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10.2478/ewcp-2022-0010
Campus/Academic Novels
and “Built-In” Nostalgia
CORINA SELEJAN
Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania
Abstract
The present article traces nostalgia across various campus and
academic novels published during the last three decades and
identifies different kinds of nostalgia – writerly and readerly
nostalgia, vicarious nostalgia, ersatz nostalgia – not in the
systematic manner of a classification but guided by the novels
themselves. The readings are informed by theories stemming from
different backgrounds – the social sciences, cultural and literary
studies, psychology and cognitive science – in an attempt to create
a productive dialogue, one that emphasizes the creative potential of
nostalgia.
Keywords: readerly and writerly nostalgia, vicarious nostalgia,
ersatz nostalgia, triggers of nostalgia, university/campus/academic
fiction, campus architecture.
In his 1987 essay entitled “Campus Fictions,” Malcolm Bradbury
claims that “the capacity for nostalgia” (51) displayed by university
novels written before World War II made them successful both in
print and on the screen (as adaptations of such novels as Brideshead
Revisited for instance). He goes on to distinguish between these
“university novels” and post-war “campus novels” of the type
written by himself, which are purportedly “much less concerned
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with nostalgia or social recollection, more with intellectual and
social change” (51). While there is truth in this claim, campus
fiction demonstrably incorporates a built-in nostalgic element, as it
conjures representations of that period in a person’s life which is
most productive of nostalgic feeling, i.e. one’s youth.
Contemporary academic fiction in turn is coerced into (frequently
vicarious) nostalgia by the current precariousness of faculty
employment and by the crisis of higher education at large, a
situation that has only been aggravated by the COVID-19
pandemic. These are all evident reasons for the genre’s propensity
towards nostalgia, yet the novels to be discussed in this article
evince various kinds of nostalgia, triggered by diverse factors. The
first distinction that needs to be made is between “writerly” and
“readerly” nostalgia, or between nostalgia as something intrinsic or
inherent to the text and nostalgia as the reader’s affective response
to that text. As will be shown in the following, campus and
academic novels are prone to both.
In her book Faculty Towers, Elaine Showalter claims that
“academic novels are rarely in synch with their decade of
publication; most reflect the preceding decade’s issues, crises, and
changes” (12-3). She goes on to argue that the post-war
development of the academic novel marks a move “from hope to
endurance to anticipation to cynicism and around to hope again”
(13). In the seventeen years since the publication of Faculty
Towers, it seems the general mood in academia has moved on from
hope to despair. Nonetheless, a certain cyclicity of nostalgia is
reflected in campus and academic novels: every change, every new
trend in academia comes with its latent, built-in obsolescence as
well as the potential for a future revival (not unlike the ever more
accelerated releases of new technology we are witnessing at
present). Unsurprisingly, writerly and readerly nostalgia are also
rarely in synch, as the reading of a book can take place decades
after its having been written. Consequently, the reader frequently
engages in a kind of telescopic or vicarious nostalgia, one that is
“divorced from any actual experience” of the past that makes the
object of the fictional work (Sayers 1).
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One of academic fiction’s most recent instantiations, Joshua
Cohen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Netanyahus: An Account of a
Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a
Very Famous Family (2021) is at first sight anything but nostalgic,
as it professes to critique current politics (particularly Trump, via
Ben-Zion and Benjamin Netanyahu) by facetiously rewriting
history and blending fiction and non-fiction in the process. The
novel’s factual figures are the Netanyahu family and Harold
Bloom; the latter, however, has been fictionally refashioned into
Ruben Blum, as the novel’s afterword, playfully entitled “Credits &
Extra Credit,” declares. For all its current political relevance and
seeming resistance to nostalgia, however, the novel cannot escape
it, albeit evincing a self-conscious, uneasy and ambiguous kind of
nostalgia. The novel harks back to the winter of 1959-1960 and
revolves around an episode involving the meeting between the
homodiegetic narrator Ruben Blum and Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s
family. Seen from Cohen’s authorial perspective, this fictional
reworking of an episode that Harold Bloom (to whom the novel is
dedicated) allegedly related to Cohen (according to the afterword),
the story reads like an enactment of a professedly vicarious
nostalgia, or what Arjun Appadurai calls “ersatz nostalgia –
nostalgia without memory” (82). The academia of the late 1950s as
portrayed by Cohen is somewhat redolent of Kingsley Amis’s
Lucky Jim (1954), with discernible parallels between Dr. Morse and
Professor Welch on the one hand, and Ruben Blum and Jim Dixon
on the other. The self-conscious quality of the novel’s nostalgia
(and Cohen’s ambivalence towards it) is made manifest in one of
Blum’s frequent humorous vignettes:
Our house – like so many in our neighborhood, a Dutch Colonial,
or, as it should perhaps more accurately be called, a Dutch Colonial
Revival, because it dated from just after the Civil War when people
were feeling nostalgic – was old and drafty and crumbling. I’d
initially been in love with its clapboarded and shuttered austerity,
but after a year of coming and going I’d become suspicious of its
double-identity. Look at a Dutch Colonial from the front, it looks
like a house. Look at a Dutch Colonial from the side, it looks like a
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barn. This bothered me. It made me uncertain as to whether we
were humans or animals. (45-6)
This excerpt illustrates some of the many layers and kinds of
nostalgia that the novel grapples with, however reluctantly or
ironically. The protagonist’s nostalgia for the City – Blum is what
Svetlana Boym would call a nostalgic “metrophiliac” (17) – is
played off against the architectural nostalgia of upstate New York.
