The Great American Column
Rosenblatt, Roger
Roger Rosenblatt The Great American Column Nostalgia as One of the Fine Arts One sure sign that a cultural idea has become a national craze is when people begin to make money off of it. We knew...
...The big bands...
...College students reminisce about the Big Band era...
...Teenagers dream on the fifties...
...Precisely what kind of a way is hard to tell...
...Tough guys and their molls...
...Is there a difference between this passage and "Early TV Fads and follies...
...based an advertising campaign around "write on, brother, write on...
...There is the contextual difference - though those "cozy nights" of the ad are within the same fantasy as the "sugarsticky girl" - but if the difference is only one of contest, then nostalgia might be considered the stream of consciousness of the general, and art of the specific...
...In our time, that isn't so...
...Yet this is also the aim of much of art...
...The central qualification for nostalgia is that it be directed toward something no longer with us, something remote and irrecoverable...
...Nickel ice cream cones with chocolate sprinkles...
...We saw the return to nature impulse take hold when Coke became the real thing, and using Ivory Soap was "getting back to basics...
...If nostalgia accomplishes its purpose, if we are genuinely moved to the recreation of intense feeling by its words and music and pictures galore, if the theme from "Fibber McGee and Molly" or a pin-up of Betty Grable brings as round a tear to our eye as Brahms or the painting of a green field, is nostalgia art...
...Fads and follies...
...Stream of consciousness was not a literary technique when William James conceived of it, but it became one (and known) in the hands of writers of fiction...
...Early TV...
...Take Proust, to pursue the point: "When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered...
...Still, alone, more fragile but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and (continued on page 26)on page 26...
...The Kennedy years are sentimentalized in great doses these days, even (especially) in the hypercritical books, and and Tom Wolfe sentimentalizes the new journalism every month by recalling the grand old days when he and Pete Hamil swaggered in newsprint and changed the universe...
...Its simple aim is to trigger our private memories and crystallize our recollection of a time of great feeling, one from which we are now removed...
...The Greeks, probably thinking of Ulysses, equated the feeling with a longing to return home (nostos-return home...
...algos-pain), implicitly connecting nostalgia with nostology, the study of aging, under the assumption that nostalgia should be the practice of the old...
...The Nostalgia Book Club helps you bring back your happy yesterdays...
...A sugar-sticky girl shoveling scoopfuls of creams for a Christian brother...
...No longer the name for some vague, internal sensation, it has become a way of looking at the world...
...Those great movies...
...Tough guys and their molls...
...singers who really sang...tunes you could whistle...
...Nostalgia seems to be most heatedly felt by people who are too young to remember anything...
...We knew that "right on" had come into its own when the Papermate Pen Co...
...We know that nostalgia is not a literary technique, but it is nevertheless very close to one...
...One does not need to have danced the Big Apple to yearn for its revival...
...In fact, nostalgia has invaded everything to a fascinating extent...
...In words and music and pictures galore, you enjoy again the fun side of the 1920-1955 days...
...Nickel ice cream cones and chocolate sprinkles...
...The catalogue mixes memory and desire, like Eliot's April...
...The following ad for something called the Nostalgia Book Club doesn't define nostalgia, but it does put forth some elements: "Here's one club that smiles through the gloom...
...We knew that modern psychology had entrenched itself when Tijuana Smalls were billed as cigars without identity crises, and Kent got it all together...
...If dollars do go out of style, they will become objects of nostalgia themselves...
...the yearning is enough...
...So, we also know that nostalgia is here to stay, because record companies, dress designers, publishers, and movie houses are raking in the dollars like they're going out of style...
...Similarly one doesn't have to feel nostalgic for things too long past...
...The long, cozy nights when radio was king...
...When Joyce has Bloom meander about Dublin, he puts the following list into his head: "Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch...
...What has happened, evidently, is that people have begun to sentimentalize experience at such a rapid rate that the sentimentalization has become at least as interesting and memorable as the experiences themselves...
Vol. 6 • March 1973 • No. 6
