On Nostalgia

David Berry, David Berry

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781770566231
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

From Mad Men to MAGA: how nostalgia came to be and why we are so eager to indulge it.

From movies to politics, social media posts to the targeted ads between them, nostalgia is one of the most potent forces of our era. On Nostalgia is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a force that started as a psychological diagnosis of soldiers fighting far from home has come become a quintessentially modern condition. Drawing on everything from the modern science of memory to the romantic ideals of advertising, and traversing cultural movements from futurism to fascism to Facebook, cultural critic David Berry examines how the relentless search for self and overwhelming presence of mass media stokes the fires of nostalgia, making it as inescapable as it is hard to pin down. Holding fast against the pull of the past while trying to understand what makes the fundamental impossibility of return so appealing, On Nostalgia explores what it means to remember, how the universal yearning is used by us and against us, and it considers a future where the past is more readily available and easier to lose track of than ever before.

"If nostalgia was a disease in the Good Old Days, then David Berry's cogently argued, intelligent, and witty book should be prescribed reading for anyone wishing to understand what sometimes feels like a peculiarly virulent epidemic of our current times." —Travis Elborough

"We're so lucky to have a writer as thoughtful, funny, smart, and cutting as David Berry. Nostalgia dictates so much of our world, and there isn't a better cataloger, critic, and guide through it than Berry." —Scaachi Koul

1The Continuous Vibration of Animal Spirits:On the Why of Nostalgia

Nostalgia has an air of total irreconcilability. There is the feeling the word describes, of course: a fundamentally impossible yearning, a longing to go back even as we are driven ceaselessly forward, pushed further away from our desire even as we sit contemplating it. But it’s the actual feeling, too, that ceaselessly resists any attempt to give it shape or sense. If we say we feel nostalgic, in general or about something in particular, it rarely needs an explanation, and there likely isn’t a good one anyway: Why should it be the smell of our grandmother’s cookies or the feel of a particular sweater or the sight of a certain tree in a certain playground, and not something else, that sends us searching backward? Why is it welling up now, on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday? Why haven’t I felt this way for a long time? Why does it matter? And that assumes it even occurs to us to interrogate this sudden rush: one of nostalgia’s more persistent qualities is its ability to elide reason, to be felt deeply without prompting any further inquiry.

It’s this strange aura of elusive profundity that makes nostalgia seem less like some sort of modern condition than a universal feeling that took us some time to put our finger on. If feelings in general are internal experiences that demand expression whether or not we have the means for it, our inability to actually do anything with nostalgia might be what kept it ineffable for so long. Most kinds of longing can be settled in one way or another, if not necessarily to the satisfaction of the yearner. Nostalgia can only be lived in or abandoned: it is yearning distilled to its essence, yearning not really for its own sake but because there is nothing else to be done. Maybe it resisted definition so long because naming it doesn’t help resolve anything anyway.

Appropriately for the elusiveness of the concept, the word nostalgia did not originally mean what we now consider it to – also appropriately, it was coined with a longing for a time when there was no word for what it described. Specifically: in 1688, a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer gave the name nostalgia to a malady he had noticed in young Swiss people who had been sent abroad – chiefly mercenaries, one of Switzerland’s prime exports at the time, though also household servants and others who found themselves in ‘foreign regions.’ As was the style at the time in the nascent field of ‘medicine more complicated than bleeding humours,’ Hofer used a portmanteau from an indistinctly highfalutin form of Ancient Greek: nostos roughly means ‘home’ – although it more often means ‘homecoming,’ which incidentally was also the name for an entire subcategory of Greek literature, most notably the Odyssey – while algos means, more simply, ‘pain,’ derived from Algea, the personifications of sorrow and grief, and a common classification at the time, attached to a variety of maladies that have since gotten either more precise or more vernacular names. (If you ever want to stoke excessive sympathy from, say, your boss, tell them you have cephalgia or myalgia – a headache or sore muscles, respectively).

So nostalgia literally means ‘pain associated with home’ – or, in slightly more familiar terms, ‘homesickness.’ This is not a coincidence, but more relevantly, it’s also not a case of fancy medical-speak being dumbed down for popular consumption. At least not generally: the English word homesickness is a more or less direct translation of nostalgia. But the original term is French, maladie du pays, and not only does it specifically refer to the tendency of the Swiss to powerfully miss their home country, it precedes Hofer by at least thirty years. Hofer’s coinage brought a specifically medical dimension, insomuch as medicine as we know it existed in his time: Hofer’s observations were quite detailed, but still entirely anecdotal, and subject to a lot of conjecture. What he lacked in scientific rigour he made up for with linguistics, attempting to legitimize medicine’s dominion over the concept with multiple coinages, including nostomania (obsession with home, which, as you’ll see in a second, is probably more accurate to the ‘disease’ as he conceived it), philopatridomania (obsessive love of one’s homeland), and, years later, in the second edition of his thesis, pothopatridalgia (pain from the longing for the home of one’s fathers, which certainly has the advantage of precision, if not rhythm).

Though the difference between mere homesickness and medical nostalgia was mostly a case of ancient language, Hofer nevertheless describes a serious disease, one that could progress from simple physical ailments like ringing in the ears or indigestion to near-catatonia and even death. Its root cause, according to Hofer, was ‘the quite continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibres of the middle brain in which impressed traces of ideas of the fatherland still cling.’ As Helmut Illbruck explains in his book Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease, essentially what that means is that the nostalgic suffers from a powerful obsession with their home that eventually makes them entirely insensate to any other experience or stimulation. Illbruck points out that the action Hofer describes does loosely capture how the brain seems to store, process, and recall memories – we’ll get into that in a bit – which may explain some of why his concept caught on, at least in the medical circles in which it persisted for the next few hundred years.

As it happens, though, a primordial understanding of the structure of the mind isn’t the only key insight that would stick to nostalgia even as its conception developed. There are two other big ones. First, Hofer recognized that nostalgia was less about whatever the nostalgic claimed to be missing than about ‘the strength of the imagination alone’: it seemed to have less to do with any material differences in the patient’s circumstances than with the collective weight of their memories, even though those were centred on a very real and specific place. Hofer’s final, curiously potent observation is his suggested cure, which he meant quite sincerely, but which elegantly captures the futility of trying to tame nostalgia, disease or otherwise: ‘Nostalgia admits no remedy other than a return to the Homeland.’ In all his observations and diagnoses, Hofer does not seem to fully appreciate that home is often more time than place. The proof of this will reveal itself as nostalgia evolves into something so incurable that it stops being a disease entirely, and its longing begins to be associated specifically with times past – but we are getting slightly ahead of ourselves.

Doctors proceeded to speculate about the causes of and potential cures for nostalgia until roughly the twentieth century, often ignoring Hofer’s observation about the imagination’s effects, causing some curious mutations in the idea. Nostalgia did remain almost the exclusive province of the Swiss for the first few hundred years after its naming – one of the original German words for homesickness, in fact, was Schweizerkrankheit, or ‘the Swiss illness.’ Hofer’s near-contemporary Johann Jakob Scheuchzer – a Swiss naturalist who was chiefly interested in rescuing his countrymen’s reputation from accusations of weakness – suggested that it was the change in air pressure (and maybe even quality) that made them so prone to debilitating longing. He suggested that a brief stay at the top of a tower or on a hill might restore some of their strength. There isn’t much proof Scheuchzer’s conception of the disease or cure ever really worked, but there is some indication that this sort of thinking is where Switzerland got its reputation as a healthful place to recover in a sanatorium or spa. Well after Scheuchzer, eighteenth-century physicians spent some time looking for a physical locus for nostalgia – a specific brain structure or bone – which was just as futile, with even less of an impact on Swiss tourism.

Gradually, the notion of nostalgia attached itself almost exclusively to soldiers – Swiss mercenaries being very popular hires in armies across the continent, and doctors being a regular part of army life. It would take a little more than two centuries for doctors to figure out that there might be something more than a mysterious nerve disorder causing young men whose sole job was dismembering other humans and dying gruesomely to yearn for the comforts of home; in the meantime, cures and coping methods grew a little more creative. There are stories, including one from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique, of foreign officers banning the playing of Swiss ranz-des-vaches – cow-based folk songs, historically played by herdsmen on horns as they drove their cattle down from the mountain pastures – and even the sound of cowbells, lest it paralyze their troops in nostalgic reverie. (It became a tenet of folk wisdom about the Swiss that the ranz-des-vaches had this power over them; it featured as metaphor or plot point in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical dialogues, dramas, poems, and operas, particularly by German Romantics, who were constitutionally interested in a disease that spoke so acutely to our conceptions of self.)

By the 1800s, the terrors of nostalgia finally spread to other countries’ soldiers. Russian physicians recommended burying alive anyone who started showing symptoms, to stop the spread of the disease – which apparently did prove quite effective. On the other side of the Atlantic, the American Civil War saw several outbreaks among the young fighting men, even though they technically had never left their homeland, per se. Their physicians were a bit kinder, suggesting occasional removal from front-line fighting would bolster their spirits (not that the doctors didn’t also suspect that the nostalgia betrayed a deep flaw in their character). The American army did apparently continue furtive explorations of the concept all the way up to the Second World War, chiefly as a way to reduce desertion, and nostalgia did maintain some interest for psychologists and psychiatrists in the first half of the twentieth century, albeit in a downgraded form: it became less disease than symptom or even disposition, usually of people who had far bigger and more immediate problems (a 1987 survey of its common historical-psychological invocations cited ‘acute yearning for a union with the preoedipal mother, a saddening farewell to childhood, a defence against mourning, or a longing for a past forever lost’). Despite these last tendrils, the Civil War was really the last time anybody was diagnosed as a nostalgic, as such: nostalgia was largely abandoned by the medical community by the last decades of the nineteenth century. This seems to have had less to do with any particular breakthroughs regarding brain structure or mental health than with the general inability of anyone to make meaningful headway on understanding, let alone curing, nostalgia.

As it moved out of the medical realm and into the cultural, though, nostalgia did not fully shed its strange stigma. It first took hold in the worlds of philosophy and theory, albeit used interchangeably with the idea of homesickness, where it tended to be classed as a symptom of disorder – if not of the individual, then of the society they had built. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, is indicative of this line of thought: ‘One is no longer home anywhere, so in the end one longs to be back where one can somehow be at home because it is the only place where one would wish to be at home.’ From almost its earliest non-medical considerations, nostalgia was regarded as a kind of reaction to the modern condition, a port in the discombobulating and alien storm that was modern life. Philosophers, critics, and theorists are still exploring variations on this theme, though as an object of critical theory nostalgia has gradually lost any meaningful sense of place (or even, arguably, a time) and gotten more tightly entwined with the notion of authenticity and our search for the same (as such, its usefulness and meaning spiked slightly with the waxing and waning of postmodernist thought). This is what underlies something like Baudrillard’s observation in Simulacra and Simulation that ‘when the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning’: the underlying implication is that if we were awash in some sense of the authentic, we would not have much occasion to look backward to find it – let alone yearn for a return.

It took some time for the popular conception to catch up to the cultural theorists. Homesickness as an idea percolated through the first half of the twentieth century, but it wasn’t until the fifties and sixties that nostalgia, as both concept and preferred term for that concept, really started to insinuate itself into the popular consciousness. Like much about nostalgia, the precise reasons for its sudden surge in popularity are fuzzy and elusive: Fred Davis, in his 1979 study of contemporary nostalgia, noted that even in the fifties nostalgia had been considered a ‘fancy word,’ limited to professionals and ‘cultivated lay speakers,’ but by the sixties it was in common enough parlance to be the subject of consideration in popular books and magazines. One theory Davis alludes to is that, as the notion of ‘home’ became less potent – as people moved around more frequently, gained easier access to increasingly widespread sources of information, and became less creatures of a specific place – homesick lost some of its power, and nostalgia slipped in as a way to capture the same feeling without being tied down: essentially, nostalgia became a better metaphor for the feeling it was trying to describe. The concept of home became a time, not a place, so we needed a new word for it.

This seems entirely plausible: to modern ears (and even at its coining), nostalgia is itself a nostalgic word, an evocation of some more glorious past, a time when they knew how to name these feelings, if not actually deal with them. You can see some evidence of this in the way nostalgia was popularly defined in the time before we had dictionaries in our pockets: broadly. Its hint of classical, distant authority allowed writers to indulge some poetry, misdefining it in ways that nevertheless captured the ethereal import of the subject: a generic ‘overwhelming yearning’ or the ‘tragic pain of loss.’ (The TV series Mad Men, set in the sixties, captures this perfectly when its central character, Don Draper, claims nostalgia is Greek for ‘the pain from an old wound.’) Windbag Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was purported to have told a crowd at the ribbon-cutting of some major project in the sixties that he was ‘looking to the future with nostalgia,’ which either suggests that the word was widely understood enough that he thought he could be clever or – more probably, based on Daley’s reputation – that it was widely known but still vaguely understood as a kind of longing.

