READING NOSTALGIA IN
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD’S TENDER IS THE NIGHT AND VIRGINIA WOOLF’S TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
Bente Verona Knops
A Thesis Submitted to
The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages Faculty of Humanities
University of Oslo
In Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English Literature
60 Credits
Supervisor: Stuart McWilliams Spring 2021
ABSTRACT
In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym describes how by the end of the modern era “the melancholic sense of loss” of nostalgia “turned into a style” (16). Nostalgia as a theme has been widely studied in literature. Nostalgia as style, however, has not. This thesis explores how two modern texts, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, employ a set of narrative and stylistic strategies to generate a “nostalgic
experience” in the reader. Both novels, in their style and structure, mimic the pattern of feeling of a nostalgic reaction. By mimicking this emotional pattern these texts become script-like and performative and evoke a nostalgic response in the reader. To determine how this effect is achieved this thesis mainly relies on Niklas Salmose’s Poetics of Nostalgia as well as some ideas from emotion/affect theory. Since the reader’s experience is important in the analysis of these novels, this thesis also draws from Reader-Response Theories by Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Throughout the writing of this thesis I have received a great deal of support and assistance.
First, I would like to thank my supervisor, Stuart McWilliams, for his support and belief in my project and for his invaluable advice and insightful feedback.
I would like to thank the Literature, Cognition and Emotions (LCE) Research Group at the University of Oslo, for providing me with the funds necessary to purchase some of the texts essential to my research.
I would also like to thank my friends and fellow students on the eighth floor of Niels Treschows Hus. Our chats during coffee and lunch breaks kept me sane during the writing process.
Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank my parents for their support of my
academic endeavours abroad and for their sympathetic ear during many facetime calls. You are always there for me.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT……….II ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……….………….III TABLE OF CONTENTS……….……….IV
INTRODUCTION………1
READER RESPONSE THEORY………...………...4
ISER: THE IMPLIED READER AND THE ACT OF READING……………....4
FISH: INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES AND AFFECTIVE STYLISTICS…………….11
EMOTIONS: STICKINESS, SCRIPTS AND PERFORMATIVITY…………13
NOSTALGIA………...………15
“FROM A TREATABLE SICKNESS TO AN INCURABLE DISEASE”: A BRIEF HISTORY OF NOSTALGIA…….……………16
POETICS OF NOSTALGIA………...………………...19
TENDER IS THE NIGHT: “SO MUCH FUN – SO LONG AGO”………...27
BOOK I: HAPPINESS – SUMMER ON THE FRENCH RIVIERA………..29
BOOK II: TRANSITION – UNCOVERING THE VEIL……….…..39
BOOK III: REFLECTION – DIVER’S DOWNFALL………45
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE: PAINTING A MEMORY………..51
I. THE WINDOW: HAPPINESS – A SUMMER DAY ON THE ISLE OF SKYE...53
II. TIME PASSES: TRANSITION – AN EMPTY HOUSE………...63
III. TO THE LIGHTHOUSE: REFLECTION – REMEMBERING RAMSAY…….69
CONCLUSION………...81
BIBLIOGRAPHY………..85
INTRODUCTION
“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me.
Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”
–Kazuo Ishiguro, from his Nobel prize acceptance speech
¨
“You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”
–James Baldwin, from Conversations with James Baldwin
¨
“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald, from correspondence with his lover Sheilah Graham
¨
“Books are the mirrors of the soul.”
–Virginia Woolf, from Between the Acts
I want to begin my thesis with these four quotes from authors I admire. I chose these quotes because they demonstrate the importance of literature and its ability to capture and move readers. Precisely that ability to touch people is what personally appeals most to me about literature, or art in general, and I know that many friends, family members and fellow students feel the same way. Yet, emotions have often been ignored or deemed unworthy of academic debate. Fortunately, in recent years, there has been an increased interest in the study of emotions within literature and it has become an important topic within literary studies.
Patrick Colm Hogan, in What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion, argues that literature provides us with “otherwise unavailable insights into the ways emotions are produced, experienced and enacted in human social life” (i). He explores several different emotions, such as love, grief, mirth, guilt, shame, jealousy, attachment, compassion and pity in an array of literary texts from different historical periods and cultural backgrounds.
Ingeborg Jandl et al. released a selection of essays that explores “the complex link between aesthetic and non-aesthetic emotional components and discusses emotional patterns by focussing on the practice of writing as well as on the impact of such patterns on receptive processes” (9). Mette Hjort and Sue Laver assembled a collection of essays about emotion and art capturing the expansiveness of the current debate around emotions and emotional responses to art. And Derek Matravers, in Art and Emotion, rehabilitates “an approach to the connection between art and the emotions long regarded as heretical” (vii).
My thesis is concerned with two of the authors whose quotes I used at the beginning of this thesis, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf. Fitzgerald and Woolf, though both modernists, are not often studied side by side and the texts I will be using for my analysis, Tender is the Night and To the Lighthouse have, to my knowledge, never figured together in a side by side analysis. Even though the texts might, initially, not seem like an obvious
comparison, I think they have many things in common. The two texts are structurally alike.
Both are divided into three parts and figure a controversial or experimental middle section.
Fitzgerald received a lot of critique on the structure of Tender is the Night, especially because of the large flashback at the beginning of Book II, while Woolf experimented with a short middle section stretching over a long period of time, connecting two days on the Isle of Skye ten years apart.
Furthermore, the two novels are also thematically alike. A story of the fall of a jazz- age psychiatrist and a story centring around a Victorian mother (and her death) and her family on their visits to the Isle of Skye might not seem to have that much in common, but they are more similar than they initially seem. Both novels deal with events that inevitably bring about nostalgia– a rich and successful psychiatrist and his inevitable fall from grace and the death of a woman and mother who was the centre and force that kept the whole family together. Both novels thus chronicle some kind of ‘fall’ and this is inevitably accompanied by a longing back to ‘better’ times.
Nostalgia as a theme has been widely studied in both Fitzgerald and Woolf. Wright Morris notes that Fitzgerald turned nostalgia into “a form of consciousness. Nostalgia, quite simply, is all there is. In plumbing this sentiment to its depths, rather than merely using or
abusing it, Fitzgerald dropped to the deep, dead-end center of the American novel” (Morris 157). And D.G. Kehl argues that Fitzgerald, in his fiction, portrays “a wistful longing to return in thought, if not in fact, to a former time or place, a pervasive yearning for something long ago and far away” (Kehl 311). When it comes to Woolf, Helen Southworth discusses
“the sting of nostalgia” in her later fiction. Leena Kore Schröder explores the nostalgia of the English country house in Woolf. And Niklas Salmose examines nostalgia and childhood in The Waves.
