Thesis Statement
As I reread my previous two posts and consider what to do next, it dawns on me that I have nearly made a strategic rhetorical wrong turn and thereby very nearly gotten myself “stuck in Romanticism” (in William Morris’s words). I need to pull my foot out of the quicksand and go another way. I would like very much to get down quickly to talking about the poet Joseph Smith, but I need to stall one more time. I am going to lay out here what can be thought of as the “thesis statement” for this series. This is awfully long, abstract, and dense, but nothing I have to say subsequently would be understood as I want it to be except against this background.
I hope to find an audience of two types of readers (who can be combined in the same person): one is a Latter-day Saint poet, the other a Latter-day Saint critic. They both find the basis of their faith in what both they and I often call spiritual experience, but which I will refer to here as revelatory experience. The poet seeks a literary method for exploring and constituting that kind of experience, and life as it is viewed in the light of the knowledge that it reveals. The critic seeks to place literature—all literature, including “Mormon” literature—in relation to that experience and knowledge. (As I write of “life as it is viewed,” I have in mind a statement attributed to Flannery O’Conner to the effect that her Catholic faith was not the subject matter of her work, but rather the light by which she viewed her subject matter. I also should say up front that my main interest as a writer and in this blog is in the former “matter,” revelatory experience.)
I find persuasive a neo-Kantian philosophy of art as it has been articulated most clearly, to my mind, by Eliseo Vivas, a critic and a professor of philosophy who seems to have enjoyed a vogue among graduate students in the 1950s but who has disappeared from the theoretical and critical conversation. I wish he could be brought into the Restorationist conversation, at least until someone explains convincingly what is wrong with his approach to the poem. (I say “convincingly” because I am unconvinced of the value, in the Restorationist framework, of most of the post-modern project that has supposedly obsolesced thinking like Vivas’s.) I present here a generous selection of quotations from his book Creation and Discovery (The Noonday Press, 1955), because I cannot say what I want to say better than he has said it.
“What we know we know by way of symbols” (p. 89).
“The mind is constitutive of the world” (p. 80).
“The act of creation … I call ‘the organization of the primary subject matter of experience” (p. 117).
It is against the background of these propositions, and of those that follow, that I say “Joseph Smith was a poet.” He was a poet whose “matter,” the raw experience that he constituted by an aesthetic faculty of a very high order, was his “spiritual” experiences. Because he had those experiences, we call him a prophet, but it as the poet of those experiences that I want to consider him in this series.
Continuing from Vivas:
“A poem is a linguistic artifact, whose function is to organize the primary data of experience that can be exhibited in and through words. With the necessary changes this can be said of all art. Put in different terms, what poetry uniquely does is to reveal a world which is self-sufficient. It does not communicate in the ordinary sense of the term, nor does it imitate or designate existent or imaginary things which can be apprehended independently of the poem. By means of the self-sufficient world that poetry reveals we are able to grasp, as the poem lingers in memory as a redolence, the actual world in which we live. Without the aid of poetry our ambient world remains an inchoate, unstructured chaos” (Vivas, p. 73).
“Somehow what the poem says cannot be conveyed by any other means than the poem itself” (Vivas, p. 80).
I have italicized words in the following quotation because I find them to be particularly relevant to the position of the Restorationist poet:
“Knowledge, morality, and religion, presuppose and build on the world we come to know by means of art. The world that poetry reveals to us is usually called the common sense world. We do not constitute it in the sense that we create it out of nothing. The world in which we live is there, furthering or impeding our activity, independently of the mind’s grasp of it; but as we come to know it, the world is constituted by the means of a symbolic process which is at the heart of the aesthetic activity. What art does is put the world at our disposal” (Vivas, p. 74).
In that light, what the Latter-day Saint poet—the Restorationist poet, to use Brother Morris’s term, and Joseph Smith was the first—does is precisely what every poet does: constitute, through the symbolic processes of natural language, the raw data of experience, thereby putting “every-day” reality at our disposal. Poetry is prior to philosophy and theology. We could live as human beings without what philosophers and theologians do, but not without what poets do (or rather, for the most part, will do, because with few exceptions they really haven’t gotten down to it). In these terms the Restorationist poet is distinguished from others primarily by the raw material of his art, which as stated above, is a certain kind of revelatory experience and life as viewed by the light of that experience. The importance of its poets to Zion is exactly analogous to the importance of their poets to the peoples of the world, as identified in the following:
“In one of Van Wyck Brooks’s earliest essays, ‘America’s Coming of Age,’ referring to Whitman, he speaks of the function of the poet in the most radical and primitive sense of the word, as a man who first gives to a nation a certain focal center in the consciousness of its own character. To do this is to exhibit to a people in dramatic terms the structure of its life and the order of rank of its values. This is what the literary artist does in the degree to which he is creative. He presents us with a symbolic fiction of a world charged with value; he defines that value in dramatic terms within the grasp of men; he shows the hierarchy that structures it; and he thus gives us the means to give vivid individual content to the generalizations on which we fall back when we take stock of our experiences” (Vivas, pp. 122 – 123).
