John Burt Foster
cano and Chicana literature and represses Chicano historical memory, thus
confirming Fredric Jameson’s point regarding the “depthlessness” of historical
memory as a feature of the postmodern.3 These points notwithstanding,
Rewriting North American Borders is, to my knowledge, the first book on Chicano
and Chicana narrative by a German scholar. Seen in this light, Kaup’s
book is an accomplishment, of value to those who feel enthusiasm even
when reviewing ideologically predictable interpretations.
Roberto Cantú, California State University, Los Angeles
The Future of Nostalgia. By Svetlana Boym. New York: Basic, 2001. xix + 404
pp.
The temporal to-and-fro embedded in the title of Svetlana Boym’s most
recent book has various antecedents. They include (on this Russian literature
professor’s native grounds) Vladimir Nabokov’s playful sense of “anticipatory
memory” (272) and Victor Shklovsky’s “knight’s move” metaphor
for an innovative author’s relation to tradition, in which linear prolongation
swerves diagonally into new territory (30). Not surprisingly, another source
is that locus classicus in the last century’s reappraisal of historicism, Walter
Benjamin’s commentary on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus in “Theses on the Philosophy
of History.” Yet although Boym responds to Benjamin’s reading of
the picture, which draws a sharp contrast between the angel’s face, “turned
towards the past,” and the force of an onrushing storm that tosses him “into
the future to which his back is turned,” she characteristically notices other
telling points. Thus, in a possible parallel with Shklovsky, the angel looks
not straight back at the past but askance; or, in a touch recalling Benjamin’s
own nostalgia for the vanishing aura of the older visual arts, its hair “unfolds
like indecipherable sacred scrolls”; and finally, in one of Boym’s favorite
images for the interanimation of past and future, its wings “are turned
inside out like a Möbius strip” (29).
As this eye for significant visual detail indicates, the sensibility that
informs The Future of Nostalgia goes well beyond narrowly literary issues and
their theoretical offshoots. Almost half of the book’s pages, in fact, are devoted to contemporary cityscapes, in which the author figures prominently as a
nimble observer, witty interpreter, and photographer—in short, as an
updated Baudelairean flaneur. But her “Paris,” far from being the capital of
a century, consists of newly established, implicitly decolonized, recently reinstated,
or variously demoted capitals of the post-Soviet “East.” A strong
engagement with cultural studies marks this second unit of the book, “Cities
and Reinvented Traditions,” with vignettes from Ljubljana and Prague and
with fuller accounts of recent monumental projects and countercultural
events in Berlin, Moscow, and, most of all, the author’s former home, Saint
Petersburg/Leningrad, where she was once a tour guide. The unit’s autobiographical
tendency might be confused with David Simpson’s strictures
regarding “the flourishing genre of academic life stories.”1 It makes more
sense, however, to value these chapters as an imaginatively conceived,
insightful documentary of a major transition in Russia and eastern Europe.
They might be viewed as a late-twentieth-century equivalent to Georg Brandes’s
Russian impressions from a century earlier, only written by a former
cultural insider. In any case, a leap of this kind from literary to cultural
study is not so startling in the Russian context, where cultural contrasts
between the nation’s two capitals have been a literary staple almost since the
founding of Saint Petersburg. Think, for example, of the geocultural range
of Anna Karenina, which, alongside its multiplot juxtapositions of social life
in the two capitals, includes glances at the recently unified Germany and
troubled Balkans of its day.
However, this book’s basic outlook differs from Tolstoy’s (or from the
cultural analysis in Raymond Williams’s The City and the Country) in its neglect
of rural life. Thus its first, largely theoretical unit, “Nostalgia, History, and
Memory,” usefully distinguishes between restorative and reflective nostalgias.
The former is naively essentialist, while the latter is self-consciously
melancholic in the spirit not just of Freud but of Robert Burton, to whom
Boym’s final words pay tribute. But despite a nod toward Gemeinschaft and
Gesellschaft, or a quick contrast between Rousseauesque tendencies in Marx
and Nietzsche and Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s fascination with Paris, both
terms are mainly urban in application. Restored or newly erected monuments
vie in Boym’s cityscapes with thought-provoking ruins or evanescent
celebrations. Hence the home implied by nostos in this inquiry into nostalgia
consists largely of urban experiences, not of a natural setting or home
land like D. H. Lawrence’s “country of the heart” or, in Nabokov’s scientific
idiom, a prized “ecological niche.” Boym’s deepest feelings, on the other
hand, seem to be stirred by the freewheeling urban imagination of Italo
Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which she cites several times. In this spirit she speaks of the formerly isolated West Berlin as an “urban island” (81) or of a fantasy
from the early 1990s that Leningrad might become a Hanseatic “free city.”
Saint Petersburg/Leningrad also becomes for Boym a richly stratified
emblem of the mingled admiration and resentment, always qualified by significant
misunderstandings, with which eastern Europeans have regarded
the West. Touching only lightly on the city’s foundation as Peter the Great’s
“window on Europe” and on its role in nineteenth-century debates about
Russian cultural identity, she focuses on its turbulent fate in the twentieth
century. Both the “cradle of the Russian Revolution,” renamed to honor the
father of the Communist drive to outstrip the West, and the former imperial
capital demoted to a provincial outpost, yet with sinister overtones of “rootless
cosmopolitanism,” it could be at once the site of heroic resistance to
Hitler and the much-purged home of supposed wreckers and traitors. If the
aging monuments in the city’s center awakened dreams of “world culture”
among intellectuals, its outlying sprawl nourished the Soviet defense industry.
