Ethical Responsibility and the Conduct of Mormon Criticism

My mission call left me with several restless months to kill prior to donning my Mr. Mac suit and entering the ranks of the shaven and the sure. One day, after rummaging through bins of remaindered books in BYU's bookstore, I ended up spending ninety-nine cents for a slim volume called Letters to Smoother, etc. I hope one day a book of mine is remaindered in such a fortuitous way, for this report of a 1980 BYU Symposium on the Humanities included a statement by the visiting critic Wayne Booth during a question and answer session that shot through me like a column of light in a shadowed grove. In answer to the perennial question, "When will there be a great flowering of Mormon arts?" he answered, "We won't get a great artistic culture until we have a great critical culture" (32).

Never did any passage of criticism come with more power to the heart of a man awaiting a mission than this did at this time to mine. I reflected on it again and again. I kept company with the idea, returning to it, conversing with it, embracing it like a brother. I had always held it to be axiomatic that Mormonism should be able to provide an engine for powerful art, engaging art, art that would do more than flatter other Mormons but would prove a catalyst to people's lives and perspectives on either border of membership. Having imbibed into the nuclei of my cells the charge and blessing given to Mormon artists by President Kimball in 1977⁽¹⁾ and the prophecy by Orson Whitney of the glorious future he foresaw for Mormon letters,⁽²⁾ I have with many others awaited and looked for those bright artistic and literary stars that will lift us into that realm where the power and depth of our religion combine with the power and depth of the arts we relish. Yes! We will have Shakespeares and Miltons of our own!

Obviously, if we are to give more than lip service to the tremendous possibilities inherent in that alluring synthesis of Mormonism and good art, we must encourage Mormon artists. But we must also focus consciously on creating a climate in which good art is understood, appreciated, and encouraged. Otherwise, just what are the chances that a Mormon audience--too often having grown up on Edward Guest's doggerel, Especially for Mormons, and the "paraliterature" of pulp sentimental fiction--would actually recognize such a distinguished literary light were he or she actually among us? Not to be cynical, but I have imagined that if given truth serum, certain Deseret Book customers would confess their standard for good literature to be whether the book in question has a one-word title that names a smiling Mormon girl on its cover. Who knows? Maybe Shakespeare could become known enough to be recognized and valued by the Mormon public if Much Ado About Nothing were to be retitled Beatrice and Emma Thompson were put on the jacket wearing a pink angora sweater. But in approaching sarcasm, I begin to distance myself from the method and message of Wayne Booth's exemplary criticism.

In The Company We Keep and in his earlier work, Critical Understanding, Booth lays out principles for having the best discussions about literature that are possible, the most desirable kinds of conversation. Such healthy verbal exchange can create the climate in which lives and arts together flourish. "To me," he says in The Company We Keep, "the most important of all critical tasks is to participate in--and thus to reinforce--a critical culture, a vigorous conversation, that will nourish in return those who feed us with their narratives" (136). If the creation of art is often depicted as an egotistical pursuit, then Booth portrays the craft of criticism as a communal one: something we do together because we enjoy the conversation and because we can both sup and supper supply; we may nourish in return those who feed us with their narratives.

Notice that Booth compares narratives to food: stories, and our stories about our experiences with stories, are something we consume to do us good, to provide us with something that is essential, daily, for our well being--just like carbohydrates or calories. And while the occasional story may give our souls indigestion, the best purgative is a conversation in which one can--forgive the literalness--"get it all out." Isn't this the case? When you first read I Spy a Nephite (Pat Bagley's Mormon spinoff of the Where's Waldo series) and were so disturbed by its depictions of the sheer ontological presence of so many crowds of people, wasn't your reading redeemed when your child finally pointed out to you where Norman the Mormon was hiding in that cultural hall tableau? My example is facetious, but the principle is not: people make sense of art--good, bad, or otherwise--only by talking it through with others. We ought to give more credit to the legitimacy of that informal and everyday procedure. After having experienced some art or literature, we are regularly eager to share, to express an opinion, to work through what bothered us, or to praise what pleased us. We already make it a habit to come to terms with the things we experience by expressing our judgments in conversation. Booth gives attention to the dynamics of this process, pointing out how the meanings and interpretations we derive are arrived at together with others and that these are subject to change as we receive new information or hold new conversations. In Company he has coined the word "coduction," describing this process of mutually figuring things out. Booth collapses the difference between arriving at our judgments and defending them, for the two activities become one in the process of coduction: you make assertions and provide reasons, as do I, and together we synthesize a meaning unavailable to us without that alternate point of view (73). To return to the food metaphor, we each bring different ingredients to the mix, and the meal takes on a different flavor each time it is renewed.

