My friend Andy wrote on her blog about this really powerful and influential talk by Boyd K. Packer about Mormonism and the arts. I haven’t read this talk before, and all I can say is: wow. Well, actually, that’s not all I can say, because I’m about to blog about it…
My initial impressions can basically be summed up as “youch!” “uh oh,” and “maybe there’s still hope for me.” In other words, it was a very good talk. As for specifics, here’s some of the bigger stuff that came to my mind:
It really was something of an indictment for my own attitude that I’ve had recently. I could go on and on about my own struggles with personal pride, but I’ll spare you. Basically, this talk led me to some self-introspection and started me on thinking about things that maybe I shouldn’t be so dismissive about–namely, Mormon fiction.
Yes, there is a lot of stuff there that is poorly written, clichéd, formulaic, preachy, etc etc, but that doesn’t mean that the genre is bad as a rule. Certainly not that the Mormon-ness of the works is the direct cause of these problems. Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s series was full of Mormon themes on ethical dilemmas and cosmology, but it was also some of the best sci fi written in this generation (funny enough, probably much better than his earlier stuff–which tried explicitly to take stories from the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith and reset them in an sf / fantasy setting. Blegh!).
The biggest thing about this talk was that it got me thinking about Neuromancer, which I finished just recently. I have no doubt that every one of BKP’s individual hairs would stand on end if he read just one chapter from that book. It was explicit, violent, godless, and full of evil. I felt spiritually depressed at certain parts of it. But I can see why it’s considered such a good work–and not only that, but what’s actually good about it as well. The writing was just superb, the setting felt real, the ideas were fascinating, etc. I learned a lot from reading it.
The question I have is where is the line in what you expose yourself to? Do we flee the worldliness of the world so much that it would be unthinkable to even pick up a book like this? Carry that to the extreme, and you get that one girl who questioned whether I was a worthy priesthood holder for writing The Clearest Vision! OTOH, do we go so far in the opposite direction that we embrace the worldliness of the world like Richard Dutcher appears to have done?
Obviously, I’m not the only one asking these questions. I’m just stumbling into this debate–probably one of the largest ongoing dialectics in the LDS arts community. I would like to say that it comes down to an “in the world, not of the world” kind of thing: that we need to be able to look at the world as it really is–look evil in the face and recognize it–while remaining spiritually grounded. It sure seems more conducive to the arts than some kind of siege mentality, while at the same time taking care of spiritual needs.
Or does it? How does this actually work in the real world? Is it wrong for me to read books like Neuromancer? Is there really a way to remain spiritually grounded while exposing yourself to these things? What is the alternative to the Utah bubble–to the siege mentality that tends to create preachy, clichéd Mormon fiction?
I’m just jumping into this debate. I’ve still got a lot of catching up to do.
But the talk gave me hope in some ways, and that was good. I’m not one of these self-aggrandizing people that BKP was talking about. I’m not writing for myself, I’m writing for the story and the fact that I’ve just got something inside of me burning to tell stories. Call it a gift, call it craziness, but it’s who I am and what I do (I’d like to think it’s a gift, at least). 🙂
And, besides giving me reason for hope, it helped me to redirect myself. I want to write stuff that God can really speak out of. That involves me striving a little harder in my personal discipleship, as well as stepping back and letting God do the preaching instead of me. It involves recognizing God more often for his influence over my creative process. In a sentence, it involves writing under the mindset of blessing the lives of others. That’s probably the single greatest message I got from this talk: bless the lives of others in your art.
Will I be doing this explicitly? No, because that’s probably how so much of this Mormon fiction became so clichéd and preachy in the first place. I just need to perfect my discipleship in the gospel and stay close to the Lord, and make it possible for these things to distill on my work “like the dews of heaven.”
I find that the magical moments of teaching (elementary art) come when (a) I, and institution, provide a structure (classroom time, materials, a measure of instruction…) (b) I give a significant degree of student choice and agency with materials and outcome–not cookie cutter, look alike artworks (c) students honestly try. The magic of good writing may come in similar fashion: mix of structure (provided on page), reader agency and honesty (intelligence, exposure and effort). Great words offer multiple thinking options but at the same time, direction (plot, message, description). “Dews of heaven” are the “magic” if you will. It is real and it is there! More power to you!
I think Dutcher is just stupid. He is advertising and associating with the wrong audience now. One of the first things any writer has to do is to target their audience. What he really wants to say is not going to get across to the people he wants to communicate with. Why? Because they are going to be so angry about how vile his movie is that they aren’t going to listen to him. So therefore he has forfieted the right to communicate to his audience because he didn’t respect their boundaries or values. So in the end he fails as a communicator and if you fail as a communicator doesn’t that mean that you fail as a storyteller? That’s my two cents. As for the reading bad stuff. Question you have to ask yourself is if it is worth it to lose the presence of the spirit? Especially if that spirit is what supports you day by day? Especially if you invoke that spirit to help your writing?
It’s true. I think that Dutcher found out the hard way that film isn’t an art, it’s a business, and when he saw the typical Mormon entrepreneurial types take over Mormon cinema making silly, corny movies like “Single’s Ward,” he got upset and never forgave the culture for doing that. He takes things too far to the extreme, with the idea that something that’s R-rated is good because it’s R-rated, when that isn’t the case at all.
That’s a good point about losing the presence of the spirit. That can be tricky, though, when people confuse emotions with spiritual impressions. Something that offends people on an emotional pseudo-spiritual level might actually do a lot to open one’s eyes. Ender’s Game was like that–it really opened my eyes to a lot of truths about the world that I hadn’t seen before, but there were things in there that would have offended a Mormon who couldn’t tell the difference between spiritual impressions and emotions (such as killing). I guess that really, it has less to do with the presence of evil things in the story than with the experience of reading it–which may explain why Mormon fiction fails to produce good literature: the writers/publishers place restrictions on what the characters can/can’t due according to the way Mormon culture interprets the gospel. So really, the important thing is to pay attention to your experience as you’re reading the story, not necessarily the content itself (although content will directly affect your experience). Very interesting.
Lots of people like to complain that Mormons don’t produce good literature, but really you just have to know who to read. There are well written book and badly written books. Thankfully, the well written books are being published more. So, you should give some newish Mormon books a read and see if you like them before you said mormon fiction fails to produce good literature (and by implication never produces good literature at all). I like to read LDS fiction and I get annoyed with people who don’t read it and bash it. You have to read it in order to bash it I say. After you read bashing is fair game but not before. 🙂