[Presented before the Association of Mormon Letters at the UC-Berkeley LDS Institute of Religion, 29 March 2019]
“Mark Z. Danielewski was born in New York City and lives in Los Angeles.” So reads the deceptively austere book-flap bio for the author of the 2000 best-seller House of Leaves, the 2006 National Book Award finalist Only Revolutions, and most recently The Familiar Vol. 1-5, published serially from 2015-2017. Yet as befits an author who plays with emptiness both metaphysically and literally on the page, the immense geography left unmentioned between these two coastal Metropoles may prove to be the most crucial of all towards understanding his immense literary labyrinths. For if, as that other labyrinthine writer Jorge Luis Borges once mused, “to always omit a word…is perhaps the most emphatic way of calling attention to that word”, then Danielewski’s biographical omissions reveal more than they conceal.
Specifically, left unsaid in this bio is the fact that Danielewski, born in 1966, spent his teenage years in Provo, Utah, where his father, Polish-born film-maker Tad Danielewski, was the Professor of Theatre and Film Studies at Brigham Young University from 1975-1989 (before then moving on to USC, where he finished his career and eventually passed away in 1993). That is, although the Danielewskis were most certainly never LDS themselves (they were at least culturally Polish-Catholic), nevertheless Mark still came of age in Mormonism’s cultural epicenter. I argue that the subtle influence of his Provo adolescence can be located in the The Familiar; working backwards from there, I will also try to trace that influence in House of Leaves.
But first, I should explain what exactly The Familiar is—no easy task, in part because it is such an ambitious attempt to top his stunning debut House of Leaves (which he frankly may never be able to—though boy, is it sure fun to watch him try). Perhaps best approached as a work of book-art, each volume of The Familiar is a massive 800+ page tome, featuring 9 parallel and/or interweaving character-arcs, each rendered in a unique font, color code, and typographical layout. (For example, Rotis Semi Sans font is used for the narration of a Singaporean errand boy; an Armenian taxi driver in LA is written in Promenoria; a Turkish-American LAPD detective in Baskerville; renegade scientists on the run from a shadowy conspiracy in Times New Roman—oh, it’s a very busy novel, a fascinating failure.) It was initially intended to be a staggering 27 volumes; but though the first 2 volumes were well-reviewed and quickly garnered a passionate cult-following, sales were unfortunately not robust enough of one to sustain the high cost of printing, resulting in Pantheon canceling the series after only volume 5 (which was at least the end of “Season 1”, as Danielewski termed it). The choice was disappointing but not surprising. These aren’t cheap books, after all: the pages have a fine sheen and gloss to them, so as to accommodate the hi-def color images of spheres, abstractions, image-poems, photos, collages, comics, and Hubble-pics of the cosmos itself—all of which blurs the boundaries between text- and graphic-novels in fascinating and innovative ways. Danielewski likewise makes generous use of minimalist, empty space on many of these pages, such that there is almost a sense of outright decadence to how some of these expensive pages are seemingly wasted. But even in its limited run, The Familiar should keep both the critics and the cranks busy for years; I myself have scarcely scratched the surface.
Yet even in my cursory first reading, my LDS-conditioned eye could not help but note some distinctly Mormon valiances (or Valiances at Temple Square, whatever). For example, early in The Familiar, Vol. 1, we are introduced to a small cadre of renegade scientists, exploring visions of the far reaches of the universe via a mysterious Orb: a Seer Stone of sorts. The reader is there first treated to a description of a distant, Mars-like planet—paradoxically neither real nor a dream—one utterly inhospitable to all possible life, yet one nevertheless that uncannily contains a “temple…strange yet intimately familiar” (135). Needless to say, there are many Temples in the red, Martian-like deserts of southern Utah. Now, one obviously need not fly all the way to Utah to find Temples; Danielewski himself at first glance appears to rely more on Greco-Roman models, as he describes said Temple as “Similar perhaps to what remains now of the sanctuary of Athena Pronania at Delphi” (135). An ancient Greek Temple on an abandoned planet is almost more a touchstone of old Star Trek reruns than anything Utahan specifically.