Achieving the critical culture that Booth claims is necessary for the flowering of Mormon arts only happens as we exchange our stories and our accounts of our experiences with stories, compassionate-service-and-casserole-like, with our reciprocating neighbors. How else will Mormons attain the sort of good "taste" necessary to discern a Mormon Milton unless they are regularly "tasting" the stories all around them and also sampling the opinions of their siblings at the banquet? Some are wary over the word "symposium" nowadays, but it means literally to drink together. Its etymology summons up the image of ancient Greeks gathering to share a meal as they share their thoughts and readings. That's the kind of culture that fosters good art--one in which we are hospitable both to one another and to one another's storytelling. Bruce Jorgensen, in his 1991 presidential address to this body, urged us to consider hospitality as a fundamental metaphor defining Mormon criticism. Criticism as hospitality nicely combines the metaphor of food with Booth's metaphor of conversation. Jorgensen emphasized remaining open to the stranger, welcoming him or her to our table in the ancient custom of entertainment that included an invitation to "Let the Stranger Say," as Jorgensen's remarks were titled.

Booth partakes of this spirit of openness but also explores the ethical dangers of remaining too open, a qualification that would satisfy another past president of AML, Richard Cracroft, who urges us to train our ears to discern the authentic Mormon voice. After all, just as there are some foods that are not healthful, certain stories or artistic works may be too caloric, too sumptuously fatty, or even dangerously poisonous. Certainly all foods are not of equal value, neither gustatorily nor nutritionally. And we have our Word of Wisdom to caution us against imbibing certain substances altogether. Without due attention, we could end up consuming art that might cause an unhealthful addiction, or by consuming indiscriminately we could end up with what I call "Chuck-A-Rama-itis," an ailment that comes about when we mistake the banquet of literary delights for an all-you-can eat pig trough. If we Mormons learn in holy places to provide ourselves constant nourishment to mind and body, we can only suppose that a discriminating diet should govern all our appetites. When we accept the basic assumption that art has stirring and strong effects on minds and souls, we cannot be too flip to chime in with chacun son gout, "to each according to his or her taste."

No, taste does not come about just by tasting, but by testing, by proving the worth of all things literary and holding fast to that which is true. It requires a critical culture committed to a refining process that heightens our powers of discrimination, a culture, according to Booth, of "those who are willing and able to judge whether a given work of art is virtuous, lovely, or of good report, or praiseworthy, and will thus know whether to seek after more things of that kind" (32).

In Booth's address last night, he repeated this criterion but qualified his definition of a critical culture by adding an important factor: such a culture must include hosts of would-be writers who do not simply read and assess but who also try their own hand at poetry or fiction. Consequently, such will have a crafting, not just a crafty, knowledge of the arts they read. In that spirit, I have penned this sonnet in which I explore Orson Whitney's vision for Mormon arts:

Shakespeares of Our Own - I

If Mormon's book so thick with life invites
Ourselves, our seed, our world to Christ to come,
What need we train on Shakespeare's tome our sights,
Our hopes, our time? What vain and greedy sum
Can we unto the gospel pure append
When faith, repentance, water, spirit speak
With eloquence divine? What need to blend
The din of actors' drone, from fictions seek
The sins of lust o'erblown, the frictions proud:
Revenge, deceit, immodest rage and crime?
What bawdy bodies boldly bent or loud
Can thoughts redeem, who evil's actions mime?
A Shakespeare of our own would prove a shame,
To foul us in, not move us from, our blame.

