Nostalgia is the modern form of pastoral in that it gives an emotional expression to much of contemporary historical consciousness. It is no more debased than pastoral itself in that it shares with all pastoral a fawning view of time past. It differs from other forms of pastoral in that the usual pastoral connection of violence, death, simplicity and virtue to a bucolic time is made instead to the sense of time past that cannot at all be remote because it is a time that is still can be remembered as having been real. Nostalgia cannot predate what happened before a person is born though I can be nostalgic about the Thirties in that I can be fanciful about the times that were close enough to be in my time to think them as similar to my times.
Nostalgia is the cultivation of memory as the object of sorrow. It occurs when the past, however vivid, is recognized as past, and so nostalgia can be an expansion of the obsession of sentimentality, a necropolis of time, since the past is loved because it is past. But nostalgia is double edged. It also overcomes death because the past is brought into the present. Life is reflected in spite of guilt; a memory of happiness is re-cultivated in spite of the sentimental predisposition to sense it as over. Nostalgia can create significant juxtapositions of past and present that make up for their emotional banality by the intellectual work they presume and so set for their audience if their audience is to be satisfied. We try to recreate what it was like to become politically aware when John Kennedy was President, as our sense of that time, why it was bracing,as it is contrasted with the stories now many times told of the deficiencies of Kennedy’s Presidency.
Nostalgia is a format of contemporary popular culture made possible by and serving commercial purposes, but its meaning is more than that. Radio and television programs revive old songs and stars and programs in cycles for new audiences and even for old ones who find them fresh partly because it is cheap for them to copy and sell them and in part because it is easier to adapt old styles to new contents than to invent something new, just as fashion reinvents gingham and pleated dresses or Tiffany lamps. So, as has been said by others, “Desperate Housewives” reinvented “The Golden Girls” and “Sunday Night Football” reinvented “Monday Night Football”, trying to make you feel you are back in the days of Howard Cosell. More than that, college age students catch reruns of “Seinfeld”, “All in the Family” and even “The Honeymooners” and so can see how life changes over the generations. My daughter once told me, on the basis of her perusal of sitcoms, that Lucy was hopelessly dated in its understanding of the relations between men and women and, to my shock, that even Mary Tyler Moore, who to me was an up to date woman, also showed herself behind what are now the times.
The significance of this repetition and rediscovery, whether of Harry Truman by Ronald Reagan or, later, by Joe Lieberman, neither of which held a candle to the man who was just out to do his job whatever that took, and is known now through school books and a few tag references, such as that of his unlikely victory in 1948, or also of the mannish shoulders on women’s suits as well as clunky shoes left over from the Forties that are slightly altered so that the can pass as the latest thing, is to find a time before now that was more innocent than now simply because what came later hadn’t happened yet. Nostalgia is the natural dramatic irony provided by the movement of time, and so yields inevitable poignancy for a time ended. Moreover, the time is made present for us by the associations that remain present from then: the mores of popular culture and styles that convey the atmosphere of the period, when the tune “Stardust” was popular, and so the past seems attractive because it was familiar. We were younger then, or not yet born, at the time at the finitude of whatever had happened was ended and completed and therefore must seem attractive, an object of comprehension for that reason, but only because it is evoked through those attractive associations. So, it makes sense for nostalgia to be of ever a more recent time, creating finer gradations of what is past, because it is reinforced rather than debilitated by the double memory of personal recollection of the past and the knowledge of what is socially defined as a past to be remembered. A person can remember what happened before he was born because he absorbs knowledge of the past into his past, and can hear the strains of “The Miami Beach Rhumba or “Begin the Beguine” as associations of courtship the way it once was.
This sentimental use of the past, a nostalgia for courtship and high school, can lead to the ludicrous presentation of the hit songs from that wonderful year, 1942, but that, as has been suggested, is a problem of all pastoral, not just nostalgia. It is not all that great to be a sheepherder, even if you get emotionally involved with your fellow shepherd. The overall structure of nostalgia is more significant and enlightening than that. Think what it means to see motion pictures from the Thirties one night, from the Fifties the next, to see a repertory company of newsreels and documentaries and period dramas, and even reruns of decades old television series. Each period takes on a simultaneous present, its own spirit comparable at any time to the spirit of any others. All time is juxtaposed, the two kinds of Taggert’s times simultaneously operative: time as a duration of time that is ever everlasting even if it began and ended, and time as a knife edge that is over as soon as it began.
