The"Neo-Romantics" Are Just Nostalgic

Romanticism is an appeal to writerly vanity and anxiety

Dear Republic,

“Romanticism” seems to be rattling around everywhere, especially on yearning-for-a-scene LitStack. Helping us make sense of this ostensible movement is Romanticon co-founder Matthew Gasda with a decidedly unromantic take: what we’re seeing now is less a turn of the literary wheel and more of a loose affiliation with those Wordsworthian “rebels without a cause” to shore ourselves up with bygone intellectual allies.

- ROL

THE NEO-ROMANTICS ARE JUST NOSTALGIC

Unofficially, my piece last winter for Wisdom of Crowds, “Are you sure you want to be a romanticist?”—the most cited and argued-with essay I’ve ever written—has become one of the founding documents of what we really should call Substack Romanticism, insofar as most of the people who are using the terminology of romanticism unironically run Substacks. I now also run, along with three esteemed colleague-editors, a Substack publication called Romanticon. The larger point is that the term “romance,” “romanticism,” has contemporary use and is proving memetically adaptable. Detractors don’t seem to be able to kill it, nor are promoters able to kill it by too much praise.

The conclusion that one might come to is that romanticism captures and, to some degree, diffuses or redeems a lot of the anxiety of writing for the internet by having traditional literary values and goals. Clearly, a certain corner of this platform is very intellectually ambitious, or would like to be seen as such. You have philosophers, poets, fiction writers, critics, and diarists congregating, commenting on each other’s work, promoting each other’s work. Some writers and pieces may in the long run deserve it; others may just be better at exploiting buzzwords and trends, doing a high-minded form of clickbait. But my hunch is that, overall, there’s just something that doesn’t feel quite right about it, and that if you removed the ability to make an income from the platform—or offered better and steadier ways of making an income through a life of intellectual and creative labor—everyone would jump ship.

The Romantic Movement on Substack, as much as it can be called that, because it is disembodied, digitized, and mimetic, is nostalgic for the possibility that a network of artists, thinkers, writers, poets could be embodied, materialized. That the letters could be physical on paper, written in pen. That the journals arrived in the mail rather than in the inbox. And that the entire Substack system—liking and restacking, commenting—would wither away.

Romance is what happens when you have a disjunction between ideal and practice. The early Romantics wanted to transform the world, institute a regime of free love, open-air worship of God, aristocratic communism, and pagan sensuality. Their own experiments in these matters typically led to suicide, death, imprisonment, madness. Internet-based writers, similarly, because they are on the internet, will never live up to their ideals by spending all day writing and reading books, memorizing poems, meeting other great intellects for stirring debates. The Romantics were, in many cases, aristocrats or friends of aristocrats, who had the means to live—or at least attempt to live—unlike the masses, and at the same time, they in quite bad faith dreamed of egalitarianism. Substack Romanticism is about writing for an online audience but dreaming of a traditional mid-century or 19th-century life of the mind.

The melancholy failure of the Romantics—as Goethe, one of its progenitors and one of its greatest critics, saw—was its permanent dysfunctionality. Byron in the end might have done less for England than an anonymous schoolteacher, reverend, or member of Parliament. We could not say the same, however, about Goethe, who transcended pure romanticism in the pursuit of science, classicism, politics, theatre, art. It’s better to take the path of Goethe than Byron or Kleist. One imagines that Keats—probably the purest example of English literary genius in the 19th century—would have preferred a long and fruitful life, marriage and children, and not a tragic death at 26.

The implication here is that I’m talking about the meaning of romance on Substack, or a revival of older ways of manifesting literary culture, which are ultimately less important than living in some way that is healing, harmonious, and whole, and in producing physical books which can be read outside of the domain of the feed. Does this mean that I regret keeping my writer’s diary on Substack? I don’t know. I enjoy those activities. But I’m trying not to romanticize them. The best thing about the writer’s diary is that it resulted in a physical book; and might in more.

Needless to say, I’m writing this on Substack about Substack for one of Substack’s most popular literary publications; I am proposing no solution. I’m not even really identifying meta-Romantic anxiety on Substack about technology as a medium for literature as a problem, per se. I mean none of the above cynically: only honestly; I’m trying to take into account the medium that’s producing a certain message.

I also think, in the era of hyper-politics and of extreme, almost performative political attitudes and postures, romanticism has the advantage of predating both Marxism and fascism. Romanticism appeals to us because its politics are serpentine and unclear. Because romanticism doesn’t entail a specific proposal for political economy, like Marxism or fascism essentially do, it is ripe for rediscovery and redeployment.

Romantics, if they do have a common politics, tend to be skeptical of big things and prefer small things. They were emotionally revolutionary but without party or institutional infrastructure. They preferred their gardens, their mistresses, their poetry more than revolution. Blake wrote like a lion but lived like a man. Wordsworth gave up his revolutionary youth for a quiet and conservative, endless retirement in the Lake Country. Byron did go to fight for revolution, but haphazardly, chaotically, and died quickly in the process.

The new romanticism movements—plural—are not driven by a scholarly assessment of the lives and careers of the Romantic writers, but by a vague, impressionistic, conglomerate sense of the Romantics as aristocratic rebels without a cause. It is flattering to associate oneself with such.

Romanticism appeals to our writerly vanity and our bad faith and guilt about being on an unromantic and un-Lindy platform. But admittedly, there is also an intellectual and spiritual need to find historical allies. To find poems, novels, essays, and fragments that gird the shocked and overwhelmed mind against the horrors of the present. The Romantics looked back to Homer, Dante, Milton, and above all Shakespeare for spiritual consolation. And now we look back to them.

Romanticism said: we have to go back, we have to look back. It’s a way to survive this, to make sense of this, to have enough wisdom for what’s to come. And now we’re doing the same.

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There is a third and final explanation, adjacent but distinct from the two explanations that I’ve offered above, that is worth exploring; namely, that what I’ve called Substack Romanticism is Neo-Bloomianism—or the work of the Millennial followers of the late Harold Bloom, who was so influential in the 90s and early 2000’s when Millennials were growing up, and into literature (Millennials read more books on average than X or Z--we should not forget). I remember my AP English teacher assigned Bloom’s companion to Hamlet—Hamlet: Poem Unlimited and played Bloom’s Charlie Rose appearances on VHS; the same teacher gave me Bloom’s The Western Canon as a graduation present (thanks Mrs. Chickey).

Though we forget now, the late period between roughly 1996-2010 was an interregnum from the culture wars, which had been fought hot and fast in the early part of the 1990s, and many old school English teachers, who resented the radicalism of the early 1990’s, were reasserting canonical priorities, quietly, in the classroom. My very normal public high school boasted English teachers interested in Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Henry James, Joyce—to name a few; and admission to the AP English program was competitive; there was still some pride in reading. Even at the time, though (I graduated in 2007), there was a sense of imminent decline; if an older teacher retired, they were replaced by a younger teacher who would not, necessarily, have the same passion for canonical reading.

Not all of my friends were hyper literary or intellectual, but a few of us dreamed of making a pilgrimage to Yale to meet Bloom; even when I went to another large, normal university (Syracuse), I found plenty of literary friends who all prized aesthetics and dreamed of writing a sublime novel with the coveted Bloom blurb on the back cover.

I would assert that, then, even if the majority of Millennials evolved in the direction of cheugy, social justice oriented literature, a meaningful minority remained loyal to the priorities of their traditionalist high school teachers, who wanted to offer their last generation of students, before they retired, ‘real’ literature (and were perhaps emboldened by approaching retirement horizons).

Matthew Gasda writes Novalis. He is the author of Dimes Square and Other Plays and The Sleepers.