Vivas says it again in another way, and I apply this to the Restorationist poet:
“The poet brings forth values with which history is in the pain of labor. Insofar as we lack the gift of the poet, we can only sense them dimly and respond to their appeal in a confused way. The values may already be there, fully actualized, or actualized in such a manner that it is possible to say of them that they already exist. But we do not notice them, because our symbolic powers are inefficient or idle. Confronted with a new situation, we see in it only an old one with which we are already familiar. The poet is the man who sees the values as they struggle to be born or who sees those that have already been born in history but that nobody notices. He is a midwife and uses the forceps of language” (Vivas, p. 87).
I have italicized certain words in the following:
“A poem is self-sufficient in the sense that it contains within itself all that it requires to make it intelligible to a person who has knowledge of the language in which it is written…. In order for a poem to function as a self-sufficient whole, we must approach it in an aesthetic attitude. We do so when we read it with rapt, intransitive attention on its full presentational immediacy. It is not difficult to see that the self-sufficiency of the object is realized only through the intransitivity of our apprehension of it, and that the manner in which we apprehend it depends not only on the reader but also on the way in which the poem is constructed. A poem functions as a self-sufficient whole when it has, as we have long known, unity, when its discriminable elements are tied by organic interrelationships in such a manner that our attention is not led off from them but is held captive by them and is fully satisfied in its captivity” (Vivas, p. 76).
“Knowledge of the language in which it is written” implies the existence of a literary tradition. The competent poet learns his craft from a literary tradition, and his work and that tradition lend meaning and significance to each other. (You may read into that statement what Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Northrop Frye, and E. D. Hirsch said on the subject.) I submit that the defining literary tradition of the Restorationist poet is that of “the sons of God,” as that term is used in the Book of Moses. It is the tradition that is represented in temple ritual and in the Standard Works. (I will here call it simply the scriptural tradition.) I further submit that the scriptural tradition is the central tradition of all the world’s literature. All literature outside the scriptural tradition is to be read in relation to that tradition, and the guiding principles for reading scripture and those for reading nonscriptural literature are essentially identical—to know how to read one competently is to know how to read the other competently. Restorationist literary education—including the education of the poet—should begin with the scriptures, and the most recent major development of the scriptural tradition is the literary achievement of the Prophet Joseph Smith.
I believe that Vivas has effectively disposed of two venerable and, he has persuaded me, erroneous explanations of what the poet and poetry do: imitation and expression.
The view of art as the imitation of life, which might called the mimetic view, reigned during the Neoclassical period, as I noted in my first post. The idea was that the artist, as it were, held up a mirror to his audience, in which was reflected back to the audience its life in the world. The mirror was necessarily selective of what it reflected, of course, and I would submit that the difference between the Classicist (and the Neoclassicist) and, say, the Realist is in what sorts of things they allow into the reflection. Whatever is said to be reflected back, the mimetic view is inadequate, because the works that have continued to be called “art” throughout history have always contained “something” that was not in the world, something that is put there by the creative act of the artist. The creative work is always something more than a selection of data put together by some set of rules, for it is a product of the constitutive faculty of the poet’s mind.
The expressive view that became popular during the Romantic period was, it seems to me, a misconstrual of a much more sophisticated view that seems first to have occurred to Immanuel Kant. Before Kant (and this is a shamefully oversimplified and reductive statement), the human mind was considered to be a passive “blank slate” upon which the data of experience were registered and somehow formed themselves into “ideas.” (See René Descartes and John Locke for the long, complex accounts.) It was Kant’s insight that the human mind is constitutive of the world, that it actively processes the raw, chaotic data of experience to create a model of reality. Kant argued that the mind must come with built-in categories for the organization of data, and he argued that the basic categories were space and time. Samuel Taylor Coleridge subscribed to a Kantian view. In his Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, he calls the faculty by which the mind constitutes reality the primary imagination. To make a long, complex story very short and oversimplified (see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, for the long, complex story), the poet came to be seen by the Romanticists as a person particularly gifted with this creative faculty, and it was a short (and I think erroneous) step from there to describing artistic creation as expression, as self-expression, or as expression of the values and world-view of the poet’s culture, or nation, or volk, or whatever, or perhaps of some preconceived idea or doctrine.