My sonnet worries over the negative effects of the arts, especially in contrast to the more pure sources of edification offered to us in the house of Mormon faith. Hand-wringing over what evils art can effect is a classic commonplace that goes back to Plato. Ironically, it is this same concern over the moral effects of the arts that also constitutes one of the prime tenets of their justification, especially within the tradition of the humanities. Literature and art have long been held to be humanizing, life-affirming, even culture-building. As Booth points out, it is the moral dimension to art that is the operating assumption upon which so many people read or teach literature: literature is supposed to be good for you--not just good for your mind, but for your character as a whole.⁽³⁾ Certainly Mormon critics have been unashamed in championing the potential moral goodness of literature, as Edward L. Hart did in a Brigham Young University Centennial lecture called "The Need Beyond Reason." There, rehearsing conventional arguments for the study of literature and language against opposing utilitarian views, Hart appealed to Latter-day Saint values and to their sense of the eternal consequences of education: literature and language lead to the "enlargement of souls" (3). Hart's opinion is representative of views held among those Latter-day Saints who value both their religion and literature: reading literature is a vital enterprise with beneficial moral consequences.

Wayne Booth situates himself squarely within this humanistic literary tradition that continues to hold forth such ideals regarding literature, but he is honest enough to acknowledge candidly the misgivings many have with art as they examine it from their own moral standards. To navigate this quandary he introduces us to ethical criticism, an approach that gives validity to our subjective, values-based assessments, claiming they are important to the conversation.

However, by opening up values-based assessments and making ethics a primary consideration in literary evaluation, Booth warns us against a dangerous form of pseudo-criticism that is possible once the doors of ethical criticism have been opened--the rendering of absolute judgments as to the goodness or badness of a given piece of art. This is not at all the purpose or method of ethical criticism as Booth lays it out. The most significant part of Booth's ethical-critical approach is not that he encourages ethical, moral, or values-based assessments, but that he relocates the focus of ethical criticism, making its new object not the individual works of authors, but the conduct we maintain in creating, experiencing, and discussing both art and criticism. Let me repeat that to be very clear. The ethical critic is not that person who renders judgments on books or other art forms in reference to given moral values; rather, the ethical critic is he or she who examines the behavior of authors, readers, and critics as they go about the creation of, the reading or experience of, and the discussion about art.

Booth's ethical criticism, as will be soon apparent, has a long list of dramatis personae. It is crowded with people, each of whom has the obligration to fulfill certain responsibilities relative to the other players involved. Booth describes a web of responsibilities that obtain among authors, readers, and critics, leaving little room for facile, absolute, or dogmatic assertions of moral worth. This is a sober qualification to ethical criticism, for it does not let us get away with the conveniences of strong labels such as "good" and "evil," however practiced at or tempted to use them that we may be.

Let me provide an example of how absolute value judgments are both easily rendered and little useful for making sense of the complexities with which we experience art. Given the fact that Martin Scorcese's motion picture, The Last Temptation of Christ, was decried by Christianity at large for its apparently blasphemous depiction of Jesus, it would seem an easy thing to classify it as a "bad" movie, at least if you share Mormon or Christian values that include honoring Christ. If it is, how can we account for the experience of my Jewish friend in Los Angeles? Having taken the missionary discussions, she remained noncommittal because she could not believe in Christ. But upon seeing Last Temptation, in which Jesus is depicted in a very human way, doubting his Messianic calling and struggling in his mind with what he should do, my friend gained faith in Christ. "For the first time," she reported, "I could believe in the idea that someone could understand the inner struggles that I've been through. The Jesus that I heard about from the missionaries was too good for me to believe that he could really understand me." I have never seen a clearer example of art having a moral effect: because she saw the film, she joined the Church. Can one gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? How, then, can this good end, gaining faith in Christ and entrance to His kingdom, come about through a plainly "bad" work of art?

