By Julie J. Nichols
Julie J. Nichols is the author of the recent novel Pigs When They Straddle the Air (Zarahemla Books). Read about her and her work at her blog www.juliejnichols.com.
One Friday afternoon about five years ago I sat in extreme discomfort through a UVU English Department faculty meeting on whose agenda was the topic of development—or not—of a Mormon Lit curriculum. I wish you all had been there.
The UVU English Department faculty is a motley group, the largest department at the university. About half of us are from Mormon backgrounds, the other half decidedly not. All of us are scholars, though, responsible members of and contributors to literary communities as widely varied as our interests, from English Education and American Studies to Writing for Social Change, Creative Writing, and LGBTQ lit. We’re always talking about new programs, new classes we could offer both to bring students to our department and to keep up with the whiz-bang trends finding traction in institutions of higher education all over the nation—yea, the world, even. Brian Birch and Boyd Petersen had offices in our building. Mormon Studies and Mormon lit were never far away.
That day, one of the “decidedly nots” sat across the room from me shouting (I promise! his voice was very loud!), “We’d be fools to waste classroom space and students’ time on a class in Mormon lit—Mormon lit? Mormon literature is a joke!”
My eyes met those of certain of my colleagues around the table. We raised eyebrows. We sputtered. But was there a defense? Did anyone leap up to cry, “Wait a minute—it’s no more joke than Native American literature, or Asian-American literature, or, for that matter, your own area of scholarly expertise, queer literature!”? Did anyone point out that Gene England, UVSC’s writer-in-residence before his untimely death in 2001, was a bastion of knowledge and experience about Mormon lit, and had taught many an inspiring and astonishing class in just that topic, paving the way for Brian and Boyd and others of their ilk?
Nobody did. Not even me. And though I’ve never forgiven the colleague who called Mormon lit a joke, I’ve also never forgiven myself for not shouting back: Mormon lit is not a joke! It’s a kick-ass field of study, alive and well and richer than Midas King!
Yet in the years since then—years in which Boyd has taught many well-appreciated classes in Mormon lit, and in which he and Brian and others have led many fine Mormon Studies conferences at UVU—I’ve read and reviewed enough “Mormon” fiction to make me ask, wait a minute. Are we a joke? Not as writers. Certainly literature itself is not the joke. But—what? Could my colleague have meant that Mormonism is a joke? That the portrayal of Mormonism in literature is not to be taken seriously, not because the writing is bad but because the Mormonism in it can’t be taken seriously?
Two examples:
A review by Stevie Davies of The [London] Guardian of Jenn Ashworth’s 2013 novel The Friday Gospels, a brilliantly crafted story about a Lancashire Mormon family, says that each of the characters is “hampered in some way by the bizarre ideology that twists the Leeke family out of true: wheelchair-using mum Pauline is only the most obviously disabled . . . Mormonism, with the ‘aprons and the mirrors, the veils and hats and handshakes and chanting,’ is a comic writer’s dream.”
And a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reviewer declared that Mette Ivie Harrison’s 2015 novel The Bishop’s Wife –a mainstream murder mystery that takes place within the confines of a Mormon ward on the west side of Salt Lake—was “so far from my reality I needed a telescope.” Publishers Weekly lauded Harrison’s ability to evoke “a world most will find as unfamiliar as a foreign country.”
Now, accusations of being “far from reality” and “unfamiliar” may not be quite the same as being “a comic writer’s dream,” but the gist of both non-LDS reviewers’ comments reminds me of the response I got to a draft of a memoir at a Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop at Reed College a few years ago. I no longer remember the faculty adviser’s name; I do remember he was working on a porn film, though, and when I tried to tell the administrators I thought he was probably not the best advisor for a Mormon grandmother, they just blew me off. Anyway, my opening paragraphs described my Provo, Utah neighborhood, where people visit each other regularly, generations live next door to each other, neighbors take each other dinner and know each other’s needs. The advisor listened to me read that paragraph aloud and said, “That’s just weird. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
I said, “No it’s not—it’s normal, in my neighborhood.” It was the setting for what happened in the rest of the memoir, and it didn’t beg to be explained, just described.
He echoed me: “No, it’s not. That’s not normal. You might need to leave that out.”
Hmm.
