EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER SHAW AND MALCOLM CHASE The imagined past history and nostalgia an) YP ER UNIVERSITY PRESS ester and New York MANCI Distributed exclusively in the USA and Ca ada by St. Martin’s PressCopyright © Manchester University Press 1989 Whilst copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA. Distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA British Library cataloguing in publication data The imagined past: history and nostalgia 1. Historiology. Role of nostalgia L Shaw, Christopher Il. Chase, Malcolm 907" 2. Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data ‘The Imagined past: history and nostalgia/edited by Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase p. om. ig from a conference held in 1985 in Leeds, England, ISBN 0-7190-2875-2 1. Great Britain—Intellectual life—19th century—Congresses, 2. Great Britain—Intellectual life—20th century—Congresse 3, English literature—19th century—History and criticism— Congresses. 4. English literatare—20th century—History and criticism—Congresses. 5. Arts, Victorian— Congresses. 6. Arts, British—Congresses Congresses. I. Shaw, Christopher, 1944 DAS33.144 1989 Essays origin at Brit: algia— Maleolm, 89-36253 941-de20 8910915 LIBRARY 29 JAN 1990 Printed in Great Britain by Bell and Bain Ltd., Glasgow10 CONTENTS List of illustrations Acknowledgements ‘The contributors MALCOLM CHASE AND CHRISTOPHER SHAW The dimensions of nostalgia DAVID LOWENTHAL Nostalgia tells it like it wasn’t WILLIAM STAFFORD “This once happy country’: nostalgia for pre-modern society CAROLINE ARSCOTT Victorian development and images of the past PAUL STREET Painting deepest England: the late landscapes of John Linnell and the uses of nostalgia ALUN HOWKINS Rider Haggard and rural England: an essay in literature and history CHRISTOPHER SHAW ‘The pleasures of genre: John Buchan and Richard Hannay TOM STE From geucleman to superman: Alfred Orage and aristocratic socialism MALCOLM CHASE This is no claptrap, this is our heritage ANDY CROFT he literary politics of anamnesis Forward to the 193 Index Cx 33 41 81 95. 112 147 7ILLUSTRATIONS ‘Rectory’, T. Kilby, del., W. Bevan, lith., Plate II in T. Kilby, Views in Wakefield, 1853 51 ‘six Chimneys, Kirkgate’, T. Kilby, del., W. Bevan, lith., Plate VI in T. Kilby, Views, 1853 51 “Heath Hall from the Barnsley Canal’, T. Kilby, del. and lith., Plate 14 in T. Kilby, Scenery in the Vicinity of Wakefield, 1843 53 ‘Market Cross looking down Silver Street’, T. Kilby, del., W. Bevan, lith., Plate XIV in T. Kilby, Views, 1853 54 ‘Kirkgate below the church steps’, T. Kilby, del., W. Bevan, lith., Plate IV in T. Kilby, Views, 1853 57 “Wood Street looking toward the Cross’, T. Kilby, del., W. Bevan, lith., Plate XII in T. Kilby, Views, 1853 58 -also back endpaper ‘Bread Strect, looking cast’, T. Kilby, del., W. Bevan, lith. » Plate X in T. Kilby, Views, 1853 59 “View from the lower part of Northgate’, T. Kilby, del., W. Bevan, lith., Plate IX in T. Kilby, Views, 1853 ol also front endpaper ‘North-east view of the church from the Borough Market’, T. Kilby, del., W. Bevan, lith., Plate XV in T. Kilby, Views, 1853 63 “The Harvest Cradle’. Oil painting (1859), by John Linnell, York City Art Gallery 6 title page: “Chalfont St Giles’, Clare Leighton, wood engraving, inscribed ‘In memory of July 13th 1931" [ vi]ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As our introductory chapter “The dimensions of nostalgia’ explains, this collection of essays originated in the History Workshop 20 national conference at Leeds in 1985. Three contributions, from participants in the Workshop but not the ‘Nostalgia’ strand, have been added. We should like to thank our colleagues on the organising collective for their interest and support. Discussions at the Workshop significantly helped refine and develop many of the arguments presented here. Our special thanks are therefore due to everyone who attended sessions in the ‘Nostalgia’ strand, ensuring a memorable weekend which convinced both the present editors and contributors that the issues that had been raised deserved further investigation. Of course, nothing here should be regarded as in any way a final statement. We have simply tried to address a variety of subjects and issues, focusing on nostalgia and the imagined past, as a contribution to the widening debate on the usage of history. As editors we should like particularly to thank Do Shaw and Shirley Chase for their unflagging help and support; also David Leighton for permission to reproduce the wood engraving on the title page and jacket. [ vii]THE CONTRIBUTORS CAROLINE ARSCOTT Lecturer, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London MALCOLM CHASE Administrator and part-time lecturer in History, University of Leeds Adult Education Centre, Middlesborough ANDY CROFT Lecturer in Literature, Department of External Studies, Middlesborough Centre, University of Leeds ALUN HOWKINS Lecturer in History, School of Cultural and Community Studies, University of Sussex DAVID LOWENTHAL Professor of Geography, University College, London CHRISTOPHER SHAW Social Science Section Leader, Harrogate College of Arts and Technology WILLIAM STAFFORD Principal Lecturer in Politics and Philosophy, Huddersfield Polytechnic TOM STEELE Formerly Tutor-Organiser, Workers’ Educational Association, Leeds PAUL STREET Lecturer in Art History, Department of External Studies, University of Leeds [ viii ]1 MALCOLM CHASE AND CHRISTOPHER SHAW The dimensions of nostalgia Of all the ways of using history, nostalgia is the most general, looks the most innocent, and is perhaps the most dangerous.! History Workshop 20 was unified by the theme of the uses of history. As soon as a series of workshops on the theme of nostalgia was suggested it was accepted enthusiastically, for it seemed to us that the contemporary appetite for the past, and the commercial Fullgesncens ich fed that appetite with Hovis loaves and Lark Rise to Candleford wine-coolers, were a double abuse. They-traded on comfortable and conveniently reassuring images of the past, thereby suppressing both its variety and its negative aspects; moreover, we felt that