A
recent article in the New York Times has left me thinking about the state of LDS writing. Go ahead: click through and read it, it's short, but interesting. Not perfectly awesome and amazing; it makes many wildly enormous summary statements like "Mormons gravitate even more powerfully than other Christians toward genre fiction." Hmmmm....really? And I, for one, am generally the opposite of sparkly and upbeat. But it makes some relevant points.
Plus it's cool to see two of my BYU professors mentioned in the NY Times (even if one of them is sort of an egotistical jerk.)
To sum up: the main point of the article is that there are so many LDS people writing successful fantasy novels because of our sunny and optimistic outlook. As this perspective doesn't fit into the literary fiction genre (which
Shannon Hale says requires the "decline and the ultimate destruction of the human spirit"), the article argues, those creative LDS types turn to fantasy because that's the only place that allows for optimism. (Also, according to the article, because novels without drinking and/or lots of sex are eventually categorized as some genre or another, but not literary. I think I could find a few exceptions...)
But I would argue that even the contemporary fiction written by LDS writers is fantasy.
Granted, much of what follows is filtered through my religious perspective, and I am far from the world's best example of being a Mormon. Perhaps if I were more successful at it, and didn't doubt and question, and need to find my own answers, and have the tendency to think, "yeah, but...," my perspective would be different.
I remember, when I read
My Name is Asher Lev for the first time, wondering—and I may have even written this as an annotation—why the same thing isn't done with the LDS faith. We are intelligent, creative people, and yet often our fiction doesn't so much strive
or grapple with our faith as simplify it. Much of the writing that is set in LDS families is generally very...mushy. It looks at troubles and more often than not finds a solution through faith, but it always seems entirely too easy in my mind. A few prayers, a trip to the temple, maybe a talk with a friend or religious leader, and then ah-ha! A dream is dreamed, a whisper of the Spirit is heard, or the perfect talk is shared over the pulpit! The problem is solved.
I know I am generalizing here, and I know there are exceptions. (Read the story at
this link for example, if you want to be troubled for the next twenty years or so.) There are a few LDS novels that are the exact opposite of what I am describing, stories that explore the implications of what it really means to live as an LDS person. In general, though, the easily-fixed plot line has been my experience with LDS fiction. I confess that I hold up my irritation and contempt for such novels without having explored the genre thoroughly. I've read annotations of a bajillion of them, but my reading of actual LDS novels ended with one that was about a woman caught in a bad marriage; the solution was that her husband was killed in a car wreck and then she was free to marry the other guy she'd been sharing a sort of friendship with.
Upon further thought, this plot development seems like it would qualify for at least a little bit of darkness, but it all happened so cheerily. "Look! Through someone's death my life is improved! That God of ours sure is clever!" Killing the problem isn't really a solution; it's just the ultimate deus ex machina. Even though it is something that could have a thorough development—I mean, what if you really were in a bad marriage? And sometimes you were so mad/upset/hurt/demoralized by your husband that you wished he was dead? And then he died. To me, that wouldn't be a solution. It would create other problems, like guilt, and doubt, and...other things you'd explore in an actual novel. In this book, though, the main character mourned a bit for the death of her awful husband, and then she got remarried to the other guy, and all was sunshine and light because, well, she didn't commit adultery, did she?
I'd call it a fairy tale except I admire fairy tales.
Think of what Asher Lev grapples with in Potok's novel. In order to express a truth, Asher creates paintings that alienate his family and religious community. They do not understand his work, but he doesn't know how to say (in paintings) his own truths in ways that would be safe within his religion. In the end, he makes a choice between the truths he wants to express in his art and the truths he has learned in his religion. Asher has to agonize over decisions and he isn't always sure what is right; nor are his parents. He has his faith but he has to figure out how to live with it, or if he even can. It isn't a happy ending—but to me, it is a true one. If you recast this into a typical LDS novel, Asher might've prayed, and been given a different artistic vision, or Aryeh might have convinced his son to make less divisive paintings, or maybe Rivkeh would've interceded and smoothed everything out, but somehow there would've been peace at the end, and a happy ending.
