For All Things Must Fail

The paper I deliverd at AML little over a month ago.

‘For All Things Must Fail’: A Post-Structural Approach to the Book of Mormon

The same year Lehi left Jerusalem, Plato was elucidating his allegory of the cave, wherein a man assumes the shadows cast on a cave’s wall are reality, until he finds the cave entrance and sees the real objects themselves. In Plato’s model, we are the ones in the cave, and what we consider to be reality are in fact mere shadows—and in a sense, he’s right; when I look out at you, I am not seeing you directly, but rather the light reflecting off you, filtered through my optic nerves, my experiences, a priori knowledge, biases, prejudices, cultural assumptions, etc. We never engage reality directly, but “see through a glass darkly,” as Paul would say. Plato’s solution, then, in Book X of The Republic, is to posit speech as a form of spoken telepathy, wherein our words somehow contain our thoughts, and we transmit them to each other through speech. But of course, words are sound waves, as dependent upon our faulty senses for interpretation as anything else. Moreover, words do not contain our thoughts, they merely represent them—and as many a “Seinfeld” episode demonstrate, words often mis-represent them.

The West’s preoccupation with the unreliability of the senses continues as late as Rene Descartes, who in 1641, in his Mediations on First Philosophy, pondered that if, since our senses can be fooled, how then do we know that they are not fooling us all the time? Descarte’s solution is to posit that the senses do not mediate reality, but perhaps they somehow carry the essence of reality into our brain; that is, when we stare at a fire, the essence of the fire somehow travels through our eyes into our brain. Of course, any biologist can tell you that when you stare at a fire, the flame does not travel up your eyes and set your brain on fire; your senses mediate, not communicate.

It’s not until the 20th century that the West finally reconciles itself to the fact we simply can’t bypass the mediation of senses or language. It was Ferdinand Saussure in 1912 who wrote that the relationship between the signifier and the referent is purely arbitrary—no matter if we call a tree a tree, un arbol, ein baum, or a píngguǒ, the word tree itself does not somehow contain the essence of tree-ness. This linguistic school was known as Structuralism, since it conceived of language as a structure. It’s in ‘60s that we get Jacque Derrida, who raises the stakes further by stating that not only do words have no intrinsic relation to the thing they represent, but that words themselves don’t even have any fixed meaning. Words can only be tautologically defined by other words with similarly non-fixed meaning; all words are inherently tautological and unreliable. This school of thought came to be known as Post-Structuralism, since it posited that the structure of language ultimately collapses on itself.

Every text, then, is inherently unstable, slippery, and self-negating.
But none needed tell the ancient Christians these things; Paul not only acknowledges that “we see through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12), but also that “the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power” (1 Cor. 4:20), implying that words are mere representations, not purveyors, of the power they signify. Sensation itself, any sensation, even a feeling as simple as a hand-shake, is outside discourse. When Paul writes, “For we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7), he’s not just expressing faith but a tautology; since we are unable to bypass the senses, we must perforce exercise faith that there is an external reality with which our poor senses interact. The senses, and sensation, are all we got.
The Book of Mormon also understands this utter reliance on sensation. Alma, for example, describes the seed of faith as something that “will begin to swell within your breasts…you feel these swelling motions…it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me… O then, is not this real?” (Alma 32:28, 35). Swelling, feeling, enlarging, deliciousness—Alma creates a constant appeal to the senses, for what else do we have but sensation to determine if something’s real? “The gospel is a feeling,” says President Dyer of the Seventy. “You say honey is sweet, and I agree with you,” said Joseph Smith, “this doctrine tastes good” (Smith 355). Paul calls the Holy Ghost “the unspeakable gift” for the simple reason that no mere sound-waves contain the “essence” of the referent; words mediate, not communicate. Consequently, our testimonies are not reliant on unreliable language for determining their veracity, but on feeling itself—just like everyone else.

The near constant lament of The Book of Mormon writers is that language is inherently inadequate and unreliable—they are, in the finest tradition of the Post-Structuralists, constantly lamenting yet paradoxically celebrating language’s shortfall. Over and over, the Nephite writers assure us that their words cannot communicate even “a hundredth part” (3 Ne. 26:6; WoM 1:5; 3 Ne. 5:8; Jacob 3:13; Ether 15:33; Hel. 3:14) of their record.