We can go beyond Taggert. Temporary time, the knife edge, creates objective time, which is time as duration. That is what happens in history and is familiar, nowadays, in nostalgia. New eternal monads of time—moments like the crossing of the Rubicon that will always be once done—are created as time itself, rather than us, moves on into the future, which is a time that has never been, but that once done, will also be forever existent, like the moment when a new President will have been inaugurated or Benny Goodman will have appeared at Carnegie Hall. These events become coded seriatim as the past and so seem eternal, but they have and gain their poignancy because they were also knife edges between past and future, vanishing as presents because the present is the time that exists rather than the memory or prospect of a time. So, the present is sensed as both a substantive, temporary thing, which derives from the present being a universal, an adjective to describe that moment of time that is now, nostalgia having made the knife edge permanent.
The simultaneity of these two forms of time is made possible as a viable experience, as an opportunity, for large numbers of people rather than for those who are academically trained to live out their time both in the present and in some period of time in which they specialize (the Nineteenth Century, American Frontier Literature, the Italian Renaissance, whatever) by the existence of those serial modes of popular culture I have referred to where figures and events and styles and topics serve both as pegs for memory and as the content of memory. There is Flo Ziegfield and Fanny Brice set on top of the Depression; there is Milton Berle emerging out of vaudeville to function as a comic popular hysteric in a period of political hysterics, the two related to one another only by coincidence and on the level of meaning rather than through cause and effect There is the earlier Mel Gibson who, like the present Governor of California, made post-Apocalypse movies in the latter days of the Cold War as opposed to the later Mel Gibson who makes movies about religious Apocalypses.
The institutional availability of nostalgia in its unrestricted formal sense of a permanent past has possibilities and advantages that are overlooked when the appreciation of earlier styles is treated as mere historical fiction, a la Doctorow. The presence of numerous cultural moments gives rise to a historical imagination because the rapidity with which cultural moments pass but remain as evoked and remembered pasts breaks through the tyranny of the current moment. To think of the Sixties as a time past, with its own properties and themes, is to see in something receding in one's own life a becoming of finality, something transformed into data for historical interpretations. Recounting those times—the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Jr., Lyndon Johnson—so as to reconstitute them as an era, makes them useful as history, a point from which we departed for good or ill. Allowing the sequence of the decades to replace epochs that go on for half a century or more as times to be defined as each having their own spirit creates a cultural situation in which everyone once out of their teens can believe themselves to have lived through history. A student I had before Saddam invaded Kuwait, much less before Al Qaeda attacked New York, replied, when I said not much had happened in my students’ lifetimes other than the Challenger disaster, that maybe it was just as well. Maybe so, but peace, even if all that means is the tail end of the Cold War, doesn’t last very long.
Historical wisdom is now available to more people because nostalgia breaks the amnesia about the past that used to be inevitable because when a society emerged from whatever had just become the past that meant that whatever were the images and uses of the now were paramount and compelling. What happened a generation ago, a decade ago, was quaint. How could people have possibly had a double allegiance to the United States and World Communism a decade before when now, just after the Second World War, we know just how awful those Communists were? What is always emerging from the past allows people to find a new evaluation of the past as a new time. Kinsey was a prophet of the sexual revolution rather than just a bad statistician who turned sex into the mechanics of sex.
