish: “Faithful Latter-day Saints need, as I need, a Mormon literature that enables us to explore common metaphors, to probe how one copes as a faithful Latter-day Saint with the junctures between the vertical and the horizontal, between the love of God and the love of our fellow beings, between the wearisome today and the promise of tomorrow-confrontations that exude essences of spiritual realities while dealing with the stuff that makes for a representative literature”

In spite of the way he invokes , if Cracroft were to stop here, then I think I’d agree with him in part. Meaning: I’d agree with him on what we could stand to see more of in literature that specifically addresses Orthodox/faithful/mainstream Latter-day Saints even though I’d also define literature that doesn’t do that as part of Mormon literature and even though the audience itself seems to not want the former all that much, let alone the latter.

But we still have two more sections of the presidential address to go.

The Mantic and the Sophic

And so having rejected the Iron Rodders/Liahonas dichotomy and redefining the Mormon audience as composed of Orthodox members of the LDS Church (Cracroft is silent on members of other branches of Mormonism, including the Community of Christ, as are most Mormon literary critics, including, frankly, myself) and labeling them as Charismatics, Cracroft introduces a new binary: the Mantic and the Sophic.

Cracroft starts by bemoaning the lack of a center for Mormon literary criticism:

“Lacking a firmly founded center stake, then, modern Mormon criticism, like Mormon literature, is unsettled and uncentered, too prone to follow Corianton in a-whoring across distant and exotic horizons after the shallow attractions of blind secularism, visionless and perverse fault-seeking, skeptical and compromising humanism, and hearkening to glib but hollow and faithless voices of Babylon.”

He then borrows from Hugh Nibley (Nibley, by the way, was a huge fan of James Joyce’s Ulysses and hated the idea of literary censorship) and attempts to apply terms from philosophy/philosophy of religion to literature by invoking the Mantic and the Sophic:

“Manticism is not mysticism, but ‘the belief in the real and present operation of divine gifts by which one receives constant guidance from the other world’ (Nibley, 316). The ‘sophic world view of horizontal naturalism,’ on the other hand, confines all realities to the natural order (Wright, 51), is ‘necessarily antireligious,’ critical, objective, naturalistic, scientific, and horizontal in attitude.” [citations original to the text]

Cracroft associates the Sophic attitude in literature with “Literary Naturalism, Modernism, Existentialism, or Nihilism,” which is, to my view, another example of Mormon culture being belated, since we’re two to three decades into the post-modern when he’s delivering his address.

As proof of the Sophic prevailing in Mormon literature, Cracroft cites Levi Peterson’s novel The Backslider and Eugene England’s enthusiastic review of it. Cracroft confesses that part of him also loves the novel, and even admits that there “can be congeniality between the two positions, and hospitality without accommodation” but in the same breath claims “there can never be comfortable compromise of Mantic and Sophic viewpoints.”

In the final section (IV), he both confesses and reinforces his binary view of Mormon literature: “W[hat] I have said can be misconstrued, I realize, as being exclusionary, even elitist. I do not mean it to be such. Nothing that I say here will change the fact that, to date, most of the best writing in Mormon literature has been done by the Sophics, who have bones to pick and axes (and teeth) to grind and divine itches that need to be scratched, while the inarticulate Mantics are too busy doing their Home Teaching-and making faithful statements that pain the Sophics. Nothing that I say here will change the nature of a single struggling doubter or, for that matter, of a struggling charismatic-for we all struggle.”

This is both an overall accurate depiction of how things ended up over the succeeding decades, and yet also not. It, and much of the rhetoric Cracroft uses, conflates belief/faith/activity in religion with interest/value in art and in doing so ignores hybridized, rhizomatic, and paradoxical approaches to both life and culture. It desires a center that has never really existed and is likely impossible to exist under the conditions of modernism, even though attempts have been made to create one over the years.

It underestimates both the culture makers and critics and the audience(s), and it ignores the varied relationships all of us who are interested in Mormonism approach religion, art, history, and our lived experience.

Certainly, there are many forces—one noun is both insufficient and sufficient and that is: the Internet––that tear at the possibility of expansive, interesting, complex, robust, maybe even (gasp!) popular Mormon literature.

But does casting things in a binary way help?

Yes, the wheat and the chaff is a binary, but that’s really not for us to decide is it?

What’s the point of binary thinking?

For me, the question of the Mantic vs. the Sophic (or any other ideological lens applied to art) comes down to this: does literature need to perfectly reflect the opinions, experience, and worldviews of its readers to be valuable and effective?

