This Highest Voice Must Crown the World of Voices: An Interview with Joshua Hren
Interviewer's Note: The last few years have been busy ones for Joshua Hren. In 2021, he co-founded the Creative Writing MFA with poet James Matthew Wilson at St. Thomas University in Houston, and 2022 saw him publish a theological-aesthetical manifesto, Contemplative Realism, and a novel, Infinite Regress. In addition to those pursuits, he continues his work as the founder and editor of Wiseblood Books and as co-founder and father of the Hren brood of Wisconsin.
Infinite Regress, Hren’s debut novel after a pair of short story collections (2017’s This Our Exile and 2020’s In the Wine Press), is by no means an easy read. It is, however, an enjoyable and edifying one—by turns carnivalesque, satiric, philosophical, wildly comic, and dead-set earnest. Lucas Smith, writing in the Australian Catholic Weekly, called Infinite Regress the “best Catholic novel of the last decade.”
I spoke to Dr. Hren about his novel, its influences and place in the literary landscape, aesthetical vision, and the ideas contained within his work.
Eric Cyr: The novel's title is thematically fitting—the idea and even the exact phrase “infinite regress” comes up several times in the work. Could you speak to the title’s relation to the book?
Joshua Hren: I’m glad that the product fulfilled its function, as (if you read the fine print on the ISBN page) you’ll find a clause promising money back guaranteed if it failed to do so! Jest aside, the novel actually grates against its own title, pursuing but also dramatically countering the “infinite regress,” the idea that, in a series or chain of causally related things, each entity depends upon its predecessor. Let’s say we justify a given belief A by appealing to justified belief B, but upon investigation we find that C, by which B is justified, is actually in need of further explanation and justification. So then we need to stop everything and scrutinize C, which, we realize, is wholly dependent on the solidity of D, which is in question, as is . . . oh my, everything in the chain to Z ad infinitum. And there’s apparently no solid first principle, first cause, or first term to save us . . . (Are you with me? I’m not sure I am!) In the book, “infinite regress” plays out both literally and sometimes in a very loose metaphorical manner as well. We can find the origin of many of Max and Blake’s virtues and vices in their father Garrett, just as we can trace the sinewy strength of Dymphna’s faith to her dead mother Catherine. But where did Catherine and Garrett get their own besetting sins and dominant merits? Blake is preyed upon by the pedophile Hape, who was himself preyed upon by another sexual predator, who was himself maybe preyed upon by a . . . but what does this mean in terms of culpability? That Hape’s responsibility is partially alleviated? Garrett picks up the idea that any proposition can be infinitely challenged in his late-night arguments with Father Marto over a series of single-shot rum bottles and a Chinese box of food. Intellectual humility asks us to be open to the possibility that our very foundational premises need to be questioned, explained. But sometimes this resistance to rest in an unmoved mover, a steady and stable first cause, or even sound first principles, bespeaks the disordered appetite of the professional and permanent seeker, the willful agnostic who resists resting in permanent or fixed things, who turns his eye from the lodestar of Christian revelation because of what that light would demand of him. And then, regress also emerges in a psychological sense, a riff that is in part made possible because Max Yourrick is a psychologist: is Blake’s driven passion to return home a regress or a progress—a corruption or a development? And then, most of the family is tempted by regressions, pulled toward a kind of paralysis by a force that feels like fate. What can cut short this penchant for backpedaling?
EC: At the same time, the title immediately brings to mind David Foster Wallace's great work, Infinite Jest (“Jocosity, too, has its cost. All this infinite jest,” says Garrett Yourrick in your book). The prose style of your novel is very much in the vein of Wallace—very dense, lengthy asides, depth of description and detail, an intelligent irony that also seems a real sincerity and truth. Was that a narrative aesthetic in which you set out to write at the onset of this novel? Or did that style of prose develop along the way as the story began taking shape?
JH: All of us who write toward sincerity in an age wherein art = consumer-friendly pyrotechnics + identity politics + cynically ironic tricks are indebted to Wallace (just as his “substitute Jesuit” character does in The Pale King—insisting that “gentlemen, you are called to account”). We who wish to cultivate the “childish gall to actually instantiate single-entendre principles”—to write serious moral fiction that is not without comedy, and realistic prose parched with spiritual thirst—we have all come out from under Wallace’s sweaty bandana. His brilliant blend of the low and the high, his zany plots and thought experiments, his harrowingly potent exploration of addiction—as well as all of the virtues that you outline—were ever in mind while I worked on the novel over the course of six years (man, if I had continued into the seventh, it would be a perfect book). “Only the lover sings,” says Josef Pieper, playing on Plato’s claim that when we behold the beautiful, we can’t not give birth to poetry. As a writer yourself, I assume you, too, have this experience: sometimes the muse arrives after a long walk through a dark, midwestern wood . . . there was something about the claps of the naked poplar’s brittle branches, maybe. But then certain authors’ stories serve as midwives of art, coaxing sentences from where they’d been lodged, gestating. I realize that that analogy is far from p.c. in this year of Our Lord 2022, but it’s all I got.
