What we've been up to

From the new issue's theme: For some people, there's no avoiding theory, even if they try. Consider the case of Roland Barthes. In the final years of his career, the famous French literary theorist claimed to have given up on such academic pursuits. But, as historian Blake Smith explores in "'I Love You' (in Theory)," love got in the way. Theory was, perhaps, an irresistibly familiar intellectual tool for a theoretician par excellence. Gripped by unrequited love himself, Barthes taught a seminar on "lover's discourse."

"When we look at love from the outside—for example, as readers of a romantic novel—we can imagine it progressing, through a series of difficulties and pleasures, to its tragic or joyous conclusion. But when we are in love, we don't see a path. We don't understand how our confused and contradictory feelings, our alternatingly joyous and dim visions of the beloved, can be reconciled into a whole. These discordant states of feeling, each coming into language in its own fragment of discourse, form in Barthes's account not the raw material of a narrative but so many distinct voices."

From the new issue's books section: Traditions have always been messy, contested features of human culture. And in modern society, religious traditions have become particularly hard to keep track of and harder to police. Would-be defenders of traditions sometimes unwittingly contribute to their corruption, reducing a living thing to an ideology or a backward-looking form of bookkeeping. In "The Living Faith of the Dead," his review of theologian David Bentley Hart's book on tradition, THR senior editor Kyle Edward Williams considers what it means to be faithful to a tradition—and who might be our best guides.

"Tradition is something we think about more clearly when it's slipping through our fingers. In the play Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye the Dairyman becomes ever more vociferous (and anxious) about the preservation of tradition even as the customs of his beloved Jewish village in Ukraine are being remade and undone before his very eyes. For many of us, the family, friends, and social conditions that made those big Thanksgiving dinners or block parties so special come to be understood more completely only after they have become an old memory. 'Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?' sang Joni Mitchell in 1970."

New Web Feature: In a new installment of "Critical Miniatures," a THR exclusive web series, Wheaton College English professor Richard Hughes Gibson considers the archival sources of fiction. That is, not the way that authors do research for their books, but rather the way that narrators and even characters make use of fictional sources within a given story. Gibson argues that such instances in fiction present a hard case for a theorist such as Lev Manovich who believed that databases and narratives were always two, competing imaginative forces.

"Cervantes indeed deserves credit here. The Spaniard revealed the artistic possibilities of inventing a character—the Don—for whom the backstory (which is thin) matters less than the enormous trove of documents lying in his story's background, an archive never fully seen by the reader but constantly felt. In the very first paragraph of the first chapter (as seen in my first quotation), the narrator alerts us to the fact that the authorities disagree about the lead character's last name: was it Quixada (jaw)? Quesada (cheesecake)? Maybe Quexana? The narrator shrugs the issue off, claiming at once that it "does not matter much to the story" which name is right and that his narration never deviates from the truth. Through this aside, Cervantes establishes that Don Quixote will not just chronicle the glorious deeds of Don Quixote (Quixada/Quesada/Quexana/Quejido/Quetal/Quetzal/etc.); it will also chronicle the chronicler who battles not with swords but sources. There is, in turn, an unspoken agon between hero and historian throughout the novel, as the narrator's reports on the state of the manuscript tradition repeatedly interrupt and sometimes abruptly end the knight's exploits. Moreover, Cervantes suggests at several points that his archive may be incomplete, meaning that somewhere out there more Don Quixote awaits the intrepid reader. But if there is a war between database and narrative here, it is a merry one. Cervantes's great discovery was that readers derive pleasure from both."

New Web Feature: Why did Silicon Valley Bank collapse? Many journalists and pundits have described it as a social media-driven bank run. In "After the Fall of Silicon Valley Bank," Jonathan Teubner, THR contributing editor and founder of the tech startup FilterLabs.AI, argues that there's a deeper story to this banking crisis. There is a dangerous failure in the tech industry to think carefully and responsibly about how economic institutions are embedded within a larger society.

"Around noon on March 9, I learned that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) had shut down the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), where my company has some of its accounts. My co-founder and I were in the middle of a call with some of our advisors, all experienced hands in the tech startup world actively advising and investing in tech startups like ours. The Zoom room was empty within seconds. We all immediately knew what that meant: The cash we pay our employees and vendors was now locked up—perhaps indefinitely."