New Romantics in the Thick Real: On Joshua Hren and Sally Thomas

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Romanticism is back in fashion. Philosopher of culture Ted Gioia’s watershed series of essays critiqued the “current malaise” wrought on the contemporary world by the technocratic paradigm and called for a “New Romanticism” to push back against the New Industrial Revolution of “rationalist and algorithmic models…dominating every sphere of life.” “Imagine,” Gioia invites, “if people started resisting technology as a malicious form of control, and not a pathway to liberation, empowerment, and human flourishing—soul-nurturing riches that must come from someplace deeper.” 

Gioia, deeply influenced by Rene Girard’s mimetic theory of desire, calls for the cultivation of what Girardian anthropologist-entrepreneur Luke Burgis terms “thick desires”—deep, life-giving sources of fulfillment and joy, desires that in Burgis’s words make us “feel satisfied about having poured [ourselves] out for,” wants written into our hearts that are transcendent rather than immanent, insofar as they endure consistently over time, fill us with completion and peace, and have some sort of objective metric beyond ourselves that determines whether or not we’ve fulfilled them well. Thick desires stand in sharp contrast to thin desires like the ultimately anhedonic hits of “dopamine culture.” They call us out of ourselves and into relationships with others. The most fulfilling relationships, the ones that make us most ourselves, are the ones that demand the most from us, the ones we have to give ourselves over to entirely. 

Both Burgis and Gioia would argue that relationships of total self-gift are what fulfills the human heart: they are the thickest desires. These are the desires that enlarge the scope of our lives—the love and responsibility we have towards our families, the imagination to create something new by representing reality truthfully through expertise in art and technical skill, the meaningful work that not only interests us but also contributes in a measurable way to the growth in well-being of our communities, all predicated on a mastery over ourselves through authentic self-knowledge, which helps us to discern how our subjective hierarchy of values aligns with what will objectively help us flourish. How much human misery, Burgis suggests, whether that be via broken families or addiction or years wasted in the pursuit of meaningless brass rings at work stems from our pursuit of short-term rivalries and immediate dopamine hits rather than an investment in the long-term desires we know will make us happier?

Gioia’s proposal for a new Romanticism has met with a mixed response, in part because its connections with old Romanticism seem underdeveloped. Old “Romantic literature is a variation on the suicide note,” as playwright Matthew Gasda recently put it: “Stated frankly, Romanticism is genius plus criminality in an attempt to make the outer world resemble the inner world—beautiful, wild, insane, primitive and unconscious, and yet highly refined at the same time.” Gasda wants us “to consider whether we really desire to embody chaos, rebellion, insanity, and … whether, in final calculation, our comfortable, safe, and predictable technocentric lives have rendered it fundamentally impossible for us to follow [the old Romantic] path.” At the same time, Gasda seems somewhat sympathetic to the deeper point beneath Gioia’s arguments. “Why should someone be a Romantic today?” Gasda asks. “Because being a Romantic means, perhaps, that you’ve felt a transformative love—a love worth dying for. Or a love worth just…changing for. It doesn’t have to be grand or public. Romanticism exalts feeling; feeling deepens life.” 

Gasda’s concerns about a New Romanticism are clear: the old Romantics rejected all the rational parts of society, not just the rationalist parts. As Gasda observes, the Romantics would “reject, laugh at, the entire civilizational premise of statistics-based reasoning and the securitization of the human body. … [For example, Romantic poet] Gérard de Nerval walked his pet lobster on a leash before hanging himself.” Perhaps we shouldn’t seek to resurrect a movement whose practitioners “practiced or dabbled in incest, sorcery, murder and suicide.” Fair enough, much as I would like to see a resurgence in people walking their pet lobsters. 

This is where the Girardian element of Gioia’s thought is vital to pay attention to, because it provides the New Romantics with a clear competitive distinction from old Romanticism: what Gioia and Burgis are calling for is not a simple resurgence of feeling, a giving of ourselves over to every passion we have, but rather a conversion of desire. New Romanticism is about purified desires, not unbridled feelings. If New Romanticism has an old Romantic model, it’s Alessandro Manzoni, author of the Italian marriage plot The Betrothed, who contended, in the words of translator Michael F. Moore, that human history is ordered by divine providence and that “forgiveness is the supreme human virtue,” which goes directly against the sublimation of the human intellect entirely to the passions: how often do you feel passionately, violently the desire to forgive someone? If you have, you’re a better person than I am. Forgiveness only makes sense in a world in which our deepest and most distinct human (and rational) desires are for love and the gift of ourselves to others.