However, both types of nostalgia are dressed in irony, a move that
makes nostalgia “palatable”: “invoked but, at the same time,
undercut, put into perspective, seen for exactly what it is – a
comment on the present as much as on the past” (Hutcheon and
Valdés 23). The nostalgic post-Civil War moment mentioned in the
excerpt above can be read as a nod to the post-pandemic moment of
the novel’s publication, just like the joke regarding Judy Blum’s
nose job as potentially causing infertility (82) can be interpreted as
an allusion to the vaccine controversy. Nostalgia seems to
reflexively fold in upon itself repeatedly, creating layer upon layer
of simulacra, so much so that “suspicion” becomes the only
possible response. Blum’s attempt at providing the reader with
Corbin University’s history in a nutshell illustrates the tension
between indulging in nostalgia and being suspicious of its object:
after all, in the late 1950s, “the sum total of students of color [at
Corbin] was zero” (18), no matter how genially the story is told.
The prevailing impression of ersatz nostalgia is further
strengthened by the second half of the afterword, which at times
sounds like a name-dropping frenzy, busy as it is recounting
Bloom’s many acquaintances, as well as literary and extra-literary
opinions. One question worth asking is whether the interest in this
novel is not fueled to a rather uncomfortable extent by the celebrity
status of the political and literary figures it makes use of in order to
allude to the political context of its publication (Trump and the
pandemic) and to what extent it owes its Pulitzer Prize award to its
artistic value. In an interview for the Paris Review, Cohen admits
that the atypical (for his standards) gentleness of this novel’s
narrator stems from the death of Bloom and of many others of his
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generation, as well as from Cohen’s “own sense of getting older,
and probably from this past year of plague and lockdown” (“The
Covering Cherub”). Obliqueness via history could be seen as an
appropriate response to the period of the pandemic as well as recent
U.S. politics, yet the expectations of readers of the academic genre
are arguably thwarted, since they may have been looking forward to
an academic novel that engages more directly with the pandemic
and its aftermath in academic life. Moreover, since the academic
novel has been constantly belittled as a coterie genre, academic
fiction scholars have been anticipating an award-winning exemplar
that would make for a reading experience as riveting as previous
Pulitzer winners, e.g. Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018) or
Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016).
At the opposite end of the stylistic spectrum from Cohen’s
novel are two academic novels from both sides of the Atlantic,
Powers’ Galatea 2.2 (1995) and Andrew Crumey’s Mr Mee
(2000). Both novels are very complex in terms of both ideational
content and style and they both tackle the Internet and new media,
i.e. things that are crucial to the pandemic and the way it
transformed learning, teaching and even our being in the world. In
this sense, Powers’ novel reads uncannily prescient if not prophetic,
given that almost three decades have passed since its publication,
three decades in which the Internet has come to be a pervasive
phenomenon in all aspects of life and society:
People who used the web turned strange. . . . The web was a
neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its
solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally
completed its program, when the terminal drop box brought the last
barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say
anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me
we’d still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways
not to say it. (Galatea 9, my emphasis)
In addition to this accurate description of how the Internet would
change (indeed has changed) social interaction, Galatea 2.2
relentlessly anticipates a readerly nostalgia for the fictional present,
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from a distant future that lies outside of the novel’s fictional scope.
The object of this imaginative exercise, this forward-looking
nostalgia mostly relates to the way technology will have changed
the world. The following example refers to the introduction of
access cards that allow university staff to enter a building: “Anyone
reading this by accident or nostalgia a hundred years from now will
have to take my word for the novelty” (7). As it turns out, this way
of gaining access into a building is widely spread less than three
decades after the publication of Powers’ novel, but it is mostly
perceived as an instrument of surveillance, alienation and of
reducing employees to mere numbers.
