Being a Restorationist Writer, and the Quest for the Infinite—15

The Spirit and the Baroque Sensibility: Clinton F. Larson, Part 2

**One of the most powerful instruments, in Clinton F. Larson’s view, for exploring various points of view was style. I have already noted his interest in style in connection with his observations that “a range of contrasting styles…can be used for expression of Mormon ideas,” that the clearness of the poetry that he himself wrote varied with the persona, the whole viewpoint, from he was trying to operate as a poet, and that to teach the gospel to people “we have an obligation to deal with various styles and ethnic groups in their own terms.”
**I continue to resist the notion that the artist’s primary task as artist is to “express” anything, including “Mormon ideas,” but Brother Larson recognized (and I recognize) the possibility that the Restorationist artist will be called upon, in fulfillment of his covenant of consecration, to do exactly that, and I read Brother Larson’s observations in this regard as good counsel about how to do that with integrity and effect, and possibly to transcend the merely propagandistic. (That it is desirable to do so is illustrated by an anecdote that can be thrown in here as well as anywhere. While I was employed in the Curriculum Editing Section of the Church Curriculum Department many years ago, an Austrian brother who was employed in the Translation Department told me that shortly after the Church Office Building was opened he escorted a group of Austrian priesthood leaders on a tour of the facility. During the tour, he noticed some troubled looks and whispering back and forth among the brethren. At the end of the tour, he entertained questions, and one of the brethren raised his hand and asked, “Why does all the art in this building look like the art of the Third Reich?” That is probably the most damning criticism of official Church art that I have ever heard or read. But I would suggest that the Socialist-realist quality in our official art is not entirely the fault of those who have commissioned and approved it, but also that of the “artists” who have failed to find their way to transcending the terms of the commission. But continuing with Brother Larson’s views—)
**Brother Larson’s view of style as one means of exploring experience as seen from various viewpoints is perhaps illuminated by a passage from Wylie Sypher’s Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformation in Art and Literature, 1400 – 1700 (Doubleday, 1955), from which Brother Larson claimed in classroom discussions and private conversations to have taken much of his understanding of style and its importance to the Mormon artist:
**“If style is a vocabulary, it is also syntax; and syntax expresses the way in which a society feels, responds, thinks, communicates, dreams, escapes. By tracing changes in literary syntax we are able to interpret the varying modes of consciousness in different eras of European culture. Doubtless the abrupt phrasing in The Song of Roland shows that the poet thinks and sees in sharply divided categories; the very parataxis indicates a rigidly feudal view of the world, when the concept of reality is limited, static, simplified, heirarchal, unarticulated. So too the syntax of Rabelais is adapted to the somewhat disorderly, disoriented, expanding world opening before the renaissance consciousness. Syntax is conditioned by the structure of the world in which we believe we live; and the whole organization of the artist’s sensibility is a screen through which appears the world he creates…. Consequently each style tends to reveal, and to create, a world of its own. Woelfflin said: “Styles crystallize the world in certain forms” (pp. 161 – 7).
**The style that seems to have interested Larson most as a Mormon writer was what he called the baroque. He defined the baroque in several ways. He said in one place that the baroque style was “the style that relates the realities of earth to the realities of heaven” (“Conversation,”  p. 76). In classroom discussions and private conversation he further defined it as “the perception of heaven as the highest reality” and also as “perception from the point of view of heaven.” He understood thinking and feeling oneself into another person’s position as being an aspect of perceiving from the point of view of heaven and thus as related to the baroque style. He also believed, as he expressed it in private conversation, that writing from the viewpoint of heaven meant “asking the reader to be more than he is,” or, as he said in an interview, doing “what Nephi is trying to do…to cause his brothers to flex their minds and spirits so that they can accommodate greater and greater truths” (“Conversation,” p. 7). He suggested in private conversation that, for example, his poem “Christ the Mariner,” in which occur the lines “Immediacy encumbers me like the willows / Before the sea, where the milfoil galaxies / Shimmer across its surface as retortion for sin,” is in that respect baroque because “most readers will need to go to a dictionary to understand it.” (There is his answer to critics who complain that his poems are unnecessarily difficult.)
**Brother Larson also used the term baroque to denote a style that he found particularly useful for achieving the “transmutation of God and the Holy Ghost into poetry.” To understand that, it is necessary to consider Sypher’s account of the origin and characteristics of baroque.
**Sypher argued that the foundation for the baroque style was laid by the Council of Trent, which closed in 1563. Sypher wrote: “The Council of Trent announced its decrees with majestic voice; it overwhelmed heresy by splendor; it did not argue, but proclaimed; it brought conviction to the doubter by the very scale of its grandeur; it guaranteed truth by magniloquence” (p. 181).
According to Sypher, the art that arose out of the climate established by the Council of Trent “speaks with the voluminous tones of a new orthodoxy…. The baroque style reaches its decisions through spectacle. It resolves the uncertainties in mannerist art by overstatement in the flesh, energy, mass, space, height, color, and light. After the bloodless and shrunken mannerist forms, the baroque is a style of plenitude, capable of absorbing, and robustly transforming to grandeur, every sort of realism. It is an art given to superlatives” (p. 181). Further on he said that “in general,…baroque art has an effect of decision, release, and fulfillment, and resonantly declares the glories of heaven and earth” (p. 185).
***Sypher further observed that “the materialism of baroque art is justified theologically by certain recommendations and doctrines of the Council of Trent, notably the permission to use images and the dogma of transubstantiation [according to which the bread and wine of the Eucharist become real, material flesh and blood in this world]” (p. 187). Brother Larson, in classroom discussions and private conversation, drew parallels between the effects on Christians of the Council of Trent and the effects of the first revelation to Joseph Smith on those who are convinced of its truth, and between the theology of the baroque Milton and the theology of Joseph Smith, which declares that “all spirit is matter” (D&C 131:7), that “man is spirit” (D&C 93:33), that “the elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy” (D&C 93:33), and that “the Father has a body of flesh and bones; the Son also” (D&C 130:22). Brother Larson concluded, as he stated in classroom discussions, that an art that captures the glory of the Restoration, in the process of which the very material bodies of the Father and the Son were revealed in this world, will exhibit all the splendor and energy of the baroque and that an art that represents heavenly things will be as full-bodied and sensuously rich as Milton’s. (This “metaphysical” point seems to me to be crucially important to placing Joseph Smith in relation to his contemporaries in C19 who still subscribed to some transmogrification of the Great Chain of Being. In the Prophet’s understanding, heavenly things are not less “material” and more “spiritual” than earthly things, for “element” and “spirit” both are transformations of “matter.”)
Brother Larson suggested in classroom discussions that the baroque style is exemplified by some of his own poems, such as “A Letter from Israel Whiton, 1851” (in Counterpoint, BYU Press, 1973). “Letter” alternates, with passages of an actual letter written by the historical Israel Whiton to his mother in his own half-literate English, poetic transmutations of the feelings that Israel could convey only crudely and imperfectly. The Israel of the poem knows that his mother, whom he and his wife left in the east when they migrated west with the Saints, is dying and will not live to read his letter, and so he tosses it into the wind, as described in this concluding passage:

