The Book of Mormon as a Post-Modern Text

Of course it's not a post-modern text; even the most virulent anti-mormon would call it a fabrication from the 1820s, not a post-WWII production. But its often fashionable to posit Renaissance, Medieval, and even Classical texts as possessing post-modern qualities, so I'd like to test out the same for the Book of Mormon:

-Post-Apocalyptic: Like Becket's "Endgame," Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," and even McCormic's "The Road," The Book of Mormon is written after the final collapse of civilization. In Mormon's case, there is a double destruction addressed; he mourns his own nation's collapse circa AD 400, and writes for the benefit of a future world that likewise faces endtimes. Of course, in Mormon's paradigm, his own nation's collapse precedes a Restoration, just as the Last Days precede a Millenium, so in this sense he differs radically from Becket and Vonnegut, who's works possess no sense of redemption. But this cyclical view of history repeating ("The course of the Lord is one eternal round"), a la "Finnegan's Wake" and "Gravity's Rainbow," is also characteristic of many High Modernist and Post-Modern texts. And perhaps most significantly, Mormon's admonition to "cleave unto charity, which never faileth, for all things must fail" also acknowledges the primacy of entropy and the inevitable dissolution of all things. His preceding of this melancholy declaration with the more upbeat "cleave unto charity" is almost Vonnegutian.

-Polyphonic: Mormon's is the dominant voice, but throughout the text, other strong authorial voices are also featured, a la "Ulysses." Nephi, Jacob, Benjamin, Moroni, and even the Savior Himself take over the narrative at differing points, revealing a wide-range of voices and personalities interacting with each other, speaking in the first, second, and third persons.

-Collage: Closely related to polyphony is collage. The Book of Mormon begins with a first-person abridgment from an earlier historical source, and through the Book will contain excerpts from sermons, prayers, coronation ceremonies (Mosiah 2-5), poems (2 Nephi 5, Alma 29), and epistles, as well as Hebrew scripture.

-Extratextuality: In a classic post-modern move, Isaiah, Malachi, and The Sermon on the Mount are all whole-sale quoted, but radically recontextualized in the process: the reader is explicitly instructed to "liken Isaiah unto yourself," while Malachi and the Sermon are delivered by a resurrected Jesus Christ in the ancient Americas, with significant commentary appended by Jesus himself. The fact that Malachi (a post-diaspora Prophet unknown to that civilization) is quoted by Jesus as written by Malachi, even though he's the one who delivered the revelation to Malachi in the first place, raises significant questions about the nature of authorship. Which brings us to...

-Collapsing Categories: Besides questioning the category of authorship, the Book of Mormon also features significant quotations from Dead Sea Scroll (unknown till 1947; hey look, the post-modern era!) writers. Now, the Book of Mormon's very existence challenges the category of a "closed canon," but doubled with the existence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the latter's presence in the former, further explodes the very concept of "canon" altogether.

-Self-aware/meta: The Book of Mormon always knows that it is a book, and never lets the reader forget it. It even comments on the metal plates upon which it is written, calling attention to the medium itself. The writers are always commenting the writing process itself (eg Ether 12:23-27), and from the first author (1 Nephi 6) on, declares its awareness that they are part of a larger narrative, meant to interact with the world outside the text.

Now, wasn't that fun? Of course, the fact that these post-modern characteristics can be so easily applied to scripture may just mean that these characteristics are too nebulous to define any specific literary period or genre, undercutting the very category of post-modernism itself (which is also a very post-modern move). Or maybe I'm just bending textual evidence to fit my ridiculous thesis. Whatever. It's my blog and I'll cry if I want to. I read the Book of Mormon, prayed about it, and felt that it was true--a purely epistemological concern; for if all experience is mediated through sensation, and since experience is incommunicable, any religious experience I feel, or sensate, is private, personal, and incommunicable; questioning the veracity of the experience is like Descarte questioning if our senses lie or if we even exist; trusting our sensations is the nature of faith (in which sense we all live by faith)--and that's why I'm LDS. As Nibley said, all the rest of this is just junk and stuff.