Critical engagements with nostalgia

I was re-reading, after many years, Martin Wickrmasinghe's classic work 'Ape Gama' published some seventy years ago. It has been admirably translated into English by Lakshmi de Silva under the title 'Lay Bare the Roots.' I like the pun in the title, because Wickraminghe's text is as much about roots as it is about routes. To lay bare the routes that he has traversed is indeed an important segment of the intended meaning of this book.

'Lay Bare the Roots' is important in assessing the body of work produced by Wickremasinghe for two reasons. First, this manifests his resolute determination to open up a narrative path for realistic fiction, moving away from the fantasy-driven, didactic fiction that was current at the time culminating triumphantly with the novel 'Gam Peraliya,' Second, the sense of nostalgia that animates 'Lay Bare the Roots', and the author's distinctive way of harnessing it, offers us a useful key with which to unlock some of his deeper ambitions as a writer.

'Lay Bare the Roots' deals with the conditions of Southern Sri Lanka nearly a century ago. The author has sought to recapture the sights and sounds of his young days realistically and vividly. He uncovers for us memorably, not without a sense of nostalgia, some of the more interesting characters that he encountered, the arts and crafts that were practiced, as well as pranks of young children. He also describes his first exposure to urban culture, thereby, through the ploy of juxtaposition, deepening our understanding of peasant culture. Thanks to the kindness and largesse of my friend Ranga Wickremasinghe, I was able to experience first hand the landscapes that his father marveled at, experiencing the feel of the earth he walked and the air he breathed.

A sense of nostalgia, the loss of a certain kind of social living and structure of feeling, clearly pervades this book. Nostalgia is indeed a concept that has stirred a many-sided interest among cultural theorists in recent times. The word nostalgia is derived from two Greek words meaning 'homesickness.' This word was put into circulation by a Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer who employed the term to signify a medical condition of soldiers who were desperately keen to return home. However, today, the term has moved beyond its original circumference of meaning in medical discourse and has entered the discussions of cultural theorists where it occupies an ambivalent space flanked by the contradictory ideas of homesickness and being sick of home.

Nostalgia signifies both a longing for lost space and longing for lost time. The recognition of irreversibility of time is a factor that sets in motion nostalgia. Svetlana Boym, who in my judgment, has written the most prescient book on nostalgia ('The Future of Nostalgia') says that, 'At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time - the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broad sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress.' When we examine the philosophical strategies of thinkers such as Nietzsche (his concept of eternal return, for example), we see how they have sought to overcome the irreversibility of time, and thereby undermine the power of nostalgia.

There is a very complex and fascinating relationship between nostalgia and modernity. It seems to me that there is a natural pairing of the idea of nostalgia with the idea of modernity. At one level, nostalgia is the polar opposite of modernity. But at another level, perhaps a deeper one, nostalgia and modernity are closely intertwined and nostalgia becomes a defining feature of modernity. If we pause to explore the writings of the French poet Baudelaire, the originator of the modern idea of modernity, we see that there is a curious juxtaposition of modernity and nostalgia, one feeding the other. In Martin Wickremasinghe's 'Lay Bare the Roots', too, we see this inter-animation of modernity and nostalgia pressing against the swirling of local culture.

As I stated earlier the concept of nostalgia has generated a great deal of discussion and debate among cultural theorists. Fredric Jameson, in discussing postmodernism, sees the preoccupation with nostalgia as a failure to engage seriously with history. His discussion of pastiche, which he sees as a central feature of postmodern cultural production, attests to this fact. Pastiche is different from parody; parody has a serous intent and a focused interest in history. Pastiche lacks such seriousness, and Jameson connects it to nostalgia.

Some critics like Linda Nochlin argue that Jameson's position, with its unconcealed longing for history, is also a form of nostalgia. Susan Stewart who has done some important work on nostalgia conceptualizes it as a social disease, while the more conservative-minded social critic Christopher Lasch identifies it as an abdication of memory. Some theorists draw on the observations of Freud that nostalgia indexes the suffering produced by the abyss between the past and the present.

The concept of nostalgia has made its presence in contemporary film theory. Some film scholars have been quick to identify a film genre which they have termed heritage films. Heritage films are largely British productions which seek to depict in glowing terms the past of England, and hence their uncontrollable interest in Shakespeare and Jane Austen. These films, which look nostalgically back at the past glories of England, focus more on the idea of place, and spectacle than the dynamics of the narrative and complexities of human psychology. Here, we see how nostalgia gets entangled in imperatives of commercialism and marketability. These films use as their selling-point this idea of nostalgia.

