Nostalgia as difference

In their simplest forms, the four paradigms of nostalgia can be divided into two types, geographical and temporal, each of which divided in two directions, according to the predominance of memory or imagination, that is, depending on whether the object of the nostalgic feeling comes from a past experience (mal du pays or regret) or from an idealized construction (exoticism or promise). This bi-directional dichotomy, while a convenient way to distinguish between different instances of nostalgic expressions, reduces the plurality of nostalgia to distinctive categories that appear disconnected from each other, as they would in a rudimentary graph like this one:

geographical temporal

memory back there past

imagination over there future

In reality, I would argue that these paradigms express tendencies that are always interconnected. In most instances of nostalgia (as most of the case studies in this dissertation show), it is possible to discuss the influence of more than one of these paradigms in the formation of the nostalgic object, rather than referring to these paradigms in isolation within a grid.

Their interplay thus constitutes a dynamic map of nostalgic ideas that serve to localize nuanced psychosocial dimensions. Hence, I would consider the four paradigms as two intersecting pairs of opposing ideas, where nostalgia is not located merely at the extreme points, but anywhere within the diagram (Fig. 1.9). In this model, nostalgia is represented as a combination of temporal and geographical elements.68 This diagram reminds us that the mal du pays always bears an element of regret, and that exoticism carries the seeds of a promise of renewal. It also invites us to contemplate the future hope of the mal du pays or to consider that the mythicized elsewhere can conceal an awareness of the errors of the past while promising changes. Finally, this diagram is not restrained to the limits of this page: we can imagine that it reflects upon itself, enabling the opposite paradigms to overlap with each other. In other words, we can imagine a nostalgia where the homeland is rendered exotic and where the promise of renewal is never entirely distinct from a return to the lost past.

Figure 1.9: Diagram representing the relationships between the four paradigms of nostalgia. The shaded area represents the site of nostalgic expression while the unshaded center represents immediate reality.

68 _{The axes are only there to guide the eye of the reader. In no way do they form a route to which nostalgia}

is tied. back th ere nostalgia as mal du pays future past ov er th ere nostalgia as exoticism nostalgia as promise nostalgia as regret

The zero-point where these elements combine—the center of the circle (unshaded in the figure)—is the point of immediate reality, the here and now from which nostalgia is absent. By “immediate reality,” I mean the present lived without mediation, without intermediary; a present practically detached from connections with the past and the future, which expresses itself as “I am here now,” a phrase that is fundamentally anti-nostalgic. In reality, it is never possible to experience this “immediate reality” since the present is always subject to personal and social mediation. “I am here now” is a declaration of conviction more than a statement of existential presence. It is for this reason that we find in Fredric Jameson what he called “nostalgia for the present,” a reflective present that contemplates itself as an object other to itself.69 We must therefore imagine the point of immediate reality devoid of nostalgia as an abstract concept of the here and now. Whenever an object is encountered and experienced outside the point of immediate reality, the gap between this object and the here and now is expressed as a form of difference which triggers nostalgic longing. This diagram shows the positioning of the self (which can also be a collective self) in relation to the object of desire. Only a complete correspondence between the immediate reality and the object of experience can resist nostalgia—that is, whenever the immediate reality is the (only) object of experience; or, when the subject and object collapse into one. If nostalgia can be likened to a sort of alienation, or at least of estrangement, it is because of this relation of difference. The nostalgic subject is nostalgic because it recognizes a lack in this gap with the object of desire. Nostalgia is the desire to close this gap, this deficit. It is the will to erase the difference between the immediate presence of self and the imagined experience. To be nostalgic is to feel here and now what, by definition, will never be here and now—it is to have the gift of ubiquity, as Jankélévitch wrote:

Nostalgia is a human melancholia made possible by consciousness, which is the consciousness of something else, consciousness of an elsewhere, consciousness of a contrast between past and present, between present and future. This mindful consciousness is the anxiety of the nostalgic. The nostalgic is at the same time here and there, neither here nor there, present and absent, twice present and twice absent; we can therefore say at will that he is multi-present, or that he is nowhere:

69 _{Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University}

here, he is physically present, but he feels absent in spirit of this place where he is bodily present; there, on the contrary, he feels morally present, but he is actually and currently absent from those dear places he once left.70

It is for this reason that, as I will discuss further below, the mediatization of nostalgia (as well as its study) lingers especially on the points of rupture, on the moments of personal, social, or historical discontinuity, which are the sources of this difference. We already saw a concrete example above with Tiersot when he introduced his plea for the renewal of French music in 1920 with a reminder of the social upheavals that marked France since the Revolution.

While this mapping of nostalgia provides for a broader understanding of nostalgias in the plural, it still does not account for the processes that render it operative in any particular context. Indeed, the paradigms of nostalgia only serve to describe different forms of nostalgic expressions, but it cannot justify them, nor can it elucidate the strategies and practices active in each of their manifestations. The aim of this dissertation is to apply this model to specific examples to gain a better understanding of how specific institutions (political, economic, cultural) contribute to the formation and circulation of various types of nostalgic experiences, and how they also capitalize on them. Those strategies and practices are what I call the rhetoric of nostalgia. Fred Davis alluded to such rhetoric in his seminal study of nostalgia (my emphasis):

So frequently and uniformly does nostalgic sentiment seem to infuse our aesthetic experience that we can rightly begin to suspect that nostalgia is not only a feeling or mood that is somehow magically evoked by the art object but also a distinctive aesthetic modality in its own right, a kind of code or patterning of symbolic elements, which by some obscure mimetic isomorphism comes, much as in language itself, to serve as a substitute for the feeling or mood it aims to arouse.71

Davis proposes that nostalgia is not merely a feeling locatable on a map, but a mechanism or technique apparent to linguistic rhetoric that can manipulate feelings and move the artist’s audiences into a state of longing out of their own volition. In nostalgia’s structure of rhetoric, nostalgia is exposed rather than described. It is something one can choose or avoid, not something

70 _{Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible et la nostalgie, 280–81.} 71 _{Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 73.}

that requires courage to get rid of, as Jankélévitch believed.72 When Charles Koechlin wrote in 1925 that his era, and especially its youth, “did not seem to have the strength to surrender to nostalgia,”73

he meant the exact opposite of Jankélévitch: courage lies not in the removal of nostalgia but in its acceptance as a valuable tool for composition.

The risk inherent to the rhetoric of nostalgia—especially decades or centuries after the fact—is to misperceive those instances when nostalgia is a genuine feeling and when it is a tactic, a diversion, or an ironical subversion. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century doctors were already aware of this complexity when treating nostalgic soldiers. How could one tell if a soldier was feigning the symptoms of an illness in order to avoid combat, be dismissed from service, and return home?74 For doctors, nostalgia was no longer just an illness with a spectrum of symptoms, it was also a tactic for which each case had to be declared sick/not sick. A similar question will be asked of many of the musical examples that I will present in the following pages: how honest, or authentic, is any instance of musical nostalgia? These questions render the whole model of nostalgic paradigms a porous scheme always at risk of dissolution. Yet, they are the necessary origin of a critical viewpoint on nostalgia.

72 _{Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible et la nostalgie, 195.}

73 _{Charles Koechlin, “La Mélodie,” in Cinquante ans de musique française de 1874 à 1925, ed. Ladislas}

Rohozinski, vol. 2 (Paris: Les Éditions musicales de la Librairie de France, 1925), 57. “On semble n’avoir

pas la force de s’abandonner à la nostalgie.”