In the novel, anticipated nostalgia also refers to antiquated
architecture: “The cityscape was something an American
postprimitive might do, a nostalgic century from now. C. and I
lived it in advance retrospective. . . . the present was far stranger
than it let on” (98). With this description, Powers self-consciously
illustrates the postmodern “nostalgia mode” that colonizes
architecture, characterized by a “complacent eclecticism . . . which
randomly and without principle but with gusto cannibalizes all the
architectural styles of the past and combines them in
overstimulating ensembles,” a “well-nigh libidinal historicism”
(Jameson 18-9). The building where the protagonist works
illustrates Powers’ point even further: “The Center’s architecture
laid irony upon irony. It was a postmodern rehash of Flemish
Renaissance” (5). In its insistence on both irony and nostalgia, this
description is redolent of Hutcheon and Valdés’s views on both,
which has already been alluded to with regard to Cohen’s novel:
“The knowingness of irony may be not so much a defense against
the power of nostalgia as the way in which nostalgia is made
palatable today: invoked but, at the same time, undercut, put into
perspective, seen exactly for what it is – a comment on the present
as much as on the past” (Hutcheon and Valdés 23). However, when
it comes to his own memories of the town of U., where he returns
after more than a decade, the protagonist’s nostalgia is anything but
affectless and superficial:
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U. was the place where I first saw how paint might encode politics,
first heard how a sonata layered itself like a living hierarchy, first
felt sentences cadence into engagement. . . . I betrayed my beloved
physics in this town, shacked up with literature. My little brother
called me here to tell me Dad was dead. I tied my life to C.’s in this
town. (Galatea 4)
As this excerpt from the novel’s second page intimates, Galatea 2.2
is a self-consciously nostalgic account of Powers’ most significant
loves (for C., A., his father, Professor Taylor and Helen), but also a
retrospective of his career as a novelist. Galatea 2.2 is Powers’ –
the author’s – fifth published novel, as well as Richard Powers the
protagonist’s fifth novel. Thus, the novel under scrutiny is not only
overtly autobiographical, but it also reads like a metafictional
account of itself, as it narrates the events that brought it into being
and comments on itself in the process. Professor Taylor – whose
real-world counterpart would be Robert Schneider, the teacher who
made the author change his major from physics to literature
(Dewey) – is constantly remembered throughout the novel: “After
my mother, the man had taught me how to read. Taylor was reading
for me. Through Taylor, I discovered how a book both mirrored
and elicited the mind’s unreal ability to turn inward upon itself”
(Galatea 141). Powers the protagonist’s one-year writer-in-
residence stint at U. results in his involvement in an A.I. project.
The project’s eighth implementation is a machine that possesses
self-awareness and can read and interpret works of literature. He
baptizes it Helen. Powers the author avails himself of this science-
fiction element to question and dissect concepts like
(self)consciousness, cognition, knowledge, memory and love: “That
would be consciousness. The memory of memory” (177). Memory
in particular is interrogated in Galatea 2.2. Professor Taylor, for
instance, is described as “the man who thought only memory stood
between us and randomness” (204). Powers’ novel is a deeply
nostalgic work that unexpectedly couples autobiography with
science fiction, i.e. a backward looking impetus with a forward-
looking drive, with nostalgia caught in between the two and
working in both directions.
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Published five years later across the Atlantic, Crumey’s Mr
Mee (2000) is also a novel of many layers that spans the Two
Cultures divide. Like Powers, Crumey is a reformed scientist, a
former theoretical physicist who veered towards a literary career.
Mr Mee consists of three intertwining plotlines, which are
organized in alternating chapters. One revolves around the
eponymous protagonist, an octogenarian living in present-day
Scotland who is an avid reader of eighteenth-century philosophy.
The second plotline introduced by the novel is set in eighteenth-
century France and centers on copyists Minard and Ferrand, two
characters harking back to Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet.
Finally, the third story’s protagonist is present-day Dr. Petrie, a
British literary scholar specializing in eighteenth-century French
literature. Mr Mee’s story is narrated through his own letters to a
lifelong friend who turns out to have been dead for more than eight
years, a fact that has not deterred Mr Mee from continuing to write
to him. Dr. Petrie’s story is also a first-person account, a memoir
written shortly before his death, while he is hospitalized with colon
cancer. Ferrand and Minard’s story is a third-person narrative
emulating Flaubert’s style.