Jonathon Langford proposes in his May 20 forum post that one of the purposes of AML should be to provide a place for “critical discussion of Mormon literature and literary criticism.” In response to that, William Morris suggests that AML should open paths for criticism/review and storytelling which should both “be as Mormon as possible in content and as diverse as possible in coverage.” But I wonder: what does it mean to “be as Mormon as possible in content,” if Mormonism is “weird,” “unfamiliar,” “comic”?
Almost the whole of my dissertation defense at the University of Utah (too long ago to date) was spent discussing the question of how much Mormon culture needs to be explained to a potential nonLDS audience. With grace and respect, David Kranes pointed to the intention of the writing itself as the guiding principle. How much does the audience need to know for the story to do its work? In other words, the story is more important than the Mormonness.
In a personal communication a couple of years ago, Jenn Ashworth told me that for her, “[Being] a writer means it just isn’t possible to be certain about anything. I find the way some kinds of Mormonism require certainty totally impossible.” Perhaps what could be considered comic in her novel is the certainty of a few of her characters that if they do or don’t behave in particular ways, the outcome (usually awful) is assured by God, regardless of intent or individual motivation. What’s unfamiliar in Harrison’s novel is similar: a belief that a particular set of behaviors is prescribed by God, regardless of human intelligence. Maybe I made the description in my memoir draft “weird” just by linking it to a set of behaviors Mormons take for granted.
I guess I don’t want to be thought weird. I don’t want to be laughed at (except where humor graces the story). I don’t want to be thought alien. I want my characters to be understood—to be seen as perfectly comprehensible human beings, though what they do is flawed and damaged. I don’t think being Mormon makes any difference in that fundamental need. Being Mormon is just one way of being human—it needn’t (shouldn’t, I think) be jokable, or mockable, or shocking, or seen as Other, except insofar as humor or Otherness is within the purview of the piece of writing.
Echoing Jenn Ashworth, Brian Evenson describes his relationship with Mormonism in this way:
I became very aware of the gaps between what people claimed to believe and how they acted, the moments when their ethics would get blurry or their perspective would warp reality to make it fit a preexisting model within their minds…I do steal all sorts of things from the authority of religious discourse…and from the somewhat stilted way of speaking in religious terms that belongs to the religion I grew up in…. there can be a … weird and impossible comfort in coming to feel that there’s no way humans will ever know anything for absolute certain.’” (Emphasis added.)
Steven Peck’s marvelous essay, “My Madness,” contains this resonant passage:
[During my week of madness,] the brain was able to construct a consistent world…with elements of the real world and produce a coherent presentation to the conscious self….I cannot help wondering how much of our current reality is likewise a construct. How pliable are our minds? These nagging questions have taken away a bit of security about why I believe the things I do. If not only the percepts presented to my mind can be manufactured by the imaginative faculties of the brain but also my beliefs and desires can be rewritten, how can I ever be sure that what I believe about the world reflects an objective reality? That is an old and almost hackneyed question, but one that takes on new meaning now that I have seen the brain in action at its creative best. (Emphasis added.)
It seems to me that these issues are fundamental to Mormons writing or reading or reviewing fiction, issues basic to the whole idea of Mormonism-and-fiction per se—that is (inserting synonyms for “fiction” from assorted sources): Mormonism and “that which is not verifiably true—but could be.” Mormonism and theory of mind, our ability to understand and inhabit the minds of others, including others quite different from ourselves (Zunshine). Mormonism and the “proposing of alternatives to the common wisdom” (Moore 77). Mormonism and the development of “new forms somewhere between factual history and fanciful epic” (Moore 75). Mormonism and stories “worked out with an eye toward a strategy of effects” (Moore 5, emphasis in the original). In short, Mormonism and (shall we say?) beautifully crafted resistance to any certainty at all—resistance whose first loyalty is to language.
Another way to speak of this, a paradox we can’t avoid: How does Mormon loyalty to “certainty” intersect with the fiction writer’s conviction, developed over time, that very little is knowable? That culture is a construct, motivations for human behavior infinitely variable and complex? And while we’re at it, how does Mormon loyalty to certain texts intersect with a writer’s growing realization that everything is a symbol of everything else, that every text can be (and usually is) changed by scribes and translators and readers? that the words we choose affect the ideas we think we’re portraying?—that those words have a life of their own we can’t always control?
