Take a Second Look at Nostalgia
AoR is on break so we’re re-running our best of the best for a few weeks.
I selected fellow blogger and writing/critique partner Kimberley A. McNamara’s “Hello Nostalgia, My Old Friend” (November 2018) because she identifies something I’ve grappled with in my own writing: how to create and maintain resonance with the reader.
Nostalgia is a device to do just that she explains, brilliantly.
Cindy Layton
Hello Nostalgia, My Old Friend
by K. Allen McNamara
Have you noticed a tremendous amount of reboots this year on television? Magnum PI, the Connors, Murphy Brown… to name just a few. What is the driving force behind these modern-day remakes of former Prime Time tv shows? The answer: Nostalgia. It would appear that Generation X (typically cited as people born in the mid-1960s through the 1980s) are hitting their 40s and 50s and yearning for storylines that peppered their youth.
Alan Hirsch in his essay: Nostalgia: A Neuropsychiatric Understanding states “nostalgia may be considered a yearning to return home to the past -- more than this, it is a yearning for an idealized past -- a longing for a sanitized impression of the past.” Hirsch states that nostalgia’s return to the past is not a desire to return to exact past but rather to what is called “a screen memory.” A screen memory is not one specific memory but rather a compilation of memories with the negative aspects filtered out. Like a Faberge egg, carefully and beautifully constructed this past is the yearn.
All the plays, novels, screenplays etc.. are merely variations of the same seven stories. This is an often-repeated adage: there are only seven stories and these seven stories keep being retold, re-spun, twisted or reversed. However, the use of Nostalgia in these story variations adds depth and dimension to these stories and makes us believe they are at once different enough to attract us and familiar enough to make us feel comfortable with what we are being offered.
Nostalgia is perhaps most acutely experienced by the reader in the “coming-of-age” novel, the immigrant experience novel or those novels which are told in the aftermath of a traumatic event.
In his novel Ordinary Grace, William Kent Krueger makes use of Nostalgia for a summer in 1961. The elements of the time period: WWII and Korean veterans tormented in a way not yet given voice, the open sale of fireworks, the cars driven, the food eaten, President Kennedy… all ground us in the time period. These elements combined with the heightened optimism of the 1960s serve to create a nostalgia that is palpable.
Emma Cline in The Girls, likewise, uses Nostalgia to underscore and evoke the simplicity that was lost by a girl who desperately wanted to be seen by her divorced parents. Cline employs beauty tips and other such fashion points to ground us in the long ago period of the protagonist's youth. Do you remember Dippity Doo, facial creams, etc? Of course Cline’s story is loosely based on the Manson murders and the Summer of Love - faint memories for Gen X but ones we think we know or at least have heard of - a familiar history that buzzes in the periphery of Gen X brought to full spotlight with the forbidden allure and dread of cults and manipulation.
Celeste Ng also uses Nostalgia in her novel Everything I Never Told You in the aftermath of the tragic event: Lydia’s unexplained death. Ng uses Nostalgia to underscore and enrich her characters with familiar objects and pressures. Who can forget the iconic Betty Crocker Cookbook? Home economic courses? Set in 1977 in a quiet Ohio town where everyone knows each other, the Lee family, Ng creates, is a mixed- race family and so is different from the other townspeople. Like Ordinary Grace, Ng’s novel strives to uncover the mystery of a tragic family death while family members struggle to decide what secrets about themselves they should reveal or keep buried.
Stephen King’s The Body uses the 1959 rural setting of Castle Rock Maine and evokes the Nostalgia of growing up in a small hardscrabble town complete with tree houses, railroad tracks, a missing body and hoodlums that run amuck. King grounds us with specifics - nostalgic details like the No. 2 eraser. "The kid was dead. The kid wasn't sick, the kid wasn't sleeping. The kid wasn't going to get up in the morning anymore ... or catch poison ivy or wear out the eraser on the end of his Ticonderoga No 2 during a hard math test. The kid was dead."
In his novel Ignorance Milan Kundera devotes a whole paragraph or more on Nostalgia on its actual origin and its translation into other languages:
“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home.”
Ignorance is a novel centered on the Immigrant experience by his protagonist Irene and the return to her homeland (an Odyssean tale). Kundera continues to express what is meant by Nostalgia as a longing for what one used to know so intimately that is now unknown and juxtaposes it against what is the main character now knows so completely in her new homeland. When she is in Paris she longs for home, when she returns home she longs for her Parisian self. Thus the saying: “you can’t go home again” is brilliantly illustrated.
For those looking for other such Nostalgia embedded reads consider: Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, Housekeeping and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, Edinburgh by Alexander Chee, That Night by Alice McDermott, The Turner House by Angela Flournoy, Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, and Mohawk by Richard Russo.
