A Collective Yearning | Eugene England and Lavina Fielding Anderson, eds., Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature

There is a collective yearning here, a palpable sincerity, that you can’t help but like and respect. The desire that practically radiates from these pages is for Mormon literature to be taken seriously, both by outsiders and by members (the latter may be a harder nut to crack), and for literature, period, to mean more in our lives. By engaging the Socratic question of what sort of “imitation” ought to be allowed in the ideal republic, these Mormon critics ask some deep questions. What is fiction, and what is truth? How much, and in what way, does literature really count for us? How then shall we live? This is a Puri tan book, in the best sense—a soul searching, and a culture-searching. 

First come the overview and some history. In his introduction, “Critical Issues,” editor Eugene En gland says that the theologically dis tinct Mormon ideas, coupled with “the dramatic and mythically potent Mormon history” and with the “demands of service, covenant-making, and charismatic experience in the Mormon lay church” (xvi), make a rich resource for fine writing: “Mormon writers, then, certainly have at hand sufficient matter with which to produce a great literature. But does Mormonism also provide insight into the resources and limitations of the means of literature: language, form, style, genres, critical perspectives?” (xvi) 

Matter and means … but there is something else that makes it all work, and that something else is really what this book is about. That something is the freedom to discover, to engage the world with the love that is beyond the range of thought and ideas and the merely social-historical level of existence. Karl Keller, in “On Words and the Word of God: The Delusions of a Mormon Literature,” says that “One of the mysteries of literary life in America is why Mormons have contributed so little to it” (13). He goes on to propose an answer to the mystery, and by the way to state the essential theme and position of Tending the Garden: “But significantly, when thought of as having a message, a moral point, a communication to make, most literature is going to be thought of by the church as being irrelevant, perverse, untrue, pornographic, for as a work explores personal experience or a per sonal point of view, it will naturally diverge from the authoritative doctrinal norms of the church. Literature does not have meaning; rather it pro vides one with the Christian exercise of getting into someone else’s skin, someone else’s mind, someone else’s life” (18). 

That “Christian exercise,” the great dare, is very much at the heart of three fine essays here by Marden J. Clark, Bruce W. Jorgensen, and Tory C. Anderson. These essays affirm the relational feeling and the relational world; they haven’t divided existence into an “us and them” thing—all is fundamentally in order, logical, integrated, in a sense “friendly.” But the hard thing is to perceive in wholes, for to move toward what Clark calls “family” or “that one great whole” (16, 18) requires that love, and not thought- and idea-generated identity, be our guide. Bruce Jorgensen writes of the generosity of spirit found in Homer and in the gospel authors and of course in Jesus Christ: it is stranger welcoming. “The imagination of Jesus, I’m suggesting, which is the ordinary Christian and Mormon imagination, will take precisely the risk Socrates warns against as the ruin of the soul: to understand another, whoever the other is, however bad or mixed” (59). And Tory Anderson (using Madame Bovary as his main text) speaks of the truth of action as experiential—much more profoundly involving, more complete in terms of consciousness, than ideas and judgments. “This is where fiction comes in. Good fiction is refined life. It gets at the heart of the meaning of life without ever talking about it like sermons do” (73). 

The first part of Tending the Gar den, then, establishes the significance in religious life of truly free reading and writing. The second part deals in practical criticism, bringing specifically Mormon examples under scrutiny. Here, to my mind, Levi Peterson’s tribute to Juanita Brooks’s courage and overriding faith, and Eugene En gland’s discerning, hopeful “Beyond ‘Jack Fiction’: Recent Achievement in the Mormon Novel” best demonstrate the very high-minded and universal aims of the book’s first, theoretical section. Although I think Cecilia Conchar Farr and Phillip A. Snyder are incorrect to say that Henry David Thoreau “looks to Nature as a singular Other to his Self” (205), I see what they’re after in doing a comparison-and-contrast between Thoreau and Terry Tempest Williams, whom they regard as a “Self-in-Relation.” They are promoting relational perception, and in a way this is what Tending the Garden is all about: seeing the world relationally means to transcend the dualistic, egoistic identity. It means to live freely, moved by empathy. 

Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature. Edited by Eugene England and Lavina Fielding Anderson (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996).