Introduction: The Problem of Nostalgia

Author(s): Dirk Klopper

Source: English in Africa , DECEMBER 2016, Vol. 43, No. 3, South African Literary
History Project: Special issue: Nostalgia (DECEMBER 2016), pp. 9-17
Published by: Rhodes University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26359335

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 f

Introduction: The Problem of Nostalgia

Dirk Klopper

We distrust nostalgia not only because we are wary of the seduction of

sentiment, but also, and perhaps more especially, because we are
suspicious of a sentimental feeling centred on home, childhood, family,
the past, the community. On the one hand, we have been taught that such
attachments may serve a politics of exclusion and oppression; on the
other hand, we have learned that such attachments may be precluded
under conditions of political oppression. Yet nostalgia persists, and what
renders it interesting is precisely that it is a problem, particularly in
South Africa, in the immediate post-apartheid context, where the home
to which the feeling refers may be located in an impoverished black
township or in an affluent white suburb, on a plot of land in a Bantustan
or on a family farm in the Karoo. Within the current generation of those
whose individual memory reaches back into the apartheid era, some are
seen not to be entitled to nostalgia because they benefited from the
politics of the past, and some are said to have little to be nostalgic about
because they were exploited by these politics.
But denial does not make the problem of nostalgia disappear. If
nostalgia, the experience of it, is deemed inappropriate, even inauthentic,
for those South Africans whose reminiscence of childhood predates the
end of apartheid, then the very feeling for childhood, for the early life of
the senses, is rendered suspect, and along with such feeling, perhaps
feeling as such, which originates in the sensorium of childhood. It is
alongside this general interdict against nostalgia that the memoirs of
Jacob Dlamini and Denis Hirson, who are among the authors discussed

English in Africa 43 No. 3 (December 2016): 9—17

DOI: http: / /dx.doi.org/10.4314/eia.v43i3.1

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10 DIRK KLOPPER

in this issue, are read, with the former seen to validate memorie
township childhood as a form of resistance to the depredations o
apartheid era, the latter seen to contextualise memories of a whites-o
childhood through the creation of textual disjunctions between
personal and the historical.
Nostalgia is always going to be a lying memory in the face of
empirical circumstance, is always going to be a wishful colouring o
past, as suggested not only by Freud but also by Marx. For F
nostalgia arises from the irrecoverable loss of childhood, home
mother, and constitutes a kind of mourning, which is not necess
problematic, and perhaps even beneficial, as a way of processing
working through, loss. What is problematic, for Freud, is obses
nostalgia, which constitutes a narcissistic identification with th
object, and manifests as an ambivalent melancholia, one
simultaneously disavows and idolises what has been lost ("Mourn
and Melancholia" 249). Marx seemingly takes a tougher stand aga
nostalgia, seeing it as a reactionary sentiment, a "superstition abou
past" that has to be overcome in favour of a progressive politics o
future, one that urges us to have "the dead bury their dead"
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 106). Curiously, though,
admired classical Greek culture, describing the ancient Gree
"normal children" whose frankness, beauty and simplicity we mod
wish to emulate (Grundrisse 51) - a sentiment that accords with
psychodynamics of nostalgia. We might say that, in a sense, the an
Greeks provided Marx with a usable memory of the emergence, n
the personal self, but of the historical self.
In associating the ancient Greeks with the simplicity of childh
and by projecting this as a trait we admire, Marx's understan
enables us to conceive of a homologous relation between the histo
self and what Freud examines as the personal self. This marriage,
were, of the psychoanalytic and the dialectic, the personal and
historical, has been the subject of much theoretical integration
Marx and Freud. A recent theorist who works in this way, Svet
Boym, repeatedly cited in the essays included here, sees no
demarcation between a nostalgic feeling vividly tied to the sens
experiences of childhood and a nostalgic feeling tied to the
political events of history, and interweaves into her examinatio
nostalgia the antinomies not only of the personal and the historic

