All-American |
07-27-2006 06:09 PM |
Regarding Brodie
With all of the fuss yesterday over Fawn Brodie's book, and finding myself unable to contribute, having never read the entire book, I went to the BYU library yesterday to check a copy out. Two slightly humorous observations: 1), Fawn Brodie's book, while listed alphabetically by author's last name, somehow ended up on the very bottom shelf of the Joseph Smith biographies; and 2), Hugh Nibley's response could be found paired with every copy of Fawn Brodie's book. I really love Mormons sometimes.
I fully intended to read the book cover to cover, but having read the first three chapters, I don't think I will. I already have another sizeable book that needs to be completely read by next Friday, for one, but at the same time, I am having a really hard time finding much of significance in the book. I recognize the two-fold weakness in this claim, that I have read but a tenth of the book and began the reading biased against it, so I claim no authoritative ethos in passing judgement, but I thought I'd share a few thoughts.
One thing that bothered me. From the beginning was Brodie's frank admission that evidence was often unreliable: "It is not that documents are lacking: it is rather that they are fiercly contradictory." Hers, then, was "the task of assembling these documents-- of sifting first-hand account from third-hand plagiarism, of fitting Mormon and non-Mormon narratives into a mosaic that makes credible history." This, we see, is her method-- from the sizeable pool of information, take that which makes sense and use it to tell the story. This is just the opposite of history-- documents should form the skeleton upon which our ideas are founded; instead, Brodie takes the documents and fits them upon the structure of her ideas.
This disclaimer allows Brodie to cast aside whatever information does not suit her purpose. One example from page 18, and pointed out in Nibley's critique, states that "although fifty-one of Joseph's neighbors signed an affidavit acusing him of being 'destitute of moral character and addicted to vicious habits,' there is no evidence that viciousness was a part of his nature." No evidence? Is not the affidavit signed by fifty-one of his neighbors evidence? The burden of proof is clearly upon the author, yet no information is presented, cited, or noted. We have to take her word for it.
Inconsistency runs rampant throughout. A few pages before confirming a major motive of the book of Mormon ("the dream of somehow recouping the family fortune," a dream which "his marriage had doubtless doubled"), Brodie explains away the breastplate described by his mother, estimated to be "worth at least five hundred dollars," with a footnote stating that "Joseph may have found a copper breastplate, for such objects were frequently discovered in the [burial] mounds." The boy who had been running around the countryside looking for treasure but a few pages earlier had now made a substantial find and was keeping it quiet for the sake of running his ruse?
She also frequently picks and chooses her sources to suit her purposes. Brodie claims that it is "some time between 1820 and 1827" when "it occured to the youth that he might try to write a history of the moundbuilders." To show that the whole matter was conceived of as an economic venture first and a religious venture well second, Brodie shows that no citizens of Palmyra considered the project to have religious connotations-- overlooking Joseph's own family, who believed every word he said. Brodie acknowledges the record of Joseph's mother, who quoted from Joseph's record unquestioningly, but moves along without discussing the paradox she had just introduced.
The greatest surprise to me was the low quality of scholarship. I didn't find any tremendously new information, but I assume that the credit ought to go to Brodie for being the first to bring up the sources and ideas which have persisted since. But ideas are introduced, discussed, and accepted with very little reference to the information source from which they are derived. This stands in stark contrast to many other, more reliable historians-- and, just to make sure I'm really not making any friends with this post, I'll tell you flat out that I consider Hugh Nibley's scholarship to be of a much higher quality. Any work by Nibley will have extensive footnotes explaining the origin of nearly every thought, making his work available to analysis and criticism. Brodie seems to bank on authoritarianism.
To save you all the trouble, allow me to tell you all the reasons my analysis is invalid. I am biased, I am relatively uneducated, I took no more than half an hour to write this, and I didn't give Brodie a fair chance by virtue of neglecting the greater part of the work and by standing by my preconceptions. I'll tell you one thing, though: I had honestly expected to find a much higher quality production than what little I read. Having read Bushman, Madsen, Perry, and others, I found no new information in Brodie's book, and I will be charitable in assuming that her greatest contribution was the material that would be evaluated by later historians better equipped to handle it. The only thing left, then, was her interpretive spin on the matter, which I found to be very dissapointing.
Maybe someday I'll get around to the rest of the book. Probably not, though.
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