Repeatedly throughout the Book of Mormon, people hearing “the voice and…underst[anding] not” (3 Nephi 11:4), being “baptized with fire, and…[knowing] it not” (3 Nephi 9:20), and “hear[ing] it not” (Moroni 2:3), for words cannot hope to live up to the referents they represent. “O that I were an angel,” exclaims Alma, “that I might go forth and speak with the trump of God, with a voice to shake the earth,” for his frustration is that shaking the earth is the one thing his words don’t do; when the angel shook the earth at the time of Alma’s own conversion, the power derived from a source that accompanied his words, not part of them, for there is no intrinsic relationship between words and power. “Neither am I mighty in writing,” cries Nephi, “for when a man speaketh by the power of the Holy Ghost the power of the Holy Ghost carrieth it unto the hearts of the children of men” (2 Nephi 33:1), implying that words do not intrinsically communicate the Spirit. Moroni himself likewise laments:

our weakness in writing; for Lord thou hast made us mighty in word by faith, but thou hast not made us mighty in writing; for thou hast made all this people that they could speak much, because of the Holy Ghost which thou hast given them; And thou hast made us that we could write but little, because of the awkwardness of our hands. Behold, thou hast not made us mighty in writing like unto the brother of Jared, for thou madest him that the things which he wrote were mighty even as thou art, unto the overpowering of man to read them. Thou hast also made our words powerful and great, even that we cannot write them. (Ether 12:23-25)

Moroni laments that his words have only an arbitrary and incidental correspondence to the referent; and while he can cite authors who can write powerfully, he also recognizes that these words have no intrinsic relationship with their subject. The Brother of Jared wrote powerfully because both his words and his content were powerful, two unaffiliated skills that must be mastered separately and individually. Moroni knows that merely writing about something powerful does not make the words themselves powerful by association. The power of their subject matter does not rub off on them—words do not live off borrowed light, to the constant frustration of the Nephite writers.

But then, truth shouldn’t be based on text; enough Churches have been established based on interpretations of the inherently unstable text of the Bible, that even the young Joseph Smith lost “all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible” (JS-H 1:12). Language fails because “All things must fail” (Mor. 7:46), as Mormon says. Nephi celebrates and even embraces the failure of text, as when he writes, “we speak concerning the law that our children may know the deadness of the law; and they, by knowing the deadness of the law, may look forward unto that life which is in Christ, and know for what end the law was given. And after the law is fulfilled in Christ, that they need not harden their hearts against him when the law ought to be done away” (2 Nephi 25:27). The law, like the language that speaks it, is dead in and of itself, and can only represent that which is alive. Abinadi warns the Priests of Noah that what they do to him will be “a type and a shadow” (Mosiah 13:10), for these representation point to another reality. The Book of Mormon full well understands that words point to, not contain or transmit, reality. Then, like a Mission: Impossible time bomb, the text self-destructs, leaving behind only that which does not fail in its wake.

For the Nephite writers, words, laws, language, are all already dead, and are not only expected to collapse, but are to be treated as though they already have (and given language’s inherent unreliability, they are right to). Hence the law is treated as though it were already dead, and none are not to act surprised when it is done away with, for “all things must fail.” Language is only useful to them in that they point to reality. Truth does not rely on structure, on language, or on text; rather, truth, love, “charity which never faileth,” is what is left after the structure collapses.

As such, the Book of Mormon plays the Post-Structural game, 1,600 years before Derrida, of calling attention to the limits of language so that your faith is not in unstable, slippery language, but in what language leaves behind. Post-Structuralism, I believe, opens new avenues for both apologetics (the Post-Structural explanation and the epistemological dilemmas of mediated sensation, I’ve found, is all that has satisfied my numerous atheist friends as to the reasons for my faith), and for interpretation for this text. By way of comparison, for example, the Modernist writers would play with a text’s dependency on context for intelligibility, by placing quotations in new contexts, radically re-contextualizing them in the process; prominent examples include TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” which is basically a collage of quotations, and Jorge Luis Borge’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” wherein Don Quixote is rewritten word-for-word, but this second version shifts in meaning since it’s now written from a Modernist, not Renaissance, perspective. In a similar mode of Derridean free-play, The Book of Mormon includes long passages from Isaiah, but accompanied with the explicit instructions to “liken them unto yourselves” (1 Ne. 19:23), inviting the reader, as did Borges, to explore how meanings shift when the context shifts. Likewise, the Sermon on the Mount is read differently when delivered after Christ’s Resurrection than before, just as Menard’s Quixote reads differently from Cervantes’s, thus calling attention to the inherent, tautological instability of language.

The Savior Himself quotes Malachi to the Nephites—that is, he quotes a Prophet that He himself inspired, thus calling into question the very category of authorship itself, another Post-Structural preoccupation. For no writers write in a vacuum, but are constantly interacting, copying, and conversing with all writers that come before and after them. Such is the ethos of TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and his “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the latter being the explication, and the former the application, of his theory that texts are in constant conversation with each other; such also is the ethos of the Book of Mormon, with its polyphonic voices all conversing with each other at once. Mormon's is the dominant voice, but throughout the text, other strong authorial voices are also featured, a la Joyce’s Ulysses, such as Nephi, Jacob, Benjamin, Zeniff, Alma, Heleman, Moroni, and even the Savior Himself, revealing a wide-range of voices and personalities interacting with each other, speaking in the first, second, and third persons, likewise destabilizing the text. Also like Ulysses, the Book of Mormon is written in a collage of genres, such as sermons, prayers, coronation ceremonies (Mosiah 2-5), poetry (2 Nephi 5, Alma 29), epistolary, and Hebrew scripture. This collage of voices and genres again calls attention to how meaning shifts depending on context, inviting the reader to consider the ever-shifting signification of meanings swarming around, pointing towards, while never touching, the referent.

The Book of Mormon is also characteristically Post-Structural in that the center constantly shifts—Derrida insists not that there is not center, but rather that there is no fixed center. In reality, according to Derrida, there is always a center, but whatever occupies the center constantly shifts. One may rightfully argue that Christ is always the center of the Book of Mormon—Mormon has placed Him there. But as for Nephite civilization, the Prophets are constantly having to re-center the people on Christ, because the center of the structure of Nephite civilization is constantly being reoccupied by riches, fine clothing, gold, silver, covetousness, murder, hunger for power, and “the vain things of the world” (Alma 39:14). If the center was immutable, then the Prophets would not have to constantly risk their lives in preaching; but the Nephite Prophets fully understand that the center will shift inexorably, for the structure, of society, of language, is inherently slippery and unfixed, and “thus we see the great call of diligence of men to labor in the vineyards of the Lord” (Alma 28:14).

I would submit that the Post-Structural approach is one we have been using all along anyways, albeit with a different vocabulary. For example, Nibley writes:
I have been. . . called upon to stand up and be counted, to declare myself on one side or the other. Which do I prefer—gin or rum, cigarettes or cigars, tea or coffee, heroin or LSD, the Red Rose or the White, Shiz or Coriantumr, wicked Nephites or wicked Lamanites, Whigs or Tories, Catholic or Protestant, Republican or Democrat, black power or white power, land pirates or sea pirates, commissars or corporations, capitalism or communism. The devilish neatness and simplicity of the thing is the easy illusion that I am choosing between good and evil, when in reality two or more evils by their rivalry distract my attention from the real issue. (Nibley 163)

In Derridean terms, these constructions are known as “false binaries,” wherein two different sides are constructed in opposition to each other, with the implication that one side must be absolutely right, and therefore the other absolutely wrong. The false binary is an easy trap to fall into even today, and The Book of Mormon is interested in deconstructing, and thereby liberating, us from the tyranny of a structure that has made itself more important than the reality it claims to represent. For this binary construction the Nephites were constantly called to repentance by the Prophets, from Jacob crying “the Lamanites your brethren whom he hate because of their filthiness…are more righteous than you” (Jacob 3:5) to Mormon lamenting, “notwithstanding this great abomination of the Lamanites, it doth not exceed that of our people” (Moroni 9:9). Furthermore, the fact that so many Nephites apostatized and defected to the Lamanites, while so many Lamanites converted en masse and joined the Nephites, causes the entire false binary of Nephites/Lamanites to collapse, as thoroughly multi-ethnic squadrons battle each other throughout the war chapters in Alma. And when one considers that the re-division of Nephite/Lamanite in late 4 Nephi is along ideological, not ethnic lines, then even the easy apocalyptic binary established in 1 Nephi 12 of who will be destroyed is also surprisingly undermined—the final desconstruction is itself deconstructed. No matter how desperately we would like to impose a clean, easy binary on the Book of Mormon, the Book itself won’t allow us; every binary structure collapses immediately, as every Post-Structural text should.

Since all structure must collapse and “all things must fail,” the Post-Modernists often write as though the structure has already collapsed, just as the aforementioned Nephites who treat the Law of Moses as though it were already dead. Hence, like Becket's Endgame, Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, and even McCarthy’s The Road, The Book of Mormon is written after the final collapse of the structure 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 certain cataclysmic end-times. 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, whose works possess no hope of redemption. But then again, this cyclical view of history repeating (where the "The course of the Lord is one eternal round"), a la Joyce’s Finnegan's Wake and Pyncheon’s Gravity's Rainbow, is also characteristic of many High Modernist and Post-Modern texts.

Yet herein lays a key difference between Post-Modernism and the Book of Mormon—every cause of despair for the former is a cause for rejoicing in the latter. By way of further comparison, in the finale of Garcia Marquez's Hundred Years of Solitude, Aureliano finally reads the undecipherable book given by the gypsies at the novel’s inception. As a final catastrophic storm destroys his town of Macondo, Aureliano realizes that the book he is reading describes the entire history of Macondo up to this final storm, ending with a description of Aureliano reading the book; that is, Aureliano is reading himself reading Hundred Years of Solitude. It is an intensely Post-Structural moment, and an ending of great melancholy—for reality must collapse because the text that represents reality likewise collapses.

The Book of Mormon also has a book unreadable until the end of the world; said the angel to Nephi, "But the words which are sealed he shall not deliver, neither shall he deliver the book. For the book shall be sealed by the power of God, and the revelation which was sealed shall be kept in the book until the own due time of the Lord, that they may come forth; for behold, they reveal all things from the foundation of the world unto the end thereof" (2 Nephi 27:11). Nephi, as early as 1 Nephi 12, has already beheld the final destruction of his people, and both he and Mormon write as though his people are already dead—this apocalyptic melancholy is co-present with the entire Nephite narrative. Yet while Marquez despairs that all has been written down, for Nephi, this revelation is one of great promise and comfort. All has already been written, and what’s written must collapse—yea, even this whole wicked world must collapse, and the mountains made low, the valley’s high, and all the elements melt with a fervent heat (2 Peter 3:12). But what’s left then is not what represents, but what was represented. Along with Aureliano reading himself reading, we also read the Brother of Jared reading us when “all the inhabitants of the world” are revealed to him, but the effect is not one of final dissolution a la Marquez—quite the opposite, in fact.

For when the Post-Modernists deconstruct, only emptiness is left. When the Book of Mormon deconstructs, what’s left is the mediation itself—specifically the Great Mediator, the “Word made flesh” (John 1:14). The Book of Mormon’s self-deconstruction results not in the destabilization, but affirmation of meaning; the Nephite record does not mourn the inescapability of mediation, but celebrates and embraces the mediation. Christ is the Great Mediator, and none come to the Father but through Him, just as we cannot engage with reality but through mediating text and sensation. The text collapses, but the Spirit remains, standing alone among the ruins of language just as Moroni does among the ruins of his people. As Moroni writes, “whoso receiveth this record, and shall not condemn it because of the imperfections which are in it, the same shall know of greater things than these. Behold, I am Moroni; and were it possible, I would make all things known unto you” (Mormon 8:12). This record does not contain perfection; it falls short of the perfection is represents, as all words inevitably must. However, it will still point you towards perfection. The Book of Mormon itself, however, is un-interested in Biblical literalists—“if ye believe not in these words believe in Christ” (2 Nephi 33:10) cries Nephi, for what is most important to him is not the words themselves but where the words point you towards. Moroni’s promise in Moroni 10:3-5 is not to know the truthfulness of the words on the page itself, but rather, what the words themselves point at—in this case, namely, “how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men” (Moroni 10:3). Hence, the record does all it can to remain imperfect, unstable, slippery, and self-deconstructive, to ensure that it remains a means to an end, and not an end unto itself. “For all things must fail,” declares Mormon, this record not-excluded, so that all that is left is precisely that which does not fail.

What’s left, according to Mormon, is “charity—which never faileth” (Moroni 7:46), which is significant because charity, “the pure love of Christ,” is characteristically relational in nature. Structuralism and Post-Structuralism alike are likewise concerned with not the words themselves, but the relationships between the words. It is through words’ relationships with each other that context and meaning is derived—hence, it is in the empty absences between words that charity never faileth. And once language collapses, it is the primacy of the charitable relationship alone that is alone left supreme.

Works Cited
The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Salt Lake City, Utah: The
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1979.
Holy Bible, King James Version. Salt Lake City, Utah: The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints, 1979.
Nibley, Hugh. Approaching Zion. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book Company, 1989.