It is clear that some of Fitzgerald’s and Woolf’s novels deal with nostalgic themes, but I would like to explore how these texts can potentially become nostalgic through their style, structure and narrative. Fitzgerald believed that “the purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind” and Woolf, in her literary essays, insisted that there is something outside the text without which the text itself is useless: the reader. Fitzgerald and Woolf both seem to agree that the reader plays an important role in a literary text. In this thesis, then, I will argue that Tender is the Night and To the Lighthouse are not just texts about nostalgia, but they also are nostalgic texts – that is they produce a nostalgic response in the reader.
The nostalgic effect literature can have on its readers has been thoroughly studied by Niklas Salmose. In his Poetics of Nostalgia, he demonstrates how some literary texts can evoke a nostalgic experience in their readers. He also provides a toolbox to analyse how this effect is generated. Salmose’s ideas will, together with ideas from Reader-Response theory and emotion/affect theory form the basis for this thesis.
This thesis will thus explore how F. Scott Fitzgerald in Tender Is the Night, and Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse employ narrative and stylistic strategies, textual memory in particular, to generate a “nostalgic experience” in the reader. The texts through their
imitation of the pattern of a nostalgic reaction become script-like and performative and in this way evoke a nostalgic response in the reader. To determine how this effect is achieved I will use Niklas Salmose’s Poetics of Nostalgia as well as ideas from emotion/affect theory. Since the reader’s experience is important in my interpretation, I will also rely on Reader-Response Criticism. However, I will take a more text-based approach and will not completely disregard the text, rather I will explore how the texts’ narrative and stylistic structures function and contribute to generating a, in this case emotional, response in the reader.
First, I will illustrate the theory I will be using and how and why I will be using it.
Then, I will outline a brief history of nostalgia and after that I will provide my working definition of nostalgia and my methodology of detecting nostalgic patterns in the texts of my
choice. In chapter one, I will demonstrate how Tender is the Night evokes a nostalgic experience in the reader through the use of several stylistic and narrative strategies, in particular textual memory. I will argue that the novel mimics the pattern of a nostalgic reaction in which Book I represents happiness, Book II represents the transition from
happiness to reflection, and Book III represents reflection. In chapter two, I will demonstrate how To the Lighthouse evokes a nostalgic experience in the reader in a similar way as Tender is the Night does. I will argue that To the Lighthouse, too, mimics the pattern of a nostalgic reaction, in which “The Window” represents happiness, “Time Passes” represents the transition from happiness to reflection, and “The Lighthouse” represents reflection.
READER-RESPONSE THEORY
The reader and the reader’s experience are important in my interpretation of Tender Is the Night and To the Lighthouse. Reader-Response Theory will therefore make up a large part of my theoretical framework. Reader-Response theorists focus on the reader and the reader’s experience of a literary text, rather than on the author, form or content. They view the reader as an active participant and see reading as an interaction between reader and text. They believe that the meaning of a text is created by the reader through the reading process. I will focus on theories of Reader-Response Criticism by Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish.
ISER: THE IMPLIED READER AND THE ACT OF READING
Iser has written two major works of Reader-Response Criticism, The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading. In “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” a section in The Implied Reader, Iser argues that when examining a piece of literature, one should consider
“the actions involved in responding to that text” and not just the text itself (IR 274). He sees a literary text as having two “poles” (IR 274). The first is the “artistic” pole, which is the text created by the author. The other is the “aesthetic” pole, which represents “the realization accomplished by the reader” (IR 274). A literary text is never one or the other but always lies somewhere “half-way between the two” and only comes into being through the interaction between text and reader (IR 275). Reading is thus an active and interactive process; it brings the text to life and uncovers “its inherently dynamic character” (IR 275). According to Iser, an author never presents his story completely. A literary text has “gaps,” unwritten
implications which the reader needs to uncover and fill in. This way reading becomes an interactive process between text and reader. However, this does not mean that any reading is appropriate. Iser argues that a text employs a variety of strategies and devices in order to limit
its unwritten implications. In this way, the reader is still an active participant but is, in a way, guided by the text (IR 276).
To explain how this works Iser uses Roman Ingarden’s concept of “intentional sentence correlatives”. Intentional sentence correlatives assume that, in literature, a set of sentences only applies to the “particular world” of that literary work and not to any other objective reality outside of the world of that text (IR 277). The idea behind this is that the connections between sentences are not formed by the text but by the reader. Iser argues that a sentence in a literary text “aims at something beyond what it actually says” (IR 278). A series of sentences sets up expectations in the reader and these expectations are constantly changing throughout the reading process. When reading scientific or philosophical texts, we seek for confirmation of our expectations. When reading literature, our expectations are often
frustrated. If a piece of literature merely confirmed our expectations and did not call upon the reader’s imagination, we would probably not be interested in reading it (IR 278). The product of the reader’s response to the text is what Iser calls “virtual dimension” – that is the “coming together of text and imagination” (IR 279).
Iser stresses two important aspects of the reading process. Firstly, reading is a non- linear temporal activity. Not even a short text can be absorbed in just a single moment and the fictional world of the text does not appear to us linearly either (IR 277, 280). Whenever we read something it is “foreshortened” – it sinks into our memory and stays there until it is evoked again somewhere else along the reading process, against a different background. This causes the reader to establish connections between different parts of the text that were not anticipated: “the reader, in establishing these interrelations between past, present and future, actually causes the text to reveal its potential multiplicity of connections. These connections are the product of the reader’s mind working on the raw material of the text, though they are not the text itself – for this consists just of sentences, statements, information, etc.” (IR 278).
While reading, our perspectives are constantly shifting as we try to make sense of the text.
Furthermore, a second reading of the same text will progress differently to the first reading since we, in a way, already know what is coming, and we might make connections that we had missed earlier. The product of that reading, then, is a text created by the reader’s process of anticipation and retrospection (IR 281).
Secondly, when we encounter “gaps” during the reading process, we try to look for coherency and “strive, even if unconsciously, to fit everything together in a consistent pattern” (IR 283). This consistency of meaning is not supplied by the text, but rather by the reader as he projects onto the text the consistency that he requires. According to Iser, textual
consistency is the product of the “meeting between the written text and the individual mind of the reader with its own particular history of experience, its own consciousness, its own
outlook” (IR 284). The reader thus attempts to make sense of unfamiliar textual material within his own framework of reference (IR 285).
The reader’s search for consistency has multiple implications. Firstly, while filling in gaps, we become aware of our own ability to make connections and interpretations. While reading, we thus learn not only about the text, but also about ourselves. Iser argues that the non-linearity of the reading process is similar to the experience of things in real life: “reading experience can illuminate basic patterns of real experience” (IR 281). He further notes that the way “in which the reader experiences the text will reflect his own disposition, and in this respect the literary text acts as a kind of mirror” (IR 280–281). However, by deciding on certain meanings for the sake of the consistency of our reading, we inevitably rule out meanings that do not fit our interpretation. This reveals the inexhaustibility of the text as the ruling out of other meanings uncovers the text’s potential to be read differently. Our desire for consistency thus draws us into a world of illusion, for how one reader makes sense of unfamiliar elements is understood differently by another. Our consistency is illusory because it leads us to “reduce the polysemantic possibilities to a single interpretation in keeping with the expectations aroused, thus extracting an individual, configurative meaning” (IR 285).