EC: Another author I think I see a bit of—I especially felt this at the novel’s conclusion—is Walker Percy. A philosophical novel; deep psychological suffering and witness; a complex, not easily resolved, but still eucatastrophic ending. There are clearly some other influences as well, all of which remind me of a letter penned by J.R.R. Tolkien I read recently in which he writes that “there is no ‘invention’ in the void.” Modern education often seems to emphasize what I’d call “the void of ‘creativity’” over learning from a great creative tradition. How do you see your role as part of a literary tradition, versus the “creativity” void?
JH: First, please allow me to simply thank you kindly for your characterization of the ending. Yes, there is a kind of beatitude at the end of the book, but it is rooted in both ever-present hope in the Resurrection and the understanding that the cross is the center of the cosmos. And then, the novel’s commitment to a deeper realism required a conclusion that contains both what Aristotle would call the resolution of the original complication and, in that resolution, a new complication that is caused, in part, by that very resolution. Reconciliation between father and son is entirely hopeful, but if we are honest, the very commitment to communion between two very flawed people means that the future will be both beautiful and fraught with little failures. The verse my wife and I chose for our wedding comes to mind: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:17).
If literature is in part a rapprochement with reality, it is also a dialogue with the dead. When in Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil has Aeneas descend into the underworld, his model is Odysseus’s visit to Hades in Book XI of The Odyssey. Motives for the heroes’ descents are different, and the architecture of the afterlife has been altered (Virgil enunciates a blessed “Empyrean” portion, for instance, whereas Homer’s inhabitants are consistently haunted and sort of stuck), but the sinews binding the two books are evident. In a similar manner, my fiction is in conversation with all the masters I’ve apprenticed under, from—to name just two—Joyce to Wallace.
That “void of creativity” is a good phrase that gets at the emptiness of narcissistic aspirations toward self-creation both inside and outside of art. When in fact we create nothing—for creation implies a summoning out of nothing, whereas in truth we must always make do with what’s already made—what’s given. Classical rhetoric always recognized the poles of imitation and invention, but in our age, invention is praised at the expense of emulation. Sure, if we slavishly imitate, we are likely doomed to be derivative, in our efforts to do what the greats did. But it is possible to write an homage that contains echoes and is also novel (the word novel literally signifies “the new”). To paraphrase St. John Henry Newman, literature must “change in order to stay the same”; the eternal truths need to be transposed into a language that answers—again and again, in every “present age”—those questions of the human heart in conflict with itself, with its brothers, with its Maker. I’ve long campaigned on the overlong slogan that would never fit on a bumper sticker or hipster pin: Catholics need not be anxious about their influences. When they forget their traditions, Catholics, like any other creatures, become intoxicated on the fumes of the present moment, and presentism is a serious problem, especially amidst a culture addicted to the new regardless of its goodness or badness. If a contemporary Catholic writer has absorbed some of O’Connor’s Christ-haunted characters who experience grace violently, this is not necessarily a sign of “unoriginality.” To be traditional is, in part, to be unoriginal.
EC: Even more than Wallace or Percy, Infinite Regress is clearly influenced by Dostoevsky, especially Brothers Karamazov, although we also see Raskolnikov in Blake and Stavrogin in Hape. Toward the end of the novel, we get a story of Satan speaking to an inquisitor—in some ways a sort of inversion of Dostoevsky’s famous “Grand Inquisitor” chapter—telling him how he would now tempt Jesus in the desert differently. Why do you think Dostoevsky’s work is still worth engaging with, both as a reader and as an author writing in his tradition, even in response to him?
JH: Even though his looming image on my office wall gives the impression that Dosty (as Kerouac called him) is a big brother in a green trenchcoat, perpetually surveilling over my shoulder, my soul’s proximity to Dostoevsky is so close that I can hardly speak to this question. By this I don’t mean that my novel even approaches the well-trod walkway that circles Dostoevsky’s House of Fiction, but rather that my affinity with him is (to cite the Song of Songs) “fierce as the grave.”
