Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern, by Linda Hutcheon
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Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern
by Linda Hutcheon
At the risk of succumbing to New Historicist fashion, I should
nonetheless like to begin with a personal anecdote. But I shall ask
you, the reader, to take an active role: I should like you to pretend
you are me and imagine your response to the following situation. The
tim you are in London, England. You have just that
hour submitted to your publisher the final version of the manuscript of
a book on the theory and politics of irony.
In a celebratory mood, you walk into a bookstore. One of the first
things that catches your eye--for obvious and deeply personal
reasons--is the cover of an English magazine entitled The Modern
Review. On it is pictured the equivalent of a &no
smoking& sign, but this time the barred red circle of
forbiddenness surrounds a pair of inverted commas, reinforcing the
headline: &The End of Irony? The Tragedy of the Post-Ironic
Condition.& You might be somewhat nonplussed: you know you
delivered the manuscript a bit later than you had promised--but you had
not really counted on the book being utterly out of date before it was
even published.
Perhaps you might react as I did: you might quickly (and not a little
nervously) turn to the article inside on the commodification of irony
by the very generation (the &twentysomething& generation)
that was said to be using irony as its only defence against
commodification. Depending on your
temperament, you might think this entire incident was uncannily odd or
disturbingly interesting or downright irritating. But stretch your
imagination a little more and consider how you might then feel if, on
the same pages as this article about the end of irony, you found a
companion article about the seven types of (not ambiguity, but)
nostalgia that were said to greet the &end of irony.&
Remember, you are me in this exercise of the imagination: and you have
therefore spent not a little time and energy over the last decade
arguing that (at least what you would like to call) the
&postmodern& has little to do with nostalgia and much to do
with irony. The forces ranged against
such a reading of postmodernism were formidable in the extreme,4 but you have always been a little
stubborn. Of course, you have never denied that a lot of contemporary
culture was indeed nostalgic: you cannot close your eyes (and ears) to
everything going on around you. But there was also lots of irony--maybe
too much irony--and that is what you have been trying to think through
for the last few years. But here was irony's end and nostalgia's
proliferating types sharing not only the same page, but the same
popular culture examples. What's worse, to believe the authors of these
articles, the end of irony seemed actually to necessitate this
proliferation of nostalgia. Now (use your imagination) would you feel
some kind of challenge in all this? Would you feel that welcome (or
unwelcome) sense of unfinished business? Obviously, I did. I thought
this issue of the magazine was Destiny, Fate, ... and all those other
capitalized monstrosities by which we excuse our obsessions in life.
And this essay represents my attempt to deal with this unfinished
business, to try to understand why I had earlier chosen to all but
ignore the nostalgic dimension of the postmodern in favour of the
ironic. It cannot simply be put down to the fact that I am utterly
un-nostalgic, though that is a personality fault to which I must admit.
I am also relatively un-ironic (and I certainly miss many
ironies)--as countless colleagues and students over the years have
learned, much to their consternation and, no doubt, amusement. I simply
believed irony to be more complicated, more interesting, more
&edgy& than nostalgia, and in so believing, I all but ignored
the very real and very uneasy tension between postmodern irony and
nostalgia today.
The specific cultural forms of the postmodern are not my only focus
here, because I also want to consider more broadly certain forms of
contemporary culture, not all of which can be considered complicitously
critical and deconstructing--that is, not all of them are postmodern.
But it was postmodernism that brought the conjunction of irony and
nostalgia quite literally into the public eye through the forms of its
architecture. The early debates focussed precisely on that conjunction
in response to postmodern architecture's double-coding, its deliberate
(if ironized) return to the history of the humanly constructed
environment. This return was in reaction
to modern architecture's ostentatious rejection of the past, including
the past of the city's historical fabric. The terms of the debate were
basically as follows: was this postmodern recalling of the past an
example of a conservative--and therefore nostalgic--escape to an
idealized, simpler era of &real& community values?6 Or did it express, but through its ironic
distance, a &genuine and legitimate dissatisfaction with modernity
and the unquestioned belief in ... perpetual modernization&?7 The question soon became: how is it that
the same cultural entity could come to be interpreted (apparently) so
widely differently as to be seen as either ironic or nostalgic? Or as
both ironic and nostalgic? The
American television series &All in the Family& was one
example of the latter conflation. Despite its allegedly progressive
intent--what its creators intended as ironic de-bunking--it seems that
Archie Bunker was popular in large segments of various populations
because of the show's conservative, indeed openly nostalgic, appeal to
attitudes perhaps consciously denied but deeply felt.
In general cultural commentary in the mass media--as in the
academy--irony and nostalgia are both seen as key components of
contemporary culture today. In the
1980s, it was irony that capture in the 1990s, it
appears to be nostalgia that is holding sway. David Lowenthal has even
asserted that, while &[f]ormerly confined in time and place,
nostalgia today engulfs the whole past.&
Perhaps nostalgia is given surplus meaning and value at certain
moments--millennial moments, like our own. Nostalgia, the media tell
us, has become an obsession of both mass culture and high art. And they
may be right, though some people feel the obsession is really the media's
obsession. Yet, how else do you account
for the return of the fountain pen--as an object of consumer luxury--in
the age of the computer, when we have all but forgotten how to write?
