new left review 14 mar apr 2002 167

reviews

Timothy Bewes

AN ANATOMY OF NOSTALGIA

Svetlana Boym, The Future of NostalgiaBasic Books: New York 2001, $35, hardback424 pp, 0 465 00707 4

It was a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, who in 1688 coined the term ‘nostalgia’, from the Greek nostos—return home, and algia—longing. Not so much an ancient passion as a pseudo-classical creation of the early modern world, nost algia was, Svetlana Boym informs us, first diagnosed among the various dis-placed persons of the seventeenth century: Swiss mercenaries soldiering abroad; domestic servants working in France and Germany; freedom-loving students from Berne, studying in Basel. As cure, Hofer prescribed opium, leeches and a return to the Alps. It was not until the eighteenth century that poets and philoso-phers seized nostalgia from the medical men. For the Romantics, the symptoms became a sign of sensibility, or of newly minted patriotic feeling. Herderians discovered that each had their own, apparently untranslatable pang: German Heimweh, French maladie du pays, Spanish mal de corazón, Czech litost, Russian toska, Polish tesknota, Portuguese and Brazilian saudade (‘a tender sorrow, breezy and erotic’), Romanian dor (‘sonorous and sharp’). Modernists responded dif-ferently to what Lukács called ‘transcendental homelessness’—Baudelaire, for example, seeking to be chez lui in the perpetual flow of the Parisian crowd. ‘Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths’, Lukács wrote in The Theory of the Novel (1916), when ‘everything is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own.’ This is the nostalgia that interests Boym: not an individual sickness but ‘a historical emotion’, a symptom of our age; a yearning for a different time as much as a faraway place. Since 1789, revolutions and restorations have frequently been followed by outbreaks of nostalgia—in part, a process of grieving, she argues, ‘for the unreal-ized dreams of the past and visions of the future that have become obsolete’. The restoration of 1989 is the crucial one here. Born in Leningrad, Boym left for

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the US in 1981 and was told at the Soviet border that she would never be able to return. ‘Nostalgia seemed like a waste of time’, she remembers, ‘an unafford-able luxury’. (Later, interviewing other first-generation immigrants to the States, she finds the taboo is common: looking back could paralyse you forever, like Lot’s wife.) Nostalgia catches up with her when she returns to Russia in 1991, but what moves her is not the smell of frying cutlets or the grey drizzle over the Neva. It is the different rhythm of life—the sense that there is time for conversa-tion and reflection. In a perverse outcome of the socialist economy, ‘time was not a precious commodity; the shortage of private space allowed people to make private use of their time’. That is what she misses now. ‘Nostalgically, I thought that the slow rhythm of reflective time made possible the dream of freedom.’ In taking nostalgia as the subject of her new book, Boym is thus addressing a politically charged concept. She suggests that in an age when the ‘constant revo-lutionizing of production’ has reached a pace disorienting to huge numbers of people, nostalgia has become normalized: ‘we are all nostalgic for a time when we weren’t nostalgic’. In an era of shifting borders, increased population mobil-ity and the consolidation of the principle of planned obsolescence in Western economies, only the least sensitive can claim to be entirely nostalgia-free. It is this sense that informs Boym’s project, and motivates her turn towards the realm of subjective experience. In a world where nostalgia has become paradig-matic, how is it to be analysed objectively—without complicity? Boym’s work proceeds on the premise of a paradox: that the only way to maintain an objective stance towards nostalgia is by subjectively inhabiting it. This approach takes her a long way from the twentieth-century engagé tradi-tion, which saw nostalgia as the very definition of reaction. Adorno, one of those who took it seriously, wrote of it as determined by a ‘fear of gaping meaning-lessness’ before an unstable present, forgetful of the lessons of past horrors, bearing us obliviously towards barbarism. Today, surviving members of that tra-dition often seem overwhelmed by the perception that, finally, things really have got worse. A generation of intellectuals has sunk, by and large, into unreflective nost algia for a world of conviction and idealism that ‘no longer exists’. Boym, however, thinks nostalgia can be prospective as well as retrospective: ‘Considerations of the future make us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales’, and it is the joint future of ‘nostalgic longing and progressive thinking’ that she wants to place at the centre of her work. What has been neglected in the conceptualization of nostalgia, she argues, are the nuances of a subjective rela-tionship to the world that an approach such as Adorno’s obliterates. To retrieve these, she draws a distinction between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia—splitting the term into its two constituents, nostos and algia, ‘home’ and ‘longing’. Restorative nostalgia, seeking a ‘transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home’, does not recognize itself as such, generating every reactionary version of the sen-timent—nationalist, fundamentalist, heritage-fixated, etc. Restorative nostalgia

