IIn the 1970s there were American press reports of an Iowa man who was haunted by his longing for the 16-year period that spanned from 1752 to 1768. His misery was the result of not being able to find anyone who shared this deep nostalgia not. for a period when electricity was still a rumor and America was proud to think of itself as British.
But does that really count as nostalgia? Isn’t this actually an attempt at attention, a way for the man from Iowa to indicate that while his body may be tied to the cornfields, his mind is free to wander in beautiful pastures where gentlemen often wearing wigs and traveling at night is best reserved for a full moon? Agnes Arnold-Forster does not say, but the unfolding of the anecdote allows her to draw attention to the slippery nature of the concept of nostalgia. Is it a legitimate and trans-historical emotion, such as sadness or anger? Or could it instead be a cultural jam, a passing fancy expression of a particular time and place (in the case of the man from Iowa, that would be Gerald Ford’s post-Vietnam America)? Most importantly, can you feel nostalgic for a time or a place you’ve never experienced yourself?
In this wide-ranging book, Arnold-Forster poses many questions, and while she doesn’t offer many answers, she covers a lot of interesting ground along the way. The “danger” part of her subtitle most obviously applies to the political realm. Starting at home (and “home” is a key term here, a place of emotional and physical refuge that the lucky among us often return to), she begins with the Brexit debacle of 2016. Quoting Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, she sees the vote to leave Europe as a direct expression of Britain’s “nostalgia for the past”, alerting us to the way Barnier’s tautologs phrasing suggests a doubling – British really, really want to live in a once upon a time country when foreigners knew their place. Then there is the even more terrifying rhetoric of Donald Trump whose repetition of the word “again” is matched only by the incantatory repetition of “bring back” to launch what amounts to a mission of recovery, a promise to take America back return to some vaguely defined former state of perfection.
Also chilling is the revelation that people in the former Eastern Bloc countries yearn for the communist absolutism of their youth. In 2004, the television channel Nostalgiya was launched in Russia. With a hammer and sickle logo, it is now broadcast in those parts of the world with a large Eastern European immigrant population, including the US, Germany and Israel. In addition to showing decades-old talk shows, documentaries and television programs, Nostalgiya runs news programs and weather forecasts from the Cold War era. Meanwhile in Poland, the 1960s series Czterej Pancerni i Piesor Four Tank Drivers and a Dog, has been repeated six times since 2001. Most incredible of all, 66% of Romanians claim they will vote for Nicolae Ceaușescu if he were alive today.
For some particularly shrinking thinkers, this kind of temporal and geographical homesickness is nothing more than personal pathology. In the postwar period, psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor described the way recent European immigrants to the US, of which he was one, reached back to “the old country” as a disguised desire to crawl into their mother’s womb and remain cradled there in amniotic fluid forever. Today, Fodor’s attitude comes across as brusquely dismissive. Arnold-Forster quotes one clinical psychologist who suggests that giving due weight to the role that longing for “home” may play in immigrant experience may help address a worrying tendency to overdiagnose such patients with PTSD, stress or depression .
In the past two decades, academic historians have turned their attention to the history of emotions, and the result has been some excellent and revealing work. Although Nostalgia lacks the tight organization that makes the best of these so exciting, it still offers many ways to think about that dull ache that so many of us feel for “our own far land”, in the phrase of CS Lewis, author from the Narnia books, who knew a thing or two about homesickness.
