“Mormon Shakespeare,” Not the greatest, but I’m too cheap to pay the $30 a month for a Midjourney membership to make it better. 

Occasionally you have an idea percolating in the back of your head that you intend to eventually develop and write out, only to find that somebody has already quite adequately made the argument, thus relieving you from the obligation to spend time to write it up. Such recently happened with a Substack piece  I ran across. (And yes, Sam Bankman-Fried is not the paragon of moral or intellectual rigour, and according to Wikipedia the author of the article used to believe some nasty things, but if we insist that every good idea has to come from somebody who’s morally pure we’d never get anywhere.) 

Because they’ve done all the groundwork I won’t rehash the arguments here, you should just read the linked brief article, but to summarize: the author makes a “Shakespeare is fake” argument. The old-school humanities used to posit that the past had objectively great, once-in-a-century writers and artists. The Mozarts, Dickens, Shakespearean, or Miltons that we all had to study in high school and college, when statistically there should be dozens if not hundreds of them in the world today given how few people had the option of being a Mozart, suggesting that the old-and-great sense that underlies much of the classic humanities is kind of an “emperor has no clothes” situation. (Interestingly, Mark Hoffmann kind of made this point when he composed and forged an Emily Dickinson poem which passed literary muster.) Like I have mentioned previously, I had a sense this was true when I finally admitted to myself that many of the “Great Works” weren’t so great and didn’t do what some claimed they did, but it was nice to see somebody flesh out the argument. 

So what are the implications Church-wise of the “Shakespeare is fake” argument?

One of the favorite quotes in the Mormon arts and literature space is Orson F. Whitney’s quip that we will “have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own…In God’s name and by His help we will build up a literature whose top shall touch heaven, though its foundations may be deep in hell.”  

Even without God’s assistance, by pure dint of numbers I suspect Orson F. Whitney’s prophecy has already come to pass. Elizabethan England had a population of 4 million people. I’m no expert on gender dynamics in Elizabethan England, but, channeling Virginia Woolf on this topic, I’m assuming women didn’t have much of a chance of making it in the playwright world, so cut that in half to 2 million people. Furthermore, only about half of men were literate, so cut that in half again to 1 million people. Plus even the literate men were barely surviving and didn’t have a lot of time or resources to long-hand write-up a manuscript, so now we’re in the hundreds of thousands if not tens of thousands. Finally, I doubt there were a lot of slush piles with hidden JK Rowlings back then. I may be wrong, but I assume you had to be even more tapped into the drama world than now to make it as a playwright.  At the end of all the numbers, we’ve almost certainly had more than a few Mormon Shakespeares (and for music Mozarts, for art Leonardo Da Vincis). So where are they? 

Of course, the “where are the Shakespeares?” question is intrinsically tied up with the “Shakespeare is fake” argument. The point of all this is that the phenomena of Shakespeare, Mozart, and Da Vinci is not one of miraculous, once-in-a-millenia talent, but rather of the sociological process of canonization by people who think it’s their right to canonize (famously, people didn’t really care for Moby Dick until one of the cool kids said it was great). Since Mark Twain Latter-day Saints have never been popular with the coffee-shop literati, so I doubt any work of Mormon fiction will ever win a Nobel Prize or become the Great American Novel no matter how brilliant. (While not Mormon fiction per se, even our writers that do make it have to deal with demeaning nose-holding by said elitist literati.) 

So I suspect we have to engage in a sort of internal canonization process, which to some extent we’ve already done with both the highbrow and lowbrow, whether it’s The Giant Joshua or The Great Brain series (and yes, The Great Brain is technically early-Utah Catholic, but it’s Mormon enough I’m claiming it). Still, if the operating variable is number of people with the literacy, know-how, and spare time to engage in creative pursuits, we should expect more Giant Joshuas and Great Brains coming down the pike (but they’ll have to be shorter to accommodate our shrinking attention spans–ain’t nobody got time for The Giant Joshua anymore). I’m not terribly surprised that no Robert Frosts came out of the starvation years in early Utah (even if Great Works greatness is an artificial construct it requires at least some talent), but with a much larger and, if Utah is any indication, economically thriving population we now have the bandwidth. (As an aside, during a recent visit to Utah I attended a play at the new Hale Center Theater–wow, much more polished and professional than that charming but somewhat hole-in-the-wall local neighborhood Hale Center Theater in 1990s West Orem I remember).    

In addition to the raw numbers, we can expect our arts and literature to become more developed because of the Flynn effect, or the empirical finding that people all around the world are becoming much, much more intelligent than their ancestors, if we assume intelligence has some kind of a causal relationship with cultural product quality (even if it’s not the whole thing). The reason for the Flynn effect is highly contested (economic development probably explains some, but not all, of it), but the fact is indisputable. More arguably, I’m convinced that popular culture is becoming more sophisticated and developed across time (e.g. cliched jump scares in horror films don’t do it for us anymore, although I do nostalgically enjoy a predictable Cheers re-run now and then). You add all that up together– more intelligent Mormon genre writers with extra time and resources to write combined with the more sophisticated popular culture environment, and I think we have the potential for a golden age of Mormon arts, cinema, and literature.  

I’m not as engaged in the Mormon Lit scene as a reader as I want to be, but I can’t help but think we have some greatness coming down the pike even if I, like most other nonspecialists, rely on signals about greatness from others about whether a particular work is worth my time (although I still cannot for the life of me make it through the first ten pages of Harry Potter, so maybe my tastes are a bit heterodox). I suspect the problem at this point is culling the mass of manuscripts and selecting and drawing attention to the brilliant gems that are already out there (everybody is working on a book, and if you’re not then you’re lying). In terms of the arts, I appreciated that the Church committee on the new hymnal was open minded enough to consider original works because, again, I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t have a Bach or two or ten in our active membership, and once you take away the historical experience I aesthetically enjoy the Church’s International Art Competition entries as much as I enjoy the Smithsonian Art Museums. 

The point is not that the Great Works aren’t great in some sense or another, but that so is so much else, and as our world of experience and knowledge grows beyond the relatively limited scope of what we had access to and time for before, so too will our art, literature, music, and cultural thinking in general.