Understanding the Book of Mormon<\/em>, wants to uncouple the problems of historicity and literary merit. He brackets the first, setting aside the apologetic debates that have dominated Book of Mormon studies over the past four decades. Instead, he turns his attention to the content of the book, and in particular to its peculiar stylistic qualities—and on this matter if he is no apologist he is nevertheless a bit apologetic, conceding the book\u2019s literary deficiencies but pleading on its behalf that, to borrow a Twainism, the Book of Mormon is \u201cbetter than it sounds\u201d (273).<\/p>\nHardy seeks to rehabilitate the literary reputation of the Book of Mormon by drawing attention to what he calls its \u201corganizing principle\u201d: \u201cthe fact that it presents itself as the work of narrators with distinct voices and perspectives\u201d (268). Because the Book of Mormon is structured as the product of three discrete narrative voices—Nephi\u2019s, Mormon\u2019s and Moroni\u2019s—and because, according to its own internal claims, the three narrative voices work with a variety earlier sources, the text is always inhabited by at least two minds, Joseph\u2019s and, say, Mormon\u2019s, and often by three or even four. This textual complexity offers an entr\u00e9e for a kind of literary analysis that moves beyond the manifest deficiencies of the book\u2019s prose style.<\/p>\n
As an interpretive strategy, his approach is shown to be stunningly fruitful—though I suspect that a reader as intelligent, attentive and sensitive as Hardy could fruitfully read the back of a cereal box. Hardy devotes a section of the book to each of the Book of Mormon\u2019s three primary narrators, and in so doing he provides a roughly chronological and nearly comprehensive sustained reading of the text. It is a tour de force and I am tempted to call it virtuosic, though occasionally the breadth achievement is obscured by the thick texture of his very close reading.<\/p>\n
But if Hardy has an ambitious exegetical aim—and that bell rings on every page—he also has an important social objective. He offers not only a new reading of the Book of Mormon, but a new way of reading the Book of Mormon—that is, he offers a new discourse that he hopes will charter a new kind of inquiry undertaken by readers of all tribes. As Hardy puts it, he seeks to demonstrate \u201ca mode of literary analysis by which all readers, regardless of their prior religious commitments \u2026 can discuss the book in useful and accurate ways\u201d (xvii). He seeks, in short, to establish a new interpretive community, blessedly free from the entrenched allegiances that distort other discussions of the Book of Mormon.<\/p>\n
For Hardy\u2019s bracketing of the historical question is neither caprice nor cowardice, as it often is in defensive treatments of the Book of Mormon, but rather a legitimate sequel to his hermeneutic approach. Hardy enters the text by way of the motivations, personalities, and perceptions of its narrators, and therein lies his justification for avoiding, at least temporarily, the historical questions and the epistemological commitments they entail. Whether one regards the Book of Mormon as 19th-century folk pulp or as the authentic translation of an ancient document, one can attend to the text\u2019s self-presentation as the work of three narrators—Nephi, Mormon and Moroni or \u201cNephi\u201d, \u201cMormon\u201d and \u201cMoroni\u201d—and thus read the text narratologically. \u201cAfter all,\u201d Hardy reminds us, \u201cnarrative is a mode of communication employed by both historians and novelists\u201d (xvi).<\/p>\n
In Hardy\u2019s discursive theory, then, the subjectivity of the narrators offers a kind of haven from historicity. Whereas archaeological or rhetorical readings of the Book of Mormon lead directly into a thicket of assumptions—none of them externally verifiable, and thus none available to non-believers—about the book\u2019s historical context, Hardy sees the question of narrative subjectivity as a route around those thorny patches. \u201cImagining [Nephi, Mormon and Moroni] as having life experiences and independent minds does not necessarily mean that one accepts their historicity,\u201d he argues (xvii). One can engage with the substance of the text on its own terms by accepting the book\u2019s narrative device, whether one sees that device as a tool of fiction or of historiography.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sympathetic to Hardy\u2019s desire to defer the ultimate questions in order to create an epistemological space for encountering the Book of Mormon on its own terms. And he\u2019s hit upon an innovative and absorbing method for doing so. But in the final analysis, I\u2019m not persuaded that the category of narrative subjectivity can do the work he asks of it. The narrative mind can work as a neutral rendezvous for devout and skeptical readers only if one holds human subjectivity constant over time, assuming that narrators of all times and places share the same foundations of consciousness and perception.<\/p>\n