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 THE PROBLEM OF NOSTALGIA 11

also of the secular and the sacred. She argues that nostalgia is "a
mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an
enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular
expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that
is both physical and spiritual, the edenic unity of time and space before
entry into history" (The Future of Nostalgia 8).
The notion that nostalgia is in some way regressive, whether it
relates to a personal or a political history, is a legacy of the hermeneutics
of suspicion. We are the intellectual heirs, the children, of Marx and
Freud. But Marcos Natali, for one, takes issue with the notion that
nostalgia is necessarily regressive, and rejects the teleological
understanding that underpins it. He claims that the "bad politics" and
"bad histoiy" arguments traceable to Marx rest on an understanding, on
the one hand, of history "as necessarily emancipatory, progressive, and
rationally comprehensible" and, on the other hand, of the past as
irrecoverable ("History and the Politics of Nostalgia" 21). The lens of
history is not the only way, he says, of relating to the past. He also
contests the psychoanalytical notion of nostalgia as fictional and
irrational, claiming that whereas the historical materialist view of
nostalgia as politically suspect is based on oppositions between
"conservatism and progressiveness, servitude and freedom, reaction and
progress," the psychoanalytic view of nostalgia is based on oppositions
between "fiction and fact, irrationality and rationality" (19-20). This
structural arrangement is only valid, he observes, in a "disenchanted
setting" (23).
Natali quotes Kristeva on the "strange" memory of the melancholic,
a memory that upholds the contradictory claim that although "everything
has gone by" I nevertheless remain "faithful to those bygone days" (23),
and concludes: "If one does not believe that everything has gone by, and
if one is not atheistic and disenchanted, then a different conceptual
territory emerges. We would in that case be in the presence of something
other than nostalgia, melancholia, or even mourning; that vocabulary,
along with the political critique of nostalgia, would therefore lose its
ground" (23). Natali's critique of the historical argument, whether
materialist or empiricist, resonates with my sense that nostalgia, in the
first instance, is about my past, which is not necessarily the same as our
past, and does not inevitably implicate a shared past, at least not in the
sense of another who experiences the past in the same way I do. My past

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12 DIRK KLOPPER

comprises a constellation of sensory and affective memories specifi

my phenomenological self. But nostalgia nevertheless has an unnerv
way of slipping between the personal and the historical, between me an
others, between, we might say, recollections of a boereplaas a
aspirations for a boerestaat. Personal memory, political history an
fantasy identifications have a way of leaking into one another
nostalgic remembrance, a form of ideation particularly susceptible
imaginary projections and fixations.
Although located in the sensory and affective world of childhoo
nostalgia has the potential of enabling us to think again, as adults, abou
ourselves. Who is to say that this kind of thinking, part reverie and pa
appraisal, lacks value, this thinking about what kind of thinking we
doing about what kind of experience? But this thinking runs the risk o
stumbling into a circular labyrinth of cerebration. When I start fee
nostalgic, I say to myself that I may resist this feeling or I may succum
to it. If I resist it, I cut myself off from myself. If I succumb to it, I
be captivated by it or I may interrogate it. If I am captivated by it, I e
into a narcissistic relation with it, a relation with what is the death of
namely, a lack of distinction, a self-consuming non-distinction. I
interrogate it, I may mistrust the nostalgic remembrance or I m
question my surrender to it. If I mistrust the nostalgic remembranc
renounce it. If I question my surrender to it, I return to where I started
the sequence of possible responses to the advent of nostalgia.
Freud submits that memories of childhood are not pristine memorie
but memories of memories, arguing that it is questionable "whether
have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to
childhood may be all that we possess" ("Screen Memories" 322)
claims that childhood memories "show us our earliest years not as t
were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories w
aroused" (322). Calling these "screen memories," he suggests th
though they are empirically unreliable, they nevertheless draw attentio
to "the operation of memory and its distortions, the importa
and raison d'etre of phantasies, the amnesia covering our ear
years" (301).
In melancholia, where the subject is identified with the lost object, i
is the ego rather than the world, says Freud, that is experienced as "poo
and empty" ("Mourning and Melancholia" 249). But because loss is b
memorialised and denied through identification with, and internalisatio

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 THE PROBLEM OF NOSTALGIA 13

of, the lost object, the subject is the site of an incomplete loss, one that
kept alive and worried over, thus sustaining the impossible possibility o
recovery (396). So Freud, in his invocation of the lost object, and Ma
in his invocation of classical Greece, both allow for the energising dream
of an unlikely access to the pristine circumstance of an original memor
of what has come into being.
The memory of loss is a memory of what has been or is imagined to
have been, not as an empirical fact but as the condition of a future.
subject to whom memory is given does not record events like a vid
camera at a security gate, but binds events through the emotional inter
invested in them, orientating the already past in the living present to t
potentiality of the future. Jacques Lacan phrases it more evocatively an
precisely than this when he says: "What is realised in my history is
the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the pres
perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what
shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming" ("T
Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" 86).
This sense of a transformational subject, a subject who realises h
history in relation to his unfolding desire, also informs Wal
Benjamin's notion of messianic time when he claims that "our image
happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption," a
says that the same applies "to our view of the past" ("Theses on th
Philosophy of History" 254). His cryptic declaratives transfigure eve
they affirm the historical materialist premise of his argument: "The pa
carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redempti
There is a secret agreement between past generations and the prese
one. Our coming was expected on earth" (254). If our coming w
expected on earth, and has come about on account of this expectatio
then our coming anticipates future comings through the expectations ou
coming has created. Inasmuch as we are the future of the past, we
also the past of the future. That is, we are not only nostalgic subjects bu
also the subjects of nostalgia.
In yielding to a drift of thought occasioned by my deliberations
the meaning of nostalgia, I find myself adrift between histori
materialism, psychoanalytic phantasm and emancipatory mysticism
With these elusive coordinates on home, and this interminable defer
of a homecoming, a nostos, I begin to wonder about the absence of t
home that presumes the homecoming, about how being haunted by hom

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14 DIRK KLOPPER

is not to be returned to the home but to be exposed to the unhome

was Freud who pointed out that the word heimlich include
meaning the notion of the unheimlich, and therefore belongs to tw
of ideas which are very different: "on the one hand it means w
familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and
of sight" ("The Uncanny" 224-25). The homely belongs to the h
the sense of something "withdrawn from the eyes of str
something concealed, secret," and yet is also "a place free from
influences" (225). Seeking to free itself from ghostly influence
itself seems to become the ghostly influence. It is the ghost ex
from the parameters it creates, restoring that which it exclude
would suggest, in the practice of the reflective (ironic) nostalgi
proposes in the place of restorative (reactionary) nostalgia (The
of Nostalgia 23, 41). Nostalgia is the remnant of the proces
motion when we were are captivated by a yearning for a home,
of dwelling, a sense of being - existentially, as an I, but also pol
as a citizen of the polis, a member of the closed space of the im
community - even as we resist such captivation.
Slavoj Zizek has argued that nostalgia applies not only t
invocation of that which has been lost, the recovery of w
fantasised as a restoration of an original wholeness, but also t
invocation of something with which we no longer identify ("Melan
and the Act" 657-681), where we invoke not what we have lost b
we have renounced. Perhaps we should, then, read Boym's ref
nostalgia not as an alternative to restorative nostalgia, but as that w
comes into being between the restoration and its renunciation
perhaps this is indeed what is implied in irony, namely,
perspective, one that equivocates between, while simulta
maintaining, the antinomies it evokes, a symptom of a predic
rather than its cure.
The essays collected in this volume comprise a more focuss
concrete field of investigation than my maundering preoccupations
suggest.
The first two essays tackle nostalgia's tangible presence in the g
of memoir. Erica Lombard's "The Work of Nostalgia in Denis Hi
Remember King Kong (The Boxer)" and David Med
'"Remembering Life under Apartheid with Fondness': The Mem
Jacob Dlamini and Chris van Wyk," make interesting reading al

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 THE PROBLEM OF NOSTALGIA 15