There is a very interesting connection between nostalgia and utopia. Utopia is an idealization of the future, and nostalgia is the idealization of the past. However, at a deeper level of social comprehension, the idealization of the past becomes a projection of the future.

The social commentator, Michael Ignatieff, in his book 'The Needs of Strangers' says that, 'political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected on to the future as a wish. Whenever I try to imagine a future other than the one towards which we seem to be hurtling, I find myself dreaming a dream of the past.'

The concept of nostalgia has become a topic of conversation not only among film scholars but also among cultural theorists of various stripes. For example, the eminent anthropologist, Renato Rosaldo, who conducted important research in the Philippines, talks about imperial nostalgia. He says that the imperialist nostalgia deploys a pose of innocent yearning to capture the imagination of people and mask its complicity with brutal hegemony. As he remarks, 'the relatively benign character of most nostalgia facilitates imperialist nostalgia's capacity to transform the responsible colonial agent into an innocent bystander.'

Martin Wickremasinghe's 'Lay Bare the Roots', and later novels, underline an aspect of nostalgia that is often neglected by modern cultural theorists - its potentiality as a usable critical frame in social re-description.

To my mind, nostalgia can be usefully divided into two main categories, the idealized nostalgia and critical nostalgia. What we find in the available critical literature, by and large, is a form of idealized, essentialized, nostalgia. It is seen primarily in a negative light as a kind of naïve idealization, a sentimental excursion, into the past. This is indeed true so far as it goes. The essentialized nostalgia is an attempt to return to a pure moment, a space of idealization, it is a norm against which the present is measured and the future is projectively re-constructed. Indeed, it is a place of the mind than a place on earth.

However, there is another form of nostalgia which I term critical nostalgia. What one finds here is not a desire to return to a pure, and impossible space, but one that encourages us to observe a complex commingling of the past and the present.

It is indeed this form of nostalgia that one senses in Wickremasinghe's 'Lay Bare the Roots' and his later writings. He sees the past not as a space of refuge, a topographical imaginary, but one that is full of possibilities for the future if only we are able to exercise our critical faculties, and sort out the good from the bad. That is why I have chosen to call it a critical nostalgia. Clearly, Wickremasinghe is espousing this form of nostalgia. It is important to bear in mind the fact that the thread that connects all his writings is Buddhist thought, and the idea of flux and multiple causalities underlying any incident - which lie at the heart of Buddhist worldview - has inflected his ideas of nostalgia.

Martin Wickremasinghe trilogy of novels, 'Gamperaliya', 'Kaliyugaya', 'Yuganthaya', which I have discussed in detail in my book, 'Sinhala Novel and the Public Sphere', display the power of critical nostalgia I am referring to.

These three novels chart a very important social transformation that took place in this country - the collapse of feudalism and the rise and spread of the middle class in terms of interpersonal relationships. In his hands, the critical nostalgia that I am focusing on has proved to be a highly productive enframing device of his narrative.

Wickremasinghe's three novels reconfigure the rise of the indigenous middle class and the cultivation of seeds of its self-destruction. The author is clearly arguing against the linear, putatively universal model of modernity imposed on our thinking by western social science.

He is also making the related point that it is only by drawing judiciously on the vitality and nurturing power of traditional culture that we are able to construct meaningful and wholesome lives for ourselves and meet the manifold challenges unleashed by the fissiparous forces of modernity.

The point of view that Wickremasinghe is articulating is wrapped up in the concept of critical nostalgia that I referred to earlier. It is indeed a mark of his mental agility that he was able to enforce that connection.

A distinctive feature of critical nostalgia, as given figuration by Wickremasinghe, is that it is quick to recognize the drawbacks of the past, the inevitability of change, even as it is holds up for admiration the power of traditional cultures and ways of understanding as living presences in modern society. The erasure of the past by supercilious neglect is not a strategy that appeals to him.

What Martin Wickremasinghe has sought to do in 'Lay Bare the Roots' and in his subsequent writings, is to demonstrate how the idea of nostalgia ramifies out through different cultural registers, ways of social understanding and making sense of the world.

It is also a way of mining the past for a guiding moral imagination, by searching for deeper continuities between the past and present. In the absence of an illuminating cultural memory, Wickramasinghe seems to be warning, we risk becoming alienated from our deeper selves. Nostalgia constitutes an unavoidable experience for most of us; yet, he seems to be implying, that we do not have a symbolic language that can capture its true complexity.

The idea of nostalgia as a terrain of critical engagement is beautifully exemplified in Gunadasa Amarasekera's poem, Nijabima Avarjana.'