I’ve taught Dostoevsky nearly every year since I started jotting notes for Infinite Regress in the underground lair of a North Dakota basement, eighty-mile-per-hour winter winds bringing tidings from Siberia, provoking a penchant for Russian Imperial Stout. As I note in Contemplative Realism, Brothers Karamazov contains the prospect of sanctity—it takes the possibility of holiness in literature and in life seriously—even as it professes our proclivity toward depravity. Dmitri may confess that the “cruel insect had already grown strong in my soul,” accentuating the fact that he is “filled with low desires,” but Alyosha (an acolyte of holiness if there is one in their family) blushes at his brother’s admissions because “The ladder’s the same. I’m at the bottom step, and you’re above, somewhere about the thirteenth. That’s how I see it. But it’s all the same. Absolutely the same in kind. Anyone on the bottom step is bound to go up to the top one.” Whenever I have taught Dostoevsky, a contingent of students will chide the novels for being so fantastical and unreal, so pathological and melodramatic. “People don’t really act or think like this,” they say. After class, as if sheepish to say so, others who have known broken families and hard times have been at the point of tears: the realist in a higher sense has read their souls.
Structurally, Brothers operates with an amazing polyphony that I found attractive and fitting: a family saga told with alternating adherence to now this sibling, now that one (certain sections of Infinite Regress cleave to Max, certain to Dymphna, others to Blake), to that sinner and now that saint (other sections cleave to Garrett, and still others to Father Marto). In these pages I’ve previously bid us to “follow Fyodor, through novels structured around families and cities and whole nations rather than sovereign selves, novels inhabited by dependent, rational creatures rather than autonomous desiring protagonists, novels whose characters’ self-determined trajectories are interrupted by the transcending providence of God.”
In his piece “The Brothers Incandenza,” Timothy Jacobs has shown the ways Wallace modeled Jest on Brothers. In his review of Joseph Frank’s massive, multi-volume work on Dosty, Wallace asks, “Should I find it depressing that the young Dostoevsky was just like young U.S. writers today, or kind of a relief? Does anything ever change?” He concludes that “Dostoevsky wasn’t just a genius—he was, finally, brave. He never stopped worrying about his literary reputation, but he also never stopped promulgating ideas in which he believed. And he did so not by ignoring the unfriendly cultural circumstances in which he was writing, but by confronting them, engaging them, specifically and by name.” I second Wallace’s adulation of Dostoevsky’s bravery—amidst vanity—his willingness to enter existentially into the nihilism of his age, to let such a range of souls (guilelessly simple and totally deranged) sizzle and simmer and surge on the page. His “realism in the higher sense”—a fictional commitment that sees the unseen realities as supreme, that moves beyond the materialist empiricism of so many European novelists—is the only kind a Catholic could really bet on in good conscience. That makes him a model worth learning from for life.
EC: One idea that comes up repeatedly in the narrative and in the characters’ own words is nothingness. Garrett Yourrick asks a pivotal question: “Why is there something instead of nothing?” And the novel itself seems to ask: “If there is in fact something instead of nothing, and part of that something is a universal truth, how does that affect the way we live and act?” In some ways, Infinite Regress could even be called a novel of ideas—not in the sense that it is a “sketch with an essay woven through it,” to quote O’Connor, but in that much of the dialogue and action shows us characters engaged in intellectual debate, the presenting and questioning of ideas. The characters inundate us with conversation and questions that most of them—especially Garrett and Hape, but also Max and for most of the novel Blake—can’t or won’t answer. Is that something you see happening in the world of academia? And what do you see as the solution? (You, of course, give some answers to that question through your novel, a rich answer that one must read in its entirety; still, perhaps it’s worth addressing in a less fictive response as well.)
JH: As Josef Škvorekcý, the Czech novelist, maintained, “Every good novel is a thesis-novel.”
The quarrel between poetry and philosophy is as old as Plato’s Republic, but while these two pursuits have distinctive ends, they are also friends. In his dialogues, Plato carefully shapes the settings and the actions of his (we can’t but call them) characters. If we were to reduce these works to the ideas they express, those very ideas would be subject to misinterpretation, or at least missed meanings, because—for instance—Piraeus, where the conversation in The Republic is set, was where the so-called “Thirty Tyrants” were defeated in 403 BC, after which democracy was restored there. This—as well as the temperaments and traits and positions of the characters—have huge significance for the philosophical explorations Plato undertakes.