Booth provides us a way for understanding what happened to my friend by focusing on the moral quality of the experience of art. Given her background, given the questions she was then facing, that movie had that specific and beneficial effect upon her. The effect would differ with others, because of their individual perspectives and background. Are we prepared to acknowledge such experience and to base our critical standards on more than the work of art in itself? It becomes a harder task, with more complexities, but one wonders whether those absolute moral judgments about art works are all that moral if one leaves out of the picture such saliently important elements as the particular nature of the individual who experiences that art. It would seem that Mormon belief in the worth of individual souls, in the inviolability of individual agency, and in the process of learning truth for ourselves would predispose us to sympathize with Booth's focus on the audience of art.

Booth's emphasis on personal experience may at first blush appear to smack of relativism, but he keeps a sharp and resisting eye on that bugbear. Although individual experience of art may differ, this does not release individuals from their obligations to one another. For example, doesn't my Jewish friend have a responsibility not to generalize her experience to others for whom Last Temptation might live up to its name? Didn't Martin Scorcese, who is Catholic, have a responsibility to his Catholic brothers and sisters in his artistic choices? Don't we practicing Christians have a duty to Mr. Scorcese not to judge him uncharitably, whatever our conclusions about the movie? Do we have a responsibility to see Last Temptation before we can speak of it one way or another to our brothers and sisters?

This emphasis on responsibility should be attractive to Mormons. Deep in the heart of Mormonism is the idea that we must be accountable for our actions, as the second article of faith states.⁽⁴⁾

Moreover, our baptismal and temple covenants bind us to serve and honor others, extending our sense of responsibility beyond the personal realm.⁽⁵⁾ And because of our intended love for all humankind, we are responsible to serve them, hear them, know of them, understand them, perhaps even read them or write of them.

Booth's criticism doesn't let us get away with making judgments about art or with making art in the first place without examining the matrix of responsibilities that obtain among artists or authors, readers or audiences, and art works themselves. Booth categorizes and describes these responsibilities in chapter 5 of The Company We Keep (124-55). In order to make these responsibilities relevant to an LDS audience and to show the potent ethical dimension that Booth invokes, I will apply Booth's categories of responsibility in a series of questions relating to Mormon literature. If we, as Mormons, value responsibility, let us consider, through Booth's categories, what our responsibilities might be. I might add that it is important to recall that these questions do not stand by themselves; they qualify one another. Sometimes, especially when negative judgments are rendered, we myopically ignore all the other people who are involved in any piece of art--such as the artists themselves or other readers or viewers--and the responsibilities those people have in the larger picture. The following questions should help us not to do that. The first set of questions deals with authors; the second, with readers; the third, with critics.

Ethical Responsibilities of Authors

First, what are the author's responsibilities towards flesh-and-blood readers? If a Mormon missionary reads Béla Petsco's story of a missionary who fornicates, "One Damned Good-looking Woman," and chooses to imitate the protagonist, to what extent is Petsco responsible? What if, on the other hand, the story scares the real elder away from sin? How far is Petsco responsible?

Next, what are the author's duties to his or her work of art? Just how much do we owe, as authors and Mormons, to executing art well? Stanley Kimball complained in 1964 that "the most unqualified amateur with scissors and paste can throw together a poorly conceived, half researched, carelessly written, and popularized pot-boiler, find a publisher, and be acclaimed throughout Mormondom as an authority" (126). Is doing so unethical, given our religion's focus on the pursuit of excellence? Or does our duty to our youth or our eternal salvation, for that matter, place the doctrinal and doctrinaire element of such novels over the aesthetic ones? Kimball also pointed out something that Wayne Booth has observed in another setting, the problem Mormons have with congratulating any and all artistic efforts, whatever the result. When he was judging Roadshow festivals, Kimball complained, the lowest possible category that he was allowed to assign was "good"--an indicator of Mormon reluctance to hold artists responsible for making good art. Well, then, if Susan Wakefield reviews Charly and Sam and finds these works by Jack Weyland to be artistically inferior, does Weyland have a duty to improve his artistry by the time Stephanie rolls off the press? Eugene England has criticized Jack Weyland and Shirley Sealy alike because they violate a standard that is both literary and Latter-day Saint: they neglect to create characters of sufficient detail and complexity that readers believe they actually have free agency instead of being "ciphers manipulated by the author for didactic purposes" (9-10). England's standard is provocative because it adds a theological dimension (the LDS belief in agency) to an aesthetic criterion (realistic portrayal of characters)--a dimension, perhaps, that implies obligation. Does a Mormon author have a moral duty to depict characters who realistically portray free agency?

