Two New Types of Nostalgia in Detective Fiction
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Reconstructive Nostalgia and Preservative Nostalgia: Two New Types of Nostalgia in Detective Fiction Thesis Research Master Literary Studies, University of Amsterdam Roos Gravemaker Gravemaker 2 Reconstructive Nostalgia and Preservative Nostalgia: Two New Types of Nostalgia in Detective Fiction by Roos Gravemaker Supervisor: Dr. Kristine Johanson Second Reader: Date of Submission: 22 October 2018 Student no.: 10424911 Tel.: +316 48036022 Abstract: Keywords: nostalgia, detective fiction, memory, trauma, narrative, performance, melancholia Declaration of Academic Integrity: I hereby declare that I have read and understood the UvA Regulations on Fraud and Plagiarism. I am fully aware that failure to act in accordance with these regulations can result in severe consequences. I confirm that this thesis is entirely my own work and that contributions from other sources are fully acknowledged. Gravemaker 3 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION: A World in Ruins ....................................................................................... 4 Detective Fiction and Nostalgia: The Longing for a Lost Home ........................................... 4 Reconstructive Nostalgia and Preservative Nostalgia ............................................................ 9 Primary Sources and Structure of Thesis ............................................................................. 10 Chapter 1: Reconstructive Nostalgia and Preservative Nostalgia: An Explanation ................. 14 Boym’s Restorative Nostalgia and Reflective Nostalgia ..................................................... 14 Reconstructive Nostalgia: Trauma and Homebuilding ........................................................ 15 Preservative Nostalgia: The Safeguarding of Home ............................................................ 19 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 21 Chapter 2: Traumatized Detectives: Reconstructive Nostalgia, the Figure of the Child, and the Struggle of Homebuilding ........................................................................................... 23 Mirroring Traumas ............................................................................................................... 24 Detective Fiction and the Case of Trauma ........................................................................... 27 The Child: A Figure of Reconstructive Nostalgia ................................................................ 30 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 35 Chapter 3: Dancing with your Dead Colleague and Saving Mum and Dad: Preservative Nostalgia and the Melancholic Performance of Memory in Detective Fiction ........................ 37 Banks’s and River’s Lost Pasts ............................................................................................ 38 Melancholic Detectives ........................................................................................................ 40 Performance and Preservative Nostalgia .............................................................................. 43 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 51 CONCLUSION: The Detective and the Ruins of the Home ................................................... 52 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 56 Gravemaker 4 INTRODUCTION A World in Ruins Detective Fiction and Nostalgia: The Longing for a Lost Home A specter haunts detective fiction – the specter of nostalgia. The BBC detective television series Father Brown (2013-), loosely based on the short stories by G.K. Chesterton, are set in the early 1950s in the fictional Cotswolds village of Kemblefold where Father Brown (Mark Williams), a priest at St Mary’s Catholic Church, solves murder cases. With Father Brown’s rural and period setting, Lawson claims that the series “continues BBC1's recent mission to bring back afternoon drama to TV: the sort of nostalgically reassuring fiction that was traditionally offered to those who were at home after lunch” (Lawson n.p.). Likewise, in The New York Times Hale writes that Endeavour, Channel 4’s prequel to the famous Inspector Morse series (1987-2000), gives “another opportunity to wallow, tastefully in nostalgia for its predecessor” (Hale n.p.). Even detective fiction set in the present day seems to be saturated by nostalgia. Of Robert Galbraith’s (J.K. Rowling) Cormoran Strike detective novels, Hughes writes that even though the stories take place in London, the atmosphere is “oddly nostalgic” (Hughes n.p.). Ben Richards, who adapted the first two novels into a television series for the BBC, adds, “It does feel very different tonally and visually from other crime dramas (…) There’s something interestingly retro about it while also remaining contemporary – it does have Gravemaker 5 a bit of a Morse-like quality” (in Hughes n.p.). And so, from the regeneration of old detective icons to modern detectives with a “retro-feel” in television series, film, and literature, the detective genre is a site where nostalgic sentiments flourish. Indeed, nostalgia is an inherent part of the formula of the detective story. The detective story is one of return and repetition: the detective returns, again and again, to the crime scene, digs into the histories of victims and suspects, while often struggling with the troubles and ghosts of their own past, longing obsessively to connect with the crime which is manifested only in the past. Nostalgia, Munt argues, is a staple of the detective genre (142). The detective’s investigation, their search for the truth behind the mystery of the crime, is defined by a longing for restoration. The detective is engaged in “an act of recovery, moving forward in order to move back” (Porter in Connelly 93). Connelly argues that detective fiction encourages its characters to long for the past as the keeper of the truth and salvation, “to view the past as holding the solution, in a sense, and to view the past through the lens of nostalgia” (Connelly 93). Despite the detective’s pursuit of the recovery of the “core truth” of a past crime, the genre also mourns the fact that its characters can never return to the same place, the exact same state before the devastating effects of the crime, but only hold a memory of it: one cannot undo the effects of the crime or bring the murdered victim back to life. This unbridgeable distance between past and present, and the difficulty of past’s retrieval, illustrate that the driving force behind the detective genre is, as Munt asserts, “a nostalgic displacement of the present” (136), or the inability to (re)connect the past with the present and vice versa. Nostalgia is the lament for being displaced both in time and space. The term itself was first coined by Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer in 1688, when he combined the Greek word nostos (return home) and algia (pain) to baptize a new disease of homesickness from which he believed many ‘displaced’ people in 17th century Europe suffered, from foreign students and servants working in France and Germany to Swiss soldiers fighting abroad (Boym 3). Nostalgia thus finds its roots in medicine and originally meant ‘homesickness’. This longing for a lost homeland can be translated to the desire for a past time: a moment before, when the homeland was not yet beyond the nostalgic’s grasp. Both the nostalgic and the detective are defined by sentiments of displacement through the irretrievable loss of a certain home or time. The detective’s nostalgia does not only refer to the pain for a lost homeland but also for a general sense of feeling at home in the world. As Svetlana Boym argues: Gravemaker 6 “To feel at home is to know that things are in their places and so are you: it is a state of mind that doesn’t depend on an actual location. The object of longing, then, is not really a place called home but this sense of intimacy with the world; it is not the past in general, but that imaginary moment when we had time and didn’t know the temptation of nostalgia” (251). In detective fiction, the disturbance of social order due to the events of the crime can result in similar feelings of displacement. Both the nostalgic and the detective attempt to solve these sentiments of dislocation by turning to the past: while the nostalgic longs for the retrieval of a lost intimacy, memory, or utopia, for the detective, this desire for a past to return is symbolized by, as Bennet and Royle assert, its “generic investment in the restoration of the status quo” (203). The detective’s endeavour to solve the crime and catch the criminal, thereby restoring and re-establishing the order or status quo that was disturbed in the wake of the crime, mirrors the nostalgic’s longing for retrieving the lost intimacy with the world. In its focus on the disturbance and restoration of the status quo, previous academic research on the presence of nostalgia in crime and detective fiction has generally focused on the ways in which nostalgia is used to engage with socio-political issues. With its presence of a detective who often “take[s] on the role of a judge or even that of an avenger” (Pyrhrönen 52) and its themes revolving around issues of social justice, detective fiction is a site where ideological notions are