What This Is Really All About
Brother Dennis says my “theory” is “compelling.” I am glad that he discerns a theory in that with which I have been firehosing him in recent weeks. (In conversations over his sandwiches and ginger tea and my pasta and water at the Enliten Bakery, 43 East Center Street, Provo, where “Speak Your Mind” open-mic poetry reading takes place every Thursday evening, starting at about 7:30. Dennis and I have both been reading there. I regularly arrive at about 6 p.m. and Dennis has sometimes joined me. I would always welcome company there to talk at table about Restorationist writing, and I would like to see more representation by Restorationist writers at Speak Your Mind.) But anyway, I am glad Dennis can see a theory emerging.
An eon ago, under the direction of Clinton F. Larson, I wrote a master’s thesis titled “A Survey of Mormon Literary Criticism” (BYU, 1978), from Orson F. Whitney to Marden J. Clark. Here is the concluding paragraph:
Mormon estheticians and literary critics, then, can be described as united in the belief that literary criticism must be completed by criticism from the specific theological position of the gospel, and as at least not in disagreement on the belief that such criticism must be guided and confirmed by the Spirit. On the basis of other issues, they may be placed in three categories: those (Merrill Bradshaw, Robert K. Thomas, Robert Rees, Clinton F. Larson, and Marden J. Clark) who consistently subscribe to a formalistic definition of literature and to the conduct of formal criticism prior to the conduct of moral and theological criticism; those (Elder Orson F. Whitney, Loren Wheelwright, Eugene England, and Elder Boyd K. Packer) who subscribe simultaneously to divergent definitions of literature (such as significant form, ikon, and embellished thought, or embellished thought and type) and shift accordingly in their standards of judgment and either shift in their critical method or suggest no method at all; and those (Elder Sterling W. Sill and Ronald Wilcox) who consistently view art in terms of negative capability (a value shared by Clinton Larson), and offer no other standards or any particular critical method. It would seem that, if any of these writers should fail to agree in their judgments of the esthetic or didactic qualities of any particular work as literature, it may be because they disagree more fundamentally on what kind of work should be considered literature at all, and that that may thus be the most important unsettled issue in Mormon criticism.”
That was a polite way of saying that what has passed for Mormon criticism and theory is a mass of confusion, and sometimes the entire quantum of confusion exists in the mind of a single writer. I might have—should have—observed in my thesis that there was no “history” of Mormon criticism, in the sense of development, because there had been no real conversation about literature (or art in the broadest sense). Individual writers (among them Wm. Morris recently on motleyvision.org, and I myself on the old AML list fifteen or twenty years ago) have spoken their minds, but they have not responded to one another. Every one of them has been a voice crying in the wilderness, because no one has paid attention to anyone else. If they had engaged in real conversation, they would have quickly discovered (surely some must have seen it—Marden Clark and Clinton Larson were too well informed and too acute to have missed it, and both were constantly urging their students to define their “critical position”) that they were talking past each other, talking in mutually unintelligible languages, arguing from mutually incompatible premises, often unaware that the vocabularies of criticism that they were employing were incoherent collections of bits and pieces of systems of which they had no knowledge and which they might have been very likely to reject if they had understood them. That was the situation I saw thirty-seven years ago, and I cannot see that it has changed. We—all the “stakeholders” of the Mormon artistic world, including artists, people who read books and look at pictures, professors of “theory,” and Church officials who make decisions about art in the Church—need to talk, with each other, not just at and past.
I expect working writers to be impatient with discussions of theory. That is because most of our Mormon writers have grown up in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. In this regard, I find these paragraphs relevant:
The American poet writes poetry. He may then think about its implications and even comment upon these in a philosophical vein. He will often criticize his own works, reading into them, after he has finished them, unexpected themes and ideas.
The French poet, if one is allowed this generalization, is a phenomenon of a different sort. He is first of all a thinker, or at least would wish himself to be one, and consequently takes himself and his philosophy very seriously. Often he has every right to do so. In the tradition of French letters, a tradition that dates back to the Pléiade in the sixteenth century and extends to contemporary works, French poets have first sought to place their writing in a general philosophic and esthetic movement. The rash of manifestos and schools that abound in histories of French literature is a most eloquent testimony to this passion for explication. The French poet finds it almost a spiritual necessity to declare his intentions before writing “creatively.”