The novel is a complex metafiction packed with literary and
philosophical ideas, but also, crucially, with scientific ideas
pertaining to information technology. The internet in particular is
taken apart as Mr Mee, a man of leisure and a man of letters who
spends most of his time reading in his library, starts using a
computer. His (debatably successful) attempts to make sense of the
internet as a technology and to use it effectively result in a
deconstruction and defamiliarization of the concept of the World
Wide Web for the benefit of the reader. Mr Mee’s journey towards
technological (and sexual) enlightenment makes for most of the
novel’s intoxicating humor. Nonetheless, this journey ends back
where it started: “I had merely been distracted by irrelevant web
pages, search engines, and bedroom tutorials; while libraries and
antiquarian bookshops still had their uses after all” (319).
Disappointed by the internet and the spoof articles it so freely doles
out, Mr Mee returns to “[his] first and truest friends . . . [his]
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precious jewels . . . [his] beloved Hume” (323) and his life reverts
back to the tranquility and routine which had been disrupted by the
arrival of the new computer. The novel’s epilogue, which at times
reads like a pro/con debate with regard to internet (albeit one set in
1914, presciently anticipating the future of technology), strengthens
the sense of nostalgia as a “longing towards slower, steadier and
more ontologically secure rhythms” (Sayers 25) that the novel
conveys. Minard’s great-great-grandson, an electrical engineer who
installs a théâtrophone in Marcel Proust’s flat in 1914, is an
advocate of the new technology: “Will people even need to leave
their own armchair? . . . Will people still bother to read? . . . just
think of all the extra time which people will have” (328-9). He
emerges as the kind of philistine who would appall devoted
scholars like Mr Mee. The engineer also lists his opponents’
counterarguments, which are made to sound equally prescient:
“That would be a terribly dull kind of society . . . People will
become lazy, isolated, they will no longer seek friendship, they will
forget how to conduct a conversation” (328). This can be correlated
to the excerpt from Powers’ novel above, where “strange” and
“lonely” are the adjectives used to characterize the internet’s effects
on humans. The engineer’s great-great-grandfather Minard is
described as the misguided and ultimately incompetent inventor of
a would-be “inference machine” (252), i.e. a “computing engine”
(271), a kind of ur-computer like the one built by Charles Babbage
less than a century later. Minard’s descendant (who turns out to be
Mr. Mee’s father, whom Mr. Mee has never met) is overly
confident in the benefits of technology and proclaims on the
novel’s last page: “. . . we are all of us, in this young century, on the
verge of limitless peace and prosperity, thanks to the miracles of
science, and to methods of communication which can bring an
entire planet within the palm of a person’s hand” (344). However,
history is about to prove him wrong, as World War I would break
out only a month after he wrote these words in a letter to a friend.
It is significant that Crumey’s novel was published in 2000,
the year many had been apprehensive about as a potential
technological apocalypse. More than two decades and a pandemic
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later, Crumey’s problematization of technology’s alienating and
isolating effects is more relevant than ever. One of the beneficial
effects of the pandemic was the opportunity it provided for many
(though not all) to slow down and take stock. The taken-for-granted
and often squandered opportunities to actually be with other people
have been re-evaluated by many, as has the ultimate goal and value
of being stuck on a treadmill. All our automated and conventional
reactions in/to life have come under scrutiny. Nostalgia in
Crumey’s novel also relates to a time before invention morphed
into convention, to a time before life stopped being examined. In
his memoir, which interrogates life, love, memory, the memoir
itself and its relationship to fiction, Dr. Petrie dwells on his
infatuation with Louisa Lawson, one of his students. In the process,
his longing for what Stuart Tannock calls “a prelapsarian world”
(456) emerges out of mundane details related for instance to buying
curtains, making the decisions involved therein, and a retrospective
thereof: “[the curtains] had moved from the problematic realm of
Recognition into the comfortable domain of Memory” (134). He
longs for the time before his wife Ellen “began reducing [him] to
the sort of man she could confidently marry” (75) and develops an
infatuation with a student he sees seldom enough to permanently
preserve the freshness of the first impression. Habit and comfort are
seen as lies, as blindness: “the first impression is the truth, and all
that follows is the excuse of memory” (133). Dr. Petrie describes
the life of an academic as “glid[ing] like a coffin into the securely
tenured entombment of academic life” (220).
