From a New York Times column:

“It is a fair thing to point out,” said Shannon Hale, a Mormon who writes young adult fiction, “that there have been very prominent Jewish writers that have received a lot of accolades, and worldwide the number of Mormons are comparable to the number of Jews, so why hasn’t that happened?”

Ms. Hale’s theory is that literary fiction tends to exalt the tragic, or the gloomy, while Mormon culture prefers the sunny and optimistic.

“When I was an English major, then getting a master’s, most of the literary fiction I read was tragedy,” said Ms. Hale… The books she was assigned treated “decline and the ultimate destruction of the human spirit” as necessary ingredients for an honest portrayal of life.

UD‘s not sure she’d put it like that. Take a novel always ranked Number One and unlikely (if the NYT column is correct in its descriptions of Mormons) to generate enthusiasm or writerly inspiration among most Mormons. Take James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s not a tragedy; as Joyce Carol Oates points out here, it’s a comedy.

The highest and most spirited comedy is by necessity democratic — even anarchic. It celebrates life: the livingness of life, not its abstract qualities. Where [T.S.] Eliot saw the contemporary world as futile because disruptive of the past, Joyce, the realist-fantasist, the unparalleled mimic, gave life to these clamorous voices without passing judgment on them.

True, the novel follows dispirited Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom as they drag their asses through Dublin; yet although both men feel themselves to be in decline, there’s nothing destructive about their shared fates this particular day: They are fortunate enough (thanks to Bloom’s kindness) to meet each other, and to forge a compassionate and perceptive fellowship. They celebrate the livingness of life, singing, gazing at stars, reciting poetry, telling jokes, sharing memories, and of course going outside and peeing together:

At Stephen’s suggestion, at Bloom’s instigation both, first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition, their gazes, first Bloom’s, then Stephen’s, elevated to the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow.

Similarly?

The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom’s longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen’s higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vesical pressure.

What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the invisible audible collateral organ of the other?

To Bloom: the problems of irritability, tumescence, rigidity, reactivity, dimension, sanitariness, pelosity. To Stephen: the problem of the sacerdotal integrity of Jesus circumcised (1st January, holiday of obligation to hear mass and abstain from unnecessary servile work) and the problem as to whether the divine prepuce, the carnal bridal ring of the holy Roman catholic apostolic church, conserved in Calcata, were deserving of simple hyperduly or of the fourth degree of latria accorded to the abscission of such divine excrescences as hair and toenails.

I don’t think it’s the gloomy aspects of modernist novels like Ulysses that seem at odds with Mormonism; rather, I suspect it’s precisely these novels’ non-abstract, non-judgmental, earthbound, ongoing livingness – their straightforward and candid capture of the way we actually think and feel and act from moment to moment – that’s jarring.