And to me, that is the greatest fantasy of them all: that if you pray hard enough, or live righteously enough, or are a good enough person, the things you are troubled with will eventually fall away. You will conquer them and you will do this using the tool of your faith. To me, this sets up a false expectation; if all I ever read were LDS novels, I would probably think of myself as a failure at living my faith, as my troubles have not fallen away, and many of my prayers have not been answered with a resounding, obvious, heavenly yes. I don't understand everything about my religion and some of our beliefs (traditions? doctrines? habits?) sit uneasily with me. Not so in the novels. All of those characters in all of those novels, living their virtuous lives—their doubts (when they have them) are explained, their problems are solved, their prayers are answered.
To me, this is a highly immoral act of a creative person: to create a false expectation of ease. To pass off as real and true a world where praying and living righteously are methods by which one avoids difficult things. Where there are always answers we can understand. Because think of someone who has experienced something hard for a long time, or maybe their entire lives. Did this hard thing continue to happen because they weren't faithful enough? Because they didn't pray enough? Because they weren't good enough? Of course not. Who knows, really, why a person experiences the hardships they do? Only God, in the end, and if I know anything it is this: God isn't Santa Claus.
The typical LDS novel to me is a mockery of my faith. It creates a silly, shallow version of an experience which is profound, complex, puzzling, moving, frustrating, and very often unfathomable. Such novels present a black-and-white portrait, whereas living faith is multicolor, nefarious, hard to pin down. Shaded and ellusive and far more complex than black and white.
I bump against this problem so often when I am writing that it stymies me. I don't necessarily want to write an LDS novel about LDS experiences; the stories banging around in my head aren't religious that way. But how do I separate my generally LDS perspective from the world at large? How do I know, for example, how it feels to have a regular, everyday grown up life that includes drinking wine with dinner? From my LDS experiences, drinking is something people do to rebel against the constraint not to drink, so our relationship with alcohol is different than a regular, everyday American's. So do I pretend I know what it feels like to have a different relationship to alcohol than I do? Do I avoid alcohol in my stories altogether? I don't want to write my characters as Mormons but I don't know what the world looks like without the Mormon perspective.
Do Catholics write novels with, say, Muslim characters? Or Protestants with a Wiccan narrator? Or can you, being a religious person, write a novel that is not always imbued with a religious perspective? How do you write a story that doesn't look through your own religious lens while still maintaining a sense of reality?
Maybe that really is why we write so much fantasy.
Which brings me back to Asher Lev. I don't think it is impossible—obviously—for an LDS woman from Utah to resonate so strongly with a book about a Jewish artist. I would imagine that many non-Jewish, non-artist people have read and resonated with My Name is Asher Lev. This is what good literature does: it transcends the situation we are in so that we can see, question, understand, or wonder at someone else's. But as much as I want to read (and perhaps even write) a novel that grapples with the LDS faith in true and difficult ways, I can't picture many other people wanting such a book. Does a market exist for it? Who would read it? Many of the Mormon readers I know (although, not all of them!) not only want to continue to read the usual LDS novel, they see it as a sign of their righteousness. So that leaves non-Mormons, and would a non-Mormon person be able to resonate with a Mormon story in the same way that so many non-Jewish people resonate with Asher's Jewish story?
Is the Mormon perspective simply too strange—too sunny and uplifting, as the NY Times article describes it—to resonate?
I want there to be a Mormon Shakespeare or Milton. Even better, a Mormon Chopin, or Flannery O'Conner or Christina Rosetti. Or how about an LDS Sylvia Plath while we're at it? I have too much faith in the creative process and the power of literature to doubt that there could be a writer who could do this: make an LDS perspective (a real one, not a flat, perfect one) resonate outside of the LDS culture. I think it hasn't happened yet because it requires a writer to look at his or her faith through a critical perspective—to see not only its good points but its weaknesses, and then to see how the weaknesses are a counterpoint to its goodnesses. (Not just something to brush away lightly.) It would require us to step outside of the fantasy we sometimes create in our actual living, breathing lives and to be honest about what happens. In my mind, a faith that is true should be strong enough to withstand this sort of critical examination. This is terrifying, of course, but is there another way to create great literature?