But then, Danielewski also describes the Temple as having “echoes of Greek and Roman civilizations and Battlestar Galactica’s Kobol” (137), a pop-cultural reference that has been the bane of many a Mormon nerd in the ‘70s and ‘80s already struggling to get folks to not snigger at Kolob. More to the point, there is a definite cosmology associated with LDS Temples, one that embraces the full, wide, incomprehensibly massive breadth of the Universe (as reads Moses 1:35, “For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me”). The chapter’s protagonist, Cas, further reports: “If she wanted, she could go back to before the planet took shape. Fear keeps her from going that far, to where she knows with a shudder the temple will still wait, unchanged, even as far back as when this universe first came into being, all the time there, still remembering all the bloody sacrifices yet to come” (137). Eternal temples at the edge of outer space, with ordinances that predate the universe itself—and that are revealed via a Urim and Thummim-esque type Seer Stone—while certainly not exclusively LDS per se, are nonetheless very comfortable within an LDS cosmology.
There is also the central character of Xanther, an awkward, epileptic 12-year-old girl in L.A. Danielewski even cheekily describes the novel as simply the story of “a little girl who finds a kitten”, though that deliberate understatement of course does the novel no justice, especially given the manner in which she finds the kitten. For in the climax of Volume 1, Xanther is riding with her adoptive father Anwar (surnamed Ibrahim, the Arabic word for “Abraham”—into whose family, according to LDS Theology, all converts to the Church must likewise be adopted into), as they drive out to pick her up a new dog in the midst of a massive rain storm. But then, all of a sudden, while stuck in heavy L.A. traffic, Xanther jumps out of the car without warning, runs several blocks (leaving poor Anwar panic-stricken) through the nigh-Biblical flooding, all to find a tiny kitten mewing pathetically in a storm drain.
That’s the uncanny thing, that even Anwar has difficulty wrapping his mind around later—how on Earth, amidst all that thunderous storm, did she hone in on a single kitten mewing for its pathetic little life literally blocks away? Or, if this were some LDS Sunday School lesson, could we re-frame the experience thusly: “a great and strong wind rent the mountain, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-12). Amongst all the tumult and natural catastrophe, divinity is made manifest not in the noise but in the still small voice.
When Anwar does finally catch-up with Xanther, rather than apologize for running off so suddenly, she instead begs him to revive the poor, drowned little creature. Heart-breakingly, he is unable to do so, though he really does try. Undaunted however, Xanther strives all the more desperately to revive it herself, and slowly its little lungs begin to expand—and suddenly, they are no longer on their way to adopt a dog, for a kitten has entered their lives under the most mysterious of circumstances (but then, isn’t that always how a kitten enters your life). Inevitable questions suggest themselves: did Xanther merely awaken and revive the kitten, or did she actually bring it back to life (which even Father Abraham could not do)? And at the novel’s end, when they’re all safely home and Anwar insists that the kitten sleep downstairs till it’s healthier (indeed, they fully expect it to die during the night)—did her parents finally relent and bring the kitten up stairs to sleep in her bed with her after all, or did this kitten mystically reappear beside her of its own accord? Have we been witness to a resurrection, and/or a carrying away in the spirit? What strange supernatural divinity is contained in this contact between Xanther and the kitten? As the final page of the novel implies, with its full-page spreads of distant nebulae, something far more cosmic occurring here; and as the series progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that there really is something ancient and supernatural about this kitten, which has the uncanny ability to open all locked doors everywhere it goes. We learn, for example, that this kitten is the reincarnated and miraculously transported familiar (hence the title) of a mysterious old sorceress from Singapore. As to what is the full extent of their powers we may now never know, since the series has been cancelled (but then, as we all know, sometimes the questions are more interesting than the answers).
I have only been able, in my limited time today, to sketch the barest LDS allusions I have found be embedded throughout The Familiar. But I think it still gives me enough to work backwards to masterpiece House of Leaves. That novel’s complex, nested-narrative is centered upon a residential house in Virginia that one day begins to be bigger on the inside than on the outside. The discrepancy is only a quarter-inch at first (hence why the book cover is a quarter-inch shorter than the body pages), but soon the closet spaces begin opening up into cavernous corridors and stairwells. A spelunking team even gets lost in the house—for its walls keep shifting, and its corridors keep expanding infinitely, in apparent reflection of the explorers’ mental state (one character traumatized by the exploration openly ponders if this is not only the house of God, but God himself). The house is the home of a Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist named Will Navidson, who produces, to great critical acclaim, a “Blairwitch Project”-style found-footage horror film about the house called “The Navidson Record”.