the fact that these images were so popular was a symptom of contemporary malaise. The sick man of Europe had taken to his bed, dreaming of a childhood that he had never had, regressing into a series of fictitious and cloudless infantile summers. Our understanding of nostalgia was rather combative, therefore: we wished to explore a cultural phenomenon that told us about the present through its falsification of the past. Our contributors showed that nostalgia was, however, a phenomenon more manifold and various than had been initially assumed. David Lowenthal had traced the historic roots of the word, locating it in medical history, where it had been originally regarded as a disease with physical symptoms that were the result of homesickness: ‘A physician found the lungs of nostalgia victims tightly adhered to the pleura of the thorax, the tissue of the lobe thickened and purulent . . . To leave home forlong was to risk death.” Our present usage of the word is therefore distinctly modern and metaphorical. The home we miss is no longer a geographically defined place but rather a state of mind. [1]‘The imagined past This documentary evidence from the history of ideas was almost instantly complemented (or subverted) by a way of looking at nostalgia that was personal and affectionate and which stressed the connectedness of the past to the present. One participant insisted that nostalgia involved a special way of being involved in the past: one had to be connected to the object of scrutiny, perhaps through kinship or through a broader feeling of identity, such as class affiliation. These were in some way my people and my present therefore was bound up in their past. Had they acted differently, then my present would be other than as it is now. Another participant spoke of being moved by the act of identification across generations. She had recently seen the TV series, The People’s War, and had realised that the events it portrayed were part of the past of her own parents; additionally, she looked on these events with a hindsight and maturity that were inevitably denied to those who had lived the experience. It goes without saying that they could not know the outcome of the war. More tellingly, however, they were facing this ordeal when they were younger than their daughter is now. Her reaction involved not only compassion and sympathy but also a revaluation of the past. Such variations of meaning and emphasis were evidence that nostalgia was not a one-dimensional concept with clean-cut edges. This is not necessarily a reflection of anything so dull as mere confusion surrounding the word. Rather it suggests that the concept is protean and pervasive, a site occupied by ideas and structures of feeling which have a family resem- blance. The constructive way out of this situation seemed to be to offer a typology of nostalgias, recognising (or more positively celebrating) their differences, while at the same time looking for links between the'scemingly separate sectors of meaning. Our introduction therefore looks at a series of questions in an attempt to specify the issue implicit in theorising nostalgia. CONDITIONS FOR NOSTALGIA Is it possible to specify the situations in which nostalgia will develop? Certain conditions would have to be met, que of which refers to our public sense of present and historic time. Modern societies share a view of time as linear with an undetermined future. If either of these requirements isnot met, then nostalgia seems very unlikely. Anthropologists have given us accounts of traditional societies that have lived in a vivid present without a sense of the progress of time. A priori, it seems unlikely that nostalgia will be part of such cultures, for our crucial distinction between past and present does not exist. [2]Dimensions of nostalgia For different reasons, a cyclical perception of time makes nostalgia unattractive: eventually time lost will be instituted once again. No time has finally passed in such a view of history. Lastly, redemptive histories are infertile ground for nostalgia. If the unsatisfactory present is merely the antechamber to some better state, whether religious salvation or the achievement of the logic of history in Hegelian philosophy, its deficiencies are tolerable because they are part of the process of becoming different and better. In short, it is Western societies, with a view of time and history that is linear and secular, which should be especially prone to the syndrome of nostalgia. _7the second requirement is some sense that the present is deficient. Most dramatically this can apply to the great declines of history, to the fall, for instance, of once great empires. Rome, Spain and Britain, for example, have all experienced the adverse turns of history, a combination of economic and military. problems with an erosion of confidence in their project. But this also applies to the lesser reverses of history: within a society, classes and strata can lose their previously privileged place and fall into obscurity. Goldmann shows how Racine made great tragedy in the shape of the appeal to God out of the fall of his estate, the noblesse de robe. But if Racine was a Jansenist, not every Jansenist was a Racine: their inward-looking theology was a sort of consolation for their loss of status and power. Nostalgia for a lost position of power and privilege expressed itself at one remove. Similar developments can be mapped in the shifting internal power structures of many societies. Chekhov elegiacally records the decline of the traditional landowner, while closer to home, Patrick Wright finds in Roy Strong’s article a social and political message behind changes in public taste: Im his recent suggestion that Britain is seeing the coming of a new biedermeer, Roy Strong refers to early nineteenth-century developments in the Austro- Hungarian Empire when ‘the ancien régime was reinstated and the liberal middle classes, denied power, turned in on themselves and created a style of living whose basis was the cultivation of domestic virtues in the form of family life, the home and the garden’ 4 Perhaps this is why nostalgia has recently become so pervasive: we have Jost faith in the possibility of changing i¢ life and have retreated into the private enclaves of family, and the consumption of certain ‘retro’ styles: thisis very close to what Williams has called ‘mobile privatisation’, where a high standard of living and a wide range of choices are allied to an [34‘The imagined past inward-looking privacy. Such new freedoms are paradoxically not free: they are bought at the cost of declining participation and confidence in our public and collective lifes Another requirement for nostalgia is that objects, buildings, and images from the past should be available. A society which simply junked all of its outworn and outmoded technology, which ruthlessly threw away ephemera and which confidently built over the developments of previous generations would lack the material objects from which nostalgia is constructed. Western societies do quite the opposite and the objects of nostalgia are often carefully preserved. From the time-worn but durable products of architecture to the humble tools of a now dead trade, from the industrial landscape itself to the ephemeral newspaper or admission ticket, almost all objects are at least capable of being appropriated nostalgically. They become talismans that link us concretely with the past; but the aura they carry is ambiguous and even ironic. First, our dialogue with them is one-sided: the deep sense of connection with ththe past one might feel can be simply_a unilateral projection of our present anxieties and fantasies. 6écondly,, many evocative items are quite simply trivial and unimportant, and their modern counterparts are disregarded and thrown away when their function is fulfilled. The tools of the carpenter’s trade, for example, are avidly collected and attract high prices; but modern tools which fulfil the same function are discarded if they become damaged or worn out. The latter are useless (because they are judged in terms of function and fitness) but the former carry on their very surface an auratic patina These three conditions, a secular and linear sense of time, an apprehension of the failings of the present, and the availability of evidences of the past are by no means an exhaustive list of the prerequisites for a popular mood of nostalgia. However, they provide base from which the specificities of more particular nostalgic forms can be explored TIME AND BIOGRAPHY Perhaps as a species we are given to nostalgia, for each adult carries the memory of an age when the experience of time was different. Following the work of Heinrich Schutz, we propose a distinction between public time and the subjective experience of time, which Bergson called the durée.’ Public time is literally what the town hall or railway station clock tells: we make appointments or catch trains and synchronise our lives with those of others by public time. On the other hand, we also have the [4]Dimensions of nostalgia experience of private time. It goes fast or it drags; we are caught up with events or we are bored. Our psychological internal clocks know nothing of the mechanical escapement or the pulse of quartz. While adults experience both kinds of time it is plausible to suggest that small children live in only one: it is a trivial truth that they are congratulated on learning to tell the time, that is to mesh with impersonality of public time: ‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was ... His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor’s hornpipe for him to dance ... Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell.” Joyce’s intention here is obviously to recreate the undivided consciousness of childhood. There is an irony, however. Inevitably we cannot know how successful he is, for both author and reader can remember the state only through the divided consciousness of adult sensibility and memory. In William Morris we find another aspect of childhood poignantly absent from the mentality of the adult. To him the natural world had a sharpness and intensity that was lost, or at least rare, in the adult. Sometimes one could be jolted into recollection: ‘to this day when I smell a may-tree I think of going to bed by daylight’? Or, in another example, Morris greeted being forty in a letter to Louie Baldwin: ‘in spite of the round figure I don’t feel any older than I did in the ancient times of sunflowers’. The pessimism inherent in this view of nostalgia as a response to the coarsening of our senses and the one-way time structure in which we live can be reinforced by a consideration of our biological destiny. We are born and grow up, mature and die. Human lifes such that the biological nature within us contradicts our plans and projects with the unilateral and arbitrary threat of our ceasing to be. For Timpanaro, for example, a person is ‘a being endowed with certain (not unlimited) adaptability to his external environment, and with certain impulses towards activity and the pursuit of happiness, subject to old age and death’."' Here a link emerges between nostalgia and secularisation. Belief in an actual, physical resurrection of the body acts as an obvious and powerful disincentive to nostalgia, as does the imminent expectation of an apocalypse. Where the latter has existed alongside intense interest in the past as a process of deterioration (such as in the case of the belief in the Norman yoke in English popular radicalism), the primary function of the view of history that resulted was analytical rather than consoling. The closer societies [5]‘The imagined past have comprehended the biological finality of death - or that the hereafter happens, if at all, outside of historical time - the greater their capacity for nostalgia. Indeed, so depressing a case can be constructed that one marvels that everybody of mature years does not regard as their best moments those devoted to an elegiac nostalgia: the rest can be construed as worse. Perhaps one explanation of our irrational optimism is that we can be surprised by joy, and from time to time regain a childlike (but not childish) intensity of vision. In Western culture this theme is to be found in Rousseau, who ‘believed that genuine happiness has to be as direct, intuitive and all-absorbing as that of the child’ and in the English Romantic poets.!? Morris believed that our common life could regain this undivided and unqualified intensity. In News from Nowhere he emphasised how the happiness of the socialist community was like a ‘second childhood’, a description which the fictional communards did not find embarrassing or demeaning: ‘Yes, and why not? And for my part I hope that it may last long; and that the world’s next period of wise and unhappy manhood, if that should happen, will speedily lead us to a third childhood’.