In the following, Vivas might seem to be reflecting the expressionist view, but actually he is rebutting both it and the mimetic:
“Prior to its embodiment in poetry we discover that the object of the poem has two different positions: in respect to culture, at any time, it may be found prefigured in it but so embedded and so inchoately realized, and insofar as it is at all realized, so little grasped at the conscious level by the members of the culture as to be, for them, practically non-existent. Insofar as the object is already realized the poet merely imitates—he is a reporter and not a poet. He is a poet only when his creative activity discloses values and meanings which the culture is ready to espouse and adopt, which are knocking, so to speak, at the gate of history, seeking admission, or have surreptitiously entered history and become operative in the culture, but have not yet been identified, revealed, given a name and a dramatic mask” (Vivas, p. 137).
The expressive view is as inadequate as the mimetic, because it does not make it possible to distinguish between a bellow of anger and a work of art as “expressions,” and it does not account for the “something” that is in the work that is not in a preconceived, discursively stated idea or doctrine. Or, as Vivas puts it:
“The genuine work of art comes from the unknown depths of the soul, where its growth is even more mysterious than the development of a foetus. The artist, moved by forces over which he exercises only limited conscious control, does not know clearly what he wants to say till the labor of the file is finished and he can discover his intention in his composition” (Vivas, p. 104).
I hope to argue further on that the mimetic and the expressionist views, uncritically imported into Mormon discussion of the arts, have caused great mischief there. Vivas has supplied what seems to me an effective rebuttal of both, and that is one of the reasons why I would wish to see his thinking brought into the Restorationist conversation.
Those are most of the essential ideas that I want to develop in this blog.
Thoughts?
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I find this compelling largely because of its truth potential though also, I should note, for its jingoistic potential. The question of exceptionalism comes up—a question I think that we the current batch of American Latter-day Saints are uncomfortable fully (read: dealing with its ambiguities) addressing.
Question: are you saying this is because scriptures come first chronologically or in importance? And if the latter, in what sense? To our souls? To our cultures? Do secular peoples have scriptures or are they adrift without them by your understanding? Perhaps another way to phrase that last question is how do we define scripture?
Wm, would you please elaborate a little on what you mean by “jingoism” and “exceptionalism” in this context?
Th. made the claim, but I’ll chime in and say that exceptionalism is an interesting bugbear for Mormon authors. Embracing it too strongly can come across as jingoism (we are the chosen people who are better than the World) but disavowing it completely seems disingenuous and un-interesting in light of the fact of the Restoration and the call to build Zion.
I think we must simply, in all Christian humility, be who we are. Candidai Seshachari: “I fail to see how one could set aside–even sublimate–one’s past, one’s culture, in a sense, one’s being, and compose a literary work that’s the life blood of one’s spirit, as Milton would have said. Indeed, why should one disregard one’s teleological or religious predilections? Would Milton be more Milton if he disregarded his strong, sometimes even perverse, theological convictions? Or is his theology the very bedrock of his literary genius? More fundamentally, could a writer neglect the very stuff of his being and yet somehow remain himself and whole?” (in _Arts and Inspiration_, 1980). “Who I am” makes the Standard Works the most important of all writings for me to understand–if that is “privileging,” I plead guilty–and to understand them fully requires applying to them everything I have learned and may learn in my “literary” education, and everything I learn about understanding the Standard Works will be applicable to all other literature–thence, a “Mormon” criticism.
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Wm captured what I meant. To believe we are chosen without believing we are better is one of the most challenging tasks placed before us. Almost like God wants us to get rolled though the Pride Cycle.
“Poets have such premonitions,
Heirs are they to intimations,
Seeings, hearings, intuitions,
Undiscemed, unfelt by most men.
Were the poet unprophetic,
Or the prophet unpoetic.
Each were wanting in equipment
For the mission laid upon him. ”
—Orson F. Whitney, “Love and the light; an idyl of the Westland”
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So you still remember that poem well enough that you could go right to it?