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is not concerned to understand its own anxiety, but to dissolve it by recovering truths that inhere in tradition. Reflective nostalgia, on the contrary, is self-aware, and as such operates as the template for Boym’s general approach in this book. Reflective nostalgia ‘dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging’ and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. It involves social rather than national memories; it can awaken ‘multiple planes of consciousness’, driving people ‘to narrate the relationship between past, present and future’. It offers not a mere pretext for midnight melancholia, but ‘an ethical and creative chal-lenge’. Nostalgia, Boym argues, as long as it recognizes the ‘impossibility of home coming’, is an acceptable, even obligatory response to the contemporary world, since anything else risks installing its own unacknowledged origin as a false certainty at the heart of some new, authoritarian political project. We are all nostalgic, she claims. The only significant distinction is between those who are aware of it and those who are not. What the twenty-first century needs is to retrieve the utopian elements of the past, the dreams of how it could have been. To do so, it must turn away from the technocratic details of the external world to the ‘mechanisms of consciousness’; for it is in these that an ‘ironic, inconclusive and fragmentary’ kind of truth is to be found, far removed from the self-certainties either of scientific monographs or political programmes. How does this work in practice? The book’s main engagement is with post-Soviet Russia. Boym is critical of mass nostalgia for the Soviet past, defending the young shock therapists (‘hardly the main culprits’) against what she describes as the ‘popular anger’ directed at them. She disapproves strongly of the young computer hackers who cut into NATO’s website during the Yugoslav war, leav-ing a picture of Beavis and Butthead and the slogan, ‘From Russia with Love’. This, apparently, is restorative nostalgia. Her own yearning, she confesses, is for the ‘unpredictable, fascinating, disorganized’ time of transition between 1988 and 1991—one of the moments that she sees Mayor Luzhkov’s subsequent com-mercial make-over of Moscow as attempting to wipe away. Komar and Melamid’s opinion-poll finding for the ‘most-wanted’ Russian painting—a blue landscape with bears and Jesus Christ in the foreground, entitled ‘The Appearance of Jesus before the Bears’—has, she suggests, been almost perfectly realized in Luzhkov’s Moscow, thronged as it is with ‘toy towers, gilded cupolas, fountains and fairy-tale bears’. Yet her discussion of the new architecture is curiously bland. One waits in vain for a withering blast against Tsereteli’s monstrous 200-foot statue of Peter the Great atop a miniaturized galleon, towering over the surrounding landscape; or of the colossal, reinforced-concrete Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, built over a luxury carpark, with a special VIP elevator going straight up to the altar. But ‘reflective nostalgia’ seems to lack the dimension of anger. Boym is distressed at the lack of public acknowledgement in Russia of the traumatic experience of Communism and state repression, seeing it as a con-