The explanations offered for this kind of
commercialized luxuriating in the culture of the past have ranged from
economic cynicism to moral superiority. They usually point to a
dissatisfaction with the culture of the present--something that is then
either applauded or condemned. Leading the applause, an apocalyptic
George Steiner claims that the decline in formal value systems in the
West has left us with a &deep, unsettling nostalgia for the
absolute.& And, I suspect more
than one reader longs for a time (in the idealized past) when
knowledge--and its purveyors--had some purchase and influence on what
constituted value in society. But even on the less contentious level of
retro fashions or various other commercial nostalgias, it does appear
that the &derogatory word 'dated' seems to have vanished from our
language.& It has been taken over
by &nostalgic,& a word that has been used to signal both
praise and blame. But, however self-evident (on a common sense level)
it may seem that an often sentimentalized nostalgia is the very
opposite of edgy irony, the postmodern debates' conflation (or
confusion) of the two should give us pause.
Before beginning to tackle this conflation, I need to lay out briefly
the definitions of my principal concepts and the terms of my argument.
I have already defined my particular usage of the term
&postmodern&--which is not synonymous with the
contemporary, but which does have some mix of the complicitous and the
critical at its ambivalent core. And I am going to trust that readers
will all have some sort of sense of what &irony&
means--either in its rhetorical or New Critical meanings or in its more
extended senses of situational irony or, with an historical dimension,
of &romantic& irony. What exactly is
&nostalgia,& though? Or perhaps the first question really
should be: what WAS nostalgia? With its Greek roots--nostos,
meaning &to return home& and algos, meaning
&pain&--this word sounds so familiar to us that we may forget
that it is a relatively new word, as words go. It was coined in 1688 by
a 19-year old Swiss student in his medical dissertation as a
sophisticated (or perhaps pedantic) way to talk about a literally
lethal kind of severe homesickness (of Swiss mercenaries far from their
mountainous home).
This medical-pathological definition of nostalgia allowed for a
remedy: the return home, or sometimes merely the promise of it. The
experiencing and the attributing of a nostalgic response appeared well
before this, of course. Think of the psalmist's remembering of Zion
while weeping by the waters of Babylon. But the term itself seems to be
culturally and historically specific.
This physical and emotional &upheaval ... related to the workings
of memory&--an upheaval that could and did kill, according to
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century physicians--was seen as a
&disorder of the imagination& from the start.
But by the nineteenth century, a considerable semantic slippage had
occurred, and the word began to lose its purely medical meaning,18 in part because the rise of pathologic
anatomy and bacteriology had simply made it less medically credible.
Nostalgia then became generalized, and
by the twentieth century, it had begun to attract the interest of
psychiatrists. But curious things
happened in that generalizing process: nostalgia became less a physical
than a psychological
in other words, it became
psychically internalized. It also went from being a curable
medical illness to an incurable (indeed unassuageable)
condition of the spirit or psyche. What
made that transition possible was a shift in site from the spatial to
the temporal. Nostalgia was no longer simply a yearning to return home.
As early as 1798, Immanuel Kant had noted that people who did return
home were usually disappointed because, in fact, they did not want to
return to a place, but to a time, a time of youth.22 Time, unlike space, cannot be returned
to-- time is irreversible. And nostalgia becomes the reaction to
that sad fact. As one critic has
succinctly put this change: &Ody Proust is in
search of lost time.&
Nostalgia, in fact, may depend precisely on the irrecoverable
nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the very
pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a
large part of nostalgia's power--for both conservatives and radicals
alike. This is rarely the past as actually experienced, it
is the past as imagined, as idealized through memory and desire. In
this sense, however, nostalgia is less about the past than about the
present. It operates through what Mikhail Bakhtin called an
&historical inversion&: the ideal that is not being
lived now is projected into the past.
It is &memorialized& as past, crystallized into precious
moments selected by memory, but also by forgetting, and by desire's
distortions and reorganizations.
Simultaneously distancing and proximating, nostalgia exiles us from
the present as it brings the imagined past near. The simple, pure,
ordered, easy, beautiful, or harmonious past is constructed (and then
experienced emotionally) in conjunction with the present--which, in
turn, is constructed as complicated, contaminated, anarchic, difficult,
ugly, and confrontational. Nostalgic distancing sanitizes as it
selects, making the past feel complete, stable, coherent, safe from
&the unexpected and the untoward, from accident or betrayal&27--in other words, making it so very
unlike the present. The aesthetics of nostalgia might, therefore, be
less a matter of simple memory than o the
invocation of a partial, idealized history merges with a
dissatisfaction with the present. And it can do so with great force.
Think of how visceral, how physically &present& nostalgia's
promptings are: it is not just Proust for whom tastes, smells, sounds,
and sights conjure up an idealized past. If you are not like me (that
is, if you are capable of nostalgia), you can think of your own
experience--or, if need be, do as I have to do and think of the power
of the taste of Proust's madeleine or the scent of violets in
Tennyson's & A dream of fair women& or of a geranium leaf in David
Copperfield.