The book itself is largely written in the style (or parody of the style) of an academic analysis of the film, as written by a mysterious old Angelino named Zampanó—a blind man in L.A. who could not possibly have ever seen the film in the first place. What’s more, in the book’s extensive footnotes, a parallel meta-narrative emerges, wherein we learn that the book is being edited by Johnny Truant, an L.A. tattoo-apprentice undergoing a nervous breakdown. Truant had recovered his neighbor Zampanó’s manuscript after his sudden death. In his footnotes where he directly addresses the reader, Truant confirms that the film does not exist in real life, that none of the critics cited therein know what the heck he’s talking about when he writes to them, and who by his own admission has a penchant for making up fake stories on the fly. That is, multiple levels of unreliable narrators and epistemological instability define the text, which has a definite disorienting effect upon the reader.
In light of Danielewki’s Provo upbringing, I can’t help but potentially read House of Leaves as a subtle rejoinder against the self-assurance of LDS testimony-bearing—particularly when we boldly declare our faith in a book whose source is separated from us by multiple levels of mediation: Nephi’s 40-years-later retelling, Mormon and Moroni’s competing editor decisions, centuries-long burial in a forgotten language, Joseph Smith’s translation into an already archaic King James English mediated through stones in hats, Oliver Cowdery’s and Emma Smith’s oral transcription from behind a curtain, E.B. Grandin’s imperious punctuation additions, Joseph still making sentence revisions right up until his murder, and etc. (And none of this, by the way, is to claim that the Book of Mormon is fiction or some sort of proto-postmodernism, obviously; it is only to note that, Grant Hardy aside, I don’t think any of us have fully wrestled with the multiple levels of mediation that the Book of Mormon self-consciously constructs—or what that might have to say about how mediated our own relationship with divinity might be, especially through the unreliable narrator of our own biases and prejudices) (But then, what else is faith but to see through a glass darkly—and House of Leaves is dark indeed).
For something I have noticed about all the current debates raging concerning the historicity of the Book of Mormon, is that even skeptics of the Sterling McMurrin variety willingly acknowledge that the book still has the curious ability to affect you—it just gets under your skin. Give Danielewski his due, House of Leaves has the same ability: though Johnny Truant knows that “The Navidson Record” is sheer fiction, he still finds his life and mental state deteriorating—and his nightmares intensifying—the longer he edits the book. Its Lovecraftian existential horror seems to seep and bleed (almost literally) into his own life. House of Leaves readers frequently report a similar impact upon their own psyches: MZD’s bold typographical experiments mean the reader is constantly having to turn the book on its side, at various angles, and at one point even having to hold it up to a mirror in order to read its backwards printing—which in turn forces you to watch yourself reading House of Leaves—such that you are constantly hyper-aware of the act of reading. Yet far from ironically distancing the reader from the text, these typographical ticks have the curious effect of making the book feel like its leaking into real life. (Certainly, I’m not the first reader to suddenly whip out the tape-measure and double-check the darkest corners of my closets the first time I read it—and that at a time when I considered myself a jaded and unimpressible young graduate student).
Yet far more interesting to me than any of that, is the fact that House of Leaves is also frequently described (on both message boards and marketing materials) as a love story disguised as a horror. For against all expectations, the novel does in the end veer—almost in spite of itself—towards some strangely uplifting finalés: there is, for example (and, Spoiler alerts), a reconciliation between an estranged couple, as Will Navidson’s claustrophobic fiancé Karen ventures into the house to rescue him in the conclusion to “The Navidson Record”—while Johnny Truant in his metanarrative finds some measure of peace (if not finality or absolution) as he leaves L.A. in search of the house itself, but ends up instead wrestling with the memory of his institutionalized late-mother. Though by no means sentimental or uncomplicated endings to these narrative arcs (death and horror still permeate its pages), the book does still end with an inescapable sense of reconciliation, and of the redeeming power of love in even the most terrifying darkness.