Next, what is the author's duty to himself or herself as someone who has duties other than art? AML sponsored an important panel in its 1993 meeting called "Domesticity and the Call to Art," in which the real-world costs of writing poetry and fiction were honestly revealed. Can Julie Nichols justify not making a better dinner for her family because she is tapping out another short story? Our responsibilities are never in a vacuum. We always owe duties to many parties. Where can art fit in legitimately?

Next, what are the duties of an author to himself or herself, in light of what art does to its creator in the artistic process? Montaigne said "I have no more made my book than my book has made me" (qtd. in Booth 1988, 128). If David Dollahite creates a character, as he does in "Possum Funeral," who is a frighteningly irresponsible and petty Mormon father, does Dollahite have a responsibility to actively resist becoming the monster he creates? If authors inhabit the moral universes of the characters they create, should they be fortified with some kind of inoculation against being morally corrupted as they spend time depicting evil?⁽⁶⁾ How is it that evil can be depicted responsibly? Orson Scott Card essay, "The Problem of Evil in Fiction," is an interesting exploration on the necessity of depicting evil, but does a theory justifying evil's depiction make him less responsible for the distasteful depiction of graphic sex that readers encounter on the opening page of his novel, Lost Boys? If authors tend to become like the characters they create, do they owe it to themselves to create literary characters that oppose their own weaknesses or that invite them to develop certain characteristics?

Next, what is the author's duty to himself or herself as a career artist? Is it ethical for a Latter-day Saint to consider herself a career artist? Given the necessity of planning and the difficulty of making a living as an artist, don't Mormons aware of their artistic potential owe it to themselves to craft a career plan that may involve short-term compromises, such as shoddy but well-paying writing jobs? Is it most ethical for a talented Mormon to refrain from or to attempt to become a Mormon celebrity, a big fish in a small pond?

Next, what does the author owe to those whose lives he or she exploits as "material"? Did Terry Tempest Williams observe a proper reverence towards her cancer-stricken mother when she wrote of her with both candor and eloquence in Refuge? Do depictions of sexuality risk violating responsibilities to one's marriage partner? Given the honor due General Authorities, could a Mormon artist legitimately portray the lives, thoughts, concerns, or personal lives of these men and women? Would it ever be appropriate to base a Mormon stage play on the tragedy of a "fallen" General Authority, for example? Did Maurine Whipple sufficiently respect the person of Brigham Young in her rougher-than-correlated depiction of him in The Giant Joshua? Did she fulfill a duty by uncorrelating our image of him?

Next, what is the author's responsibility towards those whose labor is exploited or whose attention is neglected to make the art work possible? Should the Church sponsor artistic works as the NEA does, or as the Catholic church has, when those same funds could be spent on humanitarian aid, welfare, or missionary work? Should we ask for cultural refinement to be reinstated in Relief Society at the expense of the extra Spiritual Living lesson? Whose needs go unmet when Church or home resources are allocated to artists?

Next, what is the author's duty to society generally, or to the world, or the future? Given Mormon aspirations to bring about Zion, should Mormon writers be held accountable for the degree to which they bring about a Zion society? Or perhaps, a better America? In light of Mormon concern over posterity, should artistic works be judged on their capacity to be enduring cultural legacies instead of ephemeral and consumable entities? What duty does Mormon poet Lance Larson owe to his son and daughter when he composes a poem?

And if Mormons have a duty to the future, do they have one to the past? Do Mormon writers need to invoke or come to terms with their pioneer heritage? Should Mormon writers be encouraged to make more significant attempts at portraying Nephite or Lamanite civilization in novels and stories? In light of their valuable literary output, what do we owe to Mormon and Moroni in terms of ours?

