I used to think I knew my stuff when it came to Mormon literature. I’d read the Tennis Shoes Among the Nephites books as a kid, came across Charly as a teen, and had heard of The Work and the Glory. That was all there was, wasn’t it?

It’s almost a little embarrassing to admit that my cramped perspective lasted until not too long ago. That narrow vision began expanding when I heard about books like Maurine Whipple’s The Giant Joshua, Nephi Anderson’s Added Upon, and Virginia Sorensen’s A Little Lower Than the Angels. Browsing through the LDS fiction shelves at both BYU Bookstore and the Harold B. Lee Library confirmed the staggering reality that not only was there a body of Mormon literature out there that I’d never even heard of, but it was even somewhat substantial. Novels, short stories, poetry, plays — a whole microcosm of literature from a Mormon perspective, and I’d had no idea it existed. None.

It’s like digging around in the attic, unearthing a family history, and learning about ancestors I didn’t know I had. This is my heritage. And now that I’m becoming more and more aware of how many branches there are on this literary family tree, I feel my heart turning towards the fathers — a yearning to read the novels and plays and poems of my spiritual forebears.

But, as in doing genealogy, desire isn’t enough. I still haven’t read Whipple or Anderson or Sorensen. Or most of the Mormon fiction out there, for that matter. Being a Mormon who loves books, I should find it easy to muster up the desire to read these Mormon classics…shouldn’t I?

It seems to be a lot like reading the classics in general. I want to, but it’s ten times harder to pick up a classic than it is to pick up something published a couple years ago. Sure, the classics are good for me, but they take more effort. And so the natural man in me swerves away and skates down the path of least resistance — and I end up reading “easier” books.

But it’s not just that. I seem to have a subconscious conviction that Mormon literature just isn’t as good as the rest of the world’s literature. That with only so many decades of life on earth and so many books to read, my time is better spent elsewhere. And I don’t think I’m the only one who feels that way.

Now, while we certainly have room for improvement, I think this inferiority complex has got to go. It’s keeping us in shackles, both as readers and as writers. How are we going to produce our own Miltons and Shakespeares if we keep thinking we’re not as good as everyone else?

Not everyone feels that way, certainly, but most Mormon literature is the underside of an iceberg, and most Mormon readers seem to gravitate toward the literature of the world at large. It should be the other way round.

On Saturday at BYU’s science fiction/fantasy symposium, Life, The Universe, and Everything, Orson Scott Card gave a lecture entitled “SF&F as a Legitimate Literary Genre.” Now, I’m going to ignore the primary question of his speech, since science fiction is not what this blog is all about. However, I think some of the points he raised can be legitimately applied to Mormon literature. Because, in its own way, Mormon fiction is like SF&F: a class of writing read by a small, cult-like following, a genre which many (self-proclaimed literary) people look down on because of its “juvenile” conventions.

Card’s point was this–the dismissal of an entire genre is usually illegitimate. When we do so (usually by using only one example, or only its worst examples), we’re really just setting up strawmen to knock down to our own literary preferences. To read science fiction with an eye for literary fiction is an experiment doomed to fail. The genres have different definitions of success. For example, Card claimed that in literary fiction, the star is the author, who as he/she writes, encodes meaning into complex layers of symbols which the reader is then to decode. This is what people who read literary fiction want, and when it is done well, they are happy. However, these conventions would be found ridiculous to science fiction readers, who are completely concerned with plot. Science fiction is about the believable linkage of cause and effect, an exploration of how we effect the world. That exploration is best done through stories rather than symbols.

I see this applying to Mormon literature in two ways. Read the rest of this entry »