There are, of course, many ways to look backward. You can look and
reject. Or you can look and linger longingly. In its looking backward
in this yearning way, nostalgia may be more of an attempt to defy the
end, to evade teleology. As we approach the millennium, nostalgia may
be particularly appealing as a possible escape from what Lee Quinby
calls &technological apocalypse.&
If the future is cyberspace, then what better way to soothe
techno-peasant anxieties than to yearn for a Mont Blanc fountain pen?
But there is a rather obvious contradiction here: nostalgia requires
the availability of evidence of the past,
and it is precisely the electronic and mechanical reproduction of
images of the past that plays such an important role in the structuring
of the nostalgic imagination today, furnishing it with the possibility
of &compelling vitality.&
Thanks to CD ROM technology and, before that, audio and video
reproduction, nostalgia no longer has to rely on individual memory or
desire: it can be fed forever by quick access to an infinitely
recyclable past.
That original theory of nostalgia as a medical condition was developed
in Europe &at the time of the rise of the great cities when
greatly improved means of transportation made movements of the
population much easier&; in other
words, you would be more likely to be away from home and thus yearn for
it. The postmodern version of nostalgia may have been developed (in the
West, at least) at the time when the rise of information technology
made us question not only (as Jean-Fran&ois Lyotard told us we
must) what would count as knowledge,
but what would count as &the past& in relation to the
present. We have not lacked for critics who lament the decline of
historical memory in our postmodern times, often blaming the storage of
memory in data banks for our cultural amnesia, our inability to engage
in active remembrance. But, as Andreas Huyssen has convincingly argued,
the contrary is just as likely to be true. In his words: &The more
memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the
orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen,& making
the past simultaneous with the present in a new way.
Nostalgia, however, does not simply repeat or duplicate memory. Susan
Stewart's provocative study, On Longing suggestively calls
nostalgia a &social disease,& defining it as &the
repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition.&35 The argument is that, denying or at
least degrading the present as it is lived, nostalgia makes the
idealized (and therefore always absent) past into the site of
immediacy, presence, and authenticity. And here she approaches one of
the major differences between nostalgia and irony. Unlike the
knowingness of irony--a mark of the fall from innocence, if ever there
was one--nostalgia is, in this way, &prelapsarian& and indeed
utopian, says Stewart. Few have ever
accused irony (even satiric irony) of successfully reinstating the
authentic and the ideal.
Nostalgia has certainly not lacked for defenders, most of whom are
psychoanalytically-oriented. This is
not surprising if you think of the significant relationship
psychoanalysis posits between identity and the personal psychic past
unearthed by memory. This relationship becomes the model for the link
between collective identity and memory for those who see a move to
nostalgic transcendence and authenticity as a positive move. As one
person in this camp has put it: &Longing is what makes art
possible.& By &longing,&
he means the emotional response to deprivation, loss, and mourning.
Nostalgia has, in this way, been deemed the necessary inspirational
&creative sorrow& for artists.
This position draws on the original seventeenth-century meaning of the
it sees nostalgia in our century as the positive response to the
homelessness and exile of both private &nervous disorder and
[public] persecution of actual enslavement and barbaric cruelty.&40 When I think of the displaced homeless
peoples of Rwanda or Bosnia, however, the more trivialized,
commercialized connotations of the word &nostalgia& do stand
in the way for me. My feelings when experiencing those lushly nostalgic
Merchant/Ivory film versions of earlier novels must be different (in
kind and not only in degree) from the experience of political refugees
yearning for their homeland. But perhaps not.
In other words, despite very strong reservations (based in part on
personality limitations), I do know that I should never underestimate
the power of nostalgia, especially its visceral physicality and
emotional impact. But that power comes in part from its structural
doubling-up of two different times, an inadequate present and an
idealized past. But this is where I
must return to that other obsession of mine--irony--for irony too is
doubled: two meanings, the &said& and the &unsaid,&
rub together to create irony--and it too packs considerable punch.
People do not usually get upset about metaphor or synecdoche, but they
certainly do get worked up about irony, as they did a few years ago in
Toronto, where I live and work, when the aptly named Royal Ontario
Museum put on an exhibition that used irony to deal with the
relationship of Canadian missionaries and military to Empire in Africa.
Sometimes, as we all know well, people get upset because they are the
targets or victims of irony. Sometimes, though, anger erupts at the
seeming inappropriateness of irony in certain situations. Witness the
remarks of the Curriculum Advisor on Race Relations and
Multiculturalism for the Toronto Board of Education at the time:
&The implied criticism of colonial intrusion and the bigotry of
the white missionaries and soldiers relies heavily on the use of irony,
a subtle and frequently misunderstood technique. In dealing with issues
as sensitive as cultural imperialism and racism, the use of irony is a
highly inappropriate luxury&--especially, I might add, when
condemnation is what is expected and desired.
What irony and nostalgia share, therefore, is a perhaps unexpected twin
evocation of both affect and agency--or, emotion and politics. I
suspect that one of the reasons they do so is that they share something
else--a secret hermeneutic affinity that might well account for some of
the interpretive confusion with which I began, the confusion that saw
postmodern artifacts, in particular, deemed simultaneously ironic and
nostalgic. I want to argue that to call something ironic or nostalgic
is, in fact, less a description of the ENTITY ITSELF than an attribution
of a quality of RESPONSE. Irony is not something in an object
that you either &get& or fail to &get&: irony
&happens& for you (or, better, you make it
&happen&) when two meanings, one said and the other unsaid,
come together, usually with a certain critical edge. Likewise,
nostalgia is not something you &perceive& in an
it is what you &feel& when two different temporal
moments, past and present, come together for you and, often, carry
considerable emotional weight. In both cases, it is the element of
response--of active participation, both intellectual and
affective--that makes for the power.
Because people do not talk about this element of active attribution,
the politics of both irony and nostalgia are often written off as
quietistic at best. But irony is what Hayden White calls
&transideological&: it can be made to &happen& by
(and to) anyone of any political persuasion. And
nostalgia too is transideological, despite the fact that many would
argue that, whether used by the right or the left, nostalgia is
fundamentally conservative in its praxis, for it wants to keep things
as they were--or, more accurately, as they are imagined to have been.43 But, the nostalgia for an idealized
community in the past has been articulated by the ecology movement as
often as by fascism, by what Jean
Baudrillard calls &[m]elancholy for societies without power.&45 From the seventeenth century on,
nostalgia seems to have been connected to the desire to return
specifically to the homeland. In nineteenth-century Europe, that
homeland became articulated in terms of the nation state, and nostalgia
began to take on its associations with nationalism--and chauvinism.46 Even its more innocent-seeming
forms--such as the preparing and eating of familiar foods by immigrant
groups--can be seen as a nostalgic enactment of ethnic group identity,
a collective disregarding, at least temporarily, of generational and
other divisions.
One brave anthropologist has claimed that, unlike such searches for
ethnicity, feminism has &no tendency toward nostalgia, no
illusion of a golden age in the past.&
It has been suggested that this lack of nostalgic response is because
the narratives of nostalgia--from the Bible onward--are male
stories, Oedipal stories which are alienating to women (who usually
remain at home like Penelope, while men wander the world and risk
getting homesick). And, in support of
such a theory, literary and film critics alike have located strains of
a current antifeminist, nostalgic retreat to the past in the face of
the changes in culture brought about by the rise of feminism.50 Humankind has not infrequently responded
with a nostalgic defensive retreat into the past when feeling
threatened: for example, despite its forward-looking ideology, the late
nineteenth-century United States gave great new value to its Colonial
past--as an &exclusive WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant]
heritage&--in part to combat the mass immigration that was
accompanying industrialization and that felt so new and so
un-&American.&
The politics of nostalgia are not only national or gender politics, of
course. Think of the popularity in the 1980s of the David Lean film of
Forster's A Passage to India or of The Jewel and the Crown,
the television adaptation of Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet. The
intended anti-nostalgic expos& of the corruption and
exploitation of empire in India may have been less the cause of their
success than either a nostalgic liberal-utopian hope that two races
might have been able to live as equals--despite history--or a nostalgic
memory of the time when Britain was not a minor world power but,
rather, ruler of an empire upon which the sun never set.
This is what Renato Rosaldo calls &imperial nostalgia,& the
kind that makes racial domination appear innocent through elegance of
manners. But, this nostalgia puts us,
as viewers, into the same position as the very agents of empire, for
they too have documented at length their paradoxical nostalgia for the
cultures they had colonized--in other words, the ones they had
intentionally and forcefully altered. This is the nostalgia of those
who believe in &progress& and innovation, a nostalgia (again,
paradoxically) for more simple, stable worlds--such as those of the
putatively static societies they destroyed.
Post-colonial critics have pointed to nostalgic moments in the history
of the colonized, too, however. To some, the
&n&gritude& move in African cultural theory, with its
focus on the pre-capitalist, pre-imperial past, was the sign of a
nostalgic search for a lost coherence.
Many oppressed people--Holocaust survivors and North American First
Nations peoples among them--have had a strong and understandable
nostalgia for what is perceived as their once unified identity. But
most often, the post-colonial focus of attention has been on the
nostalgia of the (usually) European colonizers, on their sense of loss
and mourning for the cultural unity and centrality they once had.55 But, as Fredric Jameson has said,
&a history lesson is the best cure for nostalgic pathos.&56
Jameson's own attack on the postmodern is in itself worth examining in
this context because it is an attack on both its regressive nostalgia
and its trivializing irony. One of Jameson's main targets is what he
calls the postmodern &nostalgia film&--a term that he has
used to refer to anything from George Lukas's American Graffiti
to Laurence Kasdan's Body Heat. These are what he calls
&fashion-plate, historicist films& that reveal &the
desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past.&
To him, these are the inauthentic, nostalgic &celebrations of the
imaginary style of a real past& which he sees as &something
of a substitute for that older system of historical representation,
indeed as a virtual symptom-formation, a formal compensation for the
enfeeblement of historicity in our own time.&
This medicalized psychoanalytic
language--&symptom-formation&, &compensation&--is
used quite deliberately by Jameson because he feels that the postmodern
taste for such films corresponds to certain needs in what he calls
&our present economic-psychic constitution.&
But film theorist Anne Friedberg has pointed out that what Jameson is
really protesting here is the distanced relation of every film
from its historical referent. In other words, it is the medium and not
postmodernism that gives the illusion of a &perpetual present
interminably recycled.& Or, as
Derek Jarman put it when rewriting Marlowe in his postmodern film
version of Edward II, &[f]ilmed history is always a
misinterpretation. The past is the past, as you try to make material
out of it, things slip even further away.&
But, even if Jameson is wrong in where he puts the blame for the
nostalgia, what interests me is that, when he finds something
nostalgic--be it in the theorizing of the Frankfurt School or the
novels of J.G. Ballard--nostalgia is meant to be taken negatively as
&regressive.& Yet his own
rhetoric and position can themselves at times sound strangely
nostalgic: in article after article in the 1980s, he repeatedly yearned
for what he called &genuine historicity& in the face of a
postmodernism which, in his words, was &an elaborated symptom of
the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing
history in some active way.& And
yet, it is precisely nostalgia for this kind of &lost
authenticity& that has proved time and time again to be paralyzing
in terms of historical thinking. Indeed
Jameson's position has been called both regressive and defeatist.65 Is Jameson's implicit mythologizing and
idealizing of a more stable, pre-late-capitalist (that is,
modernist) world not in itself perhaps part of an aesthetics (or even
politics) of nostalgia? If so, it is one he shares with his Marxist
predecessor, Georg Luk&cs, for whom it was not modernism but
realism that constituted that implied &moment of plenitude&66 in the past around which literary
historical nostalgia revolved.
Michael B&rub& has, in fact, suggested that the Left, in
America at least, has at times recently seemed paralyzed &by
dreams of days when things were better.& As he puts it: &it
was only the repeated interventions of women, ethnic minorities and
variously queer theorists that finally shattered the pernicious sense
of nostalgia to which so many men on the antipostmodern left
fell victim.& Nostalgia can
certainly be, in Tim Reiss's strong terms, &functionally
crippling.& Jameson's preference
for science fiction over these period-recreation &nostalgia&
films is a bit deceptive, for it simply points to his orientation
toward the very common futuristic dimension of an equally
nostalgic utopian drive. If the present
is considered irredeemable, you can look either back or forward. The
nostalgic and utopian impulses share a common rejection of the here and
It is not that the here and now, the present, does not have its
problems, however. All &presents& have always had their
problems, but there is little doubt that there has been, in the last
few decades, a commercialization of nostalgia, especially in the mass
media, a commercialization that many have seen as a real evasion of
contemporary issues and problems. Ralph
Lauren's &Safari& fashion and perfume line a few years ago
allowed us to experience the nostalgic style of an era without bearing
it also offered us, as one writer put it,
&a chance to relive the days of the tragically doomed upper class
engaging in their white mischief on the plains of the Serengeti&71--&living without boundaries&,
as the ads said. This is a combination of commercial nostalgia--that
teaches us to miss things we have never lost--and &armchair
nostalgia&--that exists without any lived experience of the
yearned-for time.
Is this part of the &postmodern&? Since it is part of
late-capitalist culture, Jameson would say it is. But, to generalize
the term &postmodern& into a synonym for the contemporary is
to abandon its historical and cultural specificity--an abandonment
Jameson would never condone for modernism, for example. To illustrate
what I mean about the need to make distinctions, think of the
difference between contemporary postmodern architecture and
contemporary revivalist (nostalgic) the postmodern
architecture does indeed recall the past, but always with the kind of
ironic double vision that acknowledges the final impossibility of
indulging in nostalgia, even as it consciously evokes nostalgia's
affective power. In the postmodern, in other words, (and here is the
source of the tension) nostalgia itself gets both called up, exploited, and
ironized. This is a complicated (and
postmodernly paradoxical) move that is both an ironizing of nostalgia
itself, of the very urge to look backward for authenticity, and, at the
same moment, a sometimes shameless invoking of the visceral power that
attends the fulfilment of that urge.
Perhaps the history of the wider cultural entity called postmodernity
would help explain this paradox. If, as it has been argued often,
nostalgia is a by-product of cultural modernity (with its
alienation, its much lamented loss of tradition and community),75 then postmodernity's complex
relationship with modernity--a relationship of both rupture and
continuity--might help us understand the necessary addition of irony to
this nostalgic inheritance. It has become a commonplace to compare the
end of the nineteenth century to the end of our own, to acknowledge
their common doubts about progress, their shared worries over political
instability and social inequality, their comparable fears about
disruptive change. But if nostalgia was
an obvious consequence of the last fin-de-si&cle
panic--&manifest in idealizations of rural life, in
vernacular-revival architecture, in arts-and-crafts movements, and in a
surge of preservation activity&--then
some, not all (not the commercial variety, usually), but some
nostalgia we are seeing today (what I want to call postmodern) is of a
different order, an ironized order. If the nineteenth century turned
nostalgically to the historical novels of Walter Scott and familiar
Gothic Revival architecture, the twentieth has combined nostalgia with
irony to produce the historiographic metafictions of Salman Rushdie and
historically suggestive, parodic architectural ideas of Charles Moore's
once splendid Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans. Gone is the sense of
belatedness of the present vis-&- the act of
ironizing (while still implicitly invoking) nostalgia undermines
modernist assertions of originality, authenticity, and the burden of
the past, even as it acknowledges their continuing (but not paralyzing)
validity as aesthetic concerns.