Next, what is the author's responsibility to truth? Dare they say what is truth? How responsible is Gerald Lund when he combines fictional characters with historical figures in his best-selling The Work and the Glory series--now up to five volumes? Does the movie Legacy responsibly communicate the truth about the LDS pioneer experience if it substitutes fictional characters for historical ones? What if it adds a soundtrack to events that were not, in fact, accompanied by music? Are some truths, such as the life of Joseph Smith, most responsibly represented by multiple, differing artistic accounts? Can LDS art pretend to serve truth as well as or better than LDS history? Should the Association for Mormon Letters have a liaison to the Mormon History Association in order to be certain that historical fiction has historical legitimacy?

Ethical Responsibilities of Readers

As for the reader, what does he or she owe to flesh-and-blood writers? If we read Donald Marshall's The Rummage Sale and are somehow improved, do we owe him a carefully crafted fan letter? Do we have a duty to correct Walter Kirn because he unfairly represented Mormon immorality in "The Yellow Stars of Utah," a nationally published story? Or do we have a duty to applaud him for writing a conversion story that is artful, lyric, and unsentimental in his "Whole Other Bodies"? Do we owe it to that timid writer in our ward to get her work read by someone who could publish it? Do we owe it to that timid writer in our ward to keep her from publishing her story or to insist that it be revised? Do we have a responsibility to make sure that more than Wasatch Front authors are represented in LDS literary reviews? Do we have a responsibility not to critique someone's poor quality story too harshly in public if it could injure them, even if not libelously?

Next, what is the reader's responsibility to the work of art itself? Should I, a happily married Mormon male, feel an obligation to understand the complicated problems of Megan Stevens, the abandoned wife whose marriage has disintegrated without her knowledge in Linda Sillitoe's Sideways to the Sun? How much of myself must I turn over to Brian Evenson's bleak and nihilistic world in his Altmann's Tongue? Do I have to read clear to the end of the giant, Giant Joshua to assess it fairly?

Next, what do readers owe to themselves in the reading process? Am I true to myself if I do not resist falling all the way into the mixed morals of Levi Peterson's Canyons of Grace? Do I owe it to myself to read Neal Chandler's story, "The Only Divinely Authorized Plan for Financial Success in This Life or the Next" if I have dabbled in the dark art of Amway? Should I keep myself from reading Judith Freeman's The Chinchilla Farm because she graphically describes Mormon garments?

Next, what is the reader's responsibility to society? If I read Orson Scott Card and David Dollahite's recent short story collection, Turning Hearts, and find it to be as non-Mormon as it purports to be Mormon, do I have an obligation to assert and defend my conclusions to a public who might mistake the book as being representative of the real thing? Is an exposé ever an ethical option in Mormon society?

Ethical Responsibilities of Critics

Finally, and this is the site of ethical obligation most important to Booth, what are the reader's responsibility to other readers? If I read a review about a work that matters to me with which I starkly disagree, do I owe the reviewer a conversation in which I support my opinion? If Card's Ender's Game series moves me to understand better Mormon weaknesses in fearing alien influences to our culture, do I have a missionary-like obligation to convert others to my positive opinion, or perhaps even to justify to them the legitimacy of the science fiction genre in which it occurs? Does the Association for Mormon Letters have a responsibility to the Mormon public at large? Do literature-loving Mormons have an obligation to support organizations such as this one with their time, talents, and means? Do we as members of a society devoted to Mormon letters have a responsibility to apprise readers or writers when they seem to be violating obligations we recognize them to have?

These are potent questions. By focusing on readers' responsibilities to each other we are brought back to our starting point. "High artistic culture," said Booth in a 1980 article,

is made by those who have learned the habits of discrimination, the habits of criticism. Great music is composed only in cultures in which many people have learned to recognize and reject mediocre music when they hear it; great literature is written only in cultures that have developed audiences who are willing to talk about differences of quality, to reward those who do best, and to "punish"--with neglect, at the least, and with painful criticism when necessary--whatever is second rate." . . .

