Baggage Baggage Boym Boym
Observation 1. There are people in the world who don’t even know who West Bromwich Albion are, aren’t there?
Observation 2. According to the rules of formal kitsch nostalgia, people called ‘Svetlana’ are more likely to be Soviet spies than anything else.
We’re here because we can’t really go any further with dealing in any kind of positive way with the subject of Hauntography without taking a good look at the thought of Dr. Svetlana Boym, and especially the concepts of Reflective Nostalgia and Restorative Nostalgia. By the time we’re done here, I’m hoping I can satisfy myself that this project is nothing to do with nostalgia at all, and answer the stale, hangover / hung-over question “Nostalgia Compared to What?”, and I’m going to state my conclusion early, so as to get it out of the way. Sooner or later, we’re also going to get around to Virtual Reality, and what an awful false start it’s been (three times, now), and here is a good place to point out that was I was always given to understand that the expression originated with Antonin Artaud and not Henri Bergson (There’s a cutely regionalist joke by Dr. Boym here in her use of the name ‘Bill Gates’. The nominal centre for V.R. research was….at an education institution no more than two subway stops, or one hours’ walk from where she worked, and it’s hardly likely that she’s have been unaware of this. I guess it’s better to credit the opposite side of the country than The Other University.)
Reflective nostalgia is concerned with patina, texture, olfaction and degradation of memory. It is abstract. It has no body.
Restorative nostalgia is concerned with recalling precise details and minutiae. It is figurative. It has no soul.
You can see where I’m going with this, right?
Eight legs good, five legs bad. We’re nothing if not generalising reductivists here. Restorative nostalgia is the kind that tries to dominate the present and the future with the past. Here’s Peter Pomerantsev on this very subject, from an article I had archived, but now can’t seem to track down (fittingly enough)
“Restorative nostalgia’, argued Boym, strives to rebuild the lost homeland with ‘paranoiac determination’, thinks of itself as ‘truth and tradition’, obsesses over grand symbols and ‘relinquish[es] critical thinking for emotional bonding . . . In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill”.
America made Great Again. England Reclaimed. A New Levantine Caliphate or New Tzarist Empire. The definition of reactionary thought, which does not merely seek to recall the past and out-do it, but to recall the past by means of actual Necromancy / Necrophilia.
Here’s the band Mayhem on the subject. Mayhem were earnest reactionaries, Restorative Nostalgics of the smallest kind, people who unironically attempted to de-Christianise Norway by burning churches, and unapologetically killed and died and went to jail. So they, at least, should know how the Restorative Nostalgic mindset works:
“Not even the memories are left
Back after such a long time
The stone is cold as death
But what formed its true fears
Only the wind is able to tell
Tell me – what did you see there
In the darkness – of the past
The eyes – stares so empty
The mouth – screams so silent”
This, as far as anyone can tell, is what Restorative Nostalgia actually looks like.
The song is, as far as one can tell, a meditation on being confronted with a weather-worn stone carving but the important point to take away is not the wish to understand, but the will to re-animate. The narrator, it seems, has a Restorative longing to not merely learn about, or even understand the darkness of the past, but to have it as a clear presence in the Present. But the silent scream of the carving is not even authorial intent; it’s the result of centuries of weathering. The graven mouth that’s screaming in 1992 was doing something quite different in 992 or 1492 or whenever the carving was completed. Smiling? Gurning? Laughing like a blind idiot idol at the imbecility of existence? That’s the problem with Restorative Nostalgia. The thing you’re trying to resurrect is almost certainly not the thing that its’ designer had in mind……
And here’s M.R. James, on the consequences of Restorative Nostalgia:
” No one has ever seen an Anglo-Saxon crown, or at least no one had. But our man gazed at us with a rueful eye.’Yes’,he said, ‘and the worst of it is I don’t know how to put it back.”
This passage is from “A Warning to the Curious”, a story itself shaded with myths of Nationalism and Extreme Conservatism, which are digenically stated to be myths and folk tales. Superficially, it’s a story about Hubris and Nemesis; or at least about how it’s a really bad idea to go rummaging around looking for buried treasure which you’ve already been told is protected by a vengeful guardian spirit. What it’s really about, however, is the sentence is ‘I don’t know how to put it back’. The idea that Paxton doesn’t know how to bury an artefact in the ground isn’t the point; the point is that he doesn’t know how to reverse the process of Restorative Nostalgia he’s started.
Superficially, once again, Paxton’s transgression is against a very specific kind of British nationalism: he has dug up a Saxon crown which is the last remaining of three which exert some indefinite guardianship or protection over the East Coast of England, and he has done this during World War I. But even as he outlines this transgression, James undercuts himself. There was never an invasion of England planned during that conflict, and if there had been, it would have come from France and not Holland. So what has Paxton done to provoke the entity he unwittingly calls up? He’s disturbed a thing that was best left buried and forgotten. The spirit is given to be that of a man named John Ager, and agar is a substance used in microbiology for cultivating bacteria. Left undisturbed, agar jelly can grow bacterial colonies at astonishing speed, and some of them can end up toxic.
It seems odd at first that an antiquarian, conservative and traditionalist like James would come up with such a vivid and stern admonition against Restorative Nostalgia, but I can’t imagine any responsible conservative or traditionalist coming to any other conclusion. Conservatives and traditionalists exist because there are traditions that should be conserved, and that’s a very different thing from resurrecting ancient things and giving them power over the present. Radicals and Conservatives might disdain each other, but in this at least, they need each other.