All this indicates that Daniewlewski’s seemingly-nihilistic voids are not empty but full. I mention this because in an earlier paper I published in Sunstone on the Indie-band Low, I stated that, “Silence is as integral to Low’s songs as the instrumentation. It is, in fact, where Low’s music actually lies.” Danielewski’s silences are similarly not empty but full. For I also argued in a Dialogue article years ago that the Book of Mormon participates in its own deconstruction—not that it undermines its own message, but rather in how it constantly calls attention to the limits of language itself (e.g. Moroni’s lament in Ether 12:24-25, Nephi’s in 2 Nephi 33:1, etc.), which in turn gestures to the ineffable Holy Spirit which can only be found in the spaces where words fail to mean. House of Leaves also constantly calls attention to the intrinsic unreliability of all text—but not as a cheap form of easy nihilism, but as a mode by which to gesture towards the intrinsic emptiness of the text, where one can at last find the peace which surpasseth understanding. If, as Borges stated, “to always omit a word…is perhaps the most emphatic way of calling attention to that word”, then Danielewski’s silences are perhaps the most emphatic away he calls attention to Provo’s subtle influence upon his work.
Addendum: In the limited time of my presentation, I somehow failed to address the fact that perhaps the single clearest indicator of a Provo, Utah influence upon Danielewski’s writing can be found in Only Revolutions.
Only Revolutions is a road trip novel centered upon a pair of never-aging, “allways sixteen” teenagers named Sam and Hailey, as they careen around America in an ever-changing series of cars, aggressively defying death and age together over the course of 200 years. The most immediately strikingformalistic feature of the novel is the fact that it is typographically structured as a literal revolution: it features two,intertwining stream-of-conscious narratives, each printed on thepage upside down from the other. One is narrated by Sam from November 22, 1863 till JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, the other by Hailey from that same date through November of 2063. In an attempt to out-Oulipo the Oulipogroup, these twin narratives are spread out across exactly 360 pages (like the complete circumference of a circle), with each page purportedly containing exactly 360 words. Moreover, each narration ends where the other one begins (that is, Hailey’s pg. 1 is on Sam’s pg. 360, and Sam’s pg. 1 is on Hailey’s pg. 360),such that the book can potentially be read in a constant, infinite loop, á la Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Indeed, Amy J. Elias has“note[d] the many correspondences between language play in Only Revolutions and in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake,” including their “Barthesian linguistic intertextuality and language play”, how each is cyclical like “a Möbius strip”, as well as the sheer fact that Finnegans Wake is also an ergodic text preoccupied with a circular conception of history. Yet even more so than the Wake’s circularity, Only Revolutions is also non-orientable, with no clear front cover or back cover; each end of the book opens with the same title-page; even the bar-code is duplicated on both ends of the book spine, to prevent reader orientation. The endless cycle of the novel is intended to mimic the endless cycle of Sam and Hailey, whom Elias argues can also be read as “allegorical figures signifying rebirth, youth, cycle, season, nature, and creative and destructive energies”. They continually cycle, just as the seasons continually cycles, just as the physical book itself literally cycles.
Hence it feels significant that on exactly page 219 of both the Hailey and Sam narratives, they re-cross the Mississippi River near Nauvoo, IL specifically. Sam’s page 219 reads: “Cattle Farms and fallow fields tilled cool/by moons, where Stout Fellows/slick after meals, flossing their twigs/wave US on/to cold Nauvoo”, as they drive towards Nauvoo in a Cadillac Series 62 on March 18, 1949. Hailey’s page 219 in turn also reads, “Dairy Farms and shallow ponds spilling soon/with stars, where Calloused Workers slow/against hay wheels, chewing windlestraw,/wave US on/to foggy Nauvoo”, as they pass through Nauvoo in a Mazda RX7 on March 3, 1991, 42 years later. This repeat visit to Nauvoo is peculiar because, first off, although events and episodes often mirror each other in the Sam and Hailey narratives, they rarely actually repeat. Most prominently, for example, Hailey dies of an allergic reaction to a bee sting at the end of the Sam section, at which he then tries to jump from a mountain ledge in suicidal grief, only to land in a pile of soft snow; while Sam dies in the mountain snow at the end of the Hailey section, at which Hailey tries and fails to kill herself with a frozen bee sting. Their respective deaths directly mirror each other, yes, but otherwise contradict each other narratively, and in fact render the entire text epistemologically unreliable—a fact that I will be touching back upon briefly. Butfirst, I must note that the twin crossings at Nauvoo, by contrast,are perfect repetitions of each other, and is a town crossing that occurs nowhere else in the novel. In fact, this repeat drive through Nauvoo also stands out because, despite the town beingsituated directly on the banks of the Mississippi River, one cannot actually drive across the Mississippi at Nauvoo: not in a Cadillac, not in a Mazda, not in anything. No ferry has operated there in decades, and it couldn’t have carried a car across even when it did. The nearest bridges are either 11 miles north in Ft. Madison, Iowa, or 15 miles south in Keokuk, Iowa. It is also well out of the way from any major urban centers (the nearest cities being St. Louis 185 miles south, and Chicago 269 miles north-east). The town itself only had a population of 1,063 according to the 2000 census (the nearest census to the novel’s publication), and has only continued to diminish since then. If one is engaged in a cross-country road trip across America, one must intentionally go far out of one’s way to pass through Nauvoo.
