Mormon Dialectics
by Peter Coviello
“Joseph Smith Preaching to the Indians,” oil on canvas, circa 1890 by William Armitage. Public Domain.
I begin these brief remarks—in answer to this collection of sparking, mercurial, greatly edifying responses—in much the same torque of spirit with which I can recall completing, at last, the work of the book itself: one of a great, overspilling gratitude. Then, I was grateful to have had so much to build on, and to work with, in the making of a story that I had not really known, at the outset, how I was going to manage to tell, or at least to tell with anything like adequacy. I am by training a scholar of American literature and queer theory (and, it’s worth saying, a non-Mormon to boot). And, in hoping to tell the story of early Mormonism’s fractious struggle with the disciplinary orders of a solidifying secular legitimacy, I had before me the clarifying, and also greatly heartening, example of a range of scholarly works, from a clamoring array of scholarly precincts and subdisciplines—works in postsecular critique, in the racial history of sexuality, and also, of course, in Mormon studies itself. My hope was to construct something useful out of the elaborate sense of enormous and varied scholarly indebtedness that I carried around with me throughout the labor of the project and, ultimately, to find a way to get these and other densely clustered conceptual idioms to speak in enlivening colloquy with one another, in something of the spirit of what Edgar Garcia, in his spectacularly unlocking response, calls “revision, revisitation, reconsideration, and alternative possibility.” I put it only too mildly when I say that it is a particular kind of joy to see that notion of “colloquy” come into such new and crackling life, as it does in the dialogue sustained by and through these responses.
One of the things that strikes me, in the vibrant interactivity of these pieces, is a collective clarity about the ways the Mormon story, when encountered in all of its sustained irresolution and turbulent breadth, can have a curiously fomenting, a curiously, we might say, beckoning effect on the theorists and historians and scholars who work in their differing ways to retell it. I mean only that, if these essays are any indication, Mormon history—with its distinctive weave of sex and empire, of outblown theological speculation and realpolitik maneuvering, of the hypernormative and the counterpossible—is one that persistently drives criticism itself toward ampler, more entangled, more dynamically synthesizing modes of conceptualization. Think only of the work on display here.
There is Heather White’s civilizationally-tuned account of the absolute inextricability of sex and racialization in the longue duree of the starkly gendered unfolding of Mormon familialism and Mormon life; there is K. Mohrman’s sustained, exacting, exemplary refusal to sequester from one another queerness, in its many instantiations, and belief, devotion, “religion” in all its own prodigious variousness; and there is Edgar Garcia’s clarifying insistence on the simultaneous overlaps, tensions, and unresolving-because-nonidentical relations between such quantities as “indigeneity” and “blackness,” yes, but also animal, person, spirit, angel, body, god; all of which follows directly from like pursuits throughout Taylor Petrey’s capacious, generous-hearted, wonderfully consensus-disrupting Tabernacles of Clay. In and through all this inspiriting work, I think, one glimpses a Mormonism that has the virtue of engendering what I take to be a sort of ceaseless deprovincialization—a drive, that is, toward the cracking-open of our prevailing critical idioms, in a manner meant less to dismiss or override any one in particular than to nerve us toward more combinatory, labile, adventurous versions of them. What this can result in, cumulatively, are critical languages that do not so much dissolve into one another as flourish in their fractious noncoincidence. It is a remarkable thing in the Mormon drama, I think, that calling-toward-the-deprovincializing. You could become transfixed by Mormon history and historiography, I am here to tell you, for this alone.
Such synthesizing attunements as these take, necessarily, many forms. For me, in Make Yourselves Gods, it meant thinking hard about what I call the carnal life of the spirit, as it came to be materialized inside the matrices of a nineteenth-century imperial project that had long since become not merely planetary but (as a scholar like Jared Hickman helps us to see) cosmic. And that meant, in turn, staging a long encounter between languages of biopolitical critique that flourish in the vicinity of queer theory, on the one hand, and, on the other, the idioms of postsecular critique that had come to such telling and consequential life in the context of postcolonial studies and a range of anti-imperialist (and, particularly, anti-Islamophobic) scholarly undertakings. The Mormon story, with its volatile crossings and mismatched violences, seemed to me to condense these styles of conceptualization, to make them differently available to one another, in ways worth exploring as fully as I could. For others, the combinatory possibilities are and will be different, taking up different strains of tension and inflection, and reaching toward new clarities.
As for those larger clarities, we need only think here of Garcia’s astounding turn, via Rolando Vázquez, toward an inquiry not only into the status of Moroni’s body (“formed in dynamic interaction with the social histories, cultural legacies, and natural ecologies of these lands”) but into the vast cosmological indebtedness of the edifice of Mormonism itself to a vision of embodiment enacted in what he calls, with the Popol Vuh in mind, “a Mayan sense of things.” It is hard, as I say, not to feel a particular iteration of joy in finding one’s work mobilized inside such transformative conversations as these, and for that I can only thank all these scholars, in admiration for the turns of thought and possibility they have enabled here. And I thank especially Taylor Petrey, whose altogether world-enlarging Tabernacles of Clay has itself opened up so many of these vistas of encounter, for so many of us both in and beyond Mormon studies.
By way of conclusion, then, I’ll just note one of the chief and, I think, related things that, in respect to Make Yourselves Gods, I found to have most surprised me in the making of it—what, I mean, I was not particularly expecting to find but that, in the event of research and writing, felt to be especially energizing when I did. And that is what I would now call, perhaps too frontally or too flatly, the persistence of the dialectic. Or, to put it differently and in terms related to the synthesizing ambitions brought to such keen fruition in the essays gathered here: I came into new contact with the difficult and unceasing demand of dialectical thinking, of thinking with and through knots of contradictions as they move through the shifting terrain of historical claiming. I argue throughout my book that nothing set the Mormons at odds with a regime of secular legitimacy so much as the idea of the incipient divinity of the mortal body, fired by its enlarging pleasures. So to discover in the end that this was precisely the formulation that could lead them back into the charmed circle of whiteness and its promised sovereignties, inside an imperial world where “secularism” tracks as, precisely, white divinization, or what Hickman calls “the blasé stance of the complacently divinized”—this was, for me, a great practical object lesson. It brought home to me, in its fullest force, the necessity of an analytic that bears in mind the ways all things are, as it were, pregnant with their own negation, subject to irreconcilably contradictory mobilizations and enactments out in the rushing currents of history. It is, as lessons go, easy to learn, hard to enact. That enactment is, I think, only part of what you can find in the work of my interlocutors here—that, and a vivifying reminder of just what a fine thing it can be to think with and alongside early Mormonism, not in spite of but precisely for its heterogeneity and unlikeliness, its errancy and recalcitrance, its stubborn refusal to be quite reduced to any of the frames we bend around it.
Peter Coviello is the author of five books, including Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America, Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism, and Long Players, a memoir selected as one of Artforum’s Ten Best Books of 2018. He taught for many years at Bowdoin College and, since 2014, has been Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago.