The Evolution of Nostalgia
Daniel Woolf on Tobias Becker's Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia
Readers of a certain age remember Archie Bunker and his wife Edith sitting at a piano, singing “Those Were the Days” as they wistfully recall a different time and culture, but All in The Family was not the only show of its moment to long for the past. The 1970s, following on the rapid changes in popular culture, social mores, music, and art during the mid-to-late 1960s, may have been the most self-consciously nostalgic decade of the last century. There was a glut of films and television shows set in periods ranging from the 30s to the early 60s—American Graffiti, the two first Godfather films, and The Way We Were, Happy Days, and Laverne and Shirley—and the glam-rock and heavy metal Top 40 music charts were leavened by retro-covers of 50s hits ("Teen Angel"; "Locomotion") and a pining for the past with tracks like Don Maclean's American Pie. The nostalgic aspect to the decade's Zeitgeist, and the harder right turn that followed in the 1980s, were foreshadowed with the success of the wildly popular 1970 book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler, a book which crystallized the sense of rapid change and rupture with the past occasioned by all the technological innovations and social instabilities of the previous ten years.
Nostalgia is the subject of Tobias Becker's book Yesterday, or more correctly, its history and prospects. The subject is not new, as Becker is the first to admit, and the book's subtitle bills it as a "new" history of nostalgia, acknowledging that it has precursors. Historians, sociologists, literary critics, cultural theorists, and heritage specialists have published a great many articles and books over the past thirty years on nostalgia, a topic which has long overlapped with "memory studies", and other subjects such as presentism, "pluritemporality" (an awkward neologism denoting a sense of living in multiple times), heritage, and the seemingly constant acceleration of change. Among the most interesting among recent books with which Yesterday can be compared is the late Svetlana Boym's oxymoronically titled The Future of Nostalgia (2001). Boym is among the many past authors with whom Becker engages and her book was a brilliant but (my graduate students have told me) quite challenging read. One opens Becker's contribution with the hopes of a more accessible account, which in some but not all respects he is able to provide.
Despite its billing as a history, the reader should not expect a straightforward narrative. Becker does not organize his material chronologically but instead examines several different aspects of nostalgia, following a substantial introduction, under four major chapter titles: "Revisiting: the Meanings of Nostalgia", "Regressing: the Politics of Nostalgia", "Reviving: the Past in Popular Culture"; and "Reliving: the History Boom". Among these, only the introduction and first chapter really provide a linear history of the concept. The plural "meanings" in the subtitle of chapter 1 is meant to accentuate the fact that the word nostalgia has always had several different senses. That's undeniably the case, and it creates a problem for the author, especially in the later chapters, where it becomes easy to lose track of a coherent definition.
As Becker points out, the word nostalgia originally carried a quite different, much more straightforward and narrower meaning than it does now. "Nostalgia" was coined in the seventeenth century as a medical term to describe longing for home suffered by Swiss soldiers posted abroad, and it lacked any of its modern warm and cuddly sense. It was the opposite of pleasant: a pathological condition (the "algia" is the same suffix that is included in "neuralgia") denoting mental and even physical pain at being removed from familiar surroundings. As such, it was topologically, not chronologically focused—the absent, missed reality was one of place, not time. Only in the course of the nineteenth century was nostalgia gradually re-oriented to describe principally a longing for past times, at the very same period that the historical novel became a mature literary genre as Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, James Fenimore Cooper and Leo Tolstoy recreated remote or recent pasts. Modernist authors of the early twentieth century took the representation of nostalgia in a different direction, looking inward to memory and the human experience of nostalgia, perhaps most famously with Proust's madeleine-and-tea driven recollections over the several volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu.
Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia, Tobias Becker. Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2023. 332 pages. $35 (softcover)
Becker's overarching argument is that nostalgia does not deserve its somewhat bad reputation as misguided sentimentality, or as a fetishistic celebration of pasts that don't merit admiration; and he makes the valid point that surely the latter problem lies in the character of the pasts being praised (say, the "civility" of the Jim Crow-era US South, or the virtues of Stalinism) rather than in nostalgia itself. Becker also effectively counters the tendency to associate nostalgia in politics with the right side of the ideological spectrum. Neither Ronald Reagan (who spoke of making America great again long before the current US president did so) nor Margaret Thatcher, despite referencing their countries' glory days, was especially focused on returning to them. Thatcher (who was trained as a chemist) had no time for such reverie and explicitly disavowed any interest in living in the past.