I did have to look the exact wording up.
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Well, sure, but you knew it was there.
I mostly like this formulation of what the poet does and its finessing of the dual dead ends of pure realism and pure expressionism as the central metaphors of artistic creation, although I think it suffers from the circularity of pretty much all such definitional systems: once you’ve said that this is what the poet does, then it becomes easy to dismiss any work of art that doesn’t do this as “not poetry.” What, for instance, are we to make of narratives of pure adventure that have as their goal simple entertainment? At best, the esthetic described above does not provide a space for discussing such work; at worst, it invites a judgment that such work isn’t worthy of the label “art,” and possibly isn’t worth doing at all, or at least isn’t worthy of the same degree of critical attention.
I’m not entirely sure I agree that the scriptural tradition is the necessary center of all literature and all literary criticism. Even accepting that the central subject matter of the restorationist poet is the revelatory experience, and life as viewed through the lens of that experience, scripture is by no means the only or even the central font of such experience. What of the revelatory power of day-to-day life? The internal whisperings of the Spirit? The voice of God in human interactions? The power of symbolism through sometimes wordless ceremony and ritual (e.g., the washing of the disciples’ feet — known to us through scripture, but not originally performed in scripture, and probably more powerful as an experienced event than as one read about)?
My point is that once you’ve made the entire world sacred through the outpouring of God’s spirit in the revelatory experience, any part of the world — any part of lived experience — can become a central point of manifestation for the sacred. Which, applied to literature, means that any kind of experience can be central. If, to take an easy example, you see the world — itself a creation of God — as a revelatory experience, you can, simply by investigating the world in the light of that insight, create “restorationist poetry” with primary reference to the world itself. Hence the importance of Theric’s question about how we define scripture. If “scripture” is any manifestation of the divine, then certainly it extends far beyond the Standard Works. If, on the other hand, if by “scripture” we mean ONLY the Standard Works, then it seems to me that we are unnecessarily limiting the nature of the restorationist poetic tradition. I suspect, for instance, that Orson Pratt and others would make an argument for science, properly pursued, as yet another restorationist tradition.
Harlow Clark has argued appealingly (in my opinion) that the opening of the heavens in 1820 signaled an outpouring of the Spirit of God in every field of human endeavor. If we accept that this is the case, then the subject matter of the Restorationist poet is pretty universal — not so much a “what” as a “how.”
Jonathan, points taken, but I think you may be overstating what I intend.
“I mostly like this formulation of what the poet does and its finessing of the dual dead ends of pure realism and pure expressionism as the central metaphors of artistic creation, although I think it suffers from the circularity of pretty much all such definitional systems: once you’ve said that this is what the poet does, then it becomes easy to dismiss any work of art that doesn’t do this as “not poetry.””
As Ezra Pound said (approximately, and I can’t tell you where without digging out my 40-year-old “large cards”), the history of criticism is largely a history of attempts to establish a vocabulary that means something. All I can do is be as clear and consistent as I can about what I am using words to mean. What I am willing to call a “poem” is a work that meets, first of all, the criterion of organic unity. I hold to the old faith that such works exist, though probably not in perfection, and I particularly value such works.
“What, for instance, are we to make of narratives of pure adventure that have as their goal simple entertainment? At best, the esthetic described above does not provide a space for discussing such work; at worst, it invites a judgment that such work isn’t worthy of the label “art,” and possibly isn’t worth doing at all, or at least isn’t worthy of the same degree of critical attention.”
We are to make of any narrative whatever can be made of it. If esthetic unity can be made of it, it comes under the definition of what I am willing to call “art,” and the reading of it and the discussion of it with others will reveal the quantum and the quality of entertainment the work offers. There is nothing there to preclude discussion of a story from the latest issue of _Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine_ or _Analog Science Fact and Fiction_ (both of which I occasionally read) from critical attention. Northrop Frye, in _The Anatomy of Criticism_, and C. S. Lewis, in _An Experiment in Criticism_, have a lot to say about that, and I pretty much agree with both of them, and I see nothing in them that precludes a formalistic definition of poetry. (BTW, Vivas’s esthetic is essentially that of the Anglo-American humanistic and Christian formalists, with whom Vivas was, in fact, closely associated. I have quoted him because I have found his to be the most concise and precise formulation of that esthetic. And I am advocating for a rebirth of that esthetic in Restorationist because it, of all with which I am acquainted, best accounts for my own experience as a reader, and I am discovering that much illumination can be cast upon the contents of the Standard Works from that standpoint.)
