{"id":4510,"date":"2011-05-07T19:55:08","date_gmt":"2011-05-08T00:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=4510"},"modified":"2011-05-07T21:10:34","modified_gmt":"2011-05-08T02:10:34","slug":"the-time-binding-of-nostalgia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=4510","title":{"rendered":"The Time-Binding of Nostalgia"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Sam Kelly<\/strong> (with an afterword by Athena)<\/p>\n

It is my great pleasure to reprint an essay by my friend Sam Kelly (aka Eithin — Cymraeg for Gorse) who blogs at Cold Iron and Rowan-Wood<\/a>. Sam was born to theatre folk and engineers, and brought up in the Essex woodlands and the Welsh mountains. Disability cut short a PhD in nanomaterials chemistry; he now lives in London, where he writes about fantastika and makes art.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been reading a lot of Guy Gavriel Kay recently (Under Heaven, The Wandering Fire, The Darkest Road,<\/em> and The Lions of Al-Rassan)<\/em> and have therefore naturally been thinking about identity, passion, and pride.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a commonly accepted trope amongst many fantasy critics, scholars, and commenters that fantasy is, at its root, about nostalgia. I\u2019ve never quite agreed with this, but I think that\u2019s partly because nostalgia comes in several flavours. The word comes from the Greek nostos<\/em>, a homecoming, and algos<\/em>, pain, and was coined as a medical term in 1688 to describe Swiss mercenaries\u2019 longing for the mountains of their home. (As a Welshman, I can relate to that! The Welsh word hiraeth<\/em> is mostly untranslatable, but Heimweh<\/em> does seem like a cultural analogue.)<\/p>\n

In recent decades, however (and especially by the English) it\u2019s been coopted to describe a kind of early 20th century idyll. You know the one\u2014ploughmen, foaming nut-brown ale, small children waving at steam trains, The Countryside or The Beach two hours\u2019 journey away, a distinct lack of brown people. It\u2019s basically thinly disguised neo-mediaevalism, or rather neo-mediaevalism (in fantasy writers of a certain age, at least) is a proxy for their yearning for the kind of social certainty that supposedly existed in the recent past.<\/p>\n

I feel compelled to point out here that that past (either of those pasts) never really existed, and the only way to pretend that they did is by wholesale erasure of the experiences and histories of women, the working classes, nonwhite people (there have always been nonwhite people in Britain, at least back to the Romans if not before) and Jews. Not to mention (and people rarely do mention) those who are more than one of those. It\u2019s fairly safe to blame the Victorians for making up the mediaeval idyll. We\u2019ve been reimagining recent history ever since, and it\u2019s not as though revisionist history started in 1820 for that matter, but it was the Victorians who pioneered the mass production of History.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s one way in which nostalgia is expressed in English-language fantasy fiction: the desire for an imagined past. That can be a joyful escapist wish, as with William Morris, or a heartfelt elegy for something that could never have been, as with Tolkien. In either version, the past (in the context of the novel, ie. the created world\u2019s own imagined past) is seen explicitly as a good thing, a lost Golden Age.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another version of nostalgia, however\u2014nostalgia in its most etymologically strict sense, the pain of longing for a homecoming\u2014and that is the one experienced by those whose home is contested, denied, erased. The interesting thing about that is that in the latter, the past-within-the-text is usually unpleasant, problematized, or generally Not Even Slightly Golden.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Athena\u2019s afterword: <\/strong> There is a third group that experiences nostalgia \u2013 those who have left home (mostly) voluntarily and live as perpetual exiles, outsiders to both natal and adopted cultures, a shard of thick glass between our hearts and our words. For those who walk between worlds, home is what we carry in our heads. Even the worlds we remember never existed or no longer exist and we are feral orphans who press our faces against others’ lit windows. If we ever return home, it does not recognize us \u2013 and we are more like Angelopoulos\u2019 Odysseus<\/a> than Homer\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Black Swallow<\/a> — a folksong of exile from Thrace, sung by Hr\u00f3nis Aidhon\u00eddhis (“Son of the Nightingale”). Click on the title to listen:<\/p>\n

My black swallow from afar,
\nmy white dove from home,
\nyou fly so high! Come lower
\nand open your wings,
\nso I can write to my mother,
\nmy sisters — and my love.<\/p>\n

And the lament of those left behind: the famous Tziva\u00e9ri mou<\/a> (“My Treasure”) from the Dodecanese, sung by Dh\u00f3mna Sam\u00edou.<\/p>\n

Images:<\/strong> 1st, Oleg Yankovsky in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia<\/em>; 2nd, Harvey Keitel in The\u00f3doros Angel\u00f3poulos’ The Gaze of Odysseus<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Sam Kelly (with an afterword by Athena) It is my great pleasure to reprint an essay by my friend Sam Kelly (aka Eithin — Cymraeg for Gorse) who blogs at Cold Iron and Rowan-Wood. Sam was born to theatre folk and engineers, and brought up in the Essex woodlands and the Welsh mountains. Disability […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-writing-and-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}