I’d venture to say most readers of this blog would say it does not.

I agree.

But at the same time, that also doesn’t mean there is no room for judgement, that every work is of equal value, or that every work that is of value is for every reader, or that any one work should never be written off, or that any one work shouldn’t be recommended to everyone willing to try it.

There are dangers and pleasures and revelatory experiences everywhere in literature. That’s why it is valuable as art and an expression of human culture and component of mortal experience.

But those dangers, pleasures, and revelatory experiences don’t come in neatly packaged binaries. It’s not a matter of choosing between beef and pork. Or chocolate and vanilla. Or Star Wars and Star Trek.

Or Mantic and Sophic.

This doesn’t mean either, that writers aren’t more Mantic or more Sophic in their worldview (although I’d argue that part of the modern condition is that no one is fully one or the other). But that should have little to no bearing on what the works they produce mean for a reader. The whole point of literature, in my opinion, is to engage in explorations of what it means to be human and not a single work of literature is capable of fully being in line with what an individual reader believes and has experience. There’s always slippage, resistance, the grinding of human minds in ways that are hopefully polishing rather than eroding.

Indeed, if anything fits Joseph Smith’s vision, then it’s this: experience as refinement; revelation as ongoing; community as imperfect but striving.

Mormon Literaturstreit: Bruce Jorgensen responds to Richard Cracroft

Bruce Jorgensen responds to Richard Cracroft’s review of the Harvest Mormon poetry collection by calling for an expansive definition of Mormon literature.

In order for a Literaturstreit to break out, there needs to be a response to the initial provocation. With the Mormon Literaturstreit, this came when Bruce Jorgensen used his presidential address at the 1991 Association for Mormon Letters conference to discuss Cracroft’s review of Harvest and outline his preferred approach for Mormon literary criticism. Jorgensen’s address is titled “To Tell and Hear Stories: Let the Stranger Say” and argues for an expansive definition of the field of Mormon literature, using the notion of hospitality as its’ central stance.

A Brief Side Note on Collegiality

Before I proceed, I want to acknowledge that Jorgensen wouldn’t agree with his speech being pulled into the “Literaturstreit” framing. Indeed, I recall him saying as much somewhere online in the past few years. I wasn’t able to find that source; however, quite conveniently, Jorgensen recently contributed a post on the AML blog—this one also in response to a negative review. I’ll discuss it further down the line in the series of coda posts to the Mormon Literaturstreit. But for our current purposes, Jorgensen writes:

“Sunstone misrepresented that [that = the nature of the Literaturestreit] by publishing my address in 1993, in tandem with Richard Cracroft’s 1992 AML address, under the cover rubric ‘What Is Mormon Literature? Bruce Jorgensen vs. Richard Cracroft.’ I meant, and I thought I had tried with some clarity and force, to step away from that ‘essentialist’ question ‘What Is?’ to ask instead, more pragmatically, ‘How Should We Do MormonLiterary Criticism?’”

He also goes to great pains to frame his current response to a negative review in the Mormon literary way as a “rejoinder” (rather than, say, a rebuke or rebuttal).

From the outside, Jorgensen’s protestations seem to sidestep the nature (and force) of the disagreement. However, I think this is where the context of the Mormon Literaturstreit (and, honestly, most Mormon literature debate) happening among the members of BYU’s English department (and the AML, which was dominated by BYU English for the first two decades of its’ existence) is important.

For Jorgensen, this is all happening in a context of collegiality among people who know each other well, indeed, work alongside each other, and to amplify and accentuate the differences is to rip the discourse of this debate out of the community in which it takes place.

So consider this an aside an acknowledgement of that context.

At the same time, I am of the opinion that the rhetoric that Jorgensen and Cracroft use is at cross-purposes with that sense of collegiality, especially for those of us who don’t have that same community/context.

When I first read this set of texts in the late 1990s, I read the set as a Literaturstreit. Not the most vicious one that has ever taken place, to be sure, but certainly fitting of the label.