These are issues Mormon fiction writers need to play with on a regular basis. If Mormonism means certainty—weird, comic, alien certainty—how “Mormon” can we honestly be in our fiction?
What do you think?
References in this post:
Evenson, Brian, quoted by Adrian Van Young in “The Dark Fiction of an Ex-Mormon Writer.” New Yorker Feb 10, 2016
Moore, Steven. The Novel: An Alternative History. Beginnings to 1600. New York: Continuum. 2010
Nichols, Julie J. Review of The Bishop’s Wife and His Right Hand, AML blog.
——————-. “Eternal Families: Persecution Days or Rapture?” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 46:4 (Winter 2013) 206-12.
Peck, Steven. “My Madness.” In Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Biologist (Provo: Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship at BYU, 2015. (p. 184 of my Kindle edition; emphasis added.)
Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Ohio State University Press. 2006.
Julie in a few words, alphabetized: Actively curious LDS. Anglophile. BYU grad in permanent exile. Companion to some of my husband’s horseback adventures. Health enthusiast: clean food and daily fitness. Momwifegrandmajuju. N
I’m not sure I have a loyalty to certainty. I have a few absolutes, but they are my absolutes. I think as Mormons we operate on hope, a lot. We keep open. If we’re good mormons , that is. Because we always need to be ready for a new revelation.
Yes, good–but I think we’re not doing our readers any favors if we write characters whose certainties/loyalties to absolutes make them laughable. This is maybe most true if the absolutes are really laughable, but if we think the characters are being true to “Mormonism” if they hold to them, or if we imply that those irrational or comic absolutes are really Mormon doctrine. That’s the problem I’m trying to hone in on. I think better Mormon fiction comes out of minds that don’t do that–but even very good Mormon fiction can tap from the well of that absolutist stereotype. See below for my short-answer response to Scott Abbott’s comment, where he points out (oh so truly) that there’s “Mormon” fiction that’s faith-promoting and “Mormon” fiction that’s not. I repeat, it’s a serious paradox: there’s room for both, but I guess I’d like my creative writing students to stay away from laughable, unthinking stereotypes whether they’re faith-promoting or not.
It’s certainly true that a big part of how any piece of literature will be received has to do with how it aligns with the reader’s view of the universe. That said, my own experience is that non-Mormon readers can be surprisingly open to depictions of Mormon experience that is different from their own, with relatively little need for explanation. Readers like to find something a little different from their own experience in a work of fiction; for some works of fiction, that can be provided by the Mormon element. At the same time…
I wonder if as Mormon writers sometimes we play up the eccentricity of Mormonism as a way to garner interest from readers. Then again, there are those experiences like the one you mention where something that seemed perfectly ordinary to you as a writer came across as unbelievably alien to one of your readers. I think in cases such as this, you have to be true to your characters and true to your setting, and let the accusations of weirdness fall where they may. (In my own novel about a gay Mormon teenager, the thing I remember one non-LDS reader thinking was alien was the idea that any teenager would talk about something like that with their pastor or bishop. And yet I know that Mormon teenagers do, in fact, do that sort of thing. At least some of them. Ah, well.)
Back when I was in my early teens, I remember thinking that I could never be a good writer, because as a Mormon I knew too much about the purpose of life and so my life wouldn’t be angsty enough to make me a good writer. I’m not even sure I can begin to count the mistaken assumptions in that sentence…
Made me laugh, Jonathan. We know so much about the purpose of life! Snicker. Thanks for excellent thoughts, as always.
Julie, I love the questions you raise here, questions I’ve been thinking about myself as I read and reviewed your book and Mette’s books and Brian’s books and Alex’s books and just these past couple of weeks as I read Judith Freeman’s books and Phylis Barber’s books.
After a recent reading by Alex, in response to these lines (“We recognize / each other as fellow makers, humans, & not / too anxious for immortality”), I wrote this:
Alex reads in short bursts, a single word, two words, the words that make up a line. His emphasis breaks up the meaning. I have to wait for memory to reassemble the thought. These poems are themselves fragments of meaning, often written before dawn, bordering on the subconscious. They remind me a bit of John Ashbery’s work in the way they make me agree to forego clear and sustained meaning in favor of accumulated meaning. But while Ashbery’s poems are assembled from fragments of overheard or (over)read speech, while they are arranged and rearranged, Alex’s poems have simply happened. There he is in the night. There is his notebook. There is his pen. He writes. He draws. And he turns to the next page. His is improvised poetry, fixed on the page the way a recording fixes an improvised jazz performance .