This difference explains why we in the United States are so unaccustomed to the appearance of a philosophic poet—a redundancy in France. The American poet writes and then keeps quiet. When he does establish himself as a critic it is as a critic that he is considered, and even then, there is a traditional Anglo-Saxon reluctance on his part to immerse himself in metaphysical or philosophical debates. Such debates seem to be peculiarly French. If the reader is not ready to grant this latitude of expression to a French poet, he removes from the poet’s intellectual and artistic make-up one of the gifts that so often go to contribute to his merits as a poet. Philosophical pursuits, then are not eccentric commitments: to the French poet they are the very matter that he exploits artistically. (Serge Gravonsky, Poems & Texts: An Anthology of French Poems, Translations and Interviews with Ponge, Follain, Guillevic, Frénaud, Bonnefoy, Du Bouchet Roche, and Pleynet, October House Inc., 1969, p. xi)
I propose that Mormon poets (who at this time in our history are likely to be American, and of whom I hope to be counted one) be a little more like the French.
Way down at the far end of this series, I intend to be a little French and try to justify the kinds of poems I have written. There are principally two kinds, the ones that I was writing in the late 70s and the 80s, some of which found their way into Dialogue, Sunstone, and the Ensign, and some of those into the Harvest anthology. This is a sample of my former style:
LET THE STONE WHISPER TO THE FLOWER
Behold, and lo, the Bridegroom cometh
–D&C 88:92
Let the stone whisper to the flower,
The flower to the sun,
And the sun to the stars of heaven,
That Jehovah is come for his bride;
She bends her knee graciously to him.
The sun hides its face,
And all silvering clouds, all shimmering snow
Are darkness to the light of her raiment.
He calls her Zion;
He lifts her by the hand.
The stone whispers to the flower
And the flower to the sun
That his kiss is tender.
The table is set; the wine is served;
And the stars break forth in song.
During the 90s I began to do something very different, and in my recent writing seasons I have thrown myself with abandon down that rabbit hole. Here is a sample of the second kind. In posts that follow, I will be laying a background for the theory that lies behind “Talus Slide of Cartridges,” a theory at which I have arrived partly by taking D&C 76, 93, and 132 at their word and considering what is implied by the use in the D&C of language from the Song of Solomon.
TALUS SLIDE OF CARTRIDGES
The urim of a jewelry box whispers endearments to the thummim of a suspension
*****bridge in the throes of temporary dismemberment,
As hanging in air over a rising river of piano notes in high register they wonder
*****together at five things:
The way of a lark’s tongue with seven-cornered dice,
A promising kiss from Sacagawea contorting in a secret compartment of Meriwether
*****Lewis’s spy glass,
A flash of cannon fire held in secret and reluctant reserve from the Mexican War,
A way of looking at a blackbird dismissed by establishment critics as the final belated
*****cowardice of a maimed gun-runner
But recognized by frequenters of reptile zoos on Route 66 as a stroke of pure intelligence
*****from beyond the night where stones and violets exchange caresses.
Then beyond the penultimate ridge a final crescendo of piano notes tumbling up the face of
*****a heaving talus slide of cartridges full metal jacket specially engineered for full
*****automatic fire
And finding in the press of one more key apotheosis in a backward somersault by
*****the jewelry box and the suspension bridge into the violet-colored stars at the center
*****of the galaxy
May 2015
Thoughts?
Interesting stuff. I agree that one of the sources of confusion in Mormon literary criticism/theory has been a difference of opinions about what constitutes literature, although I would welcome some elaboration about the three categories you mention, particularly definition by negative capability.