Yet that is precisely what thousands of believing Mormonpilgrims do annually—especially those from Provo and the Intermountain West, many of whom can claim pioneer ancestry directly back to Nauvoo—as they retrace their way across the Great Plains to this isolated Midwestern municipality. For the membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Nauvoo is not just another obscure Mississippi river town, butthe “City of Joseph”: the community that the faith’s founder Joseph Smith, Jr. established in 1838 after escaping state-sanctioned mob violence in Missouri; that at its height briefly rivaled Chicago as the largest city in Illinois; and where Smithwas buried after his 1844 assassination in nearby Carthage. Religious pilgrims come to pay respects at Smith’s grave, tourthe few remaining brick buildings carefully preserved from the 1840s, and visit the reconstructed Nauvoo Temple, dedicated by LDS church leadership to great fanfare in 2002 (only four years before the novel’s publication). For that matter, Sam’s cryptic catalogue on pg. 219 of, “By Palmyra. Fenway. Alexandria. Keokuk” largely only makes sense in terms of Mormon westward migration from Smith’s hometown of Palmyra, NY to Keokuk, IA (of which Alexandria, MO is part of the micropolitan area) near Nauvoo. Much like Sam and Hailey, the Mormons just keep on returning to Nauvoo.
Although the LDS connection is of course only one small part of Only Revolution’s larger tapestry of historical and cultural allusions, the religion still fits in comfortably with the novel’s larger preoccupations with the circular nature of history. There is, for starters, the fact that Smith did not claim to be launching a novel religion, but “restoring” the original Church of Jesus Christ upon the Earth, complete with a quorum of twelve apostles, spiritual gifts, and temple worship (more on that in a moment as well). Nor is this the first time that the “true church” has been “restored” according to LDS theology; the church’s Sunday School manuals often cite Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Christ himself as previous iterations of these various restorations. That is, the entire faith is also invested in a cyclical view of history, one wherein the “true church” is constantly being removed from and restored to the Earth.
Then there is the sheer fact itself of the Nauvoo Temple’s construction: first as a restoration of the ancient Biblical practice of temple building in the 1840s, and then as a restoration of the first Nauvoo temple in 2002 (only four years prior to the novel’s publication); that is, the Nauvoo Temple is a restoration of a restoration, recursive and recurrent, like Only Revolutions itself. The Nauvoo Temple is also of special interest to Mormonhistorians and theologians, since it is where Smith finalized the three major ordinances still practiced in the 150+ LDS templesstill in operation today: 1) vicarious “baptisms for the dead,”performed in hopes of allowing those who died without knowledge of the Gospel to convert in the next life and arise in the First Resurrection; 2) marriage “sealings” performed for “time and eternity,” rather than till death do you part; and 3) the “endowment”, a ceremony adapted from a Masonic initiation ritual, wherein the participating men and women all symbolically represent Adam and Eve respectively, and enter into the series of divine covenants requisite to overcome both physical and spiritual death and return to the presence of God after the final judgment.