The Jorgensen Response: Main Points

Jorgensen argues for a more expansive vision and definition of Mormon literature than what Cracroft seemed to be offering up in his Harvest review. Specifically, Jorgensen:

  1. Frames the debate around the definition of Mormon literature in relation to Socrates “quarrel with the poets” and the question of whether its’ valuable/ethical/moral to depict acts that are not in line with what we (as humanity or as Mormons) view as good
  2. Recounts some objections BYU students have had to reading fiction that made them uncomfortable because of what it depicted and adds those reactions to Cracroft’s review of Harvest
  3. Discusses the notion of the other/the stranger and hospitality (in the Bible and other ancient texts)
  4. Suggests that “we often too quickly judge the stranger by her language”
  5. States that both a Christian and a Mormon ethos should make us more open to the other, but more specifically, that rather than judge a work by what it depicts, we should use the framework of “what it ‘invites’ or ‘persuades’ us to do”
  6. Wonders if the whole idea of “‘criticism’ itself, of a crisis in which we have to decide, is the problem”
  7. Provides alternate readings to some of the poems that Cracroft accused of not being particularly “Mormon” and also notes that “all but one of the specifically named shut-out poems are by women, while all but two of the specifically shut-in are by men”
  8. Proclaims that a “Mormon criticism will surely not judge very quickly by superficial elements” and “Mormon reading would be patient, longsuffering, kind”

All of which is to say, Jorgensen sets up both Cracroft’s review and the negative reactions of some BYU students and marshals a variety of literary, ethical, and scriptural sources and ideas to argue for an expansive approach to Mormon literature—or at least one more expansive than what Cracroft is calling for.

The Rhetorical Approach of Jorgensen’s Speech

What’s interesting to me about Jorgensen’s argument is how he marshal’s classical philosophy, Biblical passages, modernist writers like Forster, Lawrence, Welty, Kundera, and O’Connor, Mormon scripture, Christian theologians, and Wayne Booth to scaffold his response to both Cracroft and the BYU students.

Indeed, Jorgensen draws a genealogical line from the parable of the prodigal son to the early origins of the novel (Cervantes) to the modernist writers all the way to the works that Cracroft claims lack a true Mormon ethos.

This is less of an appeal to authority, than it is a modernist (and quite Mormon—see: Hugh Nibley) attempt to link all storytelling together, to search for a (a given definition of, of course) universality, one that has deeply twinned roots in both certain strands of Mormonism and the project of literature (esp. the project of mid-20th century world and comparative literature) that produced figures like Jorgensen, Eugene England, and Marden J. Clark.

It is a project I find appealing even as I (as part of the following cohort of literary critics who were trained after the postmodern/theory turn) am skeptical of it.

But why is it that Jorgensen has to make all these linkages while Cracroft can just make the claims he makes?

This is the plight of those who argue for broader definitions and great inclusivity, esp. in the context of Mormon discourse: it’s easier, from a rhetorical perspective, to draw limits than expand them. Orthodoxy is immediately legible to the Mormon reader/listener; whereas, heterodoxy requires nuance, bolstering, scaffolding.

Cracroft can state; Jorgensen has to persuade.

Mormon Literature and the Question of Inclusion

But is Jorgensen’s presidential speech actually an act of heterodoxy?

I don’t think he’d suggest as much—that’s why he goes to such great pains to include all of the sources, scriptural and otherwise, that he does.

And, indeed, amidst all of Jorgensen’s linkings, the close readings he offers of two of the poems Cracroft had rejected efectuate an act of redemption that places them within—or at least within spitting distance of—the boundaries Cracroft establishes.

In spite of all the scaffolding, Jorgensen’s response (rejoinder?) to the Harvest review is that Cracroft just didn’t do a good enough job as a literary critic at finding the Mormon ethos in “Midnight Reassembled” and “Passing the Sacrament at Eastgate Nursing Home”.

Moreover, I have this memory of Jorgensen’s presidential address being more radical and forceful than it is. Not that taking a truly charity filled and hospitable approach to the other is not radical. It is. However, as I outline above, as a salvo in the Mormon Literaturstreit, it’s both more pointed in its critique of Cracroft and more Orthodox in its’ framing than I had remembered.

“To Tell and Hear Stories: Let the Stranger Say” makes a lovely case for literary criticism as an act of hospitality, for truly listening to the stories of the other, but in the end, the strangers Jorgensen argues for inclusion under the umbrella of Mormon literature aren’t all that strange/estranged.

By pointing that out, I’m not arguing here against the overall ethos—I largely agree. And I do think the AML firmly settling on a definition of Mormon literature as any literature that is by, for, or about Mormons is in line with Jorgensen’s ethos and also a good one (with the caveat, of course, that some works in each of those categories are going to be of more interest to the organization/field than others, which means there’s an additional layer of, if not so much boundary setting than prioritization that expresses a more nuanced ethos).

But I am left wondering where the boundaries truly are.

Richard Cracroft himself has no such wondering as we’ll see in the next post where he responds to Jorgensen’s AML presidential address with one of his own.