And then, the novel has from the first absorbed all sorts of genres and styles and whole fields of humanity. “I discover in my mind innumerable ideas of certain objects,” said Don Quixote, “which cannot be esteemed pure negations, although perhaps they possess no reality beyond my thought . . .” Blimey if we’re not privy, here, to Cervantes’s tête-à-tête with Descartes. The action of Herman Broch’s The Sleepwalkers is interspersed, dialectically, with an “Essay on the Disintegration of Values.” Even if we bracket the philosophy of history sections of War and Peace (which Tolstoy insisted was not a novel) and turn instead to Anna Karenina, we encounter whole sections where Levin works out Tolstoy’s philosophy of education (admittedly, the great Russian novelist had been so preoccupied with questions of agronomy and education during his writing of Karenina that at one point he wrote to his publisher “to be honest with you, I don’t like it anymore!”). And then, later in the novel (Book VIII), Tolstoy engages in an outright tractarian, polemical critique of Russia’s tawdry treatment of the Serbs, the autocratic lies used to pique military commitment. As George Steiner says, this section of the novel “is not an accretion adhering clumsily to the main structure of the novel,” because it alters our interpretation of Anna’s lover Vronsky who, standing on the train platform, is bound for the wars. It is hard to see him as wholly heroic.
Infinite Regress is—again—in debt to Dostoevsky, whose novels are full of philosophical explorations that occur beyond the walls of academia. I did not wish to write a “campus novel”—the campus scenes are all flashbacks—and yet a number of the characters are deeply concerned with ideas, with the way ideas irradiate or obfuscate reality. Garrett (Blake’s father) gets into an argument with a supremacist (at a White Lives Matter: A Celebration of Western Civilization rally), wherein he challenges the racist ideologue by citing Aristotle’s Categories to distinguish the substantial essence of human beings from the skin-color accidents: “But substance being one,” says Aristotle, “and the same in number, can receive contraries, as ‘a certain man’ being one and the same, is at one time, white, and at another, black, and warm and cold, and bad and good.” Instead of a civil reply, Garrett gets black coffee spilled across his pale face. Such a scene departs from literal realism into a zany carnivalesque play on the possibility of peripatetic philosophers walking the slum streets of Milwaukee. In Brothers Karamazov, Ivan notices that “In this stinking tavern, for instance, here, they meet and sit down in a corner. They’ve never met in their lives before and, when they go out of the tavern, they won’t meet again for forty years. And what do they talk about in that momentary halt in the tavern? Of the eternal questions, of the existence of God and immortality.” Was it realistically the case that “your average Russian” sat down and chewed the cud of the Grand Inquisitor? Of course not! But if Ivan had not delved into such a thought experiment, his character would have grated against his nature. Just so with the philosophical dialogues between Hape and Blake and Father Marto and Garrett; as Garrett is still haunted by his deceased wife Catherine’s ardent faith in Christ, and he himself is a serious thinker, it only makes sense that—albeit in a manner disrupted by Garrett’s drunkenness—they would expressly discuss the nature of God. As in Plato’s dialogues, these conversations approach answers. They even explicitly offer answers I would outside the book adhere to or “endorse.” But as the novel as a form is almost by necessity “dialogic” (it dramatizes conflicting voices in a polyphony instead of monologically tidying everything up), often the conversations end in a stalemate, or a conclusion that is contingent or at least not entirely satisfying. This is in part because only concrete acts of caritas can truly answer many of the inquiries undertaken. I’m with Bakhtin when he says that:
Among [the polyphonous voices] Dostoevsky seeks the highest and most authoritative orientation, and he perceives it not as his own true thought, but as another authentic human being and his discourse. The image of the ideal human being or the image of Christ represents for him the resolution of ideological quests. This image or this highest voice must crown the world of voices, must organize and subdue it.
EC: Your prose is heavily poetic. This is true of your previous short stories as well as Infinite Regress. For example, on the first page we get:
The butcher snoring his lamb bleats below. Blake stopped at the window, nose against the glass, to stare down his last graveyard shift. The sweet scent of treated cedar. A northern lodestar rivaled the moon. An impossible loon sang for the lonely. Discontent with Wisconsin winter the birds had migrated months ago. But there again—that melancholy croon. Companion in the night’s narrow hours. The moon.
What draws you to write in a prose voice that is so attentive to the sound of words in a way more typical of poetry?
JH: Especially since writers like James Joyce and Faulkner cracked open the novel’s stylistic possibilities, we’ve seen less concern with the need for passports to cross over the border that divides poetry from prose. Often this leads to a kind of cataract of dense streams surging through the story with a sudden intensity that tries to approximate an emotional or spiritual or mental immediacy. Some readers and writers deplore this, considering such attention to sonorousness, cadence, and musicality self-indulgent. And it can become that; language can distractingly call attention to itself. But poetic prose can also advance and more fully articulate the scene, can more completely “say” the souls of the characters into the being of language. As in a poem, the rhyme in the example establishes a parallel, a link: the loon’s croon and the moon are paired as echoing parts of the same atmosphere. If the scent is pleasant to the nose, the sound found in “sweet scent of treated cedar” aspires to be sweet to the ears. Aspires—that’s all I can on my end claim. I wish to give music to the motion—pair melody with the vision.