What all three of these rituals finalized in Nauvoo share in common—and in turn share with Sam and Hailey in Only Revolutions—is an aggressive denial of and escape from the finality of death. Like the Temple sealing, Sam and Hailey also form a relationship that seeks to transcend death and endure for “time and all eternity,” not just “till death do you part.” Theyalso, as in the endowment, become an archetypal Adam and Evethemselves, as they similarly seek to escape and deny all forms of physical death (certainly it feels relevant that “Eve and Adam” is part of the final sentence that transforms FinnegansWake into an infinite loop). In this context, it is perhaps alsorelevant that Smith identified the North American continent asboth the site of the original Garden of Eden, and the future site of Zion and the New Jerusalem; hence, Sam and Hailey’sendless drive around America, and twin returns to Nauvoo, can potentially be read as an attempt to re-enter the Garden of Edenand reclaim immortality. It is also relevant that the endowment ceremony opens with a recitation of the creation of the world, similar in language to the Biblical Genesis account, yet with the notable difference that this creation is not ex nihilo, but follows the pattern “of other worlds hitherto created.” In the Temple endowment ceremony, even the creation of the earth itself is part of the endlessly repeating cycle of history stretching backwards into eternity.
In this context, it is also likely relevant to Only Revolutions that one of the most oft-repeated phrases in the extra-Biblical scriptural canon produced by Smith is “the course of the Lord is one eternal round”. The line appears verbatim in the Book of Mormon in 1 Nephi 10:19, Alma 7:20, Alma 37:12, and in Doctrine and Covenants sections 3:2 and 35:1; and perhaps not-coincidentally, “one eternal round” is also, again, the literal, physical structure of Only Revolutions. Nor did Smith leave the phrase undefined; it is heavily discussed in his regularly-anthologized “King Follet discourse,” a funeral address that Harold Bloom ranked as “one of the truly remarkable sermons ever preached in America”, and Richard Bushman called “the culminating statement of Joseph Smith’s theology”. Whether MZD ever actually read the sermon as a teenager (though he was by all accounts a precocious youth with an intellectually exacting father who taught at BYU), or if he read it later as a curious adult (this is the same man, after all, who voluntarily audited an intensive Latin course at Berkeley after having already graduated from Yale), it is definitely plausible that he had absorbed the ideas in this sermon either through osmosis or direct encounter. As for the sermon itself: Delivered only three months before his assassination, the speech is often considered representative of Smith’s final theological innovations during the Nauvoo period. The occasion for the sermon was the funeralof a local man named King Follet, recently killed in a wellingaccident; the address is most famous for Smith making explicit his theological argument that, “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens”. Not only was God once human according to Smith, but the purpose of this mortal life is “to learn how to be Gods yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same all Gods have done before you”. As the doctrine would later be formulated in couplet form by Lorenzo Snow: “As man is now, God once was/As God is now, man may be”. In this theology,not just the creation of the world, but the creation of the infinite Gods themselves, are all part of a cycle of endlessly repeated history stretching limitlessly across the eternities, wherein mortals can become inheritors of all things.
To provide a theological basis for this apotheosis doctrine, Smith argued that human souls are not only immortal but infinite, declaring, “They had no beginning, and can have no end”. Per contemporaneous accounts of the address, Smith then tried to illustrate this argument by arguing, “I take my ring from my finger and liken unto the mind of man—the immortal part, because it has no beginning. Suppose you cut it in tow; then it has a beginning and an end; but join it again, and it continues one eternal round. So with the spirit of man”. Though his explanation is perhaps not as self-evidently clear as he intends it to be, one can still detect an analogy to Only Revolution’s Sam and Hailey, a joined-together couple who also exist in the “one eternal round” of this endlessly-cycling novel, a non-orientable text with neither beginning nor end. Smith then goes so far as to claim that “The mind or intelligence which man possesses is co-equal with God himself”; that is, each individual soul has always existed and will always exist, just as God has. Smith’s great-grand-nephew, Church Historian and eventual Church president Joseph Fielding Smith, tried to temper this claim in a 1930sfootnote by arguing that “Undoubtedly the proper word here would be ‘co-eternal’, not ‘co-equal’”, but in either case the point remains the same: the human soul is as infinite as God, and older and longer than history itself. In this framework, it is eminently apropos for Sam and Hailey to keep detouring to Nauvoo, so as to revisit the site of the sermon that proclaimed the eternity and infinity of the human soul, persisting in “one eternal round” as the novel itself does, existing outside of and beyond all history and death. Such doctrinal innovations are what once prompted Harold Bloom in a 2007 PBS documentary to declare in his usual extravagant style: “Of all religions that I know, the one that most vehemently and persuasively defies and denies the reality of death is the original Mormonism of the prophet, seer and revelator Joseph Smith”, and it was specifically in Nauvoo that Smith finalized these death-defying doctrines. The opinions of Bloom on the faith are especially relevant to this discussion, given that MZD himself was influenced by Bloom at Yale, cites him as an influence, and even features him as a minor character in House of Leaves.