“I’m not entirely sure I agree that the scriptural tradition is the necessary center of all literature and all literary criticism.”
The center is not the whole thing; it is only the starting point; and what is a more natural and logical starting point for the literary culture of Zion?
“ Even accepting that the central subject matter of the restorationist poet is the revelatory experience, and life as viewed through the lens of that experience, scripture is by no means the only or even the central font of such experience.”
Didn’t say it was; wouldn’t say it; only said that, in Zion, it is the natural and logical point of departure for learning to read everything else.
“What of the revelatory power of day-to-day life? The internal whisperings of the Spirit? The voice of God in human interactions? The power of symbolism through sometimes wordless ceremony and ritual (e.g., the washing of the disciples’ feet — known to us through scripture, but not originally performed in scripture, and probably more powerful as an experienced event than as one read about)?”
I would not call any of those things a “poem,” nor, do I think, would you; but they all belong to what I would call the defining “matter” of Restorationist poetry.
“My point is that once you’ve made the entire world sacred through the outpouring of God’s spirit in the revelatory experience, any part of the world — any part of lived experience — can become a central point of manifestation for the sacred. Which, applied to literature, means that any kind of experience can be central.”
Does it, then, make as much sense to make “The Runaway Girl from Portland, Oregon,” a story in the current issue of _Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine_, the point of departure for the literary culture of Zion_, as it does so to make the Standard Works?
“ If, to take an easy example, you see the world — itself a creation of God — as a revelatory experience, you can, simply by investigating the world in the light of that insight, create “restorationist poetry” with primary reference to the world itself.”
The person who makes that world in some measure dramatically available to us as it can be made available in and through words, I am calling a poet, and if he explores the revelatory experiences that the Restoration makes available, or any aspect of life in the light of those experiences, then I am calling him a Restorationist poet. Words must be restricted in meaning to mean anything, and I am using the words “poet” and “Restorationist” in those ways. Maybe they will catch on; maybe they won’t—I can’t control that. If they don’t catch on among my Restorationist literary peers, then maybe there is something wrong with them (with the ways I am using the words, not with my peers) and I will need to reconsider. I am here converse, not to lay down dicta.
“ Hence the importance of Theric’s question about how we define scripture. If “scripture” is any manifestation of the divine, then certainly it extends far beyond the Standard Works. If, on the other hand, if by “scripture” we mean ONLY the Standard Works, then it seems to me that we are unnecessarily limiting the nature of the restorationist poetic tradition. I suspect, for instance, that Orson Pratt and others would make an argument for science, properly pursued, as yet another restorationist tradition.”
Again, words must be restricted in meaning to mean anything. By “scripture” I mean the Standard Works. Maybe in the future I will say “Standard Works” rather than “scripture.”
“Harlow Clark has argued appealingly (in my opinion) that the opening of the heavens in 1820 signaled an outpouring of the Spirit of God in every field of human endeavor. If we accept that this is the case, then the subject matter of the Restorationist poet is pretty universal — not so much a “what” as a “how.””
When I say “life as viewed in the light of the revelatory experience made available by the Restoration,” I am not restricting what “life” comprises. I am saying, rather, that the Restorationist writer will endeavor to see his “matter” from what can be called a “celestial” perspective—marriage, mission, Mutual, sex, drugs, rock and roll, the smell of food cooking, the sound of a typewriter, daily life among the Bantu or the Apache, the girls in their summer dresses—precisely as you say, it is not the “what” that counts, but the “how.”
And speaking of “how,” how do you make those big quote marks to set off snipped copy?
Sadly, I don’t know the answer to how to make the big quote marks to set off snipped copy. Perhaps Theric can share the secret?
Please forgive me if I’m being too picky in my reading of what you’re saying. My caution here comes because it seems all too easy for all of us to take as normative the kind of literature that most interests us, and exclude other forms. Whenever we start defining, I feel like we need to ask: what might we be excluding (even unintentionally) by our definition?
You don’t need to ask forgiveness for pickiness–we need to be thinking these things through very carefully.
Now, in my previous response I missed an obvious point here:
“The internal whisperings of the Spirit? The voice of God in human interactions? The power of symbolism through sometimes wordless ceremony and ritual (e.g., the washing of the disciples’ feet — known to us through scripture, but not originally performed in scripture, and probably more powerful as an experienced event than as one read about)?”