The polysemantic nature of the text and the illusions of the reader are, according to Iser,
“opposed factors” (IR 285). However, both are necessary aspects of the reading process. If we, as readers, were to form no illusions (according to our frame of reference), the text would remain completely foreign to us. Moreover, if our illusions were universal, the text would be reduced to one level of meaning. We thus have to attempt to find a balance between these two tendencies. Iser argues, however, that due to the “dynamism” of the text this balance can never actually be achieved. As we look for a pattern of consistency in the text, we inevitably also discover other elements in the text that do not fit into our pattern. So, even “in forming our illusions, we also produce at the same time a latent disturbance of these illusions” (IR 285). It is the reader’s job to find this balance between “involvement in and observation of the illusion . . . that forms the esthetic experience offered by the literary text” (IR 286). We start out our quest for this balance with certain expectations and it is exactly the frustrating of these expectations that lies at the heart of our aesthetic experience. It is the indeterminacy of a text that drives us to find a “configurative meaning” that is both consistent and coherent (IR 287).
The constant change of our perspectives is what makes a work of literature come to life. The
reader imparts on the text a dynamism, which allows him to process unfamiliar experiences into his own world (IR 288).
According to Iser, readers go through a process of organization similar to that of the author of the text. Readers must recreate the text to be able to view it as a work of art. This aesthetic recreation is not a linear or effortless process. It depends on the constant interruption of the flow of reading. “We look forward, we look back, we decide, we change our decisions, we form expectations, we are shocked by their nonfulfillment, we question, we muse, we accept, we reject; this is the dynamic process of recreation” (IR 288). This process is influenced by two things. First, a familiar collection of literary patterns and themes. Second, strategies that “set the familiar against the unfamiliar” (IR 288). It is, then, the defamiliarisation of the reader’s knowledge of the text that results in a tension between the reader’s expectations and the frustrating of these expectations (IR 288). It is thus the interaction between “illusion- forming and illusion-breaking that makes reading essentially a recreative process” (IR 289).
Anticipation and retrospection form the bases of the connection between the reader and the text. This interplay is what makes the text alive and gives of the impression of life-likeness (IR 290). While reading, the effectiveness of the text is caused by evocation and negation; the reader seeks for his assumptions to be affirmed but these assumptions are then upset. This leads the reader into the assumptions of the fictional world of the text. This, in turn, results in the extension of the reader’s experience as he encounters unfamiliar perspectives (IR 290-1). Iser sees reading as a reflection of the manner in which we gain experience. When our assumptions are overturned, the text turns into our “present” and our own ideas fade into the past. We abandon our own beliefs in order to be able to experience the “unfamiliar world of the literary text” (IR 291).
Many critics have suggested that this happens through the reader’s identification with certain ideas or characters in the text. Iser argues, however, that it is the reader who does the thinking, not the author. Even though the text was initially composed according to the author’s ideas, during the reading process we must think like the author and in doing so place our consciousness at the disposal of the text. Iser bases this explanation on ideas expressed in George Poulet’s essay “Phenomenology of Reading.” According to Poulet, consciousness marks where author and reader merge. The text, then, becomes a consciousness which replaces the reader’s own and the reader’s individual disposition has to be shut out (IR 292-3). Iser modifies this idea slightly. He argues that our own disposition and character will not completely disappear, but that it will continue as “a more or less powerful virtual force,” and that while reading “an artificial division of our personality” will remain (IR 293). The reader
“assumes” the individuality of the author as a segmentation within his own personality, resulting in a foreign reader and a real, virtual reader. It is the relation between what is foreign in the text and the familiar virtual force of the reader’s own disposition that enables “the unfamiliar to be understood” (IR 293-4). Someone else’s thoughts can only form in our consciousness if our own mental capacity for decoding these thoughts is drawn upon to reach formulation. The reading process thus consists of the reader being subjected to the author’s subjectivity and the reader, then, has to negotiate between the fictional world and the real world (IR 293-4).
Iser sees the reading process as a simulation of the process of experience in general.
The reader’s recreation of the text lies at the core of its aesthetic dimension. But if the text
“mirrors” the reader and it is the reader who (re)creates the text, what stops the reading process from becoming entirely subjective? Iser recognises that “the potential text is infinitely richer than any of its individual realizations” and that the reading process will vary from reader to reader; he argues that this variation can only exist “within the limits imposed by the written as opposed to the unwritten text” (IR 280). Iser compares the array of possible readings to the way people look at stars – one might see a plough, the other a dipper. The “stars” in a text “are fixed; the lines that join them are variable” (IR 282). The text should thus not be completely abandoned, but rather should be seen as a guide that could lead to multiple destinations. The choice of destinations is not endless; you have to follow the roads.
Iser elucidates the problem of uncontrolled subjectivism further in his book The Act of Reading. There he argues that the meaning of a literary text is not a fixed and “definable entity”
but a “dynamic happening” (AOR 22). In other words, it is an event in time. Every fictional structure has two sides – a verbal side and an affective side. The verbal structure “guides the [reader’s] reaction and prevents it from being arbitrary” (AOR 21). The affective element is the reader’s response that has been “prestructured by the language of the text” (AOR 21). Even though the textual structure acts as a guide, it does not entirely control the reader’s response.
There will always be aspects of the text that are indeterminate and it is the reader’s job to figure out their meaning. This interplay between determinacy and indeterminacy “conditions the interaction between text and reader, and such a two-way process cannot be called arbitrary”
(AOR 24). Thus, literary texts instate “performances” of meaning “rather than actually formulating meaning themselves” (AOR 27). Iser argues that this “performing” aspect is the core of the aesthetic quality of the text and this element cannot exist without the reader (AOR 27). Meaning is thus based in the interaction between the text and the reader. Meaning, to Iser, is not an entity, hidden in the text, that can be extracted, but a temporal concept that is produced
in the reader’s consciousness. How, then, is meaning prevented from being completely subjective and individual to a single reader? Iser argues that the understanding of a text is
“intersubjective.” Readers may draw different conclusions from the same text, but they will often respond to the same things in that text. “A literary text contains intersubjectively verifiable instructions for meaning-production, but the meaning produced may then lead to a whole variety of different experiences and hence subjective judgments” (AOR 25). The production of meaning thus occurs within a range that is limited by textual structures. Different readers may then draw different conclusions from a range of meanings, but again, this range is not endless. Meaning may vary among readers but always stays within the scope of what the text provides. With this Iser criticises objective theories. One single objective meaning of a literary text, that needs to be uncovered by the reader, does simply not exist. Iser’s ideas demonstrate how different meanings can emerge from the same text – as they often do – and he stresses the importance of the collaboration between reader and text.
Iser discusses his concept of the “implied reader” in more detail in The Act of Reading.
When critics talk about the effect literature has on its readers, they tend to mention two categories, the “real” reader and the “hypothetical” reader. The real reader is an actual reader whose response to the text can be documented, whereas the hypothetical reader stands for all the possible realisations of a text (AOR 27). Both the real and the hypothetical reader are deficient concepts, according to Iser. Iser’s problem with the concept of the real reader is that any reconstruction of such a reader heavily depends on the survival of documents from the era the reader was from. The problem, then, is that the further we go back in history the less documents will likely have survived, resulting in the real reader of a text having to be constructed from that text itself (AOR 28). Iser’s critique of the hypothetical reader is that this is an ideal that is nothing more than a product of the critic’s mind. Furthermore, the ideal reader would then overlap with the concept of the author, eliminating the reading process altogether.
However, Iser also sees value in the idea of an ideal reader. If the ideal reader encompasses all the potential meanings of a text it might be a useful concept to “close the gaps that constantly appear in any analysis of literary effects and responses” (AOR 29).
Iser’s solution to this is the “implied reader.” He believes that when analysing literature
“we must allow for the reader’s presence without in any way predetermining his character or his historical situation” (AOR 34). The implied reader is a function of the text itself and has
“his roots firmly planted in the structure of the text; he is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real reader (AOR 34). Iser further defines the implied reader as “a textual structure anticipating the presence of a recipient without necessarily defining him” (AOR 34).
The implied reader, thus, represents “a network of response-inviting structures,” which aid the reader in grasping the text (AOR 34).
There are two elements to the implied reader; “the reader’s role as a textual structure, and the reader’s role as a structured act” (AOR 35). The reader’s role as a textual structure deals with the aspects of the text that the aid the reader in “actualizing” unfamiliar material. In a novel, there are four main perspectives that enable the reader to do this – narrator, characters, plot and the fictitious reader. The meaning of the text is generated through these four perspectives merging. This happens during the reading process. The reader’s role in this process is to fit these shifting perspectives “into a gradually evolving pattern” (AOR 35). The readers role as a structured act refers to the reader’s active role in bringing these different perspectives of the text together, as text cannot do this by itself.
For Iser, the implied reader also serves as an explanation for the tension that arises in the reader while reading – that is the tension between the reader’s subjectivity and the author’s subjectivity, in which the reader’s own disposition will “form the background to and a framework of reference for the act of grasping and comprehending” (AOR 36). Part of the reader’s role is to be a fictitious reader and to supply a referential background against which everything that is unfamiliar in the text can be understood (AOR 37). The structure of a text allows for different realisations. Every interpretation, then, “represents a selective realization of the implied reader” which can be judged against the background of any other realization which is “potentially present in the textual structure of the reader’s role” (AOR 37). The concept of the implied reader, thus, provides “a link between all the historical and individual actualizations of the text” (AOR 38). It serves as a “transcendental model” that enables us to analyze the structured effects of a literary text (AOR 38).
Iser’s concepts of the text as guide and the implied reader are important in my analysis.
The reader does not have full authority, but is an active participant guided by what is in the text: structure, style, theme, etc. Through the use of various nostalgic devices (which I will outline later in the section on Salmose) a familiar pattern is established, but at times frustrated as well. It is the defamiliarisation of the pattern that creates a textual ‘loss’ and makes the reader long back. The ‘performance’ of meaning is what causes an affective response. The interaction between text and reader, the knowledge and memory structures formed of what has been read before are defamiliarised and frustrated and as a result create a longing back, a reflection on earlier parts of the text. Building on these ideas of the text as guide, I will perform a nostalgic reading of Tender is the Night and To the Lighthouse and attempt to uncover the
“network of response-inviting structures” that move our implied reader, the nostalgic reader (AOR 34).
FISH: INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITIES AND AFFECTIVE STYLISTICS
In his criticism, Fish focusses on the reading process and its position in a larger institutional context. His earlier work, in which his main focus is on the reader’s experience of literary texts, includes Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost,” an important study on the role of the reader in Milton’s epic poem, and Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. In his later work, his essay “Interpreting the Variorum,” he introduces the concept of “interpretive communities,” which he then further develops in his book Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities, in which he explores the role the literary institution plays in the construction of meaning.
In his essay “Interpreting the Variorum,” Fish discusses the poems of John Milton and their interpretations. He argues that disagreements over what Milton’s poems mean are not
“meant to be solved but to be experienced” (465). He goes on to say that anyone or “any procedure that attempts to determine which of a number of readings is correct will
necessarily fail” (465). Many analyses of Milton’s poems draw different conclusions from the same evidence. Fish comments that any analysis which is based on the assumption that the meaning of a text is embedded within the text itself “will always point in as many directions as there are interpreters” (467). According to Fish, we need a “new set of questions based on new assumptions” (466). He notes that in many opposing analyses the basis for the critics’
judgements and interpretations lies actually within them, the readers, instead of the text itself, that is the meaning they attribute to particular lines coincides with their experience. Meaning is thus not already embedded within the text but is created through the reader’s experience.
Formalist analysis, which is built on the assumption that the form and structure of the text are the locus of meaning, disregards the reader and the reader’s experience. Fish opposes this formalist view that meaning “is embedded or encoded in the text, and that it can be taken in at a single glance” (473). He objects to an analysis that aims “to settle on a meaning” and intends to determine “the discrete units of significance” the text contains (473). A formalist approach like this focusses solely on the text and views it as an independent body able to generate meaning on its own, completely disregarding and devaluing the reader’s experience and the reading process. Fish proposes that we, instead, should describe “the structure of the reader’s experience rather than any structures available on the page” (468). The reader and
the reading process should be “the center of attention, where they are regarded not as leading to meaning but as having meaning” (474).
Fish has an intended reader in mind, namely a “reader whose education, opinions, concerns, linguistic competences … make him capable of having the experience the author wished to provide” (475). Even though it is the reader’s experience of the text that creates meaning, according to Fish this meaning is somewhat guided by the main efforts of the reader which “are always efforts to discern and therefore to realize (in the sense of becoming) an author’s intention” (475). Fish’s ideas differ from traditional intentional models in that he does not view the understanding of the author’s intention as a “single act,” but rather as a
“succession of acts readers perform in the continuing assumption that they are dealing with intentional beings” (475). According to Fish the author’s intention consists of “all the activities which make up what I call the structure of the reader’s experience” (476).