Equally at fault, in my view, has been a diversity of views about what constitutes “Mormon” in the definition of Mormon literature; I think it’s fair to say that this diversity of opinions about Mormonism has been a locus of discussion within Mormon literary criticism/theory (e.g., the contributions by Cracroft, Jorgensen, and Austin), but as with the question of what constitutes literature, people often have not clearly spelled out the assumptions they’re working from or clearly engaged other with different working definitions. I’m currently working on an essay about that…
Which brings me to the practical problem underlying much of what you say here, which is perhaps the biggest part of why we don’t have a developed Mormon criticism: that is, the lack of dedicated academic support for the activity. So far as I’m aware, there isn’t a single professor on any campus anywhere who receives substantial professional credit for publishing in Mormon literary studies. The discussion has been left to us amateurs. Which, don’t get me wrong, I think has some real advantages: amateurs often have great insights to offer, and there’s value to having some perspectives that aren’t constrained by the formal requirements of the academy. But ideally, there should be both.
Ditto with working writers. In my experience, a lot of the best criticism does come from working writers who have thought deeply about their own project and how it relates to other fields. But there are limitations to what they can and should be expected to do.
Not a problem we can solve. And the lack of dedicated academics in this area makes efforts like Colin’s all the more important. I’m just saying that we should also recognize the disadvantage that Mormon literature studies is struggling under.
I think the only professor who might get “substantial professional credit” is Terryl Givens. Not everything he publishes easily fits into the tent of “Mormon literary studies” — but I would argue that all of it, so far, has, even _The God who weeps_.
I have been paying attention (albeit only with the Mormon literary criticism I know about and can get my hands on). I just don’t always talk directly in dialogue with it. Partly because that requires more work (which relates to Jonathan’s comment) and partly because much of what I write about is aimed towards Mormon creative writers and readers. And it is true that I’ve grown more gnomic and streamlined in my posts as I’ve become less of a lit crit person and more of a Mormon author person. Although if manifestoes and pronouncements of intention are a sign of a French poetic disposition, then I say: Bonjour!
But to your larger point, Colin: one of the things I miss about the AML-List and the early days of blogging is that there is less cross-discussion that happens.
Also: I like TALUS SLIDE OF CARTRIDGES and also find myself very much egged on by the language of the D&C and look forward to hearing more of what you have to say about that.
Wm, as to what I am attempting–I intend to say a lot more about that in a posting that could be five or six months away. It might not be a bad think to explain that briefly by copying in here the “Author’s Note” from _Glyphs_, if it will copy in properly. Here goes–and it looks as though it might go through, so I will post it.
Most of my likely readers will find the poems in the first part of this collection, approximately through “Outside the Longhouse,” to be readily accessible, but those in the latter part of the book may seem puzzling and strange—“surrealistic,” though I am not a Surrealist (Neo-Romanticist influenced by Surrealism is closer to the mark). If the reader finds a beauty in those poems, despite their seeming irrationality, andthough it be a mysterious beauty, then I call them successful. My method for composing them has been an exercise of something like what Keats called “negative capability,” which I understand as a stepping back of the conscious, controlling mind with its categories and preconceptions to allow the poem to emerge from“somewhere else.”It is similar to Mallarmé’s method, and also the Surrealists’, as described by Wallace Fowlie: “To give over al linitiative to the words themselves” (_Mallarmé_, Phoenix Books, 1962). Suggest that they be approached as dreams. Every reader will have had the experience of waking with a dream that seems important and meaningful, though the full meaning might remain elusive. Some of the imagery in these poems, in fact, came from sleeping dreams. Most of them, however, are more like waking dreams. I view dreams as messages from a deeper part of our being, the “unconscious,” if you will, supplying insights to assist us in the conscious conduct of life. I entertain the possibility that such messages are revelatory in a certain sense, for they come from a place within us that, by God’s grace, is uncorrupted by the Fall. The unconscious always speaks the truth of its insights and evaluations about matters on which at the conscious level “the natural man,” as it is called in the Book of Mormon (Mosiah 3:19), is too willing to equivocate, rationalize, and deny. The “I” in the mortal conscious mind wants to cheat, but the unconscious is unfailingly honest. Whether messages from my unconscious are of value to anyone but me, the reader will decide, but my sense is that my life’s tasks are not wholly unlike those of others, and I become more persuaded to the Jungian view that a common set of archetypal figures from a collective unconscious speaks in dreams to us all, and, because we share the “human condition,”what is spoken to one might be of value to another. As Joseph Campbell has put it, “Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.” I would add that the public myth must begin in someone’s private myth. More can be said about the nature of these oneiric poems (which is what I prefer they be called), but to say it with anything approaching completeness requires far more philosophical and theological verbiage than space available here permits, and to condense it renders it even more incoherent than it is in fuller discourse. Nevertheless, I think I must say something, and it is the following: to my mind, poems of this kind can be merest glimpses through a window on the infinite and eternal and marvelous and rationally, literally, unspeakable mystery of being, of “that which is Spirit, even the Spirit of truth,” in the words of Joseph Smith (Doctrine and Covenants 3:23); of the utter freedom—agency—of Being; of the erotic and convulsively beautiful ecstasy of Eternal Life and Creation.