® This suggests that utopia and nostalgia are on occasion a useful conceptual antinomy. At the one extreme there is a optimistic confidence that the childlike but not infantile can be restored to our public life and to our private experience; at the other end of the continuum lies a resignation about our own mortality, and about the irredeemability of our collective structures, which is made slightly more comfortable by the wistful and knowing pessimism of nostalgia. MODERNITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS In sociology nostalgia has always been implicit in the literature concerned with the elusive concept of modernity. Our present was unfavourably contrasted with some putative property found in the past. From widely different’ political positions and across generations there have emerged analyses of modern times which have weighed them and found them wanting. Weber, Téennies’ and Durkheim, for example, all found contemporary society culturally or politically deficient. For the former, European rationality had developed an immensely powerful technology but lacked the collective structures to harness it. This gave a pessimism and regret to his work and made the irrational satisfactions of charisma and tradition very attractive. The elegiac tension in Weber results from this conflict between the desire to see the world re-mystified and the [6]Dimensions of nostalgia realisation that this was not possible. To Durkheim, modern industrial society was rootless and gave its membefs tio sense of identity and role. By implication the ascriptive social typing of the feudal system provided a stronger bond between the individual and the community, defining a clear-cut life space with no ambiguity as to one’s obligations and privileges. Téennies saw his own time as characterised by Gesellschafi-a form of calculative and contractual relationship which typically would govern the interaction between strangers. Gemeinschafi,on the other hand, contrasted with thi impersonality: it was found in the intimate relationships of friendship and kin but had formerly been found among the community at large. These views may command greater or lesser plausibility; yet despite the differences among their political values, Weber, Durkheim, and Téennies shared an implicit viewpoint. Contemporary society was critically different from its predecessors and in that difference lay a loss. This theme has persisted in sociology to resurface a few generations later in the conservative thought of the Bergers (Peter and Brigitte), Kellner and Zijderveld. Modernity had uprooted usffom community and tradition: no longer did individuals live in ‘life-worlds that were more or less unified’. As a result our consciousness was divided into components ‘or sectors, between which one moved ‘compelled to change roles like the jackets of his wardrobe’.'> The implication here is that we experience dislocating jolts as we move from miliew to milieu, that the sense of the self continuing across these sectors is attenuated and that eventually we come not to notice the alterations which we should find so hard to tolerate. There is here a prescriptive view of the constitution of human consciousness; there is also more than a hint of nostalgia for the assumed united consciousness of the authentic self which used to have space to flourish, but which is now starved of room in the alienating circumstance of modernity. There are certainly plausible aspects to this line of thought. For example, Kellner and the Bergers see people caught between two itutions of public life have become “abstract”’."6 This means that they are impersonal, denying recognition of the individual’s unique personality and circumstance. On the other hand, the private life of family and friends which allows this kind of recognition has no positive connection with the centres of power and in any case is “under-institutionalised’, It is too optional, too voluntary ‘firmly and reliably (to) structure human C7 unsatisfactory sorts of life space. On the one hand, ‘the major in‘The imagined past activity’ Such insight demands a qualified assent, but we should not suspend our critical faculty and overlook the ahistoric assumptions behind the simple dualism of modern fractured consciousness and the integrated consciousness of times past. Berman, whose analysis of modernity has quite different roots, pours scorn on the implication that former styles of social organisation better met our needs. He speaks of the ‘brutality of so many of the forms of life that modemisation has wiped out’ and reminds us that the Gemeinschaft of organic communities was at times oppressive and limiting." For Berman, nostalgia is something like a failure of our collective cultural confidence in the modernising impulse. Uniting the separate discourses of modernisation in economics, and modernism in the arts, Berman characterises the project of contemporary culture as the wish to“thake oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom’. The only certainty is uncertainty, so that in this view nostalgia is the attempt to cling to the alleged certainties of the past, ignoring the fact that, like it or not, the only constant in our lives is change. This makes the paradox theory a recognition, and at the same time an clision, of the fact that all that is solid has melted into air. The temptation was to conjure up a past defined not by the painstaking investigation of the historical record but by of negatives. If we now have Gemeinschaft, there must have been Gesellschaft; if our consciousness is fragmented, there must have been a time when it was