Our contemporary culture some parts of
it--postmodern parts--are aware of the risks and lures of nostalgia,
and seek to expose those through irony. Given irony's conjunction of
the said and the unsaid--in other words, its inability to free itself
from the discourse it contests--there is no way for these cultural
modes to escape a certain complicity, to separate themselves
artificially from the culture of which they are a part. If our culture
really is obsessed with remembering--and forgetting--as is suggested by
the astounding growth of what Huyssen calls our &memorial
culture& with its &relentless museummania,&78 then perhaps irony is one (though only
one) of the means by which to create the necessary distance and
perspective on that anti-amnesiac drive. Admittedly, there is little
irony in most memorials, and next to none in most truly nostalgic
re-constructions of the past--from Disney World's Main Street, USA to
those elaborate dramatized re-enactments of everything from the
American Civil War to medieval jousts restaged in contemporary England.
But there is much ironized nostalgia too--in Angela Carter's meditation
on gender and the dawn of the twentieth century in Nights at the
Circus or in the wonderful generic paradox of a new work
commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera of New York: William Hofman and
John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles. It is ironically and
paradoxically called a &grand opera buffa&--for
&grand& is the only kind of &intimate& opera buffa
you can put on at that particular opera house, with its more than 3000
seats and its penchant for spectacle and indeed for &grand
opera.& From a postmodern point of view, the knowingness of this
kind of irony may be not so much a defense against the power of
nostalgia as the way in which nostalgia is made palatable today:
invoked but, at the same time, undercut, put into perspective, seen for
exactly what it is--a comment on the present as much as on the past.
Seen from that angle, though, not only have irony and nostalgia gone
hand in hand in the postmodern, but perhaps they have done so for a
long time (as those who work in earlier periods may know only too
well): Don Quijote gave us those wonderful ironies of incongruity and
inappropriateness precisely through his nostalgia for a chivalric past.
In like vein, the all too ready attribution of irony to someone like
Madonna in her Marilyn (and maybe even in her Evita) phase cannot
really be separated from nostalgia. This may in part be because irony
and nostalgia are not qualities of objects; they are responses
of subjects--active, emotionally- and intellectually-engaged
subjects. The ironizing of nostalgia, in the very act of its invoking,
may be one way the postmodern has of taking responsibility for such
responses by creating a small part of the distance necessary for
reflective thought about the present as well as the past.
Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony
(London and New York: Routledge, 1995).
Toby Young and Tom Vanderbilt, &The End of
Irony?& The Modern Review 1.14 (April-May 1994): 6-7.
See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism:
History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1987); The
Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); The
Canadian Postmodern (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1998).
The list would be endless, but let me simply note
the most cited opponent of the postmodern, Fredric Jameson, whose 1984
essay on &Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism& in the New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92 in
many ways provoked my own work in the field.
See Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern
Architecture (London: Academy, 1977) and Post-Modern Classicism:
The New Synthesis (London: Academy, 1980).
See Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of
Architecture (London: Granada, 1980), 52-9.
Andreas Huyssen, &Mapping the
Postmodern,& reprinted in Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, eds., A
Postmodern Reader (Albany: SUNY P, 1993), 112.
Of course in the 1960s Susan Sontag characterized
camp in precisely these terms in her &Notes on 'Camp'& in Against
Interpretation and other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 1966), 275-92.
See Sherry Lynne Rosenthal, &Four Essays on
the Nostalgic Appeal of Popular Fiction, Film, and Television: Hard
Times, The Birth of a Nation, The Grapes of Wrath, All
in the Family.& Ph.D. dissertation, University of California,
San Diego, 1983.
See Peter Rist, &Nostalgia: Stars and Genres
in American Pop Culture,& Canadian Review of American Studies
20.1 (1989): 111-17.
David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 6.
See Christopher Lasch, &The Politics of
Nostalgia,& Harper's Magazine (November 1984), 68;
Lowenthal 29; Sandra Ernst Moriarty and Anthony F. McGann,
&Nostalgia and Consumer Sentiment,& Journalism Quarterly
60 (1983): 85 on the impact of nostalgic professional design magazine
advertisements on the media.
George Steiner, Nostalgia for the Absolute,
Massey Lectures, 14th series (Toronto: CBC, 1974), 50.
Robert Rubens, &The Backward Glance--A
Contemporary Taste for Nostalgia,& Contemporary Review
(September 1981): 149.
Johannes Hofer, Dissertatio medica de
nostalgia, oder Heimwehe (Basel, 1688), translated in The
Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 7 (1934):
This is in spite of early medical attempts to
universalize it into something felt by all beings--of all ages and
temperaments--anywhere on the face of the earth. E.g. Philippe Pinel's
nostalgia entry in the Encyclop&die M&thodique:
M&decine, 10 (Paris: Agasse, 1821). See also B. Ruml,
&Theory of Nostalgic and Egoic Sentiments,& Psychological
Bulletin 30 (1933): 656-7.
See Jean Starobinski, &The Idea of
Nostalgia,& Diogenes 54 (1966): 81-103. The citations are
from pages 90 and 87 respectively.
The medical meaning did see a revival, evidently,
during the American Civil War. See J. Theodore Calhoun, &Nostalgia
as a Disease of Field Service,& Medical and Surgical Reporter
11 (27 February 1864); DeWitt C. Peters, &Remarks on the Evils of
Youthful Enlistments and Nostalgia,& American Medical Times
(14 February 1863).
See Antonio Prete, &L'assedio della
lontananza,& in Antonio Prete, ed., Nostalgia: storia di un
sentimento (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 1992), 17.
See the discussion of, among others, Karl
Jaspers' Heimweh und Verbrechen (1909) in Starobinski 99-101.
For more on the medical and psychological angle
on nostalgia, see Willis H. McCann, &Nostalgia--A Review of the
Literature,& Psychological Bulletin 38 (1941): 165-82 and
&Nostalgia: A Descriptive and Comparative Study,& Journal
of Genetic Psychology 62 (1943): 97-104; George Rosen,
&Nostalgia: A 'Forgotten' Psychological Disorder,& Clio
Medica 10.1 (1975): 28-51.
Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer
Hinsicht (1798). More recently, it has been argued that the appeal
of the comic strip in French culture today is nostalgia for childhood.
See Ir&ne Pennacchioni, La Nostalgie en images: une
sociologie du r&cit dessin& (Paris: Librairie des
M&ridiens, 1982).
See Vladimir Jank&l&vitch's
meditation on this in L'Irreversible et la nostalgie (Paris:
Flammarion, 1974).
James Phillips, &Distance, Absence, and
Nostalgia,& in Don Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman, eds., Descriptions
(Albany: SUNY P, 1985), 65.
M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1881), 147. Thanks to Russell Kilbourn
for calling this to my attention.
See Phillips 65.
Lowenthal 62; Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The
Fifties: The Way We Really Were (New York: Doubleday, 1977).
But is this perhaps how nostalgia only
&masquerades as memory,& as one theorist puts it? See E.B.
Daniels, &Nostalgia: Experiencing the Elusive,& in Ihde and
Silverman 84.
Lee Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in
Genealogical Criticism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994), xvi.
Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, &The
Dimensions of Nostalgia,& in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Cross,
eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester and
NY: Manchester UP, 1989), 4. Chase and Shaw also point out that the
photograph is the &paradigm case of the moment of nostalgia&
Lowenthal 30.
Starobinski 101-2.
See Jean-Fran&ois Lyotard, The
Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984).
Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking
Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York and London: Routledge,
1995), 253.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narrative of the
Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins UP, 1984), 23.
Stewart 23.
See, for instance, Roderick Peters,
&Reflections on the Origin and Aim of Nostalgia,& Journal
of Analytic Psychology 30 (1985): 135-48; or Nandor Fodor,
&Varieties of Nostalgia,& Psychoanalytic Review 37
(1950): 25-38.
Laurence Lerner, The Uses of Nostalgia:
Studies in Pastoral Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972), 52.
Michael M. Mason, &The Cultivation of the
Senses for Creative Nostalgia in the Essays of W.H. Hudson,& Ariel
20.1 (1989): 23. It has also been called our &moral
conscience& for it is said to let us know what values we hold most
dear and help us fight &the sickness of despair.& See Ralph
Harper, Nostalgia: An Existential Exploration of Longing and
Fulfilment in the Modern Age (Cleveland: P of Western Reserve U,
1966), 28.
Harper 21.
All nostalgia, then, would be what Fred Davis
calls &interpreted nostalgia& wherein an analysis of an
experience, however brief or mistaken, comes to be fused with that
primary experience and thus alters it. See Yearning for Yesterday: A
Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free P, 1979), 25.
The Curriculum Advisor on Race Relations and
Multiculturalism for the Toronto Board of Education, cited in
&Analyzing Racism at ROM& in The Varsity (June 1990),
See Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia:
Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London and New
York: Routledge, 1, n.4.
See Anthony Arblaster, Viva la libert&:
Politics in Opera (London: Verso, 1992), 180.
Jean Baudrillard, &The Precession of
Simulacra,& in Natoli and Hutcheon 361. He goes on to call
nostalgia &the phastasmal parodic rehabilitation of all lost
referentials& (372).
See Jank&l& Kathleen
Parth&, &Village Prose: Chauvinism, Nationalism, or
Nostalgia?& in Sheelagh Duffin Graham, ed., New Directions in
Soviet Literature (London: Macmillan, 1992), 106-21.