Describing the reader’s activities or the structure of the reader’s experience would then also mean describing the structure of the author’s intention. Fish thus believes “that the form of the reader’s experience, formal units, and the structure of intention are one, that they come into view simultaneously” (479).
This, however, poses a potential problem. If the reader’s interpretation is the source of the author’s intention, there’s a danger of an endless relativism, in which there are as many interpretations as readers. Fish’s solution to this problem is “interpretive communities.”
According to Fish, every competent reader belongs to an interpretive community. These communities are “made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions” (483). These strategies precede the act of reading and thus “determine the shape of what is read” (483).
There are a few problems with Fish’s theory. Firstly, in the model of the reading process he proposes, he argues that the reader’s process of reading and interpreting the text corresponds to apprehending the intention of the author, which is also a result of
interpretation. The problem, then, is that the text disappears and there is nothing left but intersubjective agreement. The process of interaction between text and reader that Iser describes is completely omitted. I do not believe the text should be disregarded completely and agree with Iser that the reader’s response is “controlled by the text” in the way that the text can act as a sort of “guide” to the reader. I will go into more detail about the way a text can function as a guide in the section about (emotion)scripts. However, I find Fish’s idea of
“interpretive communities” valuable. I agree that while there is not an infinite scope of
interpretations, multiple interpretations are possible. His idea of “interpretive communities”
demonstrates this. These multiple interpretations are not endless and individualistic, but rather they belong to different communities of readers. These communities consist of readers who share the same experiences and on which the text has a similar effect. This shows that while meaning may not be singular, readers can still have the same, or at least a similar experience of the same text. A text, thus, has the potential to generate the same, or a similar, emotional response in a large part of its audience.
So, when it comes to reader and text, I believe that we should not entirely dismiss one or the other but should consider both the text and the reader and try to understand how they interact with and affect each other. Instead of exploring “the structure of the reader’s experience rather than any structures available on the page” as Fish argues, I suggest
investigating how the structures available on the page influence the structure of the reader’s experience. In Fish’s own words “what does this [text] do” (Introduction 821) to evoke such a response in the reader? In the case of this thesis, I will thus examine how “the structures available on the page” evoke a nostalgic response in the reader. How exactly I am going to examine these structures I will discuss in the section on Salmose’s Poetics of Nostalgia.
EMOTIONS: STICKINESS, SCRIPTS AND PERFORMATIVITY
In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed argues that emotions are cultural practices instead of psychological states and she discusses the political implications of emotion.
Ahmed describes how the repetition of words and signs can evoke an emotional response.
This response, in turn, only reinforces further repetition. She calls this “stickiness.”
Emotions, according to Ahmed are not inside people, instead they shape people.
“Emotions shape the very surfaces of bodies, which take shape through the repetition of actions over time, as well as through orientations towards and away from others” (4). She aims to “track how emotions circulate between bodies, examining how they ‘stick’ as well as move” (4). Ahmed starts by examining moments of emotional impression:
Forming an impression also depends on how objects impress upon us. An impression can be an effect on the subject’s feelings (“she made an impression”). It can be a belief (“to be under an impression”). It can be an imitation or an image (“to create an impression”). Or it can be a mark on the surface (“to leave an impression”). We need to remember the “press” in an impression. It allows us to associate the experience of
having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace. (6)
When one surface comes into contact with another, an impression is made. The repetition of this impression then leads to “stickiness.” Ahmed describes stickiness as “an effect of the histories of contact between bodies, objects, and signs” (90). It is the result of the continuous repetition of impressions. In language when we use a certain word “in a certain way again and again, then that ‘use’ becomes intrinsic” (92). What we think is a natural emotional reaction coming from within us to a specific word or situation, is actually something external that exists as a result of (previous) contact between us and the word/situation. The meaning of that emotion is created through cultural and personal exchanges and impressions. The repetition of these impressions reiterates and confirms that meaning. This results in an
“accumulation of affective value” or “stickiness” (92). Ahmed also describes how “sticky signs” can stick to other words. These words, then, become associated and intrinsic to the sign. The feeling associated with the original sign can then also be evoked by just mentioning associated signs. Nostalgia, for example, can thus be evoked with explicit mention or
reference to the emotion. It can also be evoked through other words or settings that are often associated with it.
What Ahmed describes as stickiness shares many similarities with emotion scripts.
Emotion scripts are defined as
knowledge structures which contents are abstracted from concrete emotional episodes. . . Thus this knowledge, which is represented in memory like a script, is about events that are regularly experienced or that are rather often or explicitly communicated about. (Fischer 12-13)
Emotion scripts are thus formed through repetition of certain emotions in certain contexts, they are created through “stickiness.” Emotion scripts enable people to recognize, understand and communicate their own and other’s emotional reactions. They act as emotion guides, almost. “Script knowledge is easily available” when people experience an emotion and certain emotions have thus become intrinsic to certain situations (Fischer 13). For example, when a child secretly takes a cookie from the cookie jar, it might feel pleased with itself at first, but when the parents find out, it is able to read the situation and understand that is not the ‘correct’ reaction. The child understands very well that it is not supposed to take things
without asking, but only feels sorry and ashamed in reaction to the parents’ anger and disappointment. The emotion is thus produced by the situation and the child’s reading of the situation. If the parents never found out or did not care the child would not feel sorry or ashamed. The child is able to act ‘appropriately’ because it has script knowledge that provides the child with the right guidelines in a specific setting. The emotion, then, is not in the child but intrinsic to the situation. Emotion scripts, like “stickiness,” are affected by culture. “The contents of emotion scripts are shared and communicated within a culture”
(Fischer 16). This means that if a literary text functions as an emotion script, a larger audience could have the same emotional reaction to the same text because they share the same script knowledge. They belong to the same “interpretive community.”
Sarah McNamer argues that some literary texts, especially those in the medieval period, act as emotion scripts. She argues that the performative potential of literary texts is often overlooked or ignored and suggests “a more imaginative, large-scale experiment with the literal; with conceiving of a wide array of Middle English texts as literal scripts that vigorously enlist literariness as a means of generating feelings and putting them into play in history” (246). In order to understand how a text “makes” feeling she calls for the close reading of a text’s “affective stylistics,” a term she borrows from Fish. McNamer’s focus is on Medieval literary texts, but I believe that the method she proposes is also applicable to modern literary texts, especially since she borrows from Reader-Response Criticism.
Furthermore, modern texts are just as capable of generating a valid emotional response in their audience as medieval texts. I will treat Tender Is the Night and To the Lighthouse as if they were emotion scripts and examine how they generate a nostalgic response in their audience. I have outlined some of the methods I will employ in the section about Reader- Response Criticism, but I will go into more detail in the section on the Poetics of Nostalgia.
