The founding of a new literary magazine is, I believe, a thoroughly worthwhile endeavor. I also believe that the stated mission of the Monarch Review is deserving of some discussion. This essay is meant to be provocative, and should be understood in that spirit. What follows is a critique of one possible interpretation of the publication’s mission. Although this critique is mainly ‘suggestive’, a nice way of saying that it is inadequate, it may still do its job, which is to elicit clarification and argument. In fact, inadequate critiques are often better than comprehensive ones for this purpose, because they are open to so many exciting misunderstandings that must be laboriously cleared up afterward – not that this is an argument in their favor. But, to work! The statement in question is as follows:

“The Monarch Review is a publication dedicated to sustaining a literary tradition both curious and amenable to the necessary adaptations of creative lives lived in a world of increasingly rapid technological advancement. Only within an understanding of tradition as existing in a state of perpetual change can it be sustained.”

But we will get to that in a minute. Let’s start with something else.

One function of literature is to pass judgment on society. This is not its primary function, and indeed it may sometimes be quite peripheral, but it is always there. Why is this so? Because literature abstracts from and re-presents social reality, and thereby interprets it. The author of a piece of literature tells us which aspects of our experience are important and, by omission, which are not. In so doing, he brings into prominence or leaves in obscurity different ways of existing and moving in the social world. More than this: he shows us what he believes his society has made of human beings, what it has done to the human spirit, for good or ill. Writing literature that will be read by others is a social act, and reading literature, if we take it seriously, changes our understanding of our surroundings and of the possibility and desirability of acting so as to change them. In plain language: what we read affects how we live our lives, what we believe we can and should do in the world.

This social and judgmental function of literature cannot be avoided, even when it is explicitly disavowed. When it is disavowed, this only amounts to the passing of a particular kind of judgment. For instance, when it is claimed that social commentary is not the business of literature, and especially when literature and literary criticism are written with this claim in mind, the effect tends to be one of conservatism and paralysis. The moral lassitude of the author is communicated to his audience, with the result that social reality comes to appear as something to be suffered and reflected upon but not substantially changed.

My question is whether the stated mission of the Monarch Review may, in however subtle fashion, be expressing some such disavowal. Let’s begin with the first sentence, which dedicates the publication “to sustaining a literary tradition both curious and amenable to the necessary adaptations of creative lives lived in a world of increasingly rapid technological advancement”. I am not sure whether I have understood this statement correctly, but I think it may be rephrased: “We live in a world of rapid technological change; this affects our lives in ways that demand of us various ‘adaptations’; we are interested in literature that accepts these facts of modern life and explores the results.”

Now, if this were merely an expression of preference, a deliberate narrowing of interests – as, for instance, one might say ‘we are particularly interested articles about horses’ – then I would have no reason to object. After all, I am not writing to Reader’s Digest or Field & Stream, complaining that they do not take seriously enough the case for social revolution. But in this instance I think it is more than a matter of limiting the purview of the publication. What more is it? It is an assertion that one aspect of our social reality – the social implications of technology – is a datum, an established and inevitable fact, to which any creative or literary activity today must adapt.

If I am correct in this interpretation, then it raises an obvious question, namely whether this picture of our situation is accurate. Certainly it is true that we live in a world of increasingly rapid technological advancement. The idea that we, as human beings and as writers, must accept and adapt to this fact as best we can seems not at all unreasonable, given that the pace and social effects of technological change appear to be mostly out of our hands. It is a characteristic fact about our society that most things appear to be out of our hands, and perhaps pursuing a ‘creative life’ within this whirlwind, expressing ourselves through language, is one of the few powers left to us.

As it happens, I believe this assessment of the limits of our ability to act in society to be deeply mistaken, and of course I would not be objecting otherwise. But the way the issue has been put, to object seems somewhat preposterous. Do I propose to halt the forward march of technology? Or to legislate its social effects? Why not try to stop the tide from coming in, or revolt against the weather? But ‘rapid technological advancement’ is not like the weather. It is a social phenomenon, and its causes, the specific forms it takes, and its effects cannot be understood without also understanding the socioeconomic system in which it is embedded – in a phrase, global capitalism. The countless ‘adaptations’, the twists and turns, the contortions and amputations of modern life, are pressed upon us not by technology per se, but rather by a system in which the development and use of technology are driven by the relentless pursuit of profit. They speak of the inexorable descent into senescence of a class society that is fast running up against its human and natural limits. To characterize our world as one of ‘increasingly rapid technological advancement’ leads, by omission, to a grave distortion of reality.

