The Red Brick Store

The following is an excerpt from “Going Mainstream: Chaim Potok as a Model for Mormon Literature,” by Elizabeth K. M. Busby, published in the most recent issue of Irreantum.

After reading Busby’s essay, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the following: Can a Mormon author write an unapologetically Mormon story—similar to Potok’s unapologetically Jewish stories—and expect it to be embraced by the larger community? And is Potok a Mormon writer’s best guide to the promised land of mainstream success?

The Gap between Jewish and Mormon Literature

The question of primary interest should be if . . . [mirroring the techniques Potok uses to make his novels accessible to a wide audience] could help Mormon literature go mainstream. Phyllis Barber, for one, questions whether these techniques are really transferable to a religion as new as Mormonism. After pointing out the difficulties in making our paradigm relevant to a mainstream audience, Barber mentions the common fallback to Chaim Potok:

An observer can say, “What about Chaim Potok . . . [and other] Jewish and Catholic writers? People are interested in them.” As I understand it, Judaism and Catholicism are much more universal, much more ancient and puzzling to the public mind than is Mormonism, which many consider a quaint, odd, right-wing cult, mainly known by its oddities, its yellow headlines. (114)

Barber’s statement highlights the problem with assuming Potok’s techniques can be transferred to a Mormon story, that is, the public mindset into which stories are born, which gives Jewish literature distinct advantages over Mormon literature in its ability to “go mainstream.”

First is the problem of familiarity with the religion. Although Potok’s stories are mainly about a fundamentalist branch not representative of mainstream Judaism, they are still rightly connected with the longer tradition of Judaism in the public mind. Though foreign to the reader’s practice, Jewishness still has the familiarity of its high-profile presence both in political history and practice. It seems something that readers ought to learn about—one might pick up the book for its cultural education value just as one might pick up Sandra Cisneros’s House on Mango Street primarily to get a glimpse of Latino culture and only secondarily because of its artful coming-of-age story. Judaism’s massive presence in modern society raises its interest as a subject for public consumption. In addition, people with more than a cursory knowledge are fascinated by the “ancient and puzzling” nature of the religion (Barber 114). A tale of Judaism brings connotations of holiness and secrecy, of strange ancient rituals, and in general, a way of life both connected and disconnected from one’s own.

On the other hand, the public image of Mormonism, if it exists at all, is often negative to modern sensibilities. A reader with no knowledge of Mormonism may feel no attraction at all to a book about its people. Given the vast amount of published material, a novel about a strange and obscure culture, one which a reader may be ignorantly certain they will never encounter, may serve to place it below seemingly more “relevant” works in the reader’s priority. At the opposite end, readers familiar with Mormonism may expect a Mormon novel to be an exposé on polygamy or cult-like corruption. Indeed, successful mainstream books about Mormons have been just that. Martha Beck’s Leaving the Saints serves as the main example, along with scores of lesser known memoirs recently published by those who have escaped from various polygamist colonies. The Mormon characters popular in mainstream genre fiction exist primarily as a convenient label on generic cult behavior (Austin). And even the great Lost Generation novels—The Giant Joshua and A Little Lower than the Angels—show this same leaning toward a sensationalist depiction of Mormonism. A desire to replace this type of literature with something more positive, modern, and community centered has driven Mormons to envision Potok’s work as a template for new Mormon literature.

There is some hope that recent events, in which Mormonism has hit the national news with a mostly positive spin, are paving the way for such a mainstream Mormon novel. Events with positive media coverage of the Church, such as the 2002 Olympics and Mitt Romney’s presidential bid, might change this tide of ignorance and stereotypes. However, their influence is limited in two ways. First, these events have been countered by negative press the Church has received—again, Martha Beck’s book being embraced by Oprah, the HBO series Big Love, and the FLDS raids in Texas, which, in spite of all the Church’s efforts, strengthened the connection of Mormons to polygamy.

Even if these negative events are compensated for by positive stories, the overall scale of media exposure remains a problem. The events propelling Mormonism into the public eye seem small and temporary compared with the events that propelled this century’s interest in Jewish literature. In particular, Jewish scholars have noted that events such as the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel were not only the impetus for much Jewish writing, but also a driving force behind that writing’s popularity. In his book on the Jewish presence in American literature, Louis Harap notes, “These events did a great deal to reduce the exoticism with which the Jew was regarded. Jews could be treated in literature as individuals, rather than a stereotype, to a greater extent than ever before. Nor can one overlook the fact that millions of American participants in the war had been brought into contact with Jews, which contributed to their demystification” (25). Clearly, Mormon history lacks an event of the same order of magnitude to attract public interest and dampen stereotypes. Although the Holocaust is certainly an extreme example, other subcultures in America have similar large-scale events backing their relevancy to the modern reader.