See Richard Raspa, &Exotic Foods among
Italian-Americans in Mormon Utah: Food as Nostalgic Enactment of
Identity,& in Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, eds., Ethnic
and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group
Identity (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1984), 185-94.
Michael M.J. Fischer, &Autobiographical
Voices (1, 2, 3) and Mosaic Memory,& in Kathleen Ashley, Leigh
Gilmore, and Gerald Peters, eds., Autobiography and Postmodernism
(Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994), 92.
Teresa Maria Brown, &Rewriting the Nostalgic
Story: Woman, Desire, Narrative,& Ph.D. dissertation, University
of Florida, 1989.
See Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, Nostalgia
and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism
(London and New York: Methuen, 1987), xiii. See also Barbara Creed,
&From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism,& Screen
28.2 (1987): 47-67 on film nostalgia and issues of gender which
Fredric Jameson does NOT deal with. For a discussion of the
condemnation of utopian &future nostalgia& by feminist
writers, see Kathe Davis Finney, &The Days of Future Past or
Utopians Lessing and LeGuin Fight Future Nostalgia,& in Donald M.
Hassler, ed., Patterns of the Fantastic (Mercer Island, WA:
Starmont House, 1983), 31-40. For a general critique of various kinds
of utopian thinking, including nostalgic ones, see Vincent P. Pecora, Households
of the Soul (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996).
Lowenthal 121.
On Shakespeare's role in this kind of nostalgia,
see Bennett 145: &To reproduce a classic text of the European
imperial archive is always to risk its willing and wistfully nostalgic
assent to (re)claim its own authority. Those texts are simply so
heavily overcoded, value laden, that the production and reception of
the 'new' text necessarily becomes bound to the tradition that
encompasses and promotes the old 'authentic' version. This remains the
argument against the revival/rewriting of The Tempest or any
other classical text: that containment is an inevitable effect.&
Renato Rosando, Culture and Truth: The
Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon P, 1989), 68. Thanks to
Monika Kaup for calling this to my attention.
Simon Simonse, &African Literature between
Nostalgia and Utopia: African Novels since 1953 in the Light of the
Modes-of-Production Approach,& Research in African Literatures
13.4 (1982): 451-87.
See Ien Ang, &Hegemony-in-Trouble: Nostalgia
and the Ideology of the Impossible in European Cinema,& in Duncan
Petrie, ed., Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary
European Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1992): 21-31.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991), 156.
Jameson, Postmodernism xvii and 19,
respectively.
Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible
(New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 85 and 130 respectively.
Fredric Jameson, &Nostalgia for the
Present,& The South Atlantic Quarterly 88.2 (1989): 527.
Anne Friedberg, &Les Flaneurs du Mal(l):
Cinema and the Postmodern Condition,& PMLA 106.3 (1991):
Derek Jarman, Queer Edward II (London:
British Film Institute, 1991), 86.
See, respectively, Fredric Jameson, The
Ideologies of Theory: Essays . Volume I: Situations of Theory
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 110 and Postmodernism
Jameson, Postmodernism 19 and 21,
respectively.
John Frow, &Tourism and the Semiotics of
Nostalgia,& October 57 (1991): 135.
Simon During, &Postmodernism or
Post-colonialism Today,& Textual Practice 1.1 (1987):
See Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form:
Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1971), 38. The phrase is used to describe Adorno's
critique of theories of history organized around the covert hypothesis
of such a &moment of plenitude& in the past or future.
Michael B&rub&, &Just the Fax,
Ma'am, Or, Postmodernism's Journey to Decenter,& Village Voice
(October 1991), 14.
Timothy J. Reiss, &Critical Environments:
Cultural Wilderness or Cultural History?& Canadian Review of
Comparative Literature 10.2 (June 1983): 193.
But it does so at a time when, as Andreas Huyssen
has argued, Western culture's utopian imagination &is shifting
from its futuristic pole toward the pole of remembrance.& See
Huyssen, Twilight Memories 88.
See Allison Graham, &History, Nostalgia, and
the Criminality of Popular Culture,& Georgia Review 38.2
(1984): 348-64. See also Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams:
Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1985, on nostalgia in
fashion as a &strangely unmotived appropriation of the
past& (172).
Vanderbilt 7.
These are the terms of Arjun Appadurai, in his Modernity
at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1996), 77-8.
This is one step beyond what has been called the
ironic nostalgia of, say, post-Soviet artists who, according to
Svetlana Boym, &reconfigure and preserve various kinds of imagined
community and offer interesting cultural hybrids--of Soviet kitsch and
memories of totalitarian childhood.& See Svetlana Boym, &From
the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia,& Representations
49 (Winter 1995): 151.
There may be analogies here with what Bennett
calls &queer nostalgia& wherein &identity-forming
discourses of the past are both confirmed and fractured at the moment
of performance& (159).
See Chase and Shaw 7.
See Lowenthal 394-6.
Lowenthal 396.
Huyssen, Twilight Memories 5; see Lasch
for contrasting view: &If Americans really cared about the past,
they would try to understand how it still shapes their ideas and
actions. Instead they lock it up in museums or reduce it to another
object of commercialized consumption& (69).
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