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The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations

2024; Volume: 11; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21568030.11.08

2156-8030

Sonia Hazard,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

the premise of the academic field of bibliography is that every book is not just a text but also a material object. That shift in perspective opens onto a wider set of questions that one may ask of any book. If a book is an object, what kind of object is it? Why was it made in the way that it was made? For whom, and for what purposes, was the object intended? Finally, how is it used by the different communities that encounter it?These sorts of bibliographical questions entered my mind as I beheld my copy of The Joseph Smith Papers: Revelations and Translations, volume 5, the long-anticipated facsimile edition of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon. For one thing, the objecthood of the manuscript itself has thrown up obstacles to the production of this edition and conditioned its possibility. The text endured devastating water damage sometime between 1841, when Joseph Smith placed it in a Nauvoo cornerstone, and 1882, when it was retrieved. Lewis Bidamon (Emma Smith's second husband) later split up the remains, giving portions to several visitors who traveled to Nauvoo during the late nineteenth century (6–8). That this new edition, expertly edited by Royal Skousen and Robin Scott Jensen, is now available is the result of a decades-long collaborative undertaking to identify the fragments and preserve them, even before the work of preparing the edition could commence. The volume, which contains an estimated 28 percent of the original text, is a monument to those efforts that involved archivists, historians, conservators, collectors, and donors, among others (xi).I say “monument” in more than the metaphorical sense. Anyone who handles the volume will not fail to notice its heft, somewhere around the same weight class as a Victorian family bible or a compact Oxford English Dictionary. Equally extraordinary is the volume's interior of over 750 glossy folio pages. Beginning with a historical introduction to the manuscript's production and afterlife, the bulk of the book is dedicated to representing the manuscript. Full-size photographic facsimile reproductions appear on the left-hand page openings; facing them on the right are transcriptions of the text, edited by Skousen and Jensen. The imaged leaves are severely damaged in many cases. By my count, of the 232 extant pages, only forty-four (or twenty-two leaves, with each leaf containing two pages, recto and verso) are complete, or nearly so. For twenty-eight pages (fourteen leaves), all that remain are tiny fragments, each smaller than a postage stamp. For fifty-eight pages (twenty-nine leaves), the text appears on a surface area larger than a postage stamp but smaller than an index card. There are also appendices at the back: one features two leaves of contested authenticity; another offers alternative views of sections that were photographed during earlier periods in the manuscript's conservation history. Altogether, the result is the most complete and thoroughly contextualized edition of the original manuscript ever attempted.For whom, and for what purposes, was this object intended? This book was produced partly for the scholarly community, especially specialists in Mormon studies engaged in textual analysis of the Book of Mormon. Researchers whose work depends on getting as close as possible to Smith's intentions and the collaborative writing process will find this edition to be indispensable. They will appreciate Skousen and Jensen's editorial principle: namely, to typographically reproduce as many details and with as much fidelity to the original as possible. The editors call their editing style “conservative” (xxiv). While this edition builds on the pioneering work of an earlier version overseen by Skousen as part of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project (xxviii), that edition had made several silent emendations (“sware” became “swore,” “makeing” became “making,” and so on). By contrast, this one includes everything as it appears in the original, including strikethroughs and insertions, as well as elements that might be regarded as errors or archaisms pertaining to punctuation and spelling.An especially useful feature is a color-coded apparatus that parses the contributions of various actors involved in the writing process. Corresponding to the page containing the text of Alma 45:17–46:6, for instance (341), the editors have distinguished between the main text rendered in the hand of the scribe Oliver Cowdery (in regular black letters), the text that Cowdery had inserted later (in brown letters), and the text that Smith himself added still later (in bold letters). Editors and conservators determined the scribes’ identities and the timing of their inscriptions using handwriting analysis and, ingeniously, chemical testing of the ink (xxix). Anyone familiar with manuscript studies will admire the level of forensic skill and sheer endurance that this sort of analysis demands. Thanks to these efforts, this volume is the definitive edition that scholars will need to consult in the future.It is also the case that the Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon is an object that exceeds its scholarly uses. Consider the facsimile reproductions of the minuscule fragments that comprise a significant portion of the extant leaves. Page 424 presents an image of a wee speck of paper containing some smudgy letters from chapter 28 of Alma. The transcription, on the opposite page, is mutilated to the point of incomprehensibility: “the d of / e sword again / ‘ere’ requisi / ld h.” In manuscript studies, a term for such a passage is a locus desperatus, a hopeless place thwarting all attempts at reading or interpretation. Why include it in the edition? To be sure, the editors seek comprehensiveness and conformity with the original. Such an editorial policy has a precedent in the history of textual editing. Yet, in this case, in my view, that scientific project tends to decant into devotionalism. In the absence of any decipherable text, the fragment's message becomes more succinct: here it is, behold, the sacred thing.The visual presentation of the facsimiles amplifies the devotional effect. The eye is enticed by the exceptional smallness of these textual remnants set against the full-folio expansiveness of their stark white backgrounds. What is on display in this volume are not only the fragments, but the magnitude of the loss represented as negative space. The viewer is asked to mourn that loss while treasuring the miracle of the scraps that remain. In other words, the conspicuous absences have a purpose: they sharpen the viewer's focus on the remains, charging them with a special power. The effect is similar to that of viewing battered ancient texts. (The famous images of fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls come to mind.) Such visual resemblance to ancient texts may also tacitly serve Mormonism's claims to antiquity.A short video circulated in a news release by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ newsroom offers a view into the volume's more reverent forms of reception. It opens with a shot of President Russell M. Nelson addressing a group of men seated around a table covered in copies of the book. As Nelson praises the achievement of its publication, the fingers of his right hand gently rest atop his copy. The video cuts later to Gail Miller of the Larry H. and Gail Miller Family Foundation, which funded the project, who announced her satisfaction at the edition's publication: “I know that this is a divine work. I know that this is an important, almost critical work for the Church. For people to be able to go to the work of the Joseph Smith Papers and get the truth.”1 The video makes clear how the volume offers not only an occasion for textual analysis, but also, in its very materiality, an ersatz relic for devotion, one invested with a divine mission to equip its audiences with the truth and with the requisite religious feelings to receive the truth. For some audiences, the book remediates the sacred into a new format in ways that ultimately call back to the sacred book-object of the gold plates. Smith may have returned the plates, and most of the original manuscript may have been lost to the ravages of time and climate, but finally here is something substantial and real that can be touched.The more devotional aspects of textual editing are not unique to the LDS Church. Much of biblical criticism since the nineteenth century has been fueled by scholars similarly seeking to get close to the urtext and therefore to the word of God. Arguably, the act of making any sort of edition assumes something of the sacred (or at least charged) status of the original, whether that is the Book of Mormon or Emily Dickinson's poetry or Shakespeare's First Folio. Mormons have intense relationships with their texts and material objects; so, too, non-Mormon scholars’ engagements with their textual objects are layered with desires and passions. I mean only to point out that this object, the Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, is the sort of object that it is because it bears the weight of expectations from multiple publics with different demands; and also that, much like the original manuscript, the printed book is the result of a collaboration among diverse contributors who shaped it in direct and indirect ways, in this case including not only the editorial duo but also art directors, conservators, collectors, donors, and church leaders, to name just a few. That Skousen and Jensen were able to carry out a work that is essential for Mormon textual studies, while also satisfying multiple publics, is a feat in itself. The volume will no doubt enjoy a broad and well-deserved reception.