New Romanticism is deeply attentive, as much to the concrete, messy realities of human life as it is to the desires that go beyond the immanent, those transcendent wants for things that will truly fulfill us regardless of time, place, or social circumstance. Because the New Romantics contend that one of our thickest desires is imagination and imagination seeks after the truth—the right depiction, reflection, and representation of reality—it’s unsurprising that the works of art they make gravitate towards stories of love and family because of the un-liminality, the thick realness, of those domains. 

Two recent small press releases, Joshua Hren’s Blue Walls Falling Down and Sally Thomas’s The Blackbird and Other Stories, showcase the transformative creativity that New Romanticism can bring to long-established genres, in this case the novel and the short story, through an attention to marriage and family. In a recent letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal, Hren discussed how his novel, set in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C. during the lead-up, horrors, and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial injustices of 2020, aimed to adapt this period to fiction by placing it in dialogue with sub-genres and traditions of literary realism which have fruitfully helped readers “gaze into the depths of hard truths, contemplating collective sufferings in a way that brings catharsis instead of panic attacks,” citing the precedent of Gustave Flaubert’s “anti-sentimental irony” in his treatment of the French Revolution. Flaubert, who distanced himself from old Romanticism over the course of his novelistic career, isn’t the only realist in Blue Walls’ literary DNA. Hren frames his book around a “choice plot,” which as novelist A. Natasha Joukovsky has recently observed is a distinctively realist approach to depicting life, one in which “characters make things happen” so as to move towards a future they desire, with a key decision or set of decisions serving as the entry point to that future. Joukovsky points not only to realist Henry James as the apotheosis of an author who uses this type of plot, but also to Jane Austen, whose marriage plots always rely on some definitive decision on the part of the heroine. 

Hren draws clear inspiration from both these authors. In addition to the decision he alludes to in his letter to the Journal—how the “sympathies of the protagonist, Stella, are divided between her father—a conspiracy-obsessed Jan. 6 attendee—and her lover—a former Black Lives Matter leader, fomenting a breaking point.” Blue Walls also deals with Stella’s romantic choice between her former fiancé Blake and her lover Peter, the father of her infant child.

These generic connections with early literary realism are not accidental, as Hren sees his novel as a work of contemplative realism. In his recent manifesto on the subject, signed by Sally Thomas, Hren defined contemplative realism as a way of viewing the cosmos in which we “suffer and praise with the whole of creation;” the aim of writers seeing and representing in this mode is to write “prose [which] cultivates a grateful disposition, prompting us to yearn for a vision of the whole” of being. Hren admits contemplative realism’s deep inspiration to the twentieth-century philosopher Jacques Maritain, who argues in his essays in Art and Scholasticism that art is a “habit of the practical intellect” which aims to work “for the good of the work made.” This is insofar as the work delights human vision, which goes beyond physical sight and deals with the entirety of human apprehension and intelligence, and the property of being that makes a thing delightful, including existence itself, we call beauty. 

In more familiar terms, Maritain affirms that the human heart’s deep desire for delight is a thick desire for beauty. “The whole world,” Maritain says about technocratic modernity, “is agog with excitement over calculating machines; everyone dreams only of method,” but method is no instructor of “love,” which “tends to what can delight the intellect.” For Hren, contemplative realism is rooted in the desire and love for reality, so much so that you attend to it with the gaze of a lover who finds it so delightful that you can’t help but represent it just as delightfully through art. Though earlier realists like Flaubert or James might have had an at-best ambivalent and at-worst critical relationship with old Romanticism, contemplative realists like Hren align with New Romanticism—little surprise, then, to find a blurb by Luke Burgis on the back of his book.