integrated; if society is now bureaucratised and impersonal, it must previously have been personal and particular. The syntax and structure of these ideas makes them superficially attractive but this appeal is no warrant for their veracity. ly utopian nostalgia of much grand social positing a series of absences. ARTEFACTS AND PRINT Zygmunt Bauman makes a deceptively simple point about utopian thought: for plans and dreams of a better future to be thinkable in the first place, social change must be rapid enough to be detectable in one lifetime” This suggests a profound dichotomy in the history of mentalities. Most of human history has been lived in the grip of Braudel’s biological ancien régime; a change in human consciousness around the fifteenth century makes the idea of a better world thinkable. More recently, it seems that our capacity for nostalgia has grown as the qualitative distance between us and the past widens. The perceivable gap between 1988 and 1938 is considerably greater than that which lay [8]Dimensions of nostalgia between 1938 and 1888 (and, arguably, even 1838). It was appropriate - even necessary ~ in 1944 to commence a study of rural planning issues with a consideration of the Repeal of the Corn Laws.” Such a point of departure would be unthinkable in a work of so academic a nature today. Nostalgia becomes possible at the same time-as utopia. The counterpart to the imagined future is the imagined aaa there is one crucial respect in which the power of the past is different Athas generated objects, images and texts which can be seen as powerful talismans of how things used to be. Certainly we are not short of such reminders for the volume of text and image available seems to have grown at an almost exponential rate this century. Of all these emblems of how we were, the photograph has been identified as the paradigm case of the moment of nostalgia: ‘Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight zone ... All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.’ /Whether we consider domestic photographs of our younger selves or whether we are looking at, for example, Fenton's photos of young men who may or may not have survived the Crimean War, the time structure is the same. We confront ities now closed, of potentials left undeveloped. And images of po: although thé argument may be most clear~ photography, very few texts or images are exempt from use in this way. Like a fly preserved in amber, they are a uni ater reminder of how things were and of how ourselves, our lives, and personalities, have changed. But there are other tyrannies that image and text can exercise. Print can be the symbol of a modernising, centralising impulse which » the local and particular into something homogeneous and ut when it concerns ‘rationalis. anonymous. The play Translations, for example, tells of a visit to Ireland by the Ordnance Survey. In mapping the terrain they also impose upon it standardised, English names so that the landscape no longer records the lives of those who live in it.3 Names that celebrated people and events were part of an oral tradition which was organic and capable of change. A printed map of the locality, on the other hand, froze a particular moment so that people and their nomenclature could no longer change interdependently: ‘But remember words are symbols, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen - to use an image you'll understand - it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of . .. fact."# fodThe imagined past The effect of having available to us a multiplicity of images of the past has been described in different vocabularies, making substantially the same point. Sontag argues that photography has converted ‘the world into a department store or museum-without-walls’ where the objects of the images have been somehow elided.?5 We are invited to confront them in aesthetic terms, to recognise composition and texture in the image. Alternatively, the image is of an object for our consumption. The categories available are the art gallery or the advertisement: the status of the image as a record of reality has been diminished to the point of disappearance, This applies to images of events just as much as it applies to images of objects. We now have a deeply illustrated history: the move from recording war, for example, on wet-plate photographs to recording it on portable video strangely parallels the increasing power of military technology. But the more richly endowed we are with images, the more which call upon our attention from the history books and from magazines; but the reality they represented becomeytthin, denatured and inauthentic. There is the obvious danger that we beCome indifferent to the significance of the past and hypersensitive to its look! it becomes “multitudinous “photographie Simulacram’ and in faithful conformity to poststructuralist linguistic theory, the past as “referent” finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts’. There are therefore several important links between nostalgia and the resents the victory social/technical consideration of image and text. It rej of the standardised over the particular, of the recéived language over the dialect. It imposes a set of cultural and aesthetic filters between the reader and the richness, specificity and diversity of the past. And, paradoxically, the continuous exposure to text and image of the past arguably changes the reader’s sensibility. In place of a deeper empathy between ourselves and the past (which might have been the consequence of a decpet immersion in its texts, images and artefacts) there grows up a feeling of indifference. In Babel, it is the loudest voice which is heard and not the most coherent message. THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION Tradition may be the most important encounter that non-historians have with what passes for history. The past is represented in their present [10]Dimensions of nostalgia through activities and practices, through ritual and ceremony, and through ideas and beliefs, Whether we consider the rites of passage in life of an individual, or the public pomp of state ceremonial, traditions are