Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon ed. by Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman (review)

"The Book of Mormon," observed the sociologist Thomas O'Dea, "has not been universally considered by its critics as one of those books that must be read in order to have an opinion of it" (The Mormons [U of Chicago P, 1957], 6). In that respect, little has changed in the last sixty years. Certainly, active Latter-Day Saints read The Book of Mormon, but few outsiders embark on that chore. The Bible and the Qur'an elicit a measure of respect among the general population, but Joseph Smith's Gold Bible? Mark Twain called The Book of Mormon "chloroform in print," and the scripture remains a joke in many quarters today.

Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman are less concerned with general indifference or disdain for The Book of Mormon than with its neglect by scholars of nineteenth-century American literature. Scholars have been in a bind, constrained to either defend the text's antiquity—a live option only for believers, it seems—or to assume the role of secular debunkers. What does one do with a text whose publisher—Joseph Smith—claimed to have translated it from golden plates that he received and later returned to an angel? Safer and simpler just to leave the text alone. At most, Fenton and Hickman explain, Americanists have presented the text "as an indiscriminate catch-all of nineteenth-century Americana" (3). There are some reasons to do so. At the very moment at which the United States became a continental empire, The Book of Mormon came along with its tale of American millennialism and a host of anachronistic references to everything from horses to "title of liberty" banners. Skeptics have found no shortage of evidence for the book's nineteenth-century setting, while faithful scholars have pointed to Hebraisms and elements of Meso-American culture in the scripture.

The essays in Americanist Approaches suggest more promising secular ways of studying this American scripture. In their very trenchant introduction, Fenton and Hickman call for moving beyond rigorously historicist "symptomatic reading" as well as "surface readings" that claim to take the text seriously on its own terms. They point to the suggestion of Grant Hardy and Joseph Spencer—both contributors to this volume—that scholars should bracket issues of historicity. Again, say the editors, it's not that simple. The Book of Mormon, they argue, "is a remarkably assured and comprehensive prolepsis" (7). The text contains outrageous anachronisms from start to finish. It is "extravagantly non- linear" (7). It is consumed with its own complex creation and presents itself as a text written precisely for nineteenth-century readers. It is self-aware of the objections that those readers will raise against it and seeks to answer them. Understood this way, The Book of Mormon lets Americanists out of the bind in which they have found themselves.

Many of the contributions to Americanist Approaches build on this foundation. As Samuel Morris Brown observes, the very title page of The Book of Mormon introduces the scripture's extravagant sense of itself. In what Joseph Smith described as "a literal translation taken from the last leaf of the plates," the book's title page informed readers that it was "An Account Written by the Hand of Mormons upon Plates Taken from the Plates of Nephi" (163). In other words, Joseph Smith translated a redaction. (As several other contributors point out, Smith's loss of the first 116 manuscript pages of his translation introduces an additional layer of complexity. Smith translated the rest of the story, then returned to the beginning, but claimed to work from a different set of plates.) Brown observes that The Book of Mormon emphasizes the unreliability of all language. The text declares many subjects to be "utterly beyond language" and also points to the linguistic shortcomings of its authors and editors (167). Moroni, The Book of Mormon's final author and son of its chief editor, confesses that if only the...