Hren’s both-and approach to contemplative realism and New Romanticism manifests clearly in the novel’s structure, a choice plot not limited to just a single choice, but several critical decision points in Stella’s life over the course of the pandemic years that track the transformation of her desires. Stella starts the novel as a miserable, underpaid Catholic school teacher in Cook County, careening towards the wrong side of forty, whose fiancé abandoned her. Having cultivated a deep desire for motherhood, inspired in part by the model of her beloved nonna, Stella falls in love with a colleague, Peter Clavier, a rhetorically gifted school therapist and former leader in Black Lives Matter. Over the course of several intimate dialogues, Stella begins to see Peter as the ideal candidate to be the father of her children. Though Stella’s story moves linearly, Hren uses time skips, with information about what happened in the interim filled in later on, so the reader can encounter Stella at her most important moments of choice: her uncertainty about how far to go with Peter, her reticence about supporting Peter’s run for local alderman, her conflict about whether or not to move with him to D.C. after his former colleagues in the BLM movement invite him to take a national leadership role, her grappling to figure out whether to leave Chicago behind and move back home with her newborn son to her difficult family in Milwaukee, her tensions with her deeply conservative father and emotionally distant mother as her nonna’s health declines, her conflict between her intense feelings of love and anger with Peter when her ex-fiancé returns, and her final struggle to discern what to do as the competing ideologies that surround her come to a violent head. 

Hren’s prose captures the tension between the formlessness of time during the pandemic and the simultaneous urgency of its social changes, using stream-of-consciousness to transform dialogue into prose poetry. Take, for instance, the first time Stella hears Peter’s voice, as he’s interviewed on public radio about his work as a counselor:

…none of that stopped this repeated dream which swung down on my sleeping body at three a.m. every single night for nine months straight: I walk into the back of the church, see my uncle Cedric muttering something I can’t make out, but he’s muttering it matter of fact and his eyes keep lifting up to me to answer a question he keeps posing until he drops his head and stops looking to me, bent over a closed casket, and whatever he’s mumbling is picked up by the women – all women – who are gathered closest to the podium and the closed casket…and then my mama stands on top of a pew and turns around so all can see and hear and starts berating herself for what she should have done for her son, how she hated the idea of teaching him how to wield a gun but she would have done better had she bit the bullet and half the congregation says Amen! and the other half say Get Behind Me, Satan! But she’s shaking her head and her body’s convulsing, closing in on itself like a crocus, her blouse not black even but purple like a flower and she castigates Nobody else but myself for all the little negligences, the missed dinners and midnight visitors, until one by one others chime in to rebuke her and volunteer their own faults, all the things they could have done but didn’t for the woman’s dead son and I’m just leaning on the banister in the back and feeling happier than I’ve ever felt to hear the praises of the dead boy gone who was me…

The tripping flow of Hren’s words belies how carefully his words are chosen, as the novel layers allusions ranging from Homer’s Odyssey to David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. Despite the essential nature the pandemic and its political unrest play in Blue Walls, Hren has clearly been wrestling with this story for a long time, with a number of characters from his incomplete 2008 novel, Pilgrim of Prophets, are repurposed, recast, or revised into full form. But the length of time Hren has been working through these thoughts parallels the depth of the novel’s complexity: this is not an easy book to read, and the difficulties of untangling certain characters’ stream-of-consciousness dialogue further compound when this style extends into the narration’s indirect discourse about what the characters think. I had to read one climactic scene of violence four times before I knew for sure who was dead and who wasn’t. The idiom Hren writes in requires so much unpacking and careful reading that it all but guarantees that this book will not reach a widespread, popular audience–but maybe that’s not a bad thing. Blue Walls Falling Down provides such a layered cross-section of the human heart at a particular, impossible moment in time that it seems like its true destiny is to be picked up by some reader two hundred years from now, who will think “would that I could have lived then, written like this, and told everyone who didn’t read this how much they were missing.”

If Blue Walls is about the choices Stella makes that slowly sift through and purify her desires, Sally Thomas’s The Blackbird and Other Stories is about the wreckage of our thin desires and how the debris of our suffering can become the seedbed of future-oriented, self-transformative choices. Though Thomas’s style has been compared to Eudora Welty, her geographic scope is much wider, attending as much to Alabama and the Blue Ridge Mountains as to the Salt Lake Valley and the Southwest. The connective tissue that stitches Thomas’s nine stories together is a preoccupation with how trauma makes us static and stymies our agency, for which the only way out is hope in something that transcends our immanent desires. Thomas’s characters are constantly confronted by people close to them who want to keep them rooted in their pain, as they hear ostensibly charitable sentiments that are a thin veneer over their true purpose, to keep them suffering in a life in which things happen to them, not because of them. 