EC: Financial concerns are a major aspect of the novel for Garrett and Blake, caused specifically by imprudent loans taken out to pay for an undergraduate degree. You seem to be showing us the exorbitant cost of the modern university, both spiritually and financially. Do you think those two costs are corollary or causal? Merely coincidental?
JH: Yes, the taking of exorbitant loans is imprudent, but this does not excuse either the university or the loan companies from their own injustices. Jacques Maritain wrote that “The successive condemnations of usury by the Church stand at the threshold of modern times like a burning interrogatory as to the lawfulness of its economy.” Like so many other sins, usury has become such a ubiquitous feature of our lives that we are numbed to the intrinsic wrongness of disproportionate interest rates. Given the infantilization of our youth, how many eighteen-year-olds have any idea that, when they enroll in a Catholic university with exorbitant tuition, they are becoming proxy indentured servants to Usury Inc. for a good portion of their lives—a fact that will work havoc on so many futures. Meanwhile, the administrative bellies of universities swell with high salaries while both faculty and students pay the price of education being remade in the image of corporate America.
One of the novel’s early readers noted that “the root of much evil in the book is not money but its lack, or its mismanagement. The book suggests that financial insecurity hinders our ability to do good in the world as much as wealth that makes us oblivious to the needs of others.” Marxists are of course wrong to reduce all causes to the material. And without question some who are impoverished have chosen their way into that lack. But I’ve spent my whole life haunted by the impoverished situations of many fellow citizens—and have even joined them in that privation at various points. Christ says quite clearly that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24). How hard it is, too, to see and seek the good when poverty and its roommates (despair and violence) are your neighbors.
The tensions in the novel between metaphysical and monetary indebtedness are voiced, also, in divine Revelation. Romans insists that we “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:8). Alongside this, the epistle of James submits this sobering challenge: “If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,’ yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that?” (James 2:14–17). There is no need to answer this tension dualistically—as if our alms or our concrete practical acts cannot, at times, pay the debt of love. Blake’s brother Max is driven to do just this.
But Blake is in his particular fix in the first place because, yes, he took out a massive monetary loan—he paid an exorbitant fee—to be corrupted spiritually. This is one of the central ironies. And yet Infinite Regress mainly moves beyond strictly monetary matters: from the start, Blake realizes that his temptations with Hape are less about repaying his fiscal infidelities than they are about testing the metaphysical borders of his being: testing the limits of his mentor’s teachings, determining whether he can assume a kind of protean life beyond the natural constraints of body or morality, a human “plasticity” credit card which can be swiped without accruing any IOUs to either nature or God. And isn’t that the spirit of our times, over which the Spirit hovers as He did over the abyss at the beginning of Genesis?
EC: Last question: are you writing a follow-up—a sequel or a whole new novel?
JH: I am lateral malleolus-deep into the next novel, working title Nostos (almost surely not what the book will be called once it assumes its final form). Whereas Infinite Regress pursued the prodigal who is jonesing to come home, if it traces and chases that arc of homecoming to the threshold of the father’s house, the next book is a kind of “thematic sequel.” It doesn’t start where Blake left off, teetering at the edge of the grave in Garrett’s delirium tremens embrace, but begins, thematically, after a soul’s return home has already happened—enters the tensions a young woman (Stella) experiences when, as a single mother, she needs to move back in with her parents. Stella was involved in an impassioned relationship with P.C. (Peter Claver), a psychologist activist in South Chicago. When his itinerant career takes off, she insists that she and the baby cannot ruin it, but, returning to her folks’ house so she can find her footing, she finds instead her father hosting conspiracy meetings in the basement, breeding an ad hoc militia. If her “politics” are entirely contrary to her family’s, she must reckon with the witness of her folks’ lavish generosity and sacrifice; her dad especially is so good, so patient, so present to her child. Still, she keeps trying to recover independence, which means now and again falling back in with P.C., who’s sprouting doubts about his own ideology even as his supervisor is handing him a marquee microphone. Maybe one of the men in Stella’s father’s misfit militia figures out her involvement with an “enemy” and seeks to do away with him. Without fully knowing what directions and destinations this crew of characters will pursue, rumor has it that Stella will, in time, chance upon a certain Blake Yourrick . . .
