"Nostalgia can be radical"

An deep-dive of nostalgia with historian Agnes Arnold-Forster

I’ve been thinking a lot about nostalgia recently. Like many millennials, I am obsessed with the 90s - the cultural mores, the politics, the inventions, the fashion, the health fads, the telly. I’m particularly intrigued by how that decade set up the chaos of the early 00s - which we’re in a heady revival of right now (including, most depressingly, Size 00, 2.0.) In short, as I read somewhere recently: “déjà vu is the spirit of the age”.

At the same time, I’m interested in nostalgia’s ominous subtext - it’s association with regressive politics and the closing of minds. Is nostalgia purely retro? Is there anything productive about having golden-tinted glasses?

And so when I read about a new book on the history of nostalgia by the historian Dr Agnes Arnold-Forster, I snapped up a copy immediately. It turned out to be everything I hoped for and more: a fascinating and rigorous debunking of everything I thought I knew about nostalgia! I was was thrilled when Agnes agreed to an interview, which you can read below.

Agnes! Your book couldn’t have landed at a more prescient time - it feels like we are constantly talking about nostalgia at the moment. Have you always been interested in it?

I’ve always been a nostalgic person. When I was a child, I was really into The Little House on the Prairie and Enid Blyton. I was so dissatisfied with my 1990s London life - and desperately nostalgic for a period of the past I hadn’t even lived through. Now, looking back at it, I think it was the best childhood imaginable. But at the time I thought, ‘What the hell is this? Why am I not in Somerset drinking ginger beer!?’ 

Several history degrees later and I became an academic historian and in the world of academic history, nostalgia has a pretty poor reputation. Generally speaking, historians think [nostalgia is] antithetical to what we are meant to do as historians, which is to be unemotional, to look at the past warts and all and to give an even-handed appraisal of its successes and failures. 

But then I began studying the history of emotions - which as a discipline has a bit more of a place for feelings - and I was researching nostalgia in the NHS. Now, if you spend any time with NHS workers, both past and present, you will quickly be exposed to the chronic condition that has always plagued the NHS: nostalgia. And soon I’d gone down the rabbit hole.

I had always thought nostalgia was a feeling. I didn’t realise until I read your book that it is an emotion. And that before that, up until about 100 years ago, it was classified as a fatal disease! 

It’s true. ‘Nostalgia’ was written as the cause of death on millions of death certificates in the 18th century. It was first coined as a term in 1688, as a sort of intense homesickness and first identified as a fatal disease in the 1720s, when it was cited on the death certificate of a mercenary soldier in the Swiss army.

The Swiss were really famous for having a very good army and they often sold their army abroad. The problem was that they were mostly young men, who had been drafted into an army on the other side of Europe, at a time where no one left their home town. Many of them were in an intensely nostalgic state - a state that was seen as so dangerous that playing certain music was banned. For example, playing the Alpine Milking Song was punishable by death. Because hearing the song caused some of the soldiers so much misery and longing for home, that it could cause them to die. And that wasn’t good for business. 

So did they die of nostalgia, or did they die by suicide, or could they not - particularly those in the transatlantic slave trade - have died of poor nutrition and infectious disease?

One of the most common questions I get asked by people who have read the book is, “Yes but what did they really die of?” My frustrating answer is, we don’t know. Nostalgia did have physical symptoms - heart palpitations, depression, loss of appetite, visions - but we cannot know what they died of. And when you re-categorize diseases - equating nostalgia with depression, or heart disease - you lose the texture of the past. 

To me, what they died of is not the important question. The important question is, what does [the fact that it was listed as the cause of death for millions of people] tell us about the world they lived in?

Nostalgia divorced itself from disease in the 1940s, you write (the last mention of nostalgia on a death certificate was in 1917) and clicked into its modern iteration - as a psychological/ emotional phenomenon - in the 1950s. So pining for the past is really not a new thing?

The biggest myth about nostalgia is that it is an exclusive project of the now. That the reason why people want to vote for Donald Trump, why the Ghosbusters film is a success, why everyone is obsessed with the 90s (which is the last time we can remember before the total infiltration of the internet) is because we are living through an especially nostalgic moment. But history shows that collective anxiety about nostalgia has been a constant companion of modern life.

For example, the 70s - my favourite decade as a historian - was very nostalgic. The 60s was extremely radical. Civil rights and feminism really upset the social order. And so you saw a lot of nostalgia in the 70s, in reaction to that. Nostalgia is a cultural response to change. It is a reassuring balm that people can use to make themselves feel better. Society is always in a cycle of reinvention and reaction. Often at the same time.

I was pleased to see you unstick nostalgia from the far right. There’s this idea that if you are nostalgic, you must also be racist and sexist and small-minded. You write that the sociologist Yiannis Gabriel calls it, “the latest opiate of the people”. But that has always felt a bit flattening to me.