represented as the means by which our own lives are connected with the past. Tradition is the enactment and dramatisation of continuity; it is the thread wh Williams teases out one of the difficulties: ‘It only takes two generations to make anything traditional ... But the word moves again and again towards age-old and towards ceremony, duty and respect,2These two themes, the readiness with which traditions are accepted and their often conservative nature,ink the concept with nostalgia. For if tradition is a kind of substitute for history, the past can be articulated and mobilised to provide easy and comfortable answers in the present. “Thus when the great rebellion of 1745 broke out, the kilt ... was a recent English invention and ‘‘clan” tartans did not exist.” Trevor-Roper dramatises the artificiality and the sometimes blatant commercialism behind the manufacture of many traditions, Romantic nationalism, self aggrandisement and shrewd business sense combined synergistically to erect a tradition through which one can claim affinity with the past simply by buying and wearing the appropriate clothes. But not all invented traditions are as wryly amusing. Hobsbawm suggests that invented traditions seem to belong to three overlapping types: ‘a) those establishing or symbolising social cohesion or the membership of groups, real or artificial communities, b) those establishing or legitimising institutions, status or relations of authority, and c) those whose main purpose was socialisation, the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of binds our separate lives to the broad canvas of history. behaviour.” This point was amplified in a less implicitly functionalist way by Williams, who regarded tradition as a ‘most powerful practical means of incorporation’. For him, tradition was not some collection of quaint and archaic practices; rather it was a process whereby conflicts are clided, and social solidarity promoted, in circumstances where conflict between classes or strata would otherwise be endemic. Tt would be impossible to make a catalogue of nostalgia-wreathed traditio exemplified in telling detail by reference to ideas about the state and the citizen, to the rituals of authority and deference, or to the finer points of regimental history. Each would provide a series of not wholly untrue in the space available here. Each of Hobsbawm’s points could be stories about the past which defused tensions in the present or which cemented the link between the individual and the collectivity. EM]The imagined past One tradition, however, is of such outstanding importance to this collection that it deserves special mention, however perfunctory. That is a diffuse ideological formation that might loosely be called English cultural nationalism, In poetry and novels, in painting and in music, the value of the shaping power of landscape, the notion of the organic community and the sense of connectedness and common identity among the English has been celebrated. Some examples from minor literature, non-fiction writing and music illustrate the point. In Dornford Yates, for example, there are several gushing and breathless descriptions of landscape. This is typical: ‘Nature was in a royal mood. Her Cap of Maintenance was out, Pomp was abroad, the trump of Circumstance was sounding, A frown of dignity knitted her gentle brows, and meadows, roads, thickets and all her Court wore a staid look to do her honour. Nature, culture and history are rolled up into an amalgam where relationships of authority and deference, provision and patronage are sanctioned by an implicit claim about the natural order of things. Yates and his protagonist, Berry, are inviting the reader into a structure of feeling which is archaic and conservative, and which trades on the nostalgic notion of a community sanctioned by the natural order. The affinity between landscape and the so-called natural order is nicely typified by the episode of the sale of Merry Down, an estate which borders Berry’s. ‘For over two centuries a Bagot had reigned uninterruptedly over the rose-red mansion and the spreading park, the brown water and the waving woods.’ The present owner, a patriot anda gentleman, who has lost both family and fortune in the First World War is faced with the necessity of selling the house, and the most likely buyer is a profiteer (and ‘sweep’) named Dunkelsbaum. Although Berry’s company cannot prevent the sale itself, they contrive to delay Dunkelsbaum and prevent his reaching the auction. As a result the estate is sold to someone of “English blood’ with “good clean hands’, ‘a very civil fellow ... and a sportsman’ The estate has passed from one ethnically and culturally entitled to it to another similarly qualified. In the 1930s and 1940s, Batsford published a substantial collection of works about English landscape and traditions. In addition to volumes of topography and reminiscence, churches, cottages, and country house: were all suitable subjects for a catalogue that approached 100 volumes.” The second edition of The Countryman’s England shows how this English tradition could be mobilised in a way that promoted a feeling more inclusive and democratic than the version which Yates had sketched. ‘Piers [2]Dimensions of nostalgia has come into his own again.’ A new introduction, written in the early years of the war, developed the image of Piers Plowman as the personification of the land, as the repository of true values, and as the keeper of deep knowledge temporarily neglected by industrial society. In a reference to the new circumstances to which many workers were directed, Hartley writes: ‘So all you who have been sent to the new country of England, find Piers and let him set you to work and learn to love Piers and his Master the Land.’* Whether or not the writer’s enthusiasm for charcoal-burning, pre-salted marsh mutton, osier~ gathering and other pre-industrial pursuits was crucial in the defeat of Germany is not the issue. What she had done was to use an image of people, land, and work to invoke a self-styled tradition that spoke of common purpose and national unity in a time of crisis. A final example comes from a different field, that of music. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the English folk-song was invented by Cecil Sharp. OF course the songs were collected from singers who were supposed to have learnt them through an organic and continuous tradition, But Sharp’s selectivity and editing were such a powerful filter that the neutral and scholarly act of collecting became instead the establishment of a canon. Not only were lyrics of dubious sexual propriety bowdlerised, but Sharp also rejected melodies that were not modal and which did not therefore fit his theories about the evolution of scales. This unscholarly interference is explained by Sharp's ulterior motive. Establishing a tradition of English music would be a source of social solidarity, especially when inserted into the education system: ‘The discovery of English folk-song, therefore, places in the hands of the patriot, as well as of the educationalist, an instrument of great value. The introduction of folk-songs into our schools will not only affect the musical life of England; it will also arouse that love of country and pride of race the absence of which we now deplore. Harker comments, ‘What he ... wished for in a period of burgeoning class-warfare, was a “return” to a mythical, homogeneous English culture. The songs were not merely rescued by Sharp from the threat of extinction by industrialisation and mass communication. They had ideological work to do in the promotion of an English tradition and an English national consciousness. These three almost arbitrarily chosen examples illustrate how tradition and nostalgia mingle. Far from being half-remembered, quaint, and (8)The imagined past archaic, tradition may be selective, with the past actively organised to speak to current anxieties and tensions, Such structures do not erect themselves. We should look carefully at the process of cultural construction to see how, when, and by whom they become articulated, and look equally carefully at their intentions and effects. IMAGE AND STYLE There are two further issues which deserve attention. The first concerns style. Almost by definition, the symbols and fashions of modern industrial cultures are eclectic, drawn from a wide variety of sources. Nostalgia has not yet had its James Laver: but in the same way that the history of clothing has been analysed in terms of culture, economy and images of the human body, so could cultural history enquire into the grammar of shifting style. Why should popular images at one time be faint Pee towards technical and social progress, while at others they trade heavily on styles and ideas that are backward-looking and self-consciously archaic? It is tempting to posit some neat relationship between optimism and future orientation and between pessimism and an orientation that is retrospective. A model of the laws of motion of nostalgia could be sketched: the ebb and flow of some cyclical economic theory (the Kondratieff long wave would be the obvious candidate) could power these changes in the cultural climate. But there are two objections to such a cavalier approach. First, the constitution and the very existence of long waves raises problems beyond the scope of this sketch. More importantly, such a reductionist account would probably need a view of the homogeneity of popular culture that was not justified. But such qualifications do not disqualify the question: they merely rule outsthe credibility of an unduly each answer. Perhaps the mode} which Terry Eagleton has sketched, at least in programmatic form, provides a method.” Culture and the economy are intricately linked, by€not in a way that is mechanical. Culture is itself a mode of pfoduction, with its own commercial and industrial logic, interposing a separate and semi- autonomous stage between the simplifying duality of base and superstructures. The fashion industry provides an example. Very few clothes today are rejected because they are simply worn out. Instead, they suddenly become the wrong colour; collars become too long or too short, and trousers become too wide or too narrow. The idea of a desirable look which is [ 14]Dimensions of nostalgia simply different to what we have already is how the clothing industry sustains demand for its product. The crucial question concerns the choice of new images. How does the designer anticipate people’s wants; how is the quaint and bygone reappropriated as a desirable look for today? Elizabeth Wilson notes the failing hegemony of the great couture houses and adds: ‘A single style can no longer dominate in the post-modern period. Instead there is a constant attempt to recreate atmosphere. In the fantasy culture of the 1980s there is no real hi nee fa real past; it is replaced by an instant, magical nostalgia, ‘a strangely unmotivated appropriation of the past." Contémporary culture ransacks the past for a style, for a look, because the présent is not serious. In the media creations of the Young Fogey or the Sloane Ranger, there is unexpected relevance: they represent styles associated with times and settings of social unity and rootedness. The fact that such cohesion was almost certainly illusory is of course totally irrelevant. CONCLUSION This chapter is deliberately allusive and in one sense no conclusion is possible, since its aim was to explore cross-cutting (if not overtly competitive) ideas about nostalgia. Nevertheless, some general points can be sn ela is experienced when some elements of the present are felt tbe defective and when there is no public sense of redeemability through a belief in progress. Nostalgia is a feeling which can operate at many levels. It may_be intrinsic to the life-experience of individuals, as they go through i fting perspectives of childhood and adulthood. Certain classes or strata within a society (especially those whose situation has changed for the worse) are likely to experience a more public and collective nostalgia. Finally, some cultural critics have identified the whole experience of postmodernity as a kind of macro-nostalgia. There is no space which we authentically occupy, and so popular culture fills the gap by manufacturing images of home and rootedness: however persuasive, the attempt must be doomed to failure by its sheer eclecticism, for if we could be as much at home here or there or anywhere else, can the place in question really be home? A simple model might involve thinking in terms of classes, generations and individuals describing some sort of trajectory through these possibilities, which in practice are never abstract and formal. They are of course specific historic locations and conjunctures and so to develop the model it is necessary to turn to concrete and and detailed examples. (5 ]The imagined past NOTES 1 Malcolm Chase, ‘Nostalgia’, conference papers, History Workshop 20, p- 26. 