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tributing factor to the resurgence of restorative nostalgia there. She is happier with the debates that have accompanied rebuilding work in Berlin. Central to her discussion here is the ideological turmoil surrounding the proposed recon-struction of the eighteenth-century Prussian Stadtschloss—heavily damaged by Allied bombing during World War II, and then blown up by the GDR—on the site of the Honecker-era Palace of the Republic. Advocates and opponents alike, she notes, are open to charges of nostalgia: ‘if one admires the Schloss, one nurtures conservative tendencies; if one advocates against the destruction of the Palace of the Republic, one defends East German politics’. (Boym is rather sympathetic to the Palace of the Republic, having fond childhood memories of sipping chilled orange juice there, an awe-struck Russian tourist.) The problem arises, she suggests, when memories and a sense of the ‘potentialities’ of a par-ticular site are confused with ‘a coherent sense of identity’—a confusion her book intends to resolve. Boym argues instead for architectural historian Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm’s notion of a ‘critical reconstruction’ in which the two palaces will ‘coexist, toler-ate each other, and make each other readable’. The years of 1933–45 will always be ‘an affront, an unassimilable challenge’; instead of covering up the destruc-tion of the Schloss, this proposal ‘will leave the wounds of the past open’, to make of the site ‘a common memory of East and West’. Here Boym seems to find the sort of creative nostalgia she is seeking, since for Hoffmann-Axthelm, the baroque Schloss stands for an alternative German history that might have happened, if ‘enlightened rationalism and urban civility’ had prevailed. Boym is sharp enough to ask whether the projected conglomeration of government offices, conference halls, Turkish restaurants, Polish jeans shops and Jewish bakeries (to be inserted within an eventually reconstructed joint Schloss–Palace complex) would actually create, in the heart of Berlin, a locus for the sort of ‘moral reflexive discourse’ that Hoffmann-Axthelm wants. Would it not be a further step towards the ‘normalization’—that ‘antidote to both nostalgia and historical critique’—from which Boym rather mildly distances herself? What she fails to explain, here as elsewhere, is how the political project of reflective nostal-gia differs from banal adhesion to a more or less liberal status quo. Traversing Europe in search of fragments to shore against current ruin, Boym recounts a series of epiphanies in which ‘unofficial culture’ has frustrated appropriation by ‘official culture’, each with its retrograde ‘restorative’ converse. They include a bohemian bar called Saigon in Leningrad; the smattering of graffiti on the heads and torsos of Dzerzhinsky, Lenin and Khrushchev in the garden opposite the Central House of Artists in Moscow after the collapse of the regime in August 1991; Ampelmann, the ‘Walk’ icon on GDR pedestrian cross-ings, elevated from invisibility to national hero when replaced in the 1990s by a ‘characterless’ West German stick version; Tacheles, an artists’ squat in West Berlin’s Oranienburger Strasse; and the origins of the Berlin Love Parade in

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‘the living tradition of the techno underground’. The redeemable element in each case is that which precedes or exceeds its institutional appropriation, dis-playing an ‘ironic’ or ‘ambivalent’ relation to its own being, and preserving some trace of organic historical processes. Boym’s method, if it is one, lies in the cele-bration of this unappropriable detail which escapes the tendency of the whole towards institutionalization, thereby resisting the propensity of ‘reflective’ nost-algia to become ‘restorative’. If this element has a name, it might be the porosity that Walter Benjamin thought he found in Naples, where ‘a grain of Sunday is hidden in each weekday’, and ‘every private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life’. Porosity for Boym is a signifier of becoming that eludes projects both of radical modernization and literal-minded reconstruction of the past. Thus the Saigon café of the seventies, frequented by ‘bohemians, poets, black marketeers and KGB informants’, rebukes the Saigon music store opened on the same site in the nineties, in rebaptized St. Petersburg. In Moscow, the broken statues of Soviet leaders in the newly established Park of Arts have been cleaned up and turned into respectable monuments of ‘artistic and histori-cal significance’. Tacheles is now a stop on a bus tour of bohemian landmarks, and the Love Parade has lost any connexion with its ‘ostentatiously apolitical’ origins, becoming a garish official festivity of the new inclusive Berlin. The Future of Nostalgia aspires to the seventeenth-century genre of the ‘Anatomy’: an idiosyncratic yet exhaustive catalogue of the dimensions of a particular mental affliction. Part cultural history, part travelogue, part literary analysis, it exemplifies a current trend in the academy to disregard disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of a wider audience, or simply in response to a world in which they seem increasingly arbitrary or parochial. One price of this approach is that earlier writers tend to be given bite-sized consideration; Nietzsche, Lukács and Benjamin get two pages each (Jurassic Park gets four). Another problem lies in Boym’s source material—one of the book’s claims to originality—most of which comes in the form of urban legends, personal anecdotes, untranslatable jokes, conveying an ‘unofficial’ version of events of greater nuance and com-plexity than standard accounts. The legitimacy of Boym’s method depends, of course, on the distinction she would draw between her handling of this mate-rial and the ‘falsifying’ effects of a conventional history. But like the book’s separation of ‘reflective’ from ‘restorative’ nostalgia, the line between the two is neither stable nor clear. Boym’s objections to the new Saigon, ‘slick and self-conscious about its radicalness’, make no sense unless prompted by nostalgia (in the ‘restorative’ sense) for its predecessor. Boym’s discussion of the restoration of the Sistine Chapel frescoes illus-trates these ambiguities. Here too, all sides in the debate are open to charges of nostalgia, and Boym declines to take any explicit position on the issue. Nonetheless, outlining the possible objections to what at one stage she calls the ‘Benetton Michelangelo’, she remarks: ‘Believing that their own final touch