Becker has read widely in a variety of sources, and the scope of his study embraces literature, politics, pop culture, cinema, fashion, music, art and architecture. There is no bibliography but the book has extensive end-notes and is impressive in its erudition and breadth of reference, both to examples of nostalgia (often accompanied by photos) and to a host of theoreticians and critics ranging from Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard to François Hartog and Hartmut Rosa. That is both a strength and a weakness: the argumentative thread is frequently obscured in the vastness of examples and critical theories. At times, it is unclear whether the author is, in fact, writing a history of nostalgia or a summation of its historiography. Becker is also sometimes less than sure-footed on factual detail. Frank Ankersmit, whose work on the sublime sensation of being cut off from the past is referenced, is a philosopher, not a historian; there was no presidential election in 1953; Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were figures of the 1930s, not the '20s; the title of the 1969 movie They Shoot Horses, Don't They? is mis-quoted; the later film Chariots of Fire was released in 1981, over a year before the start of the Falklands War, so enthusiasm for the former cannot really be convincingly linked to Britain's success in the latter; and the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg was in 2013, not 2018.
More worryingly, in his effort to locate an earlier origin of nostalgia (in the current sense of longing for the past) as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, well before the word was first used in its medical sense, Becker conflates earlier eras of past-consciousness such as the Renaissance with modern yearning for the past. But surely the remarkable aspect of nostalgia is precisely that it occurs in cultures that are future- or present-oriented rather than past-oriented. Becker knows (and says) that earlier times prior to the late eighteenth century were, by default, oriented to value the past over the present, a point well-known from the writings of Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog, who are both cited. The humanists of the Renaissance mourned the decline of mankind, the decay of arts, and the loss of that fuller knowledge of the workings of nature bestowed upon ancient sages and neglected over the centuries. Protestant reformers wished to restore a corrupted Christianity to a state of apostolic purity. Such longings to recover the past are very like nostalgia in the sense that they elevate the past (and especially the remote past) over the present, but it's not clear that they are actually nostalgic. For a start, they involved a sketchily-known remote past through which no contemporary had lived; moreover, the backwards orientation was a defining characteristic of the historical outlook in pre-modern western societies and thus neither remarkable or exceptional. Calling it nostalgia is a bit like drawing attention to a white tennis ball in the middle of a blizzard. In the past couple of centuries or so, as the cult of progress and excitement over innovation took hold, such longing for the past not only shifts color but emerges in relief. If general worship of the past was thus a feature of European cultures prior to c. 1650, then true nostalgia looks more like a bug, a backward-looking and even pathological anomaly stuck in a normative mindset that should be fixed firmly ahead.
In a quip worthy of Yogi Berra (but usually credited to the American novelist Peter de Vries), the French actress Simone Signoret entitled her 1978 autobiography La Nostalgie N’est Plus Ce Qu’elle Était: nostalgia isn't what it used to be. As Becker shows, both the meaning and the experience of nostalgia have continued to evolve. Since the turn of the millennium, waves of nostalgia have become rather more anarchic and unpredictable than previously. Becker alludes to an old rule of thumb whereby revivals of past times tend to occur 20-25 years after the time themselves (think American Graffiti and Happy Days as 20-years-after celebrations of 50s culture; That '70s Show recursively revisiting the '70s in the '90s, and so on) and suggests that this predictability has been lost. So widespread is enthusiasm for such hobbies as historical re-enactments of periods from the medieval to the early twentieth century and so extensive the number of historically-themed computer games, tv series, and movies that we are now in a period where we can revisit or relive in multiple times simultaneously. In the comfort of one's home one can be in the Downton Abbey 1920s for an hour, shift to news of the latest horrors from the Middle East, take a quick trip to ancient Rome via DVDs of Spartacus or Quo Vadis, and hunt through YouTube for bootlegged extracts from obscure 1960s cartoons or cigarette commercials. If the past is no longer a temporal "place" in defined position "back there" (the "foreign country" of The Go-Between author L.P. Hartley's massively overquoted remark) but many different times indiscriminately and simultaneously available to us in the present, how is it possible to be nostalgic about it? With the past so constantly and indiscriminately accessible, it seems we must now become nostalgic for nostalgia itself.
Yesterday will not be to every taste (those unfamiliar with many of the theorists mentioned may find it a slog in places), nor is every one of Becker's points convincing. Nonetheless, it offers as concise and readable a study of nostalgia as one is likely to find and never fails to stimulate. The only risk is that one may end up longing for by-gone days.
Daniel Woolf’s research has focused on two areas, early modern British intellectual and cultural history, and the global history and theory of historical writing. He is the author of five books and co-editor of several others, including the two-volume A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (2 vols 1998). His 2003 monograph, The Social Circulation of the Past, won the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies in 2004 for the best book on British history pre-1800. His most recent books include A Concise History of History (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and History from Loss: a Global Introduction to Histories Written from Defeat, Colonization, Exile, and Imprisonment (co-edited with Marnie Hughes-Warrington; Routledge, 2023). He is a contributing editor for Marginalia Review of Books, and his articles have appeared in journals such as Past and Present, The American Historical Review, History and Theory, Renaissance Quarterly, and The Journal of the History of Ideas. He is series editor of Cambridge University Press’s Elements in Historical Theory and Practice.