Now, it is my personal conviction that one must, in such a world, do whatever is in one’s power to bring to birth a society in which, among other things, the development and use of technology are directed toward the good of human beings. But this is not an idea I want to pursue or even insist upon here. Here I only want to suggest that even a partial appreciation of the nature of modern capitalism, and its relation to technological change, raises serious doubts as to the viability of traditions of all kinds, including literary traditions. And this brings us to the second half of the Monarch’s mission statement, the claim that “only within an understanding of tradition as existing in a state of perpetual change can it be sustained.”

This statement is puzzling. After all, on a normal day, what makes a ‘tradition’ deserving of the name is some kind of constancy, or at least continuity. A tradition either maintains its integrity, or it dissolves. Traditions themselves change, of course; but so long as they are healthy, there is a rhyme and a reason to their development: it is a productive back-and-forth, a call-and-response between whatever piece of reality a tradition is engaged in re-presenting, investigating, or shaping, and its own internal standards, values, and practices. When a tradition loses this partly independent standpoint, when it begins to merely adapt, then for all intents and purposes it has died.

If the mission’s authors mean to suggest that the conditions of modern life have rendered ‘traditions’, on this normal understanding, nearly insupportable, then I would tend to agree. Excepted are those traditions of scientific inquiry whose progress underwrites the ‘increasingly rapid technological advancement’ needed to sustain capitalist expansion; and even here a constant battle is waged between the imperatives of profit and the values essential to a genuine pursuit of knowledge. But unprofitable traditions do not fare as well. Capitalism corrodes their integrity and ruptures their continuity, severing the ties between past and future; the links between generations, and even between successive versions of our selves, yield to the planned obsolescence of products and of people. As was observed many years ago by capitalism’s most notorious critics: “all that is solid melts into air.”

The consequences are dire: for human beings, for their creative productions, and so for literature. When literature loses any stable center from which to survey and assess the social changes that impinge from without, it loses its voice. I do not think that literature today has wholly succumbed to this fate, by any means. But what has happened is that the critical function of literature has become individualized, like so much else, so that each author is left to construct her own standpoint from the cultural detritus that flows and washes up all around us; to choose for herself the values that will inform her judgment of society. This judgment – and protest, if it be one – loses much of its effectiveness in being thus personalized, and this literature taken as a whole can hardly be said to constitute a tradition. Art in general, while still an expression of social reality, ceases to be truly social: at worst, it is reduced to the cry of the individual soul bereft of all really human relations, a desperate and ultimately futile grasping after a kind of meaning that our way of life is no longer capable of producing.

This poses a problem for a publication dedicated to sustaining a literary tradition today. To think that a ‘tradition’ in any meaningful sense can exist in a state of perpetual change is, I believe, mistaken. And I am not at all sure that the notion of ‘creative lives lived in a world of increasingly rapid technological advancement’ is a sturdy enough hook to hang a tradition on. The danger is that one becomes a sort of sideline witness to a process of social, cultural and moral disintegration without knowing quite what to make of it.

This is not meant to be a counsel of despair. But I do think that certain conditions may be necessary for the recovery and rebuilding of something that can rightly be called a literary tradition. The first is that it assume a critical stance with respect to our social reality, the now-global capitalism that steadily undermines all traditions. But a critical stance, if it is to be more than a protest of desperation, requires a coherent vision of some alternative and an idea of how to get there. It is unclear where this can come from when there does not yet exist a real social movement that, while in the process of changing society, can begin to embody the standards, values, and practices of a different way of life. Whether and when such a movement can be brought into being, remains to be seen.

I hope that I have by now made enough contentious and vague statements to give food for thought. Maybe I have painted a far bleaker picture of our society than is generally acceptable. If, as is quite possible, I have completely misinterpreted the mission statement of the Monarch Review, I hope its authors will use the opportunity to expand upon their viewpoint and vision. Let me close by saying again that I wish this new literary publication all the best.

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N. B. Although I have written this essay without citations, it would be dishonest not to express indebtedness for my general outlook. So, in order of increasing (historical) age and depth of influence, and decreasing direct relevance to the subject matter at hand, I mention: William Deresiewicz, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Karl Marx.