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Learning the Languages of Nostalgia in Modern and Contemporary Literature

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Learning the Languages of Nostalgia in Modern and Contemporary Literature Learning the Languages of Nostalgia in Modern and Contemporary Literature Tasha Marie Buttler A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2012 Reading Committee: Carolyn Allen, Chair Katherine Cummings Mark Patterson Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English University of Washington Abstract Learning the Languages of Nostalgia in Modern and Contemporary Literature Tasha M. Buttler Chair of Supervisory Committee: Professor Carolyn Allen Department of English This dissertation builds upon recent discourses on nostalgia that focus on the generative potential of a sustained melancholic stance and position the past as resource for the future. My particular interest is in the potential for de-subjectification out of regulatory regimes, as outlined in the work of Judith Butler, particularly in The Psychic Life of Power. This text has allowed me to develop a robust theory about accumulated experiences of love and loss that are central to the formation of “character” that repeats or disrupts patterns of social relation. I differentiate between politicized nostalgia and experiential nostalgia, suggesting that the latter can make use of inevitable experiences of loss by initiating and sustaining a melancholic agency. I use various literary texts and memoirs to identify how the thwarting of melancholia can lead to nostalgia’s obverse: the desire to return suffering, or what Czech author Milan Kundera calls litost. These instances of thwarted grieving are positioned against a set of characters in the work of Virginia Woolf, Eva Hoffman, and Clarice Lispector who allow themselves to honor their experiential nostalgia rather than reverting to politicized nostalgia that repeats representations and clichés associated with empire. Often these characters’ grievances are undirected or misdirected criticisms of social politics and cultural inheritances that perpetuate gendered, racialized, and class identities, or even nationalistic practices that have led to loss and suffering. This study further examines the psychic economics associated with exile since, arguably, cultural inheritances are more readily perceived by those who have greater “vantage points.” In most cases, exiles must re-negotiate words, gestures, and subjectivities, and may be able to see naturalized practices with heightened sensitivity in her or his choices to repeat new social practices or to modify them, pushing the limits of cultural intelligibilities. Although all of the characters in this study struggle to represent the psychic maneuvers associated with loss of something beloved, ironically, most of these novels suggest that these dynamics are inadequately representable in language. My final argument is that the nascent subjectivities that emerge out of the characters’ and authors’ experiential nostalgia, and the texts that strive to account for these experiences, are of consequence for more than just the transformed individuals. The final novel used in this study, Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, manipulates the instruments available to narrate genesis (language) to break orders of repetition, to recodify language, and to unsettle the reader, inviting us to experience the radical alterity of another’s psyche and develop affective possibilities for new moral epistemologies spoken through the fragmented languages of nostalgia. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Representing the Psyche . .1 Chapter 1: Virginia Woolf and Milan Kundera: Deceptions of Symbolization . 14 Chapter 2: Exit into History: Eva Hoffman on Exile and Hospitality . 89 Chapter 3: Uncommon Encounters with Common Readers In the Works of Clarice Lispector . 163 End Notes: . 265 Bibliography . 290 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all of my committee members for their expertise and careful reading during the years it took me to complete this study, but more importantly, for what each of them taught me about teaching university students. In particular, I am grateful to Carolyn Allen for her sustained and very diligent support, without which this dissertation may not have been completed. I am also grateful to my early editor and friend, Nancy Kool, who is as tough in her questioning, as she is precise in her editing. Finally, I have been blessed to have the support of my sons, Travis and Calvin Baseler, who have lived with a dining-table full of books for too many years. Our table is now ready for feasts. 2 Introduction: Representing the Psyche Recent discussions on nostalgia provide a forum to explore increasingly important questions about how individuals represent their versions of history. These discussions, both theoretical and literary, provide nuanced explorations of human motivation and the role of language in understanding the psyche and how it can be represented. Ultimately they point to the distinctions we make in academia and in popular discourses about the epistemological separations between private and public discourses. “Nostalgia” provides a particularly compelling term of inquiry, because the word itself cannot be made to stand for a single perspective, affect, or operation. Its indeterminacy thus requires the researcher to consider a variety of interpretive possibilities. Scholars interested in what motivates individuals to represent their histories within certain discursive confines can now make use of recent interdisciplinary work, work that positions affects as indices of social relationships, as ideological practices, or embodied thoughts, rather than as descriptions for concretized psychosocial states.1 My work on nostalgia builds on recent studies of affect that question the cultural politics of emotions.2 In the West3 the psychic processes that are part of the sadness of separation or loss (referred to in much of the psychoanalytic literature as melancholia), have been traditionally regarded in popular literature with skepticism. Even academics have critiqued melancholic processes for their potential to distort the power of reason or to prevent individuals from becoming fully socialized.4 Nostalgia is also implicated as a mechanism of ideological perpetuation.5 More nuanced discussions of nostalgia suggest that the affect acts to create and efface the object of desire, rather than honoring that which was once cherished.6 Increasingly, however, the term “nostalgia” has summoned discourses that focus on the generative potentials of a melancholic stance, one that 1 values the psychic transformation and community re-building that can attend such states.7 Eng and Han have applied the framework of “melancholia” to broaden discussions of how the psychic state can create bonds among people, or what they call “an intersubjective psychology” (362). Muñoz has described melancholia as a structure of everyday life that affects those that are marginalized due to race or sexual orientation (74). The question that I ask of each of the texts I draw on in this study is: What is the work that nostalgia accomplishes for the characters, and in the case of autobiographical fiction or memoir, for the authors? While the original Greek compound of the word “nostalgia” consists of the terms νόστος (nóstos), and ἄλγος (álgos), that refer to suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return, Judith Butler’s work on melancholia, particularly in The Psychic Life of Power, has allowed me to construct a more robust and nuanced theory of nostalgia that contributes to discussions of how accumulated experiences of love and loss are central to the formation of “character,” character that either repeats or disrupts patterns of social relation. This study extends recent theories about the potential of nostalgia to provide ruptures in subjectivity whereby the individual can either emerge with a drive to restore illusions of coherence, or, alternatively, can apprehend8 the precariousness of all subjectivities and interdependencies with greater hospitality for the psychic processes that are yet to be understood and articulated. More nuanced understanding of an individual’s psyche, with particular concern for how he or she narrates formative experiences, lends potential for us to apprehend and record much of the life of the mind that is, as of yet, opaque. This, of course, has tremendous implications for social life. Social scientists have historically portrayed humans as subjects that act on choices based on free will and reason, analyses that preclude the role of the emotions in structural inquiries. Nostalgia, like many other disruptive emotions, has long been represented in literature 2 as a force that limits or stunts socialization or that acts to reinstate gender roles in American families. 9 And yet, nostalgia can be conceived, to borrow one of Alison Jagger’s phrases, as an “outlaw emotion.” Outlaw emotions are those that are incompatible with dominant values; they “stand in dialectical relation to critical social theory” and can help in developing alternatives to prevailing conceptions of reality by motivating new investigations. Their re-inscription into theory, she argues, can contribute to an eventual reconstruction of our emotional constitution (160-61). Such changes in conceptualization of consciousness and relationships can lead to changes in emergent structures of feeling and civic identities.10 The way that the word “nostalgia” is defined helps determine the way the affect or process is judged by societies and then either discouraged, honored, or made invisible. In the work of Czech novelist Milan Kundera, the
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