NOSTALGIA
Nostalgia is a complex emotion which meaning has evolved and changed over time. In Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, Fred Davis notes that everyone seems to have an understanding of what nostalgia feels like, but no one can really explain it (7). This seems to be the reality as no two definitions of nostalgia are the same. The Cambridge Dictionary describes nostalgia as “a feeling of pleasure and also slight sadness when you think about things that happened in the past.” The OED defines it as a “sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual’s own lifetime;
(also) sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past.” Linda Hutcheon, in “Irony,
Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” argues nostalgia occurs “when two different temporal moments, past and present, come together for you and, often, carry considerable emotional weight” (14). Even though these definitions all differ, a sense of longing and the involvement of several other emotions such as sadness and pleasure, all seem to be central to a definition of nostalgia. To provide some clarity, I will first outline a brief history of Nostalgia. Then, I will offer my definition of nostalgia and the nostalgic experience, and the methods I will employ to demonstrate how this nostalgic response is evoked in the reader.
“FROM A TREATABLE SICKNESS TO AN INCURABLE DISEASE”:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF NOSTALGIA
Nostalgia has its origins in medicine. Among the early diagnosed were students studying away from home, domestic help and servants working abroad and soldiers who were sent on missions to foreign countries. Some of its symptoms were “a lifeless and haggard
countenance,” “an indifference towards everything” and hearing voices: “one of the earliest symptoms is the sensation of hearing the voice of a person that one loves in the voice of another with whom one is conversing, or to see one’s family again in dreams” (Boym 3). The early understanding of nostalgia was thus related to a form of homesickness.
The term nostalgia was first coined by Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in 1688. Hofer believed that it was possible that “from the force of the sound Nostalgia to define the sad mood originating from the desire for return to one’s native land” (Boym 3). People affected by nostalgia “had an amazing capacity for remembering sensations, tastes, sounds, smells…”
(Boym 4). For example, Scottish soldiers, Highlanders in particular, succumbed to nostalgia when hearing the bagpipes. In this case the music “does not act precisely as music, but as a memorative sign” (Boym 4). Furthermore, Hofer believed that nostalgia produced “erroneous representations” that caused patients to lose touch with reality, confusing past and present and real and imaginary (Boym 3). Hofer’s coining of the term made nostalgia a widespread phenomenon across Europe.
When Nostalgia first emerged, it was a curable disease. There were some
medications, but their effects were nothing in comparison to the effects of a return to one’s native country, which was believed to be the best remedy. For Hofer, nostalgia was a sign of patriotism. Nostalgia shared some symptoms with melancholy, which was a disease known for producing “continuous fear, sorrow, discontent, superfluous cares and anxiety” (Boym 5).
However, unlike melancholia, nostalgia was seen as a more “democratic” disease “that threatened to affect soldiers and sailors displaced far from home as well as many country
people who began to move to the cities” (Boym 5). Nostalgia mainly presented itself in people who, for some reason, had to leave their home and was thus largely curable because all one had to do was return home.
Early understandings of nostalgia were thus largely related to homesickness and seemed easily curable. However, nostalgia started to become less and less curable. By the end of the eighteenth century, doctors discovered that returning to the motherland did, in many cases, no longer treat the symptoms. Nostalgia, thus, seemed to be based on a sense of loss which was not limited to one’s personal history. Moreover, what was lost was not always accurately remembered and those afflicted often did not remember where to look for or find what it was they were longing for. Physicians failed to find the cause of nostalgia in their patients’ mind or body. And in the twentieth century, the medical diagnosis for nostalgia died out. “Nostalgia turned from a treatable sickness into an incurable disease” (Boym 7).
In Boym’s view, the wide spread of nostalgia was not only caused by a dislocation in space but also by “the changing concept of time” (7). Longing was something that was prevalent long before the seventeenth century, not just in Europe and its literature but also in Chinese and Arabic poems. Yet nostalgia emerged and got its name at a particular moment in history. Boym explains this as follows: “nostalgia was diagnosed at a time when art and science had not yet entirely severed their umbilical ties and when the mind and body – internal and external wellbeing – were treated together” (7). What distinguishes modern day nostalgia from what it once was is not just its medicalisation, but also a rapidly changing world. “Modern day nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values” (Boym 8).
The emergence of nostalgia as a disease in the late seventeenth century took place “at the historical moment when the conception of time and history were undergoing radical changes” (Boym 8). Before mechanical clocks were invented in the thirteenth century, time was not really something that was on people’s minds. Time, in a way, did not exist or, at least, was not trackable and so people lived “in an attitude of temporal ease neither time nor change appeared to be critical and hence there was no great worry about controlling the future” (Boym 9). In late renaissance culture time was embodied in images of “Divine Providence and capricious Fate, independent of human insight or blindness” (Boym 9).
People did thus not feel the need to divide their time into past, present and future.
The French revolution was a major turning point that marked “a shift in European mentality” (Boym 9). It caused a transformation of the entire social order and created an entire generation of individualists who dreamed of “reinventing and revolutionizing their own
lives” (Boym 9). It unchained a “yearned-for future.” Because of revolution and industrial development, the idea of progress became central to nineteenth century culture and the representation of time changed.
The early modern era was the era of progress. It was the era of new possibilities, of the individual and of personal freedom and it opened up a space “for creative
experimentation with time that was not always linear and one-directional” (Boym 10).
Progress became a new theology of “objective time.” It was the first historical concept
“which reduced the temporal difference between experience and expectation to a single concept. What mattered in the idea of progress was improvement in the future not reflection on the past” (Boym 10). Progress became the new global narrative. It functioned as a “secular counterpart” to the Christian idea of eschatology. Progress applied to everything “from time to space, from the nation to the individual” (Boym 10). Manifestations of nostalgia were side effects of this new notion of progress because “progress was not only a narrative of temporal progression but also of spatial expansion” (Boym 10). Thus, nostalgia was the result of a new understanding of time and space. With this new understanding came the division between
“local” and “universal.” Those affected by nostalgia had “internalized this division, but instead of aspiring for the universal and the progressive” they looked back and yearned “for the particular” (Boym 11).
In the nineteenth century, doctors believed that the improvement of medicine along with universal progress would give them the ability to cure nostalgia again. This turned out to be true to some extent, but only because symptoms of nostalgia were confused with
symptoms of tuberculosis. Tuberculosis became treatable, nostalgia did not. The exploration of nostalgia now moved from doctors to poets and philosophers and symptoms of nostalgia came to be regarded as “a sign of sensibility or an expression of new patriotic feeling” (Boym 11). However, nostalgia was not just patriotic. Many poets and philosophers started exploring nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, instead of using it for patriotic ends. Kant, for example, saw philosophy as “a nostalgia for a better world” (Boym 13).