one another. Dealing with "white" nostalgia and "black" nostal

respectively, they address the politics of nostalgia in post-aparthe
South Africa. Lombard argues that "the kind of work nostalgia does, an
indeed the kind of thing nostalgia is, depend on where and how
functions," and proceeds to draw a useful distinction what she calls thre
"semiotic" levels at which nostalgia may operate (nostalgia as affec
nostalgia as narrative, and nostalgia as commodity) in order to elucid
the ways in which Hirson's King Kong refuses, as a "white" memoir
be read in terms of the simplicity of a totalising apartheid narrati
Medalie is similarly concerned with potential of memoir to salvage
complexity of the past, claiming that Dlamini's Native Nostalgia a
Van Wyk's two books Shirley, Goodness & Mercy and Eggs to L
Chickens to Hatch, are all three "black" memoirs concerned not
much with exposing the "abnormality" of apartheid, which i
characteristic of the traditional apartheid memoir, but with representin
the survival of "ordinariness" within the experience of living und
apartheid.
In the two essays that follow, Michael Titlestad's "Nostalgia and
Apocalypticism in Two Post-Apartheid Films" and Nedine Moonsamy
"A 'Funny' Feeling: Laughter and Nostalgia in Alex Latimer's T
Space Race," the focus is on what we may call boere melancholia. T
films Titlestad examines, Promised Land (2003) and Treurgrond (201
involve divergent perspectives on the place of the farm in t
constitution of traditional Afrikaner identity. Whereas the former is se
to caricature Afrikaner nostalgia for lost political power while its
evincing nostalgia for unambiguous demarcations between good polit
and bad politics, the latter is seen to trade on nostalgic images
Afrikaner patronage in rural communities and on narratives of pasto
harmony in providing ideological support for reactionary views th
opportunistically use farm murders to promote a mythical sense o
Afrikaner entitlement to the land. Moonsamy's reading of the scien
fiction novel The Space Race (2013) explores the paradoxi
chronotope of a redemptive future that, despite the novel's deploym
of a playful and ironic take on apartheid history, can be seen to b
premised on the validation of a repressive past. At stake, she argues
the problematic use made in the novel of Afrikaner discourse on t
divine right to the land and of racialised social evolutionary notion
support of this discourse.

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16 DIRK KLOPPER

Zamansele Nsele's "Post-Apartheid Nostalgia, Ethics and the V

Archive" and Meg Samuelson's "Reading Nostalgia and Beyo
Hermeneutics of Suspicion and Race; and, Learning to Read, A
with Zoë Wicomb," are both concerned with the poetics of the
relation to the black subject. Nsele addresses the use of the
archive in post-apartheid art exhibitions, where artists appropr
recontextualise found memory objects such as photographs an
Drawing on a range of examples, the argument focuses o
implications of gazing upon representations that, in respect of the
subject, invoke an anthropology of primitivism or a spect
suffering. The question raised is whether or not such images ext
historical events they depict into the present, thereby parado
paying tribute to them. Samuelson draws attention to the descripti
photographs in David's Story and October, and artists who ass
things or gather light in You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town and
in the Light, to explore how these representations may aid the read
moving beyond reading as a critique to reading as an curatorial
that assembles meaning through participation and implication.
The volume concludes with Duncan Brown's "Reimaginin
'Literary' in South African Literary Studies," an essay that does not
with nostalgia as such but may be read through the lens of nos
This is not to say that the essay evinces nostalgia. It seems
though, that the appeal the essay makes in reimagining the literary
the perceived depredations of post-structuralism and critical theory
resonate in interesting ways with the problematic of nostalgia t
the preceding essays. On the one hand, the essay distances itsel
what might be seen as a call for a return to the innocence of a pre-
past; on the other hand, it seeks to recover what is seen to have be
in the decades dominated by theory. Not only does the literary
practice proposed here eschew a restorative view of the past in favo
a reflective, or more accurately, a refractive view, it also speak
evocation of the sensory and the affective, to the corporeal gatheri
things to which Samuelson, too, addresses her deliberations.

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 THE PROBLEM OF NOSTALGIA 17

WORKS CITED

Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Illuminations. Ed

Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World
1968. 25-64.
Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia." The Standard Edition of the
Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV. Trans. James Strachey.
London: The Hogarth Press, 1962. 243-58.
. "Screen Memories." The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of
Sigmund Freud, Volume III. Trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1962.301-22.
. "The Uncanny." The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of
Sigmund Freud, Volume III. Trans. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth
Press, 1962:218-52.
Lacan, Jacques. "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis." Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London and
New York: Routledge, 1989.23-86.
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. 1852. Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 11. Trans. Saul K. Padovers et al.
London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975-2001. 99-197.
. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans.
Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Classics, 1993.
Natali, Marcos Piason. "History and the Politics of Nostalgia." Iowa Journal of
Cultural Studies 5 (2004): 10-25.
Ztëek, Slavoj. "Melancholy and the Act." Critical Inquiry 26.4 (2000): 657-81.

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