“You are too present / Or you don’t exist.”
Alex is too present. It is a difficult existence. It produces poetry. And he is my prophet.
Okay, that’s what I wrote.
I don’t believe in prophets. Alex is a mystic.
His work is metaphorical for me. It strives to grasp what can’t be grasped. German mystics like Meister Eckhart reached for the same unreachable truths and in doing so enriched the German language immeasurably. Every neologism is a metaphor. Every good metaphor brings new insight.
Alex claims he doesn’t believe in metaphors. We are dear friends despite and because of our respective disbeliefs.
I titled my blog post on your book “A Tight Sphinctered Response to a Novel in Seven Stories”:
https://thegoaliesanxiety.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/a-tight-sphinctered-response-to-a-novel-in-seven-stories/
I loved your characters. I loved the book’s warm-hearted portrayals of them in all their difference. I loved the interwoven stories. But I had trouble with the healing, if you remember, with the supernatural. I figured it was my problem as opposed to the book’s problem and ended the little essay like this:
Nichols I thought, a sudden thought, maybe even an epiphany, loves nature like I love nature. These are my flowers. I know them. They help me make sense of the universe. Nichols’ characters love nature too. So what if they also love the super-natural? Give them a break. Loosen your rational sphincter a bit. You don’t have to believe them. Their believing is their business. Isn’t it interesting, after all, to find your way into minds like these — such varied minds and bodies all of whom the author so clearly loves. Come on man, you can straddle the air for a bit. Nobody’s asking you to walk on water.
I can sometimes suspend my proverbial disbelief.
You are working in this essay with the idea of “Mormon literature.” One version would include work by faithful Mormons and its products would be faith promoting. Or it could include work by faithful and not-so-faithful Mormons and ex-Mormons with its works ranging from faith promoting to antagonistic..
You quote Brian Evenson, one of my favorite writers whose work often comes out of his own Mormon experience. I reviewed several of his works for Open Letters Monthly a couple of years ago.
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/affliction-fiction/
Here’s a taste of the long piece:
In Evenson’s novel The Open Curtain, a young Rudd Theurer experiences a break between what he thought to be true and what he now perceives to be true. Letters to and from his dead father reveal, perhaps, an illegitimate half-brother. His mother tightens her lips and claims the opposite: “It’s simple truth. . . . We know the truth. There’s no reason to speak of this again.” Not surprisingly, given his mother’s Mormon preference for “truth” over reality, Rudd begins to “have an odd relation to words.” He reads an old story in the 1903 New York Times about William Hooper Young, a grandson of Brigham Young who was on trial for a ritual murder. The newspaper account, supplemented by symbolic signs and penalties Theurer experiences in the Mormon temple ritual, works in him corrosively, structures and de-structures his identity until he commits ritual murders of his own. When Theurer cuts Mormon/Masonic temple symbols into the bodies of his victims, he reifies violent metaphors with which his religion has made sense of the world.
If reifying metaphors is dangerous, so is the making of metaphors. In the story “Contagion” from the book of that name, characters fatefully construct metaphors from a barbed-wire fence. The fence is a given, simply there, and the men who ride it are just doing their jobs: “They were to travel due South, checking fenceline for $2/day to territory’s extreme, and then to cross over and observe conditions beyond.” Their written notes are a straightforward litany of the various types of barbed wire until they encounter a deadly contagion, when the notations begin to stray to more subjective considerations.
Past the fence’s end the riders find a town dominated by a religious sect whose leader locks one rider in a room to write oracular notes about the barbed wire that has become the sect’s object of worship. When he runs out of paper he writes on the walls, encircling himself with sentences that resemble a long, enclosing strand of barbed wire.
As a tool in the real world, barbed wire controls, separates, and imposes order. In light of that fact and in response to the incomprehensible and frightening contagion, the town’s panicked populace has transformed the wire until the fact of the wire becomes the coercive truth of the new religion: “You shall know the fence and the fence shall make you free.” This is precisely the process of truthmaking Nietzsche wrote about so devastatingly: “What is truth? a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms . . . only insofar as man forgets himself as . . . an artistically creative subject does he live with some calm, security, and consistency.” Evenson’s work insists on this. We are the artistically creative authors of the truths we live by. We must then, if we are honest, live more tentatively in relation to the security and consistency we achieve through language. The effect of this conclusion, at least for me, at least most of the time, is bracing.