Then, nostalgia turned political. What used to be a personal emotion, in the early days experienced by homesick soldiers and later by romantic poets and philosophers turned into
“an institutional or state policy” (Boym 14). Nostalgia for its own sake was no longer tolerated, it had to serve the patriotic view of one’s nation. Individual longing was transformed into a collective belonging that relied on “past sufferings that transcend individual memories” (Boym 15). Nostalgia became heritage. The nation’s past was now known and accessible through national and provincial museums and urban memorials.
Ancient buildings and old monuments were restored to their original image. In this way nostalgia made its way into the public sphere and caused a collective longing to restore and preserve the nation’s past. Finally, in the twentieth century, nostalgia was privatised again.
The longing for home that was associated with early nostalgia and the nineteenth century collective patriotic longing turned into a private more abstract longing for one’s own
childhood. Nostalgia was now not a “maladjustment to progress” but a “maladjustment to the adult life” (Boym 53).
The notion of nostalgia, thus, went through enormous changes over the centuries. Due to revolution and progress in the modern world, nostalgia went “from treatable sickness to an incurable disease” (Boym 7). One thing that seemed somewhat stable in the understanding of nostalgia through the years, like in modern definitions, is that it contains an element of longing or yearning, whether it is for home, one’s childhood, the (imagined) past, or the (imagined) future. The nostalgic is longing for something, but what this something is seems subject to history and the individual.
POETICS OF NOSTALGIA
In Towards a Poetics of Nostalgia: The Nostalgic Experience in Modern Fiction, Niklas Salmose outlines a ‘poetics of nostalgia’, a method of analysing nostalgic art and separating it from art about nostalgia. Salmose speaks of nostalgia as an experience rather than of
nostalgia as an emotion. The reason for this is that basic emotions such as, for example, joy, anger, fear, mostly refer to relatively short durations of ‘feeling.’ Whereas more complex emotions, like nostalgia, are often constituted of a range of different basic emotions.
Furthermore, nostalgia’s complexity is also a result of “a variety of social cultural, and historical implications,” which is why Salmose prefers the term “nostalgic experience,”
which is the term that I will be using from now on as well (Poetics of Nostalgia 93-4).
Salmose divides the nostalgic emotional experience into three main phases:
motivation, nostalgia, and reflection. These phases, in chronological order, constitute the
‘nostalgic reaction.’ He defines these phases as follows:
Motivation: “In motivation we belong to the present now and are subjectively and subsequently transported into the object of our longings” (Poetics of Nostalgia 94) This transportation is triggered by what Salmose calls “memorative signs.” Memorative signs can be divided into four categories: souvenirs – which are physical objects, sensations – like sounds and music, situations – for example, seasons, and imaginations – like dreams, thoughts and hopes. Memorative signs can be direct – that is when there is an explicit link –
or indirect – when the signs are representational. Memorative signs in combination with “a dependence on the present moment as well as psychological and sociological facts” trigger the nostalgic subject, or nostalgee, to be transported “into the object of their longings”
(Poetics of Nostalgia 94).
Nostalgia: Nostalgia is Salmose’s term for the space or time of longing and remembrance and the “idealized, or selective, recollection of a distant then or there. This phase is
exemplified by a strong joyful, happy, positive emotional reaction” (Poetics of Nostalgia 95).
Reflection: The dreamy phase of nostalgia ebbs into an act of reflection. Reflection is exemplified by “a gradual transformation from joy to sadness resulting in melancholia or even bitterness that is a reaction to an emerging knowledge of the transient quality of our nostalgia, the irreversibility of time” (Poetics of Nostalgia 95).
When it comes to the literary nostalgic experience, Salmose translates these three phases into a two-fold experience, in which motivation and nostalgia become “happiness”
and reflection remains reflection. Happiness, then, is “the remembrance of an idealized image or event that brings immediate happiness and great emotional affection as the senses unite in recreating something past and perhaps even lost” (“Reading Nostalgia” 68). Reflection is “a more intellectual and reasoning state,” in which “one is reminded of the passing status of the idealized image or event” and “a melancholia is created” as it ends “bittersweet” (“Reading Nostalgia” 68). Happiness and reflection can be used ina text to create a literary nostalgic experience in the reader. “One part can engage and thrill the reader into experiencing it as a present. A second part confronts the reader through melancholia and reflection upon his or her own textual memory of the first part” (“Reading Nostalgia” 68). The outcome is a
“fictional creation, or substitution of the nostalgic experience” (“Reading Nostalgia” 68).
Salmose also distinguishes between internal and external nostalgia. Internal nostalgia is “related to a personal memory” (Poetics of Nostalgia 122). External nostalgia includes
“every kind of nostalgia that is not related to one’s personal past” (Poetics of Nostalgia 122).
Internal and external nostalgia do not really reflect the social and private influence on the nostalgic experience, but they merely mark when or what we are nostalgic for. If we are nostalgic for antiquity in general, our nostalgia is external, whereas if we are nostalgic for our childhood home, the experience is internal (Poetics of Nostalgia 122). When it comes to the literary nostalgic experience, then, an internal nostalgic reaction is closely connected to the reader’s own biography and is not necessarily evoked because the text itself is nostalgic. An external nostalgic experience would be “one that is triggered through art but does not, in an obvious way, work in ways of private and personal experience” (Poetics of Nostalgia 159). A
reader can thus feel nostalgic when reading a text for purely private and personal reasons that have nothing to do with the text per se, but more with the reader’s personal background and memory. A reader can also feel nostalgic when reading a novel because nostalgia is an emotion that is part of the fictive world of the text. The reader is then thus simply relating to a character. These forms of nostalgia or not of interest to Salmose and also not to me in this thesis. What Salmose focusses on in his poetics and what I will focus on as well is when the reader experiences nostalgia through the text that is “not part of the fictive world (non- diegetic) but in line with the author’s intentions” (Poetics of Nostalgia 160). This is the distinction between art about nostalgia (fiction which content is about nostalgia) and
nostalgic art (fiction where the experience of the text is nostalgic) (Poetics of Nostalgia 161).
In order to be able to analyse nostalgic art, Salmose has created a toolbox of several nostalgic strategies that seem to work for more than one single person. These tools are divided into stylistic and narratological strategies, I will outline the strategies that will be most important to my analysis.
Stylistics
The first stylistic strategy Salmose describes is that of nostalgic tenses, for example, using present tense in a past narration or how changing between past and present tense can modify the mood of the narration. He also stresses the importance of past progressives. Past
progressives signal “a temporality somewhere in between past and ongoing present; it does not completely belong to a past event, but it is not entirely a present activity either” (Poetics of Nostalgia 185). Past progressives also make scenes more visual, “actualizing a feeling that it is happening before us” (Poetics of Nostalgia 185).