Even if people were fuzzy on the exact Greek roots, nostalgia as a concept was solidified in the popular consciousness by the time of Davis’s book: he neatly summed it up in his title, Yearning for Yesterday. It was a strong enough force that Davis openly wonders if the seventies represented some kind of peak in nostalgic feeling. Though he himself admits that this would be impossible to measure and that nostalgia was probably universal anyway, he makes a compelling case that the seventies was at least a boom time for open use of the term: ‘nostalgia shops,’ a sort of midpoint between antique stores and thrift stores, were a staple of retail streets; book clubs and sports memorabilia suppliers openly branded themselves with ‘nostalgia’ in their names; there was even a periodical, Liberty, whose tag line was ‘The Nostalgia Magazine’ and that consisted solely of reprinted articles from its original run, which had ended in the early forties.

If the word nostalgia is no longer novel enough to be used as branding, its presence in our collective consciousness has certainly not diminished any since Davis’s day. If we complain about Hollywood strip-mining our nostalgia for an easy buck, or if we post pictures of nineties toys under a hashtag, everyone knows roughly what we’re talking about. We don’t even really need to conjecture here: nostalgia is ubiquitous enough to have been repeatedly studied by psychologists around the world, and their findings confirm that we all think the word means roughly the same thing. The largest study, pulling in more than 1,800 students from seventeen culturally and geographically diverse countries, found that people associate nostalgia primarily with memories and the past, and that these memories are almost all fond ones. Underneath this surface understanding, nostalgia generally provokes a certain sense of happiness, but for almost everyone it is strongly tinted with a sense of longing or loss – and often, of course, a desire to return. If asked, most of us basically define nostalgia as bittersweet memory.

Even that, though, is not precisely accurate: the tastes aren’t properly mixed, except in retrospect. They are more shot and chaser than one large gulp. Nostalgia is sweet, finding its undertones of bitterness only when we become aware again that it is about our memories – snapshots of a time we can never relive, outlines of a home that has been wiped from the map. It’s this aspect that gives nostalgia both its mystery and its meaning: why on earth should we feel this way? What part of our humanity demands that we should be not just drawn toward our past but pulled so hard that it pains us? Why is this phenomenon so important that we had to rehabilitate a disorder just so that we might adequately express it?

However much we like to claim that it’s a modern condition or the sole province of the wilfully deluded, there is every evidence that nostalgia is indeed a universal part of the human condition: a setting to be toggled, not a trait that can be picked up or discarded. Eckart Frahm, professor of Assyriology at Yale, estimates that nostalgic writings started showing up about two hundred years after Sumerians developed a codified language – just enough time for sufficiently old records to accumulate that people might start feeling like their own time was missing something. And that’s only nostalgia on a societal scale: as we’ll explore in more depth in Chapter 3, art is littered with nostalgic feeling from its earliest days – it was prevalent enough to make up a whole subcategory of Greek storytelling, after all. And being aware enough of the feeling to name it has done nothing to diminish its prevalence: another batch of psychological studies found that roughly three-quarters of people feel nostalgic at least once a week. They’re the median of a population that leans heavily toward nostalgia: more than a quarter of people reported feeling nostalgic at least three to four times a week, while only 4 percent claimed it happened less than once a month.

What is it, though, that sends us yearning backward? Often as not, it is simply interaction with something from our past: sometimes that is as simple as the smell or taste of a madeleine, though slightly more often it is the presence of another person – many nostalgic memories are centred on family, friends, and other significant people in our life, although that probably has more to do with how we value social connections than with some underlying quirk of our memory. This is understandable but feels a little inadequate: of course we will remember things, but why should we yearn for them when we know we can’t ever get them back? The answer might lie in what actually appears to be the most common trigger for nostalgia: feeling bad.

It would be wonderful to have some grander explanation, but here we are. In terms of the spectrum of bad feelings, loneliness seems to be the most common trigger, but really any sort of vaguely baddish mood will do, from anger or feeling threatened right on down to simple boredom. (Perhaps I shouldn’t sell boredom short: psychologist Clay Routledge theorizes that it might prime nostalgia because bored people are tapping into the grander existential angst that comes from lacking purpose.) The basic idea is that by casting our thoughts backward to a time when we weren’t feeling bad, we find some comfort, or maybe more importantly some steel, to help us carry on. To use loneliness as our example, it seems that when we’re feeling isolated, we have a reflex to think back to fine times with friends and family, reminding ourselves that we have been surrounded by love and companionship before and presumably will be again. We are, in effect, turning our past into our present – even giving ourselves a tenable future – by reminding ourselves that we are still that person who was not so lonely, not so long ago.

As far as we can trust the psychologists, their findings are a curious reversal of nostalgia’s origins. In labelling it a disease, Hofer assumed nostalgia was the cause of its subjects’ physical maladies and psychological distresses, when, even then, it was the result of them....