I’ll end this long response by saying thank you for your thoughts here and especially for your wonderful book.
Thanks as always for much thought provocation. Yep: we make metaphors and live by them, and that’s dangerous. Making is dangerous. Creating is dangerous. And oh so much better than living by assumption. I’m going to think more about what you’ve said here, with appreciation for your references and links, and write more after a long horseback ride up Payson Canyon tomorrow.
I’ll go back and read more deeply when I get home tonight, but I do need to point out that Publisher’s Weekly gave my very, VERY Mormon book a starred review (although I suspect the reviewer was Mormon). Magdalene. It’s 100% Mormon. (Except for the dirty parts and the f-bomb.) Thing is, I didn’t write it for Mormons. My goal is and always has been to put our jargon and culture out in the open, to get the public familiar with it, as they are Catholic and Jewish terms.
In my 2nd edition of Proviso, I did include footnotes after my non-Mormon readers said it would’ve helped. They did a lot of googling. I didn’t want to distract from the story with hyperlinks. In the end, I should’ve, so I did.
All my books (except the historical and my two current WIPs) have Mormon protagonists (and antagonists) or at least secondary characters. I don’t sugarcoat much, although one reviewer did say I went a tidge too heavy on the apologetics in the last third if Magdalene.
So. There’s that. Most of my readership is NON-Mormon.
Loved hearing this. I don’t know your work yet but will not let that remain the state of things for long. A PW starred review–oh, I’m envious. Way to go, girl. Carry on.
Julie, thanks for your reflections here. I’m intrigued by your lack of response at the meeting. Were you taken by surprise? Was there as sense of shock or shame? I’d also be curious to know his motives for the rude outburst. Had he truly read deeply in Mormon lit and found it lacking? If his own specialty was queer lit, was this maybe an emotional response to “anti-gay Mormonism”? I only ask because I sometimes freeze up in those situations too. Sometimes its hard to defend something Mormon without looking like an overly sensitive zealot.
As far as Mormonism’s commitment to certainty intersecting with fiction writing goes…I wonder we are in the middle of a sea change. The impact of the internet on LDS culture is complex and hasn’t fully played out. But one thing is certain (see what I did there) — it has eroded the old naive certainty that used to be so pervasive. It has been interesting to see various of my family members undergo minor faith crises brought about by stuff they’ve found on the internet. They have come through with their membership intact, but their testimony is more complicated than before. I wonder if this change will open up the possibilities (and readership) of LDS fiction (and nonfiction, for that matter).
Yes–complicated testimonies. Fiction requires complication and conflict, and so do our testimonies. Both genres reflect the willingness of the writer/speaker to “go there” and stay present, do you think? As for my stupefied silence at that meeting–sheesh. I’m still gobsmacked at my own non-response AND that of my LDS colleagues. The loud-voiced denouncer is known for throwing his weight around, and I think none of us was prepared for a long knock-down drag-out at the end of a long faculty meeting at the end of a long week. I think ultimately we all wanted to avoid the argument we knew would ensue–and also we needed time to know what to say. But I felt Gene England’s disappointment in us for a long time afterward.
Julie, I’ve had the same response to my work, especially during debates over my tenure application. All this was reported to me by a friend after the fact. Colleagues have had no compunction challenging my work’s value, while, as you point out, having no awareness of the narrowness (in content and circulation) of their own work. It’s stunning, actually.
At one point, I had to correct my annual report which encouraged me to seek more some national publications, and at the time 75% of my publications were national ones. It seems they thought writing about Mormons automatically placed a person in a parochial category. On the flip side, I’ve seen BYU show very little interest in writers working in this vein. There appears to be almost no middle ground in the academy.
There is an amazing group of readers for good Mormon fiction, but not a large one. I’d love to see that circle push outwards. Chris Bigelow has really made a dent in the universe with Zarahemla Books. That he’s a decade into this is a testimony of its own. There are more of us now than ever. Which is great news.
I appreciated hearing this. 100% agreement with your last paragraph. I’m indebted to him and look forward to widening the circle.