But Eliza is still as I write, and I must only
Listen. I, Israel Whiton of the Salt Lake Valley,
Write this letter to you, Mother, from the canyons
And the butte above my land; it is a leafe
From the spring before we came, as both you and Eliza
Know, unanswerable except in the signs that come,
That I cannot seek. So I give it to the wind
From the tips of piñons or the butte, and it lifts
Away, and I try to see it as it diminishes
Away, then vanishing through what I know is there,
As you know better than I, Mother…And it will rise
Beyond the golden seal and touch the white hand
In the cirri plumbing the Oquirrh crest west
Over the sunset, and it is as if I take a veil
Full in my hand as I write, as if to let it yield
To the days consecrated to the journey west
That holds me aloof from all that I have ever known,
The East and the Cities of my common being,
As I am here, in Zion, wondering about you
Who cannot respond except in the barest hints
Of being that lift over me and show me the way
To yield and rise into the Kingdom, the sky
And the land like the white silver spirit
That we know but is fathomless before us
And indefinite as the planes of God rising
Into the sun….

The “stacking” of clauses in that last sentence to create a syntactical analog of great height; the sense of effortless upward movement conveyed by the image of a letter lifting and rising to the cirri; the light of the sun and “the white silver spirit” and the brightness of “golden seal,” “white hand,” “plumes of cirri,” “sunset,” “Oquirrh,” (with its suggestion of gold); and the sense of enormous space in the sky and the landscape all combine—Brother Larson hoped and, I must say, with some basis, for there is some analog in that passage with the feeling of the Spirit as I myself have experienced it—to bring this passage close to the baroque as defined by Sypher. On the basis of the foregoing, Brother Larson argued in classroom discussions that the poetry drama was a form particularly useful to the Mormon poet, partly because of the possibility that it provided for indicating the presence of the Spirit in a person or a situation, through lyrical language. (In a blue-book answer for the final exam of Lambert and Cracroft’s MoLit course, I argued the same, and added that the drama provided the audience with some aesthetic distance from a character’s claim that he was experiencing revelation—a distance that some audience members might appreciate— and that the drama offered a communal experience that would be valued in a Mormon community.)
***Thoughts?