2 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, 1985, p. 10. 3 Lucien Goldmann, The Human Sciences and Philosophy, London, 1969, pp- 133-41. This theme was expanded in The Hidden God, London, 1964. 4 Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country, London, 1986, p. 72. Wright quotes from Roy Strong’s Times article of 10 November 1984. Raymond Williams, Towards 2000, London, 1983. a 6 7 patina and the look of authenticity we expect from age see Lowenthal, Past, pp. 155+ 7 Heinrich Schutz (ed. Maurice Natanson), Collected Papers, vol. I: ‘The Probleme of Social Realty, The Hague, 1967. Schutz. and Bergson address the problem as part of the human situation. Today we may locate it more concretely in the process of industrialisation, when seasonal work-rhythms were replaced by the calculative rationality of the hourly rate and the mathematically defined day. With an clegant and complementary irony, industrialisation also made clocks much more widely a . See E.P. Thompson, “Time, work-discipline nd industrial capitalism’, Past and Present, 38, 1967. 8 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Harmondsworth, 1965, p. 7- 9 Jack Lindsay, William Morris: His Life and Work, London, 1975, p. 6. 10 William Morris to Louie Baldwin, 26 March 1874, cited in Lindsay, William Morris, p. 11. 11 Sebastian Timpanaro, On Materialism, London, 1975, p. 45. 3 12 Ronald Grimsley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Study in Self-Awareness, Cardiff, 1961, p. 32. Incidentally, Alvarez. writes persuasively about a cultural phenomenon whoye aim was precisely to defeat the onsct of the commonplace through the process of ageing, In Keats and Goethe (most especially in the character of Werther) there was a feeling for romantic suicide which was motivated by a wish to avoid the prosaic future that must inevitably follow the ecstasy of the present. See Al Alvarez, The Savage God, Harmondsworth, 1979. 13. William Morris, News from Nowhere, London, 1934, p. 96. 14 Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind, Harmondsworth, 1974, p. 62. 15 Anton Zijderveld, The Abstract Society, Harmondsworth, 1974, p. 71 16 Berger et al., The Homeless Mind, p. 165. 17 Ibid., p. 167. There is an interesting parallel here with the work of Jeremy Seabrook. In What Went Wrong? he paints a picture of modern Britain made rootless through changes in the structure of work, policy decisions in housing, and the decline of working-class communities: ‘Our sense of home-place has been destroyed, and the relationships that might bind us there contaminated ... This process involves the detachment of the working class from any sense of continuity with the past.’ Jeremy Seabrook, What Went Wrong?: Working people and the ideals of the Labour Movement, London, 1978, p. 226. 18 Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air, London, 1983, p. 60. 19 Ibid., p. 345. 20 Zygmunt Bauman, Socialism: the Active Utopia, London, 1976, ch. 1 A Oxford Agricultural Economic Research Institute, Country Planing, Oxford, 1944, pp. oe 22 Susan Sontag, On Photography, Harmondsworth, 1979, p. 15. , 23 Brian Friel, Translations, London, 1981. This point is not made to accuse the Survey of English cultural imperialism. Indecd, in the case of Wales, great care was taken with the spelling of place-names (sce J. Harley and G. Walters, ‘Welsh orthography and Ordnance Survey mapping, 1820-1905’, Archaeologica Cambrensis, 121, 1982). But once [ 16]RRS BS Mw 32 33 Dimensions of nostalgia mapped, place-names become set and no longer change to record the lives of the people. Keith Thomas provides another example of placenames commemorating and celebrating local people, Robert Smith, official rat-catcher to the daughter of George II, ‘lived in an age when Wittenham Clumps, those pleasant twin hills in Berkshire, were still known (after the local landowner’s wife) as Mrs Dunch’s buttocks’, Keith Thomas, ‘Man and the Natural World, London, 1985, p. 85. Friel, Translations, p. 43. Sontag, On Photography, p. 110. Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, 146, p. 66. Raymond Williams, Keywords, London, 1976, p. 269, Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Highland tradition of Scotland’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 1983, p. 23. Ihid., p. 9. Raymond Williams, Marsison and Literature, Oxford, 1977, p. 115. Dornford Yates, Bemy and Co. (1920), Harmondsworth, 1981, p. 90. The copyright of Yates's work is, incidentally, held by an un-Britishly titled Rhodesian Equities (Private) Ltd, 1920. Ibid., pp. 202, 220-1 ‘The series was more quirky and less systematic than Arthur Mee’s King’s England volumes, which were organised on the lines of county boundaries, The feeling was similar, however. Dorothy Hartley, The Countryman’s England, London, 2nd edition, 1942-43, p.x. Cecil Sharp, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, London, 1907, pp. 135-6. But folk song ‘was not necessarily attached to an unreflective patriotism. The ‘Clarion recommended socialist singers: “when in doubt sing folk songs”; folk music was not a branch of music but “the very tree stem itself.’” Vic Gammon, ‘Folk song collecting in Sussex and Surrey 1853-1914", History Workshop Journal, 10, 1980, p. 81 Dave Harker, ‘May Cecil Sharp be praised?’, History Workshop Joumal, 14, 1982, p. 55. ‘Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A study in Marxist literary theory, London, 1976, ch. 2, p. 4d Elizabeth Wilson, Adomed in Dreams: Fashion and Modemity, London, 1985, p. 172, [17]