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is invisible, the scientists didn’t take into account that modern airborne toxins might begin to corrode the perfect work of restoration in ways that Michelangelo could never have predicted.’ Her purpose is to show that any talk of a ‘return to Michelangelo’ is undermined by the fact that the painter himself—unavoid-ably but incontrovertibly—‘left his masterpiece open to the accidents of time’. She cannot, of course, use this observation to argue against the restoration, since that would be merely another variant of the ‘restorative’ fallacy. Few who have seen the results of the restoration would argue against it on aesthetic grounds; and Boym’s discussion only reinforces the impression that the notion of nostalgia, no matter how anatomized, offers little guide to action, perhaps least of all in the aesthetic field. Once consciousness becomes the privileged analytic standpoint, there is no stopping a kind of voluntaristic delirium in which everything is potentially available both for retrograde reconstruction and redemptive reflection, and inconclusiveness appears to be the only response untainted by violence. The final section of the book deals with nostalgia in the work of three Russian-American artists who never returned to their homeland: Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky and Ilya Kabakov. An appealing feature of The Future

of Nostalgia is Boym’s attempt to overturn the complacent assumption that a progressive politics must aim to abolish, rather than creatively reinvent, the experience of alienation. In a society of literally or metaphorically displaced persons, alienation—in the form of the aesthetic reserve of Nabokov, say, or Brodsky’s ‘aversion to sentimentality’—can become, in Boym’s words, ‘a per-sonal antibiotic against homesickness’. But to introduce Nabokov was perhaps a tactical error. His caustic prose sears through her more saccharine pages, and her consideration of his ‘nostalgic and anti-nostalgic revelations’ backfires. ‘I get no special kick out of revisiting old émigré haunts in those incidental countries’, sneers Nabokov of his time in France. Boym is left to gush that ‘algia helped the writer to inhabit virtual planes of existence. Nostos was what he carried with him, light as ashes and dreams.’ Something more tough-minded than the gossamer line between the ‘reflective’ and ‘restorative’ is needed to grasp the longings that are the subject of her book. Nostalgia is a sentiment that entails no practice. A one-way relationship to the world, its typical effect is to reify the past into a frieze of clichés, incapable of releasing inventive action in the present. Boym’s book does little to disturb its doubtful reputation, though much to illuminate its workings. Only a genuine transformative passion can weave lost experience into the finding of a more liveable future. In the meantime: opium, leeches and brisk mountain air.

Timothy Bewes researches at Liverpool John Moores; Reifi cation, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism, will be published by Verso later this year.