The meaning of those experiences lies in their relationship to a narrative—a “myth,” in the sense of a story that unfolds a worldview; and myth is the first product of the esthetic faculty, the beginning of all art; and the myth that gives meaning to my experience is the one that underlies all the Standard Works. How, then, can the Standard Works not be the essential starting point of my education as a writer?
This seems to be a good place to throw in something from my master’s thesis, regarding Merrill Bradshaw:
“Commenting further on the matter of style in ‘Reflections’ [‘Reflections on the Nature of Mormon Art,’ BYU Studies, 9, No. 1 (1968), 25 – 32], Bradshaw suggests that the Mormon artist has a special interest in the styles of many eras and cultures. He observes that the Mormon idea of ‘dispensation,’ the belief that ‘history has been punctuated with repeated heavenly affirmations of basic principles of action and belief,’ is a concept that ‘brings the Mormon artist into direct theological contact with several periods of world history not only in the developmental, evolutionary sense that the age to age chain of their thought has provided some of the roots of our system, but also in a nonevolutionary sense that affirms certain principles as unchanging and allows certain ideas to leapfrog over the various stages of cultural-historical development’ (p. 29). Bradshaw believes that since the patriarchs and the prophets are our brethren and are directly inspired of God, ‘the details of their way of life and thus the cultural systems in which they lived become significant to us’ (ibid., p. 29). Furthermore, Bradshaw suggests, ‘the extension of this way of thinking to historical periods not directly involved with the dispensations, and to influences from other cultures, opens up wide vistas of style and technique’ (ibid., p. 29). He believes that ‘the point is quite defensible that art has taken different forms in the different dispensations and that in this, the “dispensation of the fullness of times” when “all things are to be gatherd [sic] in one,’ influences from all of these past forms of art are legitimate and important’ (ibid., p. 30). The concept of the gathering of all things in one during the final dispensation suggests to Bradshaw ‘another direction, involving the tendency Mormon thought to reconcile opposites so that they might exist in the same system.’ Bradshaw reasons that ‘in the artistic realm the mere acceptance of influences from the various epochs and styles . .. becomes insufficient,’ for ‘the Mormon artist has the responsibility of bringing these styles into a system where their divergent, conflicting characteristics are balanced against each other in a single, dynamic, unified manner of expression’ (‘Reflections,’ p. 30). Bradshaw makes it clear that he is not talking about ‘a simple eclectic combination of styles int an unintegrated stylistic hash,’ but rather ‘the creation of a true synthesis of these many facets of his experience into a unified, integrated expression of his culture, his thought and his deepest, most precious possession, his testimony’ (‘Reflections,’ p. 32).
We can’t do what Bradshaw calls for without an intimate knowledge of the literary art of the scriptures, from Genesis 1:1 to the last word of the Pearl of Great Price, and, as well, a knowledge of world literature. (BTW, I quibble with Bradshaw’s “expressionist” language, but it is not fatal to his essential thought.)
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Place your text between these:
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Whoops. This gibberish should be a /.
We seem to have reached the limit of embedded response layers, so I’ll start with a new comment on the understanding that this is a continuation of the previous.
First, I like your citing of Bradshaw on narrative art, and his pleasing thought that we have an opportunity (or even calling) to embrace all forms of art, at least in their positive potential. I would argue that the same is true of literary criticism as well, and that there are redemptive readings of even postmodern criticism; however, that’s an argument for another time…
Please note that I have no argument with the idea of informing both our work as artists and our discussions as literary critics with a knowledge of Mormon scripture. However, I would be more comfortable calling it “a” starting point, instead of “the” starting point. The Standard Works, for all their value to us, are only one of many sources from which we derive our understanding of the gospel — and not necessarily the source that is the most relevant for any particular work of literature or literary endeavor.
Case in point: For all that I hear people claim otherwise, I see very little in the Standard Works about families as families: that is, how they can and should interact on a day-to-day basis, in light of our view of the eternal nature of the family. And believe me, as a child growing up in a single-parent family, I was on the lookout for all the models I could find. But I have to say that the understanding I have of how families are supposed to work is rooted far more firmly in my own observations of other people’s families and my experiences since starting my own family than in any examples or precepts from scriptures (though D&C 121 provides a couple of nice pointers). And I doubt that my experience in that respect is unique.