Whatever else can be said about the great periods of religious art in the past, they have always occurred in conjunction with periods of great critical alertness in the "consuming public." (33, 32)

Wayne Booth has helped me realize that our public has been all too consumed with awaiting that Mormon Shakespeare, passively, instead of preparing for her (or him), actively. We have supposed individuals would come, savior-like, to usher in a new dispensation but have failed to see that our task is to establish those conditions in which great writers can be nurtured, encouraged, fostered, and recognized for what they have done. Collections of Mormon short stories and poetry have been titled Greening Wheat and Harvest. But we must till and tend the fields before we can expect to be heavy laden with nourishing sheaves. The sweat from Adam's brow came less from eating his bread than from planting, hoeing, and tending his crops. And I am certain that Eve would confess that conceiving her children was not the painful part of the child-bearing process. Like parents to a fruitful culture, we conceive it in a certain pleasure, but we must thank Wayne Booth for calling our attention to the all-important gestation period of that vision. I was going to continue this metaphor, calling the annual meetings of the Association for Mormon Letters a kind of prenatal ultrasound in an unusually long pregnancy; however, I will conclude instead with another sonnet, a counterpart to my earlier one:

Shakespeares of Our Own - II

Oh brave new world! No longer dim and cold
But warmed with knowledge strong and priesthood sure
That Jesus Christ restored to Joseph, bold
Enough to beg of heaven his desires pure.
Can we, the true yet stripling church, request
Our liberal answering God to show us well
How we through consecration may be blessed
To dramas act and pictures paint and stories tell?
If Shakespeares are to be or not to be
Among ourselves, the saints of latter days,
We must, as Joseph, study, question, see
What virtues lay in Shakespeare's words and ways.
Before the Prophet's prayer was ever said
He long had savored well the words he read.

Just as Joseph Smith prepared for the glorious coming forth of truth and knowledge for which he was an instrument, so must we prepare for the glorious coming forth of Mormon artists. As Joseph studied the sacred texts, we must study our literary ones, testing their virtues and savoring their truths. As he listened to what many had to say on religion and then discussed it openly and frankly with many, so must we take in many kinds of art and discuss this openly with others. And perhaps, just as Joseph found miraculous, divine help in taking seriously the powerful words he read in the Bible, so might we receive miraculous, divine help as we take seriously the powerful literary words we read in other canons of writing. As we attempt this, conversing with one another thoughtfully and ethically as Wayne Booth has encouraged us to do, we will create that critical culture that will both foster and recognize the art and literature to which we aspire.

Bagley, Pat. I Spy a Nephite. Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1989.

Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1988.

---. Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

---. "Letter to Smoother." Letters to Smoother, etc.: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual BYU Symposium on the Humanities. Eds. Joy C. Ross and Steven C. Walker. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, [ca. 1980].

---. "Religion versus Art: Can the Ancient Conflict Be Resolved?" Arts and Inspiration. Ed. Steven Sondrup. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1980. 26-34.

Card, Orson Scott. Ender's Game. New York: Tor, 1977.

---. Lost Boys (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

---. "The Problem of Evil." A Storyteller in Zion. Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, 1993. 69-98.

---. Speaker for the Dead. New York: Tor, 1986.

---. Xenocide. New York: Tor, 1991.

---, and David Dollahite, eds. Turning Hearts: Short Stories on Family Life. Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, 1994.

Chandler, Neal. "The Only Divinely Authorized Plan for Financial Success in This Life or the Next." Benediction: A Book of Stories. Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 1989. 13-22.

Cracroft, Richard H. "Attuning the Authentic Mormon Voice: Stemming the Sophic Tide in LDS Literature." The Association for Mormon Letters Annual 1994 [Salt Lake City: AML, 1994], 1:34-43. Reprinted in Sunstone 16.5 (July 1993): 51-57.

Dollahite, David. "Possum Funeral." Turning Hearts: Short Stories on Family Life. Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, 1994. 5-35.