Yet it is also worth noting that Bloom only a few years after the PBS documentary, in a 2011 New York Times Op-Ed, wrotethat “the 21st-century Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has little resemblance to its 19th-century precursor. The current head of the Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson, known to his followers as ‘prophet, seer and revelator,’ isindistinguishable from the secular plutocratic oligarchs who exercise power in our supposed democracy”. That is, Bloom draws a distinction between how the faith was first articulated by Smith in the 19th century and its present 21st century formulation, which ambivalence also happens to map onto Only Revolution’s own oblique attitudes towards the faith. For the novel not only formalistically expresses some of Smith’s most radical theology, but also interrogates it; for example, Smith in the same King Follet sermon argued that “All the minds and spirits that God ever sent into the world are susceptible of enlargement”, which itself is but a reformulation of the Book of Mormon’s own “the word [of God] is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul”. However, if there is one thing that Sam and Hailey do not do over the course of the novel, it is enlarge; quite the opposite in fact. Typographically, each of their sections start off in roughly 20-point Times New Roman font on pg. 1, gradually shrinking as the narrative proceeds (only achieving parity on pg. 180, of course), then finally finishing in miniscule 10-point font on their respective pg. 360. Hailey and Samliterally diminish, not expand, as they progress in their “eternal round.” Likewise, as numerous critics have noted, though they begin each of their respective narratives full of bluster and self-confidence, Sam and Hailey become gradually less sure of themselves as they progress. They each finish their respective narratives by affirming that, “I could never walk away from you” to the other; yet even the sheer fact that they have to so affirm their love insinuates that they have definitely thought of abandoning each other in the first place. Their love has not grown, but merely statically persisted to an increasinglywearying degree.
Not just typographically, but also spatially and temporally, Sam and Hailey remain trapped in a sort of non-progression; notably, they never actually leave the United States, nor do they ever exceed the 200 year span of the narrative, as the novel itself continuously cycles back and forth between 1863 from 2063. The integrity of their union for time and eternity is perpetually kept in doubt by the text, as is their capacity for true immortality: one never knows if they ever make it past the year 2063. They may not grow older, but nor do they progress or grow as characters. They are not on their way to godhood, nor are they on their apparent way to anything; though they escape death, they still end up just literally spinning their wheels in aseries of disposable cars with no apparent destination; the title of the novel is “only revolutions” after all: “only,” condescending, diminutive, lowly. For that matter, Nauvoo itself spins its wheels; despite its status as a modern Mormon pilgrimage site, it will most certainly never rival Chicago again. Like Sam and Hailey, modern Nauvoo persists, but does not grow. Such, perhaps, explains why Sam and Hailey each in turn describe Nauvoo as “cold” and “foggy”: their “one eternal round” promised by Nauvoo is but a “cold” comfort, and their assurance of immortality remains “foggy”, unclear, unsatisfied, and undefined. Even the King Follet discourse itself remains foggy; delivered extemporaneously, it was only jotted down inshorthand after the fact, and reconstructed via multiple and sometimes contradictory accounts of varying rigor andthoroughness. Textual scholars persistently disagree as to its original wording and intent, which will likely never be known for sure. Many of the sermon’s central claims have either been disputed, disavowed, or distanced away from by numerous LDS church leaders in the 180 years since its delivery; even among the faithful, the final great sermon of Nauvoo remains “cold” and “foggy.” Ultimately, via his dual Nauvoo allusions, MZD takes the promise of apotheosis and eternal life promised by the predominant faith of his teen years, and questions whether these “eternal rounds” would be all that comforting, clear, or even possible to accomplish in the first place.