These characters continuously hear platitudes that threaten to become the thesis statements of their lives. Caroline, a recent widow, endures frequent reminders that she hasn’t sufficiently worked and re-worked through her husband’s death ad nauseum from her psychologist-therapist daughter Amelia. “‘I just want you to process things, Mother,’” Amelia whines. “Not pretend that everything’s the same. La la la, nothing’s wrong, look at me, I’m fine. … It would be a lie.” Caroline’s reply is at the ready: “‘Not if I really was all grieved out.’ ‘Well, that’s a lie too,’ Amelia had snapped. ‘Nobody is ever all grieved out.’” Anne, a Utah mother whose son’s extreme photosensitivity means he can never go out into the sunlight, a fact that led to her husband divorcing her, attends a support group for parents with similar children, which ends up doom-spiraling more than helping. “If there was a consistent theme to their monthly meetings,” Anne considers, “it was that flailing around in wreckage was the single defining activity of the human race.”

But Thomas’s characters refuse to accept this. As Parul Sehgal has argued, a trauma plot “flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom” by forcing them to live in what Joukovsky calls a “no-choice plot,” in which “things happen to characters,” in contrast with the more engaging, realistic (in the tradition of old realism), and New Romantic “choice plot,” in which “characters make things happen… the choice plot is distinguished not by absolute power, but by great power operating under frustrating constraints.” Thomas’s characters operate under all the most fraught and tremendous constraints of the past—broken families, elderly parents in mental decline, parental abandonment, long-term chronic illness, divorce, or the loss of a child (whether by accident or their own decision). 

And yet, Thomas’s most consistent message in this masterful collection of short stories is that no matter what sorts of constraints a person is in, healing is always possible through hope, which begets agency and true freedom. The sources of hope these characters find are rarely able to be identified clearly: a child whose mother is dying is saved from a deadly accident seemingly by chance, an inherited and initially unwanted beach house becomes the unlikely center of a divided family’s culture, a therapist’s traumatic past simultaneously haunts her and fuels her passion for helping women recover from the abuses of Utah’s “polygamist subculture.” In all these cases, the source of this hope is some sort of gift, given mysteriously and gratuitously, that provides each of Thomas’s protagonists the opportunity to make a gift of themselves to another through a reorientation towards some transcendent desire for love or responsibility or excellence or self-mastery or art or all of the above.

It’s not coincidental that New Romanticism is beginning to thrive at the same time old Romanticism’s most significant critic is reaching new heights of popularity 250 years after her birth. Jane Austen’s novels are simultaneously the exemplary models for early realism’s choice plots and excoriating takedowns of old Romantic sensibilities. But though Austen would certainly agree with Gasda that the satiric chaos underpinning old Romanticism is disastrous for human flourishing, which requires right reason’s mastery of the passions; would Mr. Darcy ever be caught dead owning a pet lobster, much less walking it down the street? Austen’s commitment to the virtue ethical tradition puts her much more in line with the ideals of New Romanticism. And yet, though some of Austen’s most famous novels, like Pride and Prejudice and Emma, deal explicitly with the perfection and reorientation of her protagonists’ desires from thin to thick, immanent to transcendent, her more difficult-to-adapt works like Mansfield Park and Persuasion feature heroines whose desires are already perfected and whose virtues are unimpeachable. Tortured souls like Blue Walls’ Stella and Peter or The Blackbird’s many struggling, hoping main characters may depict accurately the sorrows we have in separating out, painfully, healthy desires from harmful ones, they present extensive examinations of the journey, foregrounding the passions as old Romanticism did, and little consideration of the goal. Austen saw the end of properly ordered human desire as our flourishing through a life of virtue. As New Romanticism continues to grow, what space, if any, will its art carve out for the Elinor Dashwoods, Fanny Prices, and Anne Elliots, whose desires are the thickest, the most real, and the most beautiful?