Cultural Specificity as a Road to Empathy

Does this barrier really matter though? Will the unfamiliarity of Mormonism inevitably keep it unfamiliar? Writers like Barber seem to think so: who would want to read a novel about a backwater religious tradition with less than two hundred years of its own history? Yet one might also ask, as Jewish literary critic Sheldon Grebstein does:

What would seem an unlikelier best seller than . . . a novel about Orthodox Jews, especially Hasidic Jews, set in the Brooklyn of the early 40s . . . whose most stirring action is a schoolboy baseball game? Yet Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen . . . was a best seller indeed, even rising to the exalted number one position on the New York Times list. (23)

As Grebstein notes in his article, predicting best sellers is a difficult business, but it is irresistible to see if they can be “explained after the fact” (23). He concludes that at least part of the novel’s success was due to its combination of a Jewish community, “an alien and thus intriguing life-style,” with an American story, a “dream of success” ending with “a limitless future” (25).

This assessment of Potok’s appeal, I believe, is accurate: his writing is fascinating because the stories he tells are both foreign and familiar. Although The Chosen deals with the specific problems of a boy who doesn’t want to inherit his father’s religious empire, such intergenerational problems are universal. The conflict between the ideas one has been brought up with and those encountered in the world is likewise a universal phenomenon; as Potok says, “We endlessly travel culture highways crowded with ideas. And we continue to encounter new visions of the human experience” (Potok, “The Culture Highways We Travel” 10). Certainly situating the reader into a new society presents some challenges to the writer, but as we see in Potok, this barrier is not insurmountable.

Another evidence of this is Potok’s own discovery of this mode of writing. As a fifteen-year-old, Potok read Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited, “a book about an upper class, British Catholic family, and I was a member of a very closed, very Orthodox Jewish world. And you can imagine that I knew a great deal about upper class British Catholics” (Walden 112). Seemingly, the story of the Flyte family should have been too alien for Potok to grasp. Yet the book quickly became one of the greatest influences on his adolescent life:

I was overwhelmed by that story. . . . I was fifteen years old, a little Jewish boy in New York and found myself, after about 70-80 pages, so inside the world of that book. That was the first time in my life that I was actually inside the feelings of people. . . . I remember closing that book and looking down at it and sensing the power of this form of expression (Walden 112).

After having a similar experience with James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Potok was compelled to create for the Jewish world what these two novels had done for the Catholic one. He saw that “these writers could get me to be interested in two different Catholic worlds” although there ought to have been no connection to his own perspective.

If Potok’s theory is correct, perhaps “a character’s struggle between obedience to LDS principles and obedience to self, or the struggle with emotions of fear/anger because of a bishop’s interview” are not untransferable as Barber fears (114). Potok claims that “a novel is really a way of presenting a particular world universally. It’s about particulars, but the writer’s hope is that it can be crafted in such a way that will enable all people to lock with it if they are willing to invest some time and energy getting into that world” (Chavkin 155). As novels like Waugh’s, Joyce’s, or Potok’s immerse us in a world, they teach us to think as that community, to understand the signs and symbols otherwise meaningless to us. We as readers learn to play by the rules of the community, again much as if we were reading science fiction, and our reward is a new understanding of problems that are not as foreign as we first thought. Perhaps what draws Mormons to Potok’s work is his mastery of this art, both bringing familiarity into an otherwise alien culture and bringing a deeper examination of our own. If these are the types of books we want to share with the world, perhaps Mormon writers can have no better model than this Orthodox Jew.

Elizabeth K. M. Busby graduated from Brigham Young University in August 2008 with a BA in English and a minor in chemistry. She and her husband, George, live in Springville, UT, where they recently welcomed their first child. Liz enjoys studying religious literature and writing creative non-fiction about her own spiritual experiences.

January 21st, 2009 | Tags: Chaim Potok, Elizabeth Busby, going mainstream, Mormon literature, Phyllis Barber | Category: Irreantum | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL