Maria Oikonomou OnOnOn thethethe Clinical Picture ofofof NostalgiaNostalgia———— aaandandndnd aaa Remote Literature Nowhere does one find better somatization than among foreigners... (Julia Kristeva: Strangers to Ourselves ) When speaking of homesickness, Odysseus comes to mind as the first great nostalgist, who is fated to force his return against insurmountable resistance – not only against all the external adversities, but also against inner deviations and the ebbing of all motivation. Later on, in Tomis on the Black Sea, Ovid finds plaintive words for his longing for Rome, for his desiderium patriae . In his epistles Cicero laments the loss of his homeland, while Dante’s Divine Comedy speaks of the hour “that turns back desire in the sailors, and softens their hearts.”1 For the ancient and pre-modern world, homesickness – a longing for that which is lost and a profound desire to ease this deficiency – was at base a spiritual orientation, and only the use of metaphors could make this emotional state palpable. Sometimes, metaphors pertaining to the body seem to presage the path of homesickness through the history of the discourse. While Odysseus’ homesickness is soothed by the smoke of Ithaca, transient and incorporeal, for Dante it is the heart of the sailor, which seems to transfer homesickness not only into the material, but even the somatic realm. In that sense it is no longer a vague yearning, not scattered signs in the heavens, but an organ whose tissues and pulse are inscribed with emotion. This shift of a previously disembodied feeling of longing, which now enters the subject and its anatomy, presages the reconceptualizations of homesickness during the early modern differentiation of discourses. Here, in the context of a general and all-encompassing scientification, of 1 “Era già l’ ora che volge il disio/ ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core/ lo dì c’ han detto ai dolci amici addio.” “Now was the hour when voyagers at sea / Pine to turn home and their hearts soften, / the first day out, for friends they bid goodbye” (Dante 2000:1-3). 1 MARIA OIKONOMOU an increasingly sharp distinction between all areas of knowledge (from philosophy to psychology and anthropology to medicine), in the environment of what Foucault calls the 'human sciences,' nostalgia finally emerges as a disease. One witnesses the shift from the soul to a metaphoric body and then to a physical one. It is precisely this corporality of nostalgia, which makes it – much like neuralgia or myalgia – recognizable as a pathological condition, as a syndrome for which diverse theories and healing processes of modern medicine have been devised. Moreover, it is not surprising that literature – as an 'interdiscourse' which, according to Jürgen Link, gathers the dominant ‘collective symbols’ of other fields of knowledge – understands nostalgia as belonging to the same discipline. 2 Accordingly, literature begins to replace the 'body metaphor' with an actual body. And in 19 th century literature homesickness is no longer a diffuse psychological phenomenon, but reveals itself, in light of the thought of that period, as a collection of somatic symptoms. It is this re-contextualization of nostalgia, its relocation into pathology, which is examined by the first part of this article. At the forefront stands Johannes Hofer, who founded the relevant discourse; its end is marked by Karl Jaspers. These authors’ respective texts on homesickness may be seen as opening and closing brackets. Meanwhile, the second part of the essay is devoted to the reflection of this concept in literature. While it hardly seems possible to contribute anything new to Jean Starobinski’s study of nostalgia or Simon Bunke’s transhistorical and transnational reconstruction of this 'lethal disease,' the accent is shifted to a so-called 'minor' literature. In focusing on nostalgia in Modern Greek writing, this paper does not only discuss a text’s contexts or the relationship between medical and literary discourse. Likewise (and perhaps to an even greater extent), aspects of cultural transference come into view when Greece adopts the European syndrome of homesickness, when nostalgia manifests itself in other times and other ways. While symptoms of nostalgia can claim an enormous growth and establishment throughout the Western civilizations of the 18 th and 19 th centuries, they are much less accepted in not so 'modern' cultural spaces. It remains to be examined how and why these spaces admit this 'foreign' knowledge, whether it is filtered and deferred, and which mechanisms or agents allow it to enter and circulate. With respect to the history of science, as well as literature, one can thus delineate a differentiated image that bears in mind the discontinuities, rifts and asymmetries within the 2 According to Link, the total system of societal discourses is held together by a synchronous system of ‘collective symbols.’ The term designates the entire “imagery” [Bildlichkeit] of a culture, the totality of “the most widespread allegories and emblems, metaphors, examples, demonstrative models and orienting topics, comparisons and analogies.” Collective symbols are like funnels; the knowledge of the particular discourses flows into them, into the melting pot of interdiscursive materials. For Jürgen Link, literature is the preferred medium of this interdiscourse (Becker, Gerhard, Link 1997). 2 NOSTALGIA European discourse of homesickness – an image that is not limited to the ‘central’ or culturally 'hegemonic' zones of France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the English-speaking world. When research on nostalgia states that “in the 18 th century a new, terrible sickness arises first in Switzerland and then in all of Europe ” (Bunke 2009:13, emphasis M.O.), this statement should, in light of the Greek culture, not be categorically rejected, but qualified with due care. In this respect, the paper at hand is a rejoinder of peripheral comparative studies, which often are only theoretically included in ‘actual’ comparative studies. AAA Brief History ofofof Homesickness, ororor How ItItIt Became a Narrative 'Homesickness' first appeared as a medical term at the end of the 17 th century. It describes an illness characterized by the sufferer’s constant thoughts of his native land, in addition to various other symptoms. The discoverer of this new disease is Johannes Hofer, who wrote the Dissertatio medica De Nostalgia, Oder Heimwehe , composed in Latin and published in Basel in 1688. In this study, the ambitious medical student, later city doctor and burgomaster of Mulhouse, takes up – with an unmistakable claim to originality – a 'new topic,' an illness described by no doctor before him. In Swiss dialect, this new sickness was known as 'Heim-Weh,' literally 'home pain,' in France as 'mal du pays,' but the humanistically learned Hofer coins the term 'nostalgia.' He goes on to give a comprehensive description of the malady’s characteristic signs: The symptoms indicating the presence of the disease vary and consist particularly in a lasting sadness, incessant thoughts of the native land, restless sleep or lingering wakefulness, a decline in strength, decreased sensations of hunger and thirst, feelings of anxiety or even intense heart palpitations, frequent sweats and a mental lethargy able to muster an interest in almost nothing beyond thoughts of home. Such people are then susceptible to various illnesses. For example, they may suffer from persistent fever or febrile attacks, often quite serious, if the longing of the victim cannot be assuaged (Hofer 1745:14; Transl. by M.O.). However, as nostalgia was not – or not yet – a temporally, but a spatially backward-directed yearning, it also appears curable, namely through a return to the familiar ways of life. This is demonstrated by three case studies of patients, who spent time abroad, fell victim to the disease and found relief only through a return to their homeland. One of Hofer’s case studies examines a young student from Berne, who falls ill in Basel and becomes feverish and panicked. Severe symptoms ensued, and his death was expected. Ordered by the treating doctor to administer a clyster, the apothecary recognized the man’s condition, diagnosed it as homesickness, and insisted that the only cure would be a return to his 3 MARIA OIKONOMOU native city. The student’s constitution improved day by day; he recovered fully on his journey, and arrived hale and hearty in Berne. Another case concerned a young girl taken to hospital with an injury, who responded to all questions and treatment attempts with the words: “I want to go home, I want to go home.” Home again, she recovered in only a few days, entirely without further treatment. In this manner, the pathologization of homesickness takes place in the context of a new medicinal knowledge, which is characterized not only by the progress of healing methods, but also by the novel conceptualization of ailments of all kinds. Particularly with respect to the tenacity and historical insistence of nostalgia as a complex of physical symptoms, it seems appropriate to characterize Johannes Hofer as a “founder of discursivity” in the emerging framework of the humanities, even though his discovery owes much to pre-classical or 'archaic' knowledge. The first of the two case studies clearly shows how homesickness is not merely a curable illness in the scope of an enlightened 17 th century. At the same time, it is traversed by a then obsolete form of knowledge, which Foucault would identify as a concept of “resemblance” (Foucault 1997:79-82). Up to the 16 th century, resemblance serves as the guiding principle and establishes a global system of counterparts between heaven and earth, planets and fate, microcosm and macrocosm – a fertile ground not only for the 'magical' views of astrology. Consequently, this pre-modern age assigns a fixed place to all elements within a holistic totality. The play of analogies between a mandrake root and the human body, between a constellation of stars and a person's future knows no boundaries and makes it possible to discover overwhelming resemblances in the world.