England, Eugene. "Contemporary Mormon Fiction." Course packet for English 368, "Literature of the Latter-day Saints," Brigham Young University, September 1994. England's essay was excerpted and revised from his "Coming of Age: The Recent Work of Nine Authors Shows a New Maturity in Mormon Fiction," This People 11.2 (Summer 1990): 38-39 and "Novels and Niceness; Chaos and Killing: Mormon Fiction Runs the Gamut," This People 11.3 (Fall 1990): 65-68.

---, ed. Greening Wheat: Fifteen Mormon Short Stories. Murray, UT: Orion Books, 1983.

---, and Dennis Clark, eds. Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989.

Evenson, Brian. Altmann's Tongue: Stories and a Novella. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Freeman, Judith. The Chinchilla Farm. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Hart, Edward L. "The Need Beyond Reason,""The Need Beyond Reason" and Other Essays: College of Humanities Centennial Lectures, 1975-76B. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 1976): 1-10.

Jorgensen, Bruce W. "To Tell and Hear Stories: Let the Stranger Say." The Association for Mormon Letters Annual 1994 [Salt Lake City: AML, 1994], 1:19-33. Reprinted in Sunstone 16.5 (July 1993): 40-50.

Kimball, Stanley B. Letter to the Editor. BYU Studies 5.2 (Winter 1964): 125-28.

Kirn, Walter. "Whole Other Bodies," My Hard Bargain. New York: Knopf, 1990. 53-58.

---. "Yellow Stars of Utah." Esquire 112.1 (July 1989): 117-19. Reprinted and retitled as "Planetarium." Kirn. My Hard Bargain. New York: Knopf, 1990. 3-12.

Lund, Gerald N. Pillar of Light: A Historical Novel. Vol. 1 in The Work and the Glory (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1990).

Marshall, Donald R. The Rummage Sale: Collections and Recollections. Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book, 1972.

Nichols, Julie J., Gail Newbold, Lisa Orme Bickmore, Margaret Blair Young, and Bruce W. Jorgensen. "Domesticity and the Call to Art: A Panel." The Association for Mormon Letters Annual 1994 [Salt Lake City: AML, 1994], 2:284-96.

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Peterson, Levi S. The Canyons of Grace. Murray, Utah: Orion Books, 1982.

Sillitoe, Linda. Sideways to the Sun. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987.

Wakefield, Susan. "Sermons in Novel Form." Sunstone Review 2 (January/February 1982): 24-25. See Orson Scott Card's rejoinder to her review in his "Sermons in Critical Form," A Storyteller in Zion. 130-37.

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1. "For years I have been waiting for someone to do justice in recording in song and story and painting and sculpture the story of the Restoration, the reestablishment of the kingdom of God on earth . . ." Kimball, "The Gospel Vision of the Arts," Ensign (July 1977, 5.

2. "We will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own. God's ammunition is not exhausted. His brightest spirits are held in reserve for the latter times. In God's name and by his help we will build up a literature whose top shall touch heaven, though its foundations may now be low in [the] earth." Orson F. Whitney, "Home Literature," A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints. Eds. Richard H. Cracroft and Neal E. Lambert. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1974), 206.

3. For a summary and refutation of this fundamental humanist stance, see Peter Thorpe, Why Literature is Bad for You (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1980).

4. "We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam's transgression."

5. The prophet Alma's remarks in Book of Mormon best express the obligations to others that we take upon ourselves through baptism: "[A]nd now, as ye are desirous to come into the fold of God, and to be called his people, and are willing to bear one another's burdens, that they may be light; Yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death, that ye may be redeemed of God, and be numbered with those of the first resurrection, that ye may have eternal life . . . what have you against being baptized . . . ?" (Mosiah 18:8-9).

6. Consider, for example, C. S. Lewis's reservations regarding writing from the perspective of a devil. Inhabiting a "diabolical" point of view in his popular Screwtape Letters produced what Lewis called "a sort of spiritual cramp. The work into which I had to project myself while I spoke through Screwtape was all dust, grit, thirst, and itch. Every trace of beauty, freshness, and geniality had to be excluded. It almost smothered me before I was done." Preface, The Screwtape Letters. Rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1961), xiii.