A note on talking past/at each other: one of the things that frustrates me about the Jorgensen-Cracroft Mormon literaturestreit is the way that Jorgensen’s focus on hospitality and Cracroft’s focus on Mantic vs. Sophic don’t leave much room for (or don’t point us towards) what I think is most possible for Mormon literary criticism: readings of Mormon narratives that ignore/elide the truth claims/existence of the LDS Church while also allowing for nuance (and maybe even ambiguity and maybe even resistance*) in relation to the Church (and its various forms–doctrine, orthopraxy, texts, leadership, PR, communities, folk doctrine, etc.).
*but not the standard kind of resistance that so often boils down to “Mormons and Mormonism are provincial so I’ll just adopt the obvious stance of mainstream American high or middlebrow culture”.
A slight digression on negative capability: this is just me spitballing here, but I suspect that Joseph Smith would agree with the notion of negative capability but that he’d also suggest that some avenues are more fruitful to pursue than others. Or to put it another way: the Restoration is an act of negative capability in that knowledge is always contingent on further revelation and that revelation is always mediated through the language of men and in response to the socio-economic/political/cultural circumstances in which Zion is attempting to establish itself.
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I think this is why Clark and Larson were always after us to define our critical position. (Clark asked me in master’s orals, “What is your critical position?” and I was prepared for the question with a succinct answer.) I think we are at least better prepared to engage in a fruitful conversation if have worked out coherent starting positions. We may not agree, at least not at first, and probably in mortality never completely, but we can more readily identify true points of disagreement and search for the underlying differences in premises that leave us in disagreement. Somewhere there will be premises to give us a common point of departure. I am going to lay out my premises in the next two installments. I have never had opportunity to discuss any of them. Please engage me—all I want is to arrive at some clarity.
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Maybe after this series I can run again over the ground I covered in my thesis (which is still sitting on the shelf at the HBLL gathering dust, even though Richard Cracroft, as my stake president, promised me in a setting-apart blessing in 1978 that it would be value to students to come).
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Larson used the term to refer to the artist’s capability of thinking and feeling himself into the minds of hearts of other people, and of the work’s ability to enable readers to do the same. Larson said that it was a Christian’s duty to do that and that art was one of the most powerful tools available for doing it. I agree with him.
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The professors have families to take care of, and I can’t judge them. I myself spent 5 more years in Curriculum Editing after being forbidden to publish poems in SunStone or Dialogue (not in so many words, but effectively), because I had two more missionaries on deck to support. I can do what I am doing now because I am fully retired and my wife believes in me. And I know I am an amateur. Who else is there to do it? I remember when someone, maybe Jonathan Culler, spoke to the English faculty and the grad students in about 1975. He told us that the Mormons already have a literature that is worthy respect, and then pointed toward Lambert and Cracroft and said, “And I would like to know—and I say this with no disparagement of them—why is it that the only people you have working on it are these two?” There was laughter, and Lambert and Cracroft laughed and applauded. But here I am going to say something apocalyptic. Civilization is collapsing all around us, on every continent. The day will come when what is left of the world will look to Zion for guidance to rebuild civilization. We will have a civilization to offer them because somebody(ies) paid the price to find its foundations stones. I am just doing the best thinking I can. It is all I have to put on the alter. And I do have this consuming sense of vocation about my amateur efforts.
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There is premise I can sign on to. See my next two installments, particularly no. 4
OK, I am still learning to do this. I copied out snippets of JL’s comments to MSW document to compose my reply to them, expecting that they would copy back in with my new text, but they did not. I think you can figure out what I was answering by the context, however.