Proximate and non-proximate words also are an important stylistic strategy. “Words, mostly deictic pronouns, in their proximate and non-proximate form can unfold the duality of time and space” (Poetics of Nostalgia 187). Examples of proximate and non-proximate pairs are I and you, this and that, here and there, and now and then. In using these antagonistic pairs the author can achieve “a sense of nostalgic temporality and space between two values”
(Poetics of Nostalgia 187).
Another stylistic tool is the use of asyndeton and polysyndeton. Salmose argues that
“nostalgic imagery is often constituted by long and winding sentences” (Poetics of Nostalgia 188). And clauses in these long and winding sentences are coordinated by asyndeton – use of comma – and polysyndeton – the use of ‘and.’ Commas and ‘ands’ “function as pausing elements instead of periods.” They create flow and rhythm by coordinating the length and
pauses in clauses and sentences. Asyndeton “increases the sense of speed and energy by disregarding normal punctuation” (Poetics of Nostalgia 189). This can be useful when conveying “motion, tumult, and vigour as part of an exceptional memory” (Poetics of Nostalgia 189). The ‘and’ in a polysyndeton carries even more nostalgic value as it has the ability “to infuse awe, pathos and poignancy to a text. Its general seriousness combines well with lyricism or symbolism in order to fulfil the gravity of the nostalgic emotion” (Poetics of Nostalgia 189). Another reason polysyndeton carries so much nostalgic value is because of the rhythmic contributions it makes to a sentence. Polysyndeton has a repetitive character and it graphically stands out from other words, making it easily recognisable and setting a
“rhythmic pattern that alludes to time, clocks, and progress” (Poetics of Nostalgia 190).
Asyndeton and polysyndeton thus have the capacity to emphasise or create movement, energy, impressions, pathos, and rhythms. This, then, either enhances an already nostalgic scene or it creates a nostalgic mood of its own. Especially polysyndeton produces awe and emotional emphasis as well as repetition and rhythmic patterns (Poetics of Nostalgia 190-1).
Narratological strategies
The first narratological strategy Salmose describes is anachrony. Anachronies are discrepancies between story and narrative. Genette defines anachronies as “connections between the temporal order of succession of the events in the story and the pseudo-temporal order of their arrangement in the narrative” (Poetics of Nostalgia 35). There are different ways in which narrative and story can differ in time. One of the options is analepsis, also known as flashback or retrospection. Analepsis can create nostalgic meaning through its capacity to “modify the meaning of past occurrences after the event” (Genette 56). The capacity of analepsis to “revalue or recharge” a past event with a present meaning makes the event susceptible to nostalgia (Poetics of Nostalgia 192). This does not always have to be the case but a past event contrasted with the present attitude often gives the event a nostalgic twist.
Another form of anachrony is prolepsis – anticipation or flashforward. There are two types of prolepsis. Internal prolepsis which is a movement from the present point in the narrative to a later point and then back again. Internal prolepsis often uses a future event as “a return to the time of narrating to remember or evaluate the present event” (Poetics of
Nostalgia 195). It is not necessarily the content of the flashforward that is of interest but rather the fact that the narrator “learned later” that “creates a temporal flux,” a notion of already remembering something that has not yet happened. “The notion of remembering an
event from a future perspective grants this event a particular, even strange, sense of importance and truly transient character” (Poetics of Nostalgia 195-6). The other type of prolepsis is external prolepsis, which is when it is not certain that the future event that is described will happen or not. External prolepses are often addressed in “an imaginary way”
(Poetics of Nostalgia 195). An external prolepsis thus refers to an event in the future outside of the narrative. Prolepses can work nostalgically because they often involve “an anticipation of a future event” which causes one to feel nostalgic for the present event (Poetics of
Nostalgia 198).
Frequency is another narratological tool that can contribute to the nostalgic value of a text. Frequency is concerned with the quantitative relationship between story and narrative.
Genette defines four different possible relationships:
1. Narrating once what happened once
2. Narrating several times what happened several times 3. Narrating several times what happened once
4. Narrating once what happened several times (114-6)
Categories 3 and 4 are the most interesting when it comes to nostalgia. Category 3 is what we can call repetitions. There are two different types of repetitions: the repetitions are either exactly the same or almost identical, for example, “I got dressed in the morning. I got dressed in the morning” or the repetitions differ but they regard the same event, for example, “I got dressed in the morning. In the morning I put on my clothes.” Category 4 is called iterative frequency, which would look like this: “For many years, I got dressed in the morning.” To distinguish between the two different kinds of repetition, Salmose refers to them as repetition (identical) and recollection (different). Due to the exactness of repetition, the reader is forced back into the narrative and it also carries “a movement forward” (Poetics of Nostalgia 201).
Recollection, on the other hand, does not necessarily force the reader back into the narrative but rather “opens up new ways of looking at the story” (Poetics of Nostalgia 201).
Repetitions, due to their “narrative oddity,” create an impression of being outside of the narrative. In this way, repetitions become emotionally charged bursts “from either the narrative itself or the consciousness of a character” (Poetics of Nostalgia 201). Repetitions can work in five different ways. Salmose describes these functions as follows:
1. As rhythmical time markers, such as … with polysyndeton or repetition of specific words and phrases.
2. As a means of emphasizing clock time.
3. As a tragic element, hammering in the unavoidable progress of time as well as an upcoming tragedy.
4. As a reinforcement of a specific meaning or atmosphere through the repetition of keywords.
5. As a means of forcing the reader back into textual time in order to either re- evaluate or remind of a past textual event. (Poetics of Nostalgia 201-2)
Recollections, on the other hand, work slightly differently. Recollections serve as triggers of past story events in the narrative and “acknowledge the importance of this past scene and thus can inflict idealization or a stronger sense of loss” (Poetics of Nostalgia 202).
Recollections are often not exact and influenced by a character’s or narrator’s memory. This causes them to become “sad and melancholic in the way that they cannot reproduce the truth or reality in an exact degree” (Poetics of Nostalgia 202). Frequency can also be iterative, so instead of “happened” “used to happen” is used. Iterative frequency explores rituals and recurring events and in this way “evokes the nostalgic idea of how rituals and seasons trigger nostalgic memories” (Poetics of Nostalgia 202). Iterative frequency also treats memory nostalgically instead of memorial, “since it lacks the specificity of memory and embraces the vagueness of nostalgic memory” (Poetics of Nostalgia 202).
The next narratological device is duration. There are four basic forms of “narrative movement” (Genette 94).
1. What Genette calls “descriptive pause” (94). This slows down the narrative through the use of a high number of details or detours.
2. Ellipses, when there is a gap in the narrative due to the omission of a part of the sequence of events.
3. Scene, when “narrative and story are close in execution” (Poetics of Nostalgia 203), for example, in dialogue.
4. Summary, which speeds up the narrative, resulting in a “longer stretch of story time” (Poetics of Nostalgia 204).