James’ cracked Transatlantic mirror, H.P. Lovecraft, has his most calculating, skilled, cynical and self-serving antagonist, the undead sorcerer Joseph Curwen, put it this way:
“I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe. . . . Have ye Wordes for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you have. . . . ”
Curwen does not make the mistake of Restorative Nostalgia. Once he has been reclaimed form the past, he diligently sets about sequestering the knowledge and skills necessary for the process back within his own domain. Having stormed the citadel, he locks the door very, very firmly behind him. Curwen is a piece of Restorative Nostalgia, a blood-drinking necrophiliac who has chosen to not understand that he should be dead. He wants the Wordes for Laying att all times readie, because restorative nostalgia is exclusively for the benefit of the restored and never the restorer.
‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ is set in Providence, Rhode Island, but the academic centre of Lovecraft’s world is Miskatonic University, a thin disguise for Harvard, where Dr. Boym worked from 1988 onwards. One of her areas of interest was parsing and understanding the emigre experience, and it was through this lens that she formulated the concept for which she will be most remembered: Homesickness and the Sickness Of Being At Home. Cosmopolitan conflicts, in the actual sense of the word and the weasel sense of the world.
“not about having everything illuminated or obscured, but about conspiring and playing with shadows,”
“not enlightenment but luminosity”
Not exerting ownership of the Subject, but willingly and equitably making oneself the Object of it.
Are there positive ways to Objectify? Not if the target is an external entity. But there are ways to Become the Object; to do a thing instead of having it done to you. You can’t avoid being the thing to which the Verb happens, but you can choose which Verbs happen to You. You can’t choose not to be a servant. But you can choose your master wisely. And while we’re at it, doesn’t “conspiring and playing with shadows” make a pretty good shorthand for the joissance of espionage fiction? Can’t you imagine it being used as a description of Le Carre or Ambler? Isn’t it exactly why we’re so uncertain whether we’d want to work for Smiley or Karla? Is it worth pointing out that it was Dr. Boym herself who decided to live her life as what Circus-speak calls ‘legends’. Svetlana, Susana, Zenita and Olga Carr.
The difference between enlightenment and luminosity is the difference between a searchlight on a guard-tower on the East German border and a slightly under-powered bedside lamp. “Luminosity” is precisely the aching, satisfied-longing quality that Lovecraft gives to his narration of Charles Ward’s return to Providence (and his simultaneous fall from providence) after his self-imposed exile. But no sooner is Ward’s homesickness assuaged but he becomes sick of home, and he makes, according to Boyn, the fatal mistake of assuming that Reflective Nostalgia is fiction and Restorative Nostalgia is fact, simply because it is more anally obsessed with detail and precision. Restorative Nostalgia turns out to have the power to resurrect one evil old wizard. Reflective Nostalgia has the power to do so much more, because it defers the homecoming for as long as possible, for ever, if possible. The tragedy of Charles Dexter Ward is that he doesn’t heed the warnings that Curwen gave, to be wary of what exactly you are resurrecting, even as Curwen relies on that precise piece of ignorance to actualise his own resurrection. The subtle difference between illumination and luminosity is a gnostic one, and it may be unavoidable that something dualist is gong to be invoked here. The source of illumination is not only obvious but is made to me deified and fetishised. The source of luminescence is interior and not Outside, but for luminescence to exist, it must come from Somewhere, even if the source is not readily identifiable.
“Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones”. This idea is going to become important to us, soon.
Let’s leave Dr. Bohm for now, with this:
” Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, just as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment, or critical reflection”
The ontological endpoint of Restorative Nostalgia is paranoia and conspiracy. The Restorative Nostalgic need never be answerable or accountable for themselves, because all mistakes, failings, shortcomings and suboptimal outcomes are the consequence of external influences. As in the case of Postcolonial Melancholy, the external is inevitably the foreign, the immigrant or the strange (or the queer). And if the causal nexus cannot be understood in terms of the observable or reproducible (hint: it almost never can), there’s always the recourse to the hidden, the secret. For Charles Dexter Ward, the real evil is not the exotic other, not what he finds in Warsaw or Prague or Bucharest, it has always been buried in a graveyard close to his own home (which is to say, it’s not from haunted, exotic Eastern Europe – the locus of Boym’s homesickness; it’s from New England, the place of her sickness-of-home), and when it takes up residence first in his fireplace, and then in his attic, it ceases to be even figuratively Outside.
If reflective nostalgia is gnostic (wherein the source of luminescence is unknown, and not so much unknow-able as unimportant) then the conspiratorial is Manichaean, an unending battle between the Sons of Light and the Forces of Darkness (there’s a gender that’s always left out of that dualism, and it’s inescapable that the Manicheans would like us to make the substitution ourselves, especially since it alliterates so nicely. Like Charles Man/son, Man/i isn’t telling you what to think, just helping you to stand up. This presence-in-absence is something Eurotrash Horror Cinema is particularly adept at playing with, and we’ll come to that soon, too, just as soon as we get around to Jesus Franco and David Rudkin.) A key component of Manicheanism is that men are the swords that souls fight with, and nobody sees the hands, and it’s here that we can find some of the origins of the eternal conspiracy, the abnegation of responsibility that paranoia allows for: It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it. Charlie Manson made me do it. Or MKULTRA. Or The Aliens. But always The Other.
We’re getting close to understanding why Restorative Nostalgia is such a poisonous influence here, and it’s not because we might actually resurrect an evil seventeenth-century wizard or disinter the one totemic artefact that’s keeping England safe from a Prussian invasion. It’s because Restorative Nostalgia offers the comfort blanket of dissociating oneself from consequences. Hauntography, let’s not forget, is about resuming or restarting modes of operation that were halted, not about allowing the truly dead to do anything except rot in peace.