“Altar,” by the way, not “alter.” “Alter” is Robert.
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I don’t feel prepared to comment on the poems until I have a sense of what you’re attempting. It’s still a bit foggy to me, but then I am absolutely guilty of reading people lightly because it’s easier to talk past than engage.
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I will get into that. For now I will just say Arthur Rimbaud, Andre Breton, David Gascoyne, and D&C 93:23.
Can somebody please explain to me why nothing inside of shows up? What was supposed to be in there was “what you’re attempting.”
Or why sometimes the horizontal V’s that in math indicate “greater than” and “less than” don’t show up?
I’m afraid that I’m not enough of a WordPress wonk to know the answer to your questions. But I didn’t want you to think I was ignoring them.
And yes: I think it was generally easy enough to figure out what you were responding to from context.
A question that I’m hoping you get to at some point is whether we need a distinctively Mormon literary criticism, or if what we need is LDS critics who apply the various existing methods of literary criticism to Mormon texts. My own bias is more toward the latter, but also toward a discussion of how and in what ways various approaches to literary cricitism clash and/or mesh with the gospel.
I also am biased toward the application of existing methods of criticism to Mormon texts, starting with scripture. I am further biased toward a formalist position, as a starting point for reading, explication, and criticism. When Marden Clark asked me in master’s orals, “What is your critical position?” I answered: “Well, that’s not cast in bronze yet [and there were nods and murmurs of ‘I should hope not’ all around], but, during the early fifties, Kenyon Review published a series of statements by prominent critics under the title ‘My Critical Creed.’ [Marden Clark nodded as though in recognition.] One of statements as by Cleanth Brooks, and I have to say that I can’t find a thing in there that I want to disagree with. [There were expressions of surprise all around.] Do anything you want to with a poem, but first of all deal with as an aesthetic object, words on the page.” I think that that old formalistic approach that _Understanding Poetry_ and _Understanding Fiction_ taught us, enhanced by historical, cultural, psychological etc. studies and completed by criticism from a specific theological or philosophical (or political, or sexual-political, or whatever floats your boat) position is compatible with most common readers’ (and most General Authorities’) experience with literature–certainly with mine–and can be a common ground, where we can all speak the same language. That is the kind of criticism that most of us actually do when we review books or shoot the bull about literature. No deceased author is dead, but rather merely waiting in the spirit world to carry on the conversation about what he had in mind, and, more importantly, God is not dead, and by the logic that I can follow that means that most of the assumptions of “postmodernism” are flat-out wrong or of exaggerated importance. Again, I think that what distinguishes what I am thinking of as a “Restorationist” writer–and the best we can do is attach a definition to words and then stick by them consistently–is the “matter” that he renders artistically, a certain kind of experience and life as lived by or viewed in the light of that experience, and his problems as an artist have to do with “constituting” and representing that kind of experience, and of “constituting” in the light of that experience life as lived by all kinds ofpeople. And I am interested in far more than criticism of “Mormon” writing. As Ezra Pound said, more or less, the object of all criticism is to answer the question “What the deuce shall I read?” An adequate Restorationist criticism will explain to the LDS common reader why Homer and Dante and James Joyce merit the dedication of a little of his precious and limited mortal time (as I think they do) and _Saturday’s Warrior_ may not merit as much. In subsequent posts, I will lay out a set of propositions bearing on all this.
Here are URLs for one poem each by the poets I named above. I am certainly not “all in” with Surrealist theory, but in those poems and their writers’ theories are clues to what I am attempting.
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/Rimbaud2.htm#_Toc202067613
http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poems/best/andre_breton
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/and-the-seventh-dream-is-the-dream-of-isis/
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My best guess is that WordPress is seeing the angle brackets and thinking that you are trying to use html code. If that guess is correct, then you will see two tests above in square brackets and curly brackets. If that is incorrect then you’ll also see the angle bracket version.
Yep. So the problem, Colin, is that you’re using angle brackets. Angle brackets are the characters that set off all bits of code in html and css (which are the programming languages that run the web). Use a different mark, and you’ll be fine.