The very inclusion of Ferrand and Minard’s story in the
novel and the fictional return to the eighteenth century it entails can
also be seen as symptoms of writerly nostalgia. Given the historical
acceleration of late modernity, Ferrand and Minard’s slower
rhythms of life in Montmorency can be read as “a form of reaction
to the velocity and vertigo of modern temporality” (Pickering and
Keightley 922-3). The style of the chapters that revert to
eighteenth-century France elicits readerly nostalgia, as the reader
enjoys the comic relief and the ostensibly realist third-person
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narrative, the dialogue and the free indirect speech that pervade
these chapters:
Within three or four weeks of first meeting one another, each knew
no more or less about his companion’s life than was already
apparent after that first conversation on a bench. They knew their
similarities to be so profound that any attempt at exploration would
simply be a form of introspection, a habit with whose dangers they
were well acquainted. (31)
By interlacing the three plotlines, Crumey’s novel seems to
reproduce the very fragmentation brought about by late modernity
that it also bemoans. However, by the end of the novel, all the
narrative strings have been pulled together and, in spite of its
formal fragmentariness, the novel conveys the sense of a deeper
continuity at work underneath the apparent discontinuities of the
contemporary world. Nostalgia’s potential for establishing
continuity has been recognized by many scholars, whether they
come from the social sciences, literary studies or cognitive
psychology (Pickering and Keightley 919-20; Sayers 25; Routledge
76-8). What is remarkable in Crumey’s novel is the interplay
between continuity and discontinuity and the way in which various
kinds of nostalgia inform each other.
Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel Textermination (1991) wears
its concern on its sleeve. It anticipates the end of reading as an
everyday activity, and the end of certain kinds of engagement with
books. The novel presents an MLA-like conference attended by
fictional characters of all times and cultures, as well as academics,
all brought together by their anxiety that reading might die out.
Fictional characters are more or less pleading with readers (Brooke-
Rose’s readers) for their lives, implying that only by reading does a
text come alive, a tenet of reader response theory. At some point, a
fictional Pope Hadrian VII protests:
. . . for we [i.e. fictional characters] are not read, and when read, we
are read badly, we are not lived as we used to be, we are not
identified with and fantasised, we are rapidly forgotten. Those of us
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who have the good fortune to be read by teachers, scholars and
students are not read as we used to be read, but analysed as
schemata, structures, functions within structures, logical and
mathematical formulae, aporia, psychic movements, social
significances and so forth. (25-26, my emphasis)
The entire novel actually reads like a facetious, but also desperate
and nostalgic attempt to preserve reading as such. The humanities
are in crisis – they have been for decades – and this prompts the
nostalgic return to the way things used to be. This excerpt is
illustrative of the memory bias involved in recalling past
experiences; to quote (comedy writer) Robert Orben, “Nostalgia is
like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, but the past
perfect” (qtd. in Leboe and Ansons 606). Experiments conducted
by psychologists like Jason P. Leboe and Tamara L. Ansons have
indeed shown that “negative memories fade faster than positive
memories,” an occurrence called “fading affect bias” (607). This is
especially true of autobiographical events: we tend to remember
positive events rather than negative ones. When it comes to the
triggers of nostalgia, various experiments have been conducted in
cognitive science, one of which has revealed that the most
important cause triggering nostalgia in everyday life is negative
affect, i.e. a dissatisfaction with the present, which accounts for
38% of cases, followed by social interactions (24%) and sensory
inputs (19%) (Wildschut et al. 981). Brooke-Rose’s novel seems to
illustrate the first of the causes.
A further example of nostalgia triggered by negative affect is
found in Hanno Hackmann, the protagonist of Dietrich Schwanitz’s
Der Campus (1998), who argues that the university per se is gone,
that it no longer exists:
The university that used to exist, was committed to truth. It was the
institution that, amidst the roar of social interests and
pursuits/ambitions, was supposed to represent the truth. What has
remained of all this you can see in me. Yes, take a good look at me!
Then you will see what the university has become: a heap of
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rubble, a ruin, a wreck, to the further de-composition of which
everyone who feels like it helps themselves. (382-3)1
Hackmann laments the politicization of the university and the
inflationary morality promoted by leftist academics, much in the
same vein as Philip Roth deplores the “piety” or “purity binge,” the
“ecstasy of sanctimony” (2) that destroys Coleman Silk and Faunia
Farley in The Human Stain (2000). Nostalgia for a by-gone era is
implicit in the relentless repetition, at the beginning of the novel, of
references to the summer of 1998, when America indulged once
more in puritanism, “its oldest communal passion” (2). At this
point, the politics of nostalgia should be mentioned. Nostalgia’s
association with conservatism and regression is by now a critical
truism which is being challenged by several scholars (Pickering and
Keightley 920-1; Sayers 6). Boym’s distinction between
“restorative” and “reflective” nostalgia, between an uncritical
nostalgia that seeks to restore the past exactly as it was and a kind
of nostalgia that “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and
belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of
modernity” (xviii) is one such endeavor. Another is Pickering and
Keightley’s assertion that nostalgia is both “melancholic and
utopian,” that “a distinction between the desire to return to an
earlier state or idealized past, and the desire not to return but to
recognize aspects of the past as the basis for renewal and
satisfaction in the future” needs to be made (921).
Social interactions are certainly an important trigger of
nostalgia, as the international seminar that resulted in the
publication of this issue attests. When David Lodge’s characters
Morris Zapp, Hilary and Philip Swallow meet again in Small World
(1984), they inevitably start reminiscing about the past and their
stories are tinged with nostalgia. Philip even confesses to having
gone on living in Euphoria, California, albeit in his head, after
having returned to England. He goes to great lengths in staging the
narration of his love story with Joy Simpson, as Morris notices
when he returns to the room: “. . . he was conscious that the
furniture and lighting had been rearranged in his absence” (67). The
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intertextually charged, low-burning gas fire is a must in creating the
right atmosphere for indulging in nostalgic reminiscing. So are the
vivid details related to the persons Philip met on the plane that
almost crashed, as Morris points out: “Solidity of specification . . .
contributes to the reality effect” (68). As studies into the cognitive
roots of nostalgia show, “the most potent nostalgic experiences
occur in response to recollections that possess a vivid, story-like
quality” (Leboe and Ansons 607) or, in other words, nostalgia
“might actually originate from an affective response to the act of
remembering itself” (608). What Philip wants to communicate most
to Morris is that for him “intensity of experience” (Lodge 68) is key
to being happy and in this he is much like Crumey’s character Dr.
Petrie. Philip tells the story of his affair against an elaborate set-up
and with carefully chosen (if not downright rehearsed) words – like
Jane Austen’s Mr. Collins, he confesses to actually having written
down the story when Morris compliments him on a “very fancy
metaphor” (72).
It is a well-known fact that appealing to the senses is crucial
to memory and to reviving past experiences (Hutcheon and Valdés
20). Speaking of ‘fancy’ metaphors, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty
(2005) is dappled with vivid language and sensorially rich
imagery:
Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way
out. The shudder sent the leaves to the ground all at once, and Zora
Belsey had that strange, late-September feeling that somewhere in a
small classroom with small chairs an elementary school teacher
was waiting for her. It seemed wrong that she should be walking
towards town without a shiny tie and a pleated skirt, without a
selection of scented erasers. (129)
This image provides an example of what Iris Murdoch meant by
“mental events” (50), as she calls them in her essay on aesthetic
experience entitled “Nostalgia for the Particular” (1952). It is in
these particulars, in the “quasi-physical character” (51) of these
mental events that clear, impressive, vivid metaphors originate.
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Rather surprisingly, settings (such as campuses) are not
frequent triggers of nostalgia (1%), according to Tim Wildschut et
al. They are, however, its third most prevalent object, with 10% and
19% of all respondents respectively, depending on which of the two
experimental studies one deems to be more relevant (Wildschut et
al. 978). The two studies conducted by Wildschut et al. differ
mainly in their sample: the first one had a sample consisting of U.S.
nationals of all ages, whereas the participants in the second study
were British undergraduates (979). Azar Nafisi’s memories of Iran
(and of Tehran in particular) as reflected in Reading Lolita in
Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003) revolve around the University
of Tehran: “It was the navel, the immovable center to which all
political and social activities were tied. When in the U.S. we read or
heard about the turmoil in Iran, the University of Tehran seemed to
be the scene of the most important battles. All groups used the
university to make their statements” (88-89). Nafisi’s feelings
towards the University of Tehran are ambiguous, mixed and highly
self-conscious: she constantly factors in potential memory biases.
When she describes the actual buildings and the architecture of the
campus, she is aware of the fact that “[m]emory has given them
gargantuan proportions they probably didn’t have in reality, but
those expansive buildings of the thirties had a strange feel about
them. They were made for crowds: you never felt quite at home”
(92). In this novel, the object of nostalgic recollection is not the
campus, but Nafisi’s living room, where she holds a private,
clandéstine literature class for seven of her best female students
while Iran is in the throes of a totalitarian Islamic regime:
When my students came into that room, they took off more than
their scarves and robes. Gradually, each one gained an outline and
a shape, becoming her own inimitable self. Our world in that living
room with its window framing my beloved Elburz Mountains
became our sanctuary, our self-contained universe, mocking the
reality of black-scarved, timid faces in the city that sprawled below.
(6)
Corina Selejan
205
She further describes that room as “a place of transgression” and “a
wonderland” (8), while allowing for memory bias once more: “That
room, which I never paid much attention to at that time, has gained
a different status in my mind’s eye now that it has become the
precious object of memory” (7). Nafisi illustrates the claim made
by cognitivists that “nostalgic experiences represent a distortion of
both the past and the present” (Leboe and Ansons 596), i.e. that the
past is always sentimentalized and the present is always found to be
impoverished and emaciated (Davis qtd. in Gabriel 121). In
diasporic narratives like this novel, remoteness in time entails
remoteness in space, so nostalgic recollection feels two- instead of
one-dimensional and is reminiscent of older meanings the concept
of nostalgia used to incorporate, such as homesickness (Pickering
and Keightley 921-2; Wildschut et al. 975). Perhaps this is why
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin (1957), Patrick McGuiness’s The Last
Hundred Days (2011), André Aciman’s Harvard Square (2013)
feel doubly nostalgic, as compared to the other campus novels
already mentioned here. Aciman’s novel opens with his
protagonist’s visit to Harvard together with his son as part of the
college selection process. The son’s dismissive reaction to Harvard
University is explainable to the father in the following terms:
“Everything he sees is steeped in a stagnant vat of nostalgia, and for
all its rosy cheeks, the past always gives off that off-putting, musty
scent of old pipes and mildewed rooms that haven’t been aired in
years” (4-5). This serves to confirm the fact that, in most cases, the
self is the protagonist of nostalgic reminiscence. Cognitive studies
partly corroborate this (Wildschut et al. 976; Routledge 17) – and I
say only “partly” because “organizational nostalgia” has also been
shown to exist and indeed to be a pervasive phenomenon (Gabriel
119); yet the more recent studies on nostalgia focus on the
individual.
In the essay mentioned at the beginning of this article,
Bradbury concedes the fact that “the term [university novel]
annoys”, as few non-popular writers “like to have [their] novels
labelled by their settings” (“Campus Fictions” 50). One year later,
East-West Cultural Passage
206
in an article entitled “If Your Books Are Funny, Please Tell Me
Where” (1988), his sarcasm reaches mordant heights:
I have to tell you that the phrase “campus novel” causes me some
anxiety and has even brought me out in large red blemishes. It is
said, I think, that Thomas Mann had similar problems when people
described his “Zauberberg” – or “The Magic Flute,” as we call it
here – as a “hospital novel,” and that Franz Kafka turned into
something totally different from his so-called normal self when he
was asked to compare his work in the field of the “castle novel”
with that of P. G. Wodehouse.
Perhaps some of this aversion to the term “university/campus
novel” can be explained by Bradbury’s disdain for the campuses
that feature in most of his academic novels: according to him,
redbrick universities are “frequently converted lunatic asylums or
extended public lavatories,” whereas the ‘new’ universities are
“1960's architectural wonders built in green fields by Finnish
architects driven mad by the remarkable plastic properties of
concrete” (“If Your Books”). The History Man (1975) includes a
description of the latter style of campus, designed by “that notable
Finnish architect Jop Kaakinen” (37), a campus that is a reflection
of Howard Kirk’s self-image as a history-transforming individual.
Bradbury’s views on new campuses have rippled across time and
space and find at least one echo in Schwanitz’s Der Campus, which
features a similar campus, described by nouns like “lovelessness,”
“dreariness,” “ugliness” and “randomness” (36-39). This is
reminiscent of Ian Carter’s claim that Oxbridge settings are
flaunted by academic novelists like “status symbols” and that “new
buildings are at best tolerated, at worst excoriated” (45). In Juliet
Lapidos’ recent novel Talent (2019), the Collegiate campus is an
“aspirational, neo-Gothic campus, designed to make ignorant
Americans think the university dates back to the Middle Ages, and
visitors from Oxford or Cambridge think, Haven’t I seen this
somewhere before?” (4). The novel takes issue with the fact that
university campuses do all in their power to cater to ersatz nostalgia
by fashioning inauthentic imitations of iconic, ancient university
Corina Selejan
207
campuses from across the pond. Elsewhere, the text elaborates on
this by comparing the two library buildings, Golden Memorial and
New Campus (which bring to mind Thornfield Library and its
Annex in James Hynes’s The Lecturer’s Tale (2001)):
The promotional brochure that Collegiate sent to newly admitted
students had a picture of Golden Memorial Library on the cover.
Golden was meant to resemble a Gothic cathedral, which it more or
less did. Construction crews must have exhausted New England’s
quarries to assemble its granite and limestone façade; must have
wondered if they were, in fact, building some sort of church when
they erected the portentous entrance hall, with its sixty-foot vaulted
ceiling, and the fifteen-story tower destined to hold books –
millions upon millions of books acquired as part of a literary arms
race with the nation’s competing research universities.