Nostalgia, like other pastorals, also has its deficiencies, mostly it's truncations and simplifications. Nostalgia is subject to the errors of the historical imagination in general. For one thing, it is easy to think that what once was done tested a historical option that worked or failed. That is a pleasing idea because it personifies history as a scientist discovering its own laws. But the Weimar Republic and the hopes for a democratic Germany did not fail because they had to fail: they failed only because they happened to fail. For that matter, Nazi Germany can be thought of either as an interlude in the Westernization of Germany or as the completion of the three hundred year European Civil War, each of these competing narratives treated as if they were intrinsic to the story rather than imposed upon it. Earlier moments are not just preparations for now, as if we were nostalgic because the past was simpler rather than just different, and so we ascribe to the Fifties, for example, an innocence of Vietnam and Islamic Fundamentalism, when it was filled with nuclear terror and racism both stagnant and triumphant. Choices back then, whenever then was, are sensed as unavoidable by the purely historical imagination, the participants all sharing a temper from which time has now been liberated. Lyndon Johnson was a tragic prisoner of his own political and social inheritance when, in fact, all he had to do was change his mind about Vietnam. We are caught in Iraq because of the American tendency toward imperialism, when it was just that the Bushies just miscalculated badly about how easy it would be to take over Iraq.
What is distinct about nostalgia is that it serves to compose a profound and useful anti-historical imagination as well. To the same effect as medieval paintings that place the Christ child in a contemporaneous manger, distant events are stripped by nostalgia of their peculiarity by the reverse process of putting contemporary feelings in period dress. The styles are kaleidoscopic; themes like love and death and ambition and comfort emerge as universal. Any recent past, one that falls after the coming of popular culture, is made familiar by its association with the popular culture of the time. Time-Life books report the history of the Fifties as an amalgam of hula-hoops, the Army-McCarthy hearings, Ike buttons, and school children hiding under their desks so as to prepare themselves for a nuclear attack. My son remembers the Seventies as the time, maybe because we remind him, when he watched Nixon resign while sitting on the little blue chair we had bought him. The world and not just family life is associated with any number of madeleines.
If periods are simultaneously available, marked in our memories by their coordination with personal moments remembered and created, then there can be a great debate between the ages, ideas and themes ripped out of their context, forced to be universal by their contention with other ideas and themes similarly drawn as well as with newly created ideas and themes. The debate may occur in a court inevitably of our own time, for that is whatever that is, and what alone can make a determination of the future, and so that is why it is not only that Thomism renews its debate with scientific pragmatism in the debate about intelligent design; it is that Fredric March as Clarence Darrow weighs in on the side of evolution.
Nostalgia, then, is to be awash in sociological time, to yield to the ways of all and any times. But this can be to submit to illusions as well as to become liberated. The past is reduced to the memory of it, its associations as they are remembered. As if the past was no more than that, nothing but its consciousness. It is to forget completely the time of which the past is made up and which is not identical to the past known as past. It is to forget the callousness of crass causality for the comfort of humanity’s time, its enclosure in its sense of its history, rather than the remorselessness of history itself. Contrary to Doctorow, pastoral and nostalgia require this paradox and the uses of this form of literature and emotion will be worked out by the social forces of the time on other more practical grounds. We favor wars from the air in the Balkans in the Nineties and despair of land warfare in Iraq in the Twenty First Century.
In that case, past revolutions and crises can, like Bible stories, turn into comforting histories, as nostalgia buffs with academic and political excuses relive the Paris Commune or Russia in 1917 or how they took on the establishment in the Sixties or how they made their money in the early days of the Internet and why can’t everybody invent a gizmo in our own garage? Intellectuals are often political radicals and cultural conservatives, hot for prefigura, sentimental for their own reconstructions of history, bitter and nostalgic that they cannot wrench the past into the present. Ever ebbs the oceanic feeling of having resolved in mind the forces and dilemmas of history, the brief moment for a new solution so quickly passing. There can not be, strictly speaking, nostalgia for the future because of an asymmetry in the structure of time. The future cannot be recapitulated, only a prediction of it, like low flying airships in “Metropolis”. The future is always foreign. That is a general truth. All that needs to be added to that truth for our times is that in an era of nostalgia, self-consciousness about time that has been externalized. And so nostalgia need not make or sabotage change. It need not require us to wax nostalgic about the days in the Fifties when women wore aprons and Blacks weren’t uppity, nor need it mean Trumpists are in a permanent present where past icons and ideologies are given heft to counteract their nihilism-- nor indulge, as Bidenites do, of a time when there was a two party system both careful of the parameters of politics. Rather, it is just the inner life of the time from now on because it pervades it as an outer experience.