It has been the work of nearly a century of continental philosophy to vex precisely this notion of the autonomous, self-contained, transhistorical subject—but one need not quote Nietzsche, Althusser and Bourdieu to recognize that two narrative minds separated by twenty-five centuries will bring to the text a different set of perspectives, concerns, sensibilities, motivations, personalities and perceptions. Thus even a narratological analysis implies some assumption of historicity—and indeed to the extent that \u201cNephi,\u201d \u201cMormon\u201d and \u201cMoroni\u201d speak to contemporary readers as legible, coherent personalities, and Hardy brilliantly demonstrates that they do, one must reluctantly (or triumphantly) recognize a modern context at some level. One need only compare the laconic narrative voice of the Hebrew bible with the over-determined narrative personalities at work in the Book of Mormon to sense the difference.<\/p>\n
As an example of Hardy’s narrative subject problem, consider the comparison he suggests between the narrative development of Mormon and the development of the implied narrator Benengali in Don Quixote<\/em>. Hardy introduces the comparison to highlight the depth of Mormon’s indirect characterization in the Book of Mormon, which is striking when placed against the relatively incoherent, undeveloped personality of Cervantes’s Benengali. Hardy concludes:<\/p>\nThe Book of Mormon may not be as much fun to read as Don Quixote<\/em>, but at least in this one respect, it is more thoroughly composed. However readers may conceptualize Mormon, part of the interest of the book is observing the way he interacts with and shapes his material.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nHardy is indisputably right in both judgments here, but he doesn’t pursue the implications of the comparison. If Don Quixote<\/em> fails to exhibit for the modern reader a coherent and developed narrative subjectivity, this is most likely not an artistic failing of Cervantes but rather an artifact of the history of the narrative genre. When Benengali was conceived in the early modern dawn of print culture, the romance had not yet become the novel, the author had not yet entirely separated from the narrator, and indeed the human being had not yet become the modern subject comfortably at home in its fully-furnished mental interior. Thus to interpret a narrative voice as coherent, undeveloped, deliberate or whatever is necessarily to make certain assumptions about what it means to be a human subject — assumptions that are inescapably historical in nature.<\/p>\nThis is not to say that Hardy\u2019s exegetical project is illegitimate, but rather that his social project will probably fail. Narrative subjectivity will probably not be the analytical charter for a tolerant new interpretive community around the Book of Mormon. But Hardy\u2019s work remains a landmark achievement, one that I salute and from which I have personally learned much. For my part, I continue to find Hardy\u2019s Reader\u2019s Edition<\/em> of the Book of Mormon to be his most significant work, which is to take nothing away from the intelligence of his readings in Understanding the Book of Mormon<\/em>. But the lucidity and openness of the page in the Reader\u2019s Edition has opened the text to me in little short of a revelation. Thank you, Brother Hardy.<\/p>\nOriginally appeared under a different title and in a somewhat shorter form at Patheos.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Criticisms of the Book of Mormon generally fall into one of two categories: objections to its historical claims on the one hand, and on the other critiques of its literary style. The two prongs are often combined in a single attack, for instance in the suggestion that the awkward style of the book reflects the na\u00efve voice of an unlettered youngster. For their part, the book\u2019s defenders also tend to elide the two categories, arguing that passages of inelegant prose are better understood as latent Hebraisms laboring under English syntax. Most of the time, of course, devout readers of the Book of Mormon simply ignore the book\u2019s style altogether. Grant Hardy, in his new book Understanding the Book of Mormon, wants to uncouple the problems of historicity and literary merit. He brackets the first, setting aside the apologetic debates that have dominated Book of Mormon studies over the past four decades. Instead, he turns his attention to the content of the book, and in particular to its peculiar stylistic qualities—and on this matter if he is no apologist he is nevertheless a bit apologetic, conceding the book\u2019s literary deficiencies but pleading on its behalf that, to borrow a Twainism, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,52,1,53,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-of-mormon","category-book-reviews","category-corn","category-latter-day-saint-thought","category-philosophy-and-theology"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16569"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16578,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16569\/revisions\/16578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Understanding](\"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/Understanding-BofM-ii-128x150.jpg\" "\\"Understanding")
Criticisms of the Book of Mormon generally fall into one of two categories: objections to its historical claims on the one hand, and on the other critiques of its literary style. The two prongs are often combined in a single attack, for instance in the suggestion that the awkward style of the book reflects the na\u00efve voice of an unlettered youngster. For their part, the book\u2019s defenders also tend to elide the two categories, arguing that passages of inelegant prose are better understood as latent Hebraisms laboring under English syntax. Most of the time, of course, devout readers of the Book of Mormon simply ignore the book\u2019s style altogether.<\/p>\n