Below Golden was New Campus, an underground library that
Collegiate never featured in its advertising materials. Whereas
Golden was lousy with stained glass and gargoyles and marble
reliefs and chandeliers, New Campus had buzzy fluorescent lights,
cubicles shaped like swastikas – if you took the bird’s-eye view –
white plaster walls and poster reproductions of forgotten
midcentury pop art. . . . To move from Golden, built in the 1920s,
to New Campus, built in the 1970s, was to witness the devolution
of American architecture.
Yet there was something comforting about New Campus. . . .
New Campus did not demand anything of its visitors, like Golden
did. Golden expected heady gratitude. New Campus accepted
wallowing. (Lapidos 31-32, my emphasis)
The underwhelmed, seemingly detached, critical tone in which
Golden Memorial is discussed might suggest the utter absence of
nostalgic emotion; however, a closer look reveals a budding
nostalgia for New Campus and, in particular, for the comfort it
provides. The novel also comments on the increasing virtualization
of learning and writing: “The desk was a mahogany behemoth out
of place in our digital age, with its stacked drawers, shelves, and
nooks meant to hold the debris of an intensely physical time” (15,
East-West Cultural Passage
208
my emphasis). The time of physicality is seen as having generated
debris, as the analog is everywhere replaced by the digital.
In the already mentioned article on organizational nostalgia,
the “physical buildings” (Gabriel 126) are mentioned first in
connection to collective nostalgia and are thereby accorded the
highest importance as an object of nostalgia. By contrast (and
predictably), in studies of private, individual nostalgia, persons
(33%/28%) and momentous events (21%/34%) take precedence
over setting (Wildschut et al. 978). In Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita
in Tehran, the students attending the class in the narrator’s living
room are dwelled on first and at length: it is Manna, Mahshid,
Yassi, Azin, Mitra, Sanaz and Nassrin that make the object of
Nafisi’s fondest recollections. They are only rivalled by the books
they discuss during that class. Still, the most vivid images are those
of the seven young women shedding “their mandatory veils and
robes and burst[ing] into color” (5-6). Grudin’s Book: A Novel
(1992) foregrounds a book as both the trigger and object of
nostalgia: a nostalgia for a kind of literature that is not being
written anymore – a correlative to the nostalgia in Brooke-Rose’s
Textermination for a certain kind of reading. Thus, Adam Snell’s
Sovrana Sostrata awakens in its readers
a feeling of profound familiarity, a connection restored apparently
after so long a loss of touch as to suggest the sudden repetition of
some forgotten childhood event. What event? . . . No particular
event . . . Something more like an attitude, a way of seeing or
focusing the senses . . . An attitude of commitment, of total,
abandoned, celebratory engagement with a subject. (55)
This attitude of passionate, focused and exploratory “intensity” (56-
57) is the object of nostalgia here – and it emerges as the very
opposite of comfort. Nostalgia, we are told by psychologists and
cognitivists, “bolsters social bonds, increases self-regard, and
generates positive affect” (Wildschut et al. 987), “helps lonely
people restore feelings of belongingness” (Routledge 56),
“mobilizes the social self by making people prioritize relationship
goals” (58), “promotes self-continuity” and “psychological
Corina Selejan
209
growth,” “motivates exploration and creativity” (83), and “restores
meaning” (99). In short, if we are to believe recent findings in
psychology, nostalgia comforts us without making us comfortable,
which is what good fiction does as well.
It seems that psychology and cognitive science confirm what
cultural and literary studies already knew: the fact that nostalgia is
not just a backward-looking malaise, but also a creative and
productive way in which the past informs the present and the
future. The novels referred to in this article illustrate this in very
different ways: via ideas as well as style, by reflexively
commenting on literature itself as well as architecture, by crossing
the divide between the Two Cultures and making sense of how
technology changes the present and how the future can be steered
towards a critical engagement with technology.
30
Notes:
30
1 My translation. In the original: “Die Universität, die es mal gab, war
der Wahrheit verpflichtet. Sie war die Institution, die im großen Getöse
gesellschaftlicher Interessen und Strebungen die Wahrheit darstellen
sollte. Was davon übriggeblieben ist, können Sie an mir sehen. Ja, sehen
Sie mich an! Dann sehen Sie, was aus der Universität geworden ist: ein
Trümmerhaufen, eine Ruine, ein Wrack, aus dessen weiterer Demontage
sich jeder bedient, der Lust dazu hat. (Schwanitz 382-3)
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