On Nostalgia
David Berry
Coach House Books, 2020
Canadian critic David Berry‘s slim book resonates in a time when all culture seems a hasty reissue and many of us profess a longing for times and things past. During the confounding year of On Nostalgia‘s release, I found myself collecting vintage film cameras, including a Polaroid Sun 660 Autofocus, a variant of the model illustrated on the book’s cover.
A soft but powerful critique of the impulse and its contradictions, Berry explores nostalgia in its many localities: its pathological origins, its power in politics, its ubiquity in the arts, and its place in the personal human experience. My own interest sits mostly with the latter two.
Swiss then-medical student Johannes Hofer (1669–1752) coined the term nostalgia.
“In all his observations and diagnoses, Hofer does not seem to fully appreciate that home is often more time than place.”1
Berry’s comment is suggestive of Thomas Wolfe’s well known passage: “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood…back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame…back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”2
George Eliot paints a much warmer picture. “A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth”, grounding us at a young age with “a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge”.3 Eliot continues: “At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality”, foreshadowing a nostalgia then not for a earlier outside world but a simpler cognitive one.
“Insomuch as there are emerging fields in the world of nostalgia study, one of them is the idea of anticipatory nostalgia. This is, essentially, the realization that whatever you’re currently experiencing will one day be something you look back on fondly. You might think that such a feeling would bring some deeper appreciation of the moment….But for the most part, becoming suddenly aware that a good experience is already in the process of becoming a memory mostly just makes us acutely sad.”4
Anticipatory nostalgia, or what John Koenig calls “dès vu” in his amusing and incisive dictionary.5 This itself is an example of Berry’s “one of the big, overarching purposes of art is to grasp at the unnameable maelstrom inside us, either to name it ourselves or to borrow the label that someone else has been kind enough to extract.”6
Nostalgia has become the predominant driver of contemporary popular culture.
“Artists’ intentions are a breeding ground for accidents of interpretation, and some of the most powerfully nostalgic aspects of art are happenstance.”7
Art is created through novel expression within constraints. Classically, there are rules imposed from without. Poetry has meter and rhyme, painting has principles of composition and theories of colour, music has structure and, conventionally, tonality. And yet the space for varied interpretation remains.
As artists sought to break free of these rules, interpretation became increasingly the focus. Samuel Jay Keyser theorizes that modernist art — poetry, music, painting — came about at the dawn of the 20th century when these “shared rules were abandoned because artists felt that the rules had been fully explored and overused.”8 Artists felt unchallenged in their practice. And when these rules, which Keyser ties to our shared mental architecture as humans, were replaced with “private formats”, known only to the artist, our comprehension shifted from the unconscious to an overt encounter where understanding “had to be worked at to be discovered and appreciated.” Berry’s notion of art as an instigator of nostalgia becomes stronger in this light.
Berry’s is not a personal essay, and straddles the strange conversational dispassion characteristic of contemporary writing. Frequently framed with “we” and “our” while applying a wide lens, these are not the intimate observations of John Buchan. Yet here too, Berry gives voice to the often perplexing and deeply subjective encounter of time and memory and longing.
Collected Quotations
On looking back and looking forward
In all his observations and diagnoses, Hofer does not seem to fully appreciate that home is often more time than place.
Page 14
To what extent aging can be defined as progress in the positive sense of the word depends on the person, but our identities, what we understand ourselves to be, are inherently progressive: we are the sum of what we have done, experiences piling on top of each other like wet clay. Some kind of deep knowledge of those things, of our personal history, is essential to knowing what we are.
Page 39
Returning to those times, though, besides being impossible, would also seem to effectively stop the whole business of living, cryogenically preserving some iteration of yourself without even the promise of thawing it out. And that’s only the yearning aspect of nostalgia: the overall effect our nostalgic tendencies have on our memories, lessening if not eliminating some aspects while promoting others to core experiences, would seem to doom the entire attempt to know ourselves, leaving us like some floating consciousness grasping at flotsam and trying to claim that as our authentic selves.
Page 40
One of the bitterer truths that nostalgia helps us to deal with is the fact that we so rarely know when things are ending. Nearly all of the widely accepted momentous occasions of a life are those rare times when we are definitively, incontrovertibly aware that something is over: graduations and moving-away parties and retirements and funerals — admittedly it can be hard for a person to fully appreciate the importance of their own funeral — but even birthdays and anniversaries and weddings and births, too. Some of these events, of course, tend to be dominated more by the optimism of potential, but I don’t think it’s excessively cynical to suggest that we’re able to really indulge the future precisely because we’ve had a chance to process and accept the fact that things are changing, that our school days or our pure independence Or even just our twenties are definitively over.
Page 123
Insomuch as there are emerging fields in the world of nostalgia study, one of them is the idea of anticipatory nostalgia. This is, essentially, the realization that whatever you’re currently experiencing will one day be something you look back on fondly. You might think that such a feeling would bring some deeper appreciation of the moment, some sort of odd time-loop Möbius strip of being present. And it can do that, on occasion, particularly on one of those happy occasions of transition we have had time to prepare for, like a wedding or birthday. But for the most part, becoming suddenly aware that a good experience is already in the process of becoming a memory mostly just makes us acutely sad.
Page 124
Art and the stories we tell ourselves
We could go so far as to say that one of the big, overarching purposes of art is to grasp at the unnameable maelstrom inside us, either to name it ourselves or to borrow the label that someone else has been kind enough to extract.
Page 54
Artists’ intentions are a breeding ground for accidents of interpretation, and some of the most powerfully nostalgic aspects of art are happenstance.
61
Film is almost certainly the medium most likely to spring these accidents upon us, and I would not be the first to suggest that, as an accidental record of things like fashions, settings, and sounds, it is the most fundamentally nostalgic medium, full of potential sparks of yearning.
Page 61
Honestly, even the concept of hiving off recent history into decades, as if the forces that acted on our lives carefully marked their calendars, is some indication of how collective nostalgia operates in a way that is fundamentally incoherent but practically functional: all it really needs to do is prompt a mass of individuals with some rough dates, and they will take care of the rest.
Page 77
- Berry, 14 ↩︎
- Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (Harper & Row, 1940) ↩︎
- George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Oxford World’s Classics, 2014), 15-16 ↩︎
- Berry, 124 ↩︎
- John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Simon & Schuster, 2021), 196 ↩︎
- Berry, 54 ↩︎
- Berry, 61 ↩︎
- Samuel Jay Keyser, The Mental Life of Modernism: How poetry, painting, and music changed at the turn of the twentieth century (MIT Press, 2020), 7 ↩︎