So when it comes time to look at works of Mormon fiction where family dynamics play an important role — such as Bound on Earth by Angela Hallstrom, or my own novel No Going Back — I’m not sure that the Standard Works have much explanatory value, even when it comes to explaining those features that may be unique to a revelatory/revelationist perspective. I’m not saying they have no relevance, but the relevance is, I think, pretty indirect, and not necessarily “central.”
I would never argue that critics shouldn’t look at the scriptures when considering Mormon art. Even for artists with a restorationist agenda, however I don’t think that the most relevant or useful context for considering their work will be one that starts with scriptural interpretation. And because I think that in some respects the project of literature is not identical to the project of scripture, an esthetic/criticism that puts scripture in the undisputed center will in some ways be untrue to the literature it is trying to explain.
“Embedded response layers”–I’ve never seen that phrase before, but I like it. I think we are talking somewhat at cross-purposes. I see evidence that what I (think I) am saying is being interpreted through a template of expectation, and you may be seeing the same coming back at you. Moreover, we are both talking out of our individual experience as writers looking for solution to the artistic problems that have presented themselves to us. Most of what I been saying I am content to have taken for now as talking points. I am very much still in the process of clarifying my own thinking and working out my rhetorical presentation of what I am willing to be held responsible for at this time, and this is truly the first opportunity I have ever had for an extended and informed conversation about these matters. Thank you for taking me as seriously as you have so far.
When I sat down about forty years ago to write a poem as an adult, I took to heart Ezra Pounds advice and asked the question, “Where shall I look for a mentor?” Among the writers of the world, I was inclined, at that time, to look to Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder, but I wanted to write out of the experiences that had made me a believing Latter-day Saint, and those three were of limited use for teaching me how to do that–how to effect what Clinton Larson called “a transmutation into poetry of God and the Holy Ghost.” It seemed clear to me that I needed to look past the writers who were anthologized in my English major’s textbooks to what I had come to believe was my real tradition as a writer of the Restoration, which I had come to see in the writers of the Bible and in the Poet Joseph Smith. That was where I turned for models. I do not think that that was a mistaken strategy. I certainly would not wish to impose it on anyone–no one should attempt to impose any strategy on creative writers–but it has worked to some degree for me, and it seems to me to be a natural and logical one for Restorationist writers to consider. I would suggest, for instance, that Robert Alter and Gabriel Josipivici have discovered things about the nature of biblical narrative that are highly relevant to the Restorationist novelist. I am glad that we can agree that tapping into the literary tradition of the scriptures is at least “a” strategy, and an at least reasonable one, for learning to write as Restorationists (are we agreeing on that, or am I interpreting you through a template?). But I will stand on this (at least for now): there is a dimension of meaning in the literary art of the scriptures that has hardly been recognized by LDS exegetes and literary artists, and our relative failure to explore that dimension has limited to a regrettable degree both our understanding of the scriptures and the literary development of Zion, and discovering that dimension has the potential to bring about a revolution in both of those, which really cannot be separated.
I think we will be able to converse more fruitfully after I have posted some more installments.
I think you’re right that where I have an issue is in (possibly preemptively) viewing any given strategy as prescriptive: that is, something everyone should be doing (whether as a writer or as a critic). I’m all in favor of whatever people find useful and valuable in their writing and reading endeavors. In particular, I agree that there’s a lot about the spiritual reality of being a Mormon that could fruitfully be explored by Mormon writers to a greater extent than has often been the case in the past–though for me, it’s less the scriptures as such and more other sources that I find useful in that regard.
I appreciate your sharing your experience as a poet in finding inspiration in the scriptures. Interestingly, in my own novel, it was less the scriptures as such and more the language of priesthood blessings–patriarchal blessings in particular–and priesthood interviews that I found generative for the story I was trying to tell. Which, granted, often include scripture as points of reference and/or unconscious models, but that was not usually an aspect that I consciously referenced in my writing.
Now, of course, I’m engaged in trying to write a set of fantasy novels. It will be interesting to me to discover in what ways my Mormon/restorationist perspective winds up manifesting itself. This, too, is part of my caution about models for Mormon literature: I’m reluctant to conclude too quickly that just because my work is less explicitly and consciously Mormon, it will necessarily be less intrinsically restorationist and Mormon in its end product. I suppose this is something I will have to see (assuming that I ever finish the thing).
In the meantime, I definitely look forward to further installments. And I am very happy to see you exploring these ideas. I too see this as an opportunity to further refine and develop my own thinking about the relationship between literature and the gospel.