Ironically, as Boym stresses, by 1989 the “liberalism and literature” (222)
that sustained dissident efforts to stay in lingering touch with the West had
lost their centrality on the other side of the Iron Curtain. She might have
added that by then these visions of “world culture” would have met criticism
for being too “Eurocentric.” In her witty formula for such cross-purposes,
the “eros” that fed the East’s yearning for “European” cultural freedom
clashed with the “euros” that drove the West’s prosperous market
economies. Boym aligns this disenchantment with the East-West trajectories
in Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting, especially with their outcome at
the end, in his disturbing vision of inner borders that dissolve, only to produce
an anomie that undoes the promise of fading national or ideological
divisions.
Building on the cultural dissonances between East and West in Europe,
Boym argues in more traditional literary-historical terms for recognition of
an alternative tendency or category in the modern movements of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. She proposes to call this alternative the “off
modern,” a coinage with several simultaneous meanings. The condition of
“off modernity” points up the relative cultural eccentricity of figures who
were often exiles from places outside western Europe or the United States
while it acknowledges their refusal of modernity as an up-to-date trendiness
that resembles the vagaries of fashion. Above all, the term registers a
“hybridized” sense of nostalgia, a wary attitude of partial acceptance that in
turn counters a hypermodern urge to forget or even obliterate the past, an
uncritical antimodern identification with that past, and a postmodern
stance that is willing to reinstate the past, but only “within quotation marks”
(30). Along with Benjamin, Nabokov, and Kundera, Boym names Stravinsky,
Cortázar, and Perec as prime exemplars of the off modern, and later analyses
indicate that she would add Kafka and Joseph Brodsky. One senses in this proposal a dissatisfaction with the stark polarities and exclusively Western
orientation in much of the debate over modernism versus postmodernism,
as well as a desire to make more room for an eastern European and
Russian role in modern art, notwithstanding the antimodern art policies of
the Communist regimes. Boym does not, however, attempt to relate this
diversification in our vocabulary of modernity to Matei Calinescu’s similarly
motivated but wider-ranging analyses in Five Faces of Modernity.
The third and last unit of The Future of Nostalgia, “Exiles and Imagined
Homelands,” puts the off-modern typology to the test of three detailed critical
analyses. The chapter on Ilya Kabakov, an offbeat visual artist and “collector
of banal memorabilia” (319), includes a pointed, thought-provoking
comparison with Marcel Duchamp, while a Brodsky chapter comes closest
to the author’s own “off” identity, as another Russian Jewish émigré who
grew up in Leningrad but chose to stay in the United States. A Nabokov
chapter confirms my judgment that this author can indeed be described as
an eccentric modernist. Discussions of specific works like the early novel
Mary or the great short story “Spring in Fialta,” when read in isolation,
might cover familiar ground, but they gain a deeper cultural resonance
from arguments put forward elsewhere. Thus Boym impressively connects
Nabokov’s sharp dismissal of the symbol as a literary device and his insistence
on precise descriptive details with her own distinction between
restorative and reflective memory. She also dissents from current interest in
hidden “otherworldly” glimmers in Nabokov’s writing, contending that the
key word potustoronnost’ (a Russian noun he coined on the basis of a prepositional
phrase meaning “on the other side”), which sparked this trend after
appearing in Vera Nabokov’s introduction to her husband’s poems, does
not have to have an explicit metaphysical meaning (381 n. 4). Boym’s
Nabokov is “not a dual citizen of this world and another”; instead, as “a passportless
wanderer in time as well as in space” (262), he is restlessly reflective
rather than a seeker after fixed nostalgic origins.
To the extent that Boym’s off modernists are exiles, they occasion reflections
on the “home away from home” of diasporic identity. A short chapter
from what seems a larger ongoing project deals with the nature and role of
souvenirs in the homes of recent Russian immigrants to the United States.
But at the heart of this aspect of the book is Boym’s emphasis on what she
calls “diasporic intimacy” (252). Treatments of diaspora often boil down to
revealing a persistent communal cohesiveness among groups living at a distance
from their home culture, and in thus stressing a center-periphery
model they overlook the possibilities for interaction on the periphery
among different diasporic groups. Boym’s concept, by contrast, insightfully
cuts through to a potential deeper “solidarity with strangers like themselves”
(256). A similar tendency marks Paul Gilroy’s more politicized accounts of
cultural cross-fertilization among Caribbean blacks and Asian Indians in London, or of the inspiration that some black leaders found in Jewish history.
Boym concedes that intimacy among cultures on the basis of displacement
can be fortuitous and fleeting. But it can also cross supposed cultural
boundaries with surprising impact. “That is my life!” as a student of mine
exclaimed on reading Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory several years
after fleeing the Iranian revolution. In such cases of cross-cultural contact
and negotiation, as well as in others that need not depend on diasporic displacement,
nostalgia can look ahead into a future with creative possibilities
that are invisible to the restorative backward glance.
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