The quotation haunting any conversation of Mormon literature (whatever that may mean), is the Orson F. Whitney prophecy that “we shall yet have Shakespeares and Miltons of our own.” Now, that twelve hundred years of English literature—in all of its breadth, depth and richness—has scarcely produced one of each, let alone multiple, makes this a prophecy an ambitious one indeed. I hope I am merely observing fact, and offend no one, when I state that though we’ve made multiple promising green-shoots over the years, we thus far have not produced any. If we generally don’t beat ourselves up over it, it’s because we remind ourselves that when the English language (however we choose to define it) was less than two centuries old, it had yet to produce even a Chaucer. This perspective, however, erroneously presupposes that we are not already part of English literature—and not just of English, but of the whole wider literary tradition.
The Book of Mormon itself is a collage of multiple writers conversing not only with each other, but with Hebrew literary forms from the Old World. These same Hebrew forms likewise influenced the rise of English literature, from the Medieval Morality plays through Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible, which in turn influenced countless poets, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, and the English translation of the same Book of Mormon. That is to say, the first important piece of writing produced by Mormondom was already functioning and conversing within the larger literary tradition. Mormon writers I suspect must do so as well, and should view the LDS scriptural cannon as another voice in the literary dialogue inhabited by Shakespeare et al.
The need to write within the larger tradition was most forcefully set forth by TS Eliot in his influential 1922 essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, wherein he states:
…anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
We might add that the Hebrew Prophets, alongside Homer, likewise compose this simultaneous existence and simultaneous order within Eliot’s literary tradition. In any case, the need to acquire not only the literary tradition, but all good things under heaven, is a point of doctrine repeatedly emphasized throughout the LDS canon. The 13th Article of Faith, for example, emphasizes that “If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things;” and if we are to count the works of Shakespeare and Milton as lovely, of good report and praiseworthy enough to cite as models for our own potential writers, then it behooves us to acquire the same English literary tradition that includes both those men. This means acquiring the entire tradition that influenced them—Plutarch, Ovid, Virgil, Homer, and the entire Epic tradition.
The Doctrine and Covenants more specifically commends the Saints “to seek out the best books,” and as numerous other commentators have ventured to point out, the D&C does not make clear what the best books are. We are specifically to seek them out, acquire them, and integrate them into our own literary repertoire, and thus integrate ourselves into that larger tradition a la Eliot. We are not to ignore the tradition, or start our own tradition from scratch.
Brigham Young similarly stated,
If you can find a truth in heaven, earth or hell, it belongs to our doctrine. We believe it; it is ours; we claim it.
The whole literary canon is ours, we claim it, and should inform our own literature. If we are to take seriously the Book of Mormon’s claim that “every good gift comes from God,” and if we are to consider Shakespeare and Milton good, then it follows that we must likewise follow the Book of Mormon’s commandment to “lay ahold of every good thing,” and lay ahold of the larger literary tradition, if we are to secure the right to write literature ourselves. Our own doctrine tells us not to expect a new revelation until we respect the ones we have already; similarly, we are not to expect to create new literature until we respect the literature already extant.
This acquirement will not be easy; Eliot himself acknowledges that:
The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility.
There are in fact a host of uneducated writers in the canon—Joseph Smith himself was barely educated when he effected a King James-esque English translation of the Book of Mormon. But for Eliot, this is but a testament to the genius of those uneducated writers. Said Eliot,
Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum.
Some (including Brother Joseph) absorbed the tradition more intuitively than others, but make no mistake, they still absorbed, and worked within, the tradition. We are not to be an exclusionary faith, but an inclusive one; we are to treat the secular canon with near the same reverence as we treat our scriptural one.
Our own Book of Mormon states that “It is by grace we are saved, after all we can do” (2 Nephi 23:25). Have our LDS writers done all that we can do yet? Have we studied the entire literary tradition, and have we attempted to write within the structure of that tradition? Is Homer, Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens, as much a part of Mormon writing as Nephi Anderson (and Nephi of old, for that matter, who also wrote within the literary tradition of his own time, as evinced by the heavy Isaiah quotations in his writing)? Are Austin, the Bronte’s, and Woolf informing our women writers? How would we write differently if Joyce, Faulkner, Gaddis, Becket, and Pynchon informed our tradition? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not waiting for anything so insipid as a Mormon Faulkner to appear, as though we were churlishly waiting for our own replacement for Faulkner, but rather I’m waiting for one who has learned to write from Faulkner, among so many others.
A simple illustrative example of what I mean is in LDS Cinema; many of our portrayals of Christ, or even of Joseph Smith, for example, seem to still be stuck in the sentimental and mawkish. We seem to have not quite resolved how to properly portray the Savior and His Prophets on screen, as though C.C. DeMille and William Wyler hadn’t resolved these problems well over a half-century ago. The portrayals of Christ in Ben-Hur, for example, are for me far more rousing, reverential, and successful than many of our own attempts. Why can we not learn from those who’ve gone before? Let us learn from these earlier film-makers (as well as from other writers), discern the strategies they’ve employed to great effect and cease reinventing the artistic wheel.
I’m not saying we should start writing like any of these writers; certainly TS Eliot aped no one’s style in his poetry, even as he incorporated fragments of their writing into his own. And that’s just thing: the Mormon Shakespeare will not read like Shakespeare; nor will the Mormon Milton sound like Milton. They will be new, they will be unique, and they will be new and unique precisely because they will be working within the same tradition of Shakespeare and Milton. If we pull this off right, it will be as natural for Shakespeare and Milton to inform Mormon lit as it will for Mormon lit to function within the tradition of Milton and Shakespeare.