Can We Save Culture With A Single Sentence?

A Critique

To please a young man there should be sentences. What are sentences. Like what are sentences. In the part of sentences it for him is happily all. They will name sentences for him. Sentences are called sentences.

- Gertrude Stein

The first step to becoming insufferable is learning the word “avant-garde.” Once you have it, every piece of art you create is genre-bending. “Bad” becomes just a label that normies throw around to try to kill your vibe. They don’t get the “milieu” like you do.

The avant-garde can destroy the foundations of capitalism and tear through the canvas of patriarchy. It shields the oppressed from their oppressors; it uproots expectations and offers devastating commentary on the failures of society, promoting resistance against the elite; it is the rallying cry for condign retribution; it is the antidote to anachronisms and the opposite of the obdurate. Or maybe it’s just buttons. I’m not quite sure.

This is what I do know: over the past decade, the literary world has seen a surge in short writing, with calls for flash essays popping up everywhere to capitalize on the undeniable fragmentation of attention spans. Yet still, these were too long; they didn’t break form enough. Now, Complete Sentence, a Covid-born lit mag, has created a home for the shortest of short, the flashest of flash: the single sentence.

Complete Sentence has arrived to meet the needs of our day. Why spend time writing 500 or 1,000 words (or even a whole novel, God forbid) when you can spasm with impatience and be rewarded with the satisfaction of creativity? Alright, maybe I’m being excessively cruel. What’s really so terrible about a fun lit mag? Why do undergrads think the most impressive thing you can do is critique?

Here’s why: If art converses with and comments upon the culture and politics of a society, then we mustn’t settle for a quip. We need more than a sentence from the avant-garde. A literature of fragments may be faithful to the age, but it is not faithful to the soul. If we consecrate beauty — fun — as the final form of art, then we are colluding in our own cultural diminishment, our own political and social collapse. Mirroring our distractions does nothing to steady us against them.