Yes, that's another myth about nostalgia - that it’s for "the sick, the sentimental and the stupid". It has been associated with having your head in the ground, an inability to reckon with the modern world, and a conservative small and large C. MAGA, for instance, is a quintessentially nostalgic slogan. ‘Great again.’ The problem with that rhetoric is that it is used to foreclose conversation, rather than expand it. We don’t do the complexity of political debate, and the appeal of electoral reforms justice, if we just say, "It’s just down to nostalgia." 

It’s very easy to think or imply that nostalgia is somehow synonymous with discriminatory beliefs. That isn’t compelling to me because nostalgia doesn’t cause people to be racist or homophobic or to long for an imagined patriarchy. Nostalgia isn’t the problem. It’s what people are nostalgic for, that can be the problem. 

Nostalgia isn’t a political problem, if you believe in progress. Nor is it just a conservative emotion. People on the left can also be very nostalgic. For example, people who talk wistfully about a pre-crisis NHS in the 1950s are nostalgic. As a historian, I can say that there was never a pre-crisis NHS. It has always been on the brink of collapse.

I find it oddly comforting that the NHS has always functioned on the brink of collapse. It insinuates that it may continue on, forevermore, on said brink. (Whilst wishing, of course, it wasn't nor had ever been!) I really liked your restorative version of nostalgia. It feels like a calming corrective.

Nostalgia is not just stultifying. It can be galvanizing, optimistic and productive. Nostalgia for a past of community, for aid, for support - that has become in some ways a radical vision of what you want society to look like. When you have nostalgic reflections, the mind - as one psychologist put it - is “peopled”. You don’t feel nostalgic for solitary time, you feel nostalgia for time you spent in community. That’s the thing that I find so powerful about "Make America Great Again". It’s open-ended. It can mean anything to anyone. It can actually be an anti-Trumpian sentiment. To go back to the past and resurrect things for progressive, radical reasons. 

Like abortion!

Yes, let's go back to 1973 [when abortion was decriminalised.] Also, as much as there’s a lot of nostalgia in modern society, there’s also the prevalent idea that all of our problems are going to be solved by tech. Apple recently released an ad which is basically rage-bait. There’s a big crushing machine and into it goes paint and pianos and record players and out comes a tiny little thin ipad.

The implication is that tech is going to replace all the other ways in which we produce culture. This Elon Musk idea that we can space race our way into the future and that the past has nothing to offer us is, to me, as problematic - if not more damaging - than nostalgia for the past. It’s important to look at the past, to see what was productive and radical. 

That advert is literally painful to watch. You write that “Nostalgia has the power to make you buy things.” How is nostalgia used in adverts?

One of the adverts I write about most - which is also the one that people ask me about the most - is the 1971 Hovis ad, directed by Ridley Scott. It’s a 1930s scene, with a little boy pushing a bicycle up a hill in Somerset, and it was a nostalgic vision of ye olde Britain. It’s got this cult status as an ad, it’s been voted Britain’s best ad multiple times and it’s been repeatedly re-issued on TV. When you watch it, you can see why it’s appealing. 

It’s also a great example of how nostalgia can get a bit meta. People who grew up in the 30s were nostalgic watching it, as it reminded them of their childhood. But people who grew up in the 70s are also really nostalgic for it - because it makes them think of their childhood watching it. It shows how nostalgia in culture works on many levels and how irrelevant the actual past is. 

Another example of this is a museum in Shropshire, which is set up to look like a 1890s town. If you read the reviews on Trip Advisor, it's all these people writing quite explicitly about how nostalgic it makes them feel for the good old days and their childhood. But this is a town set up in the 1890s - none of these people were alive then! At the earliest they were born in the 40s. So it doesn’t really matter what era or decade of the past is being displayed. Nostalgia is about your own projection of the past.

I find this whole ‘life was so much simpler/ easier/ happier back then’ so interesting. Because it’s well documented that there was a sort of social/ moral/ cultural meltdown when the telephone was invented in the 1920s. And then when lots of British households started to get TVs in the 50s.

My favourite example of this is Samuel Pepys in the 17th century, when he gets a pocket watch. He is obsessed with it and can’t stop taking it out of his pocket to check the time. It only has the hours, it doesn’t even have the minutes. And he writes that he is addicted to it and that he thinks it’s the end of civilisation. It’s so comforting! 

In the 19th century, there was the same reaction to the train, the telegraph, the postal service - the post being the end of civilisation was a real thing. Every decade has its own point of reference and change. Of course, the pace of change is much faster now. But things also stay remarkably the same. It’s so telling to me that the main thing I use my phone for now is to do the New York Times crossword. It’s a technology to do something that’s been around for a long time and is actually very analogue.

On that note - I absolutely loved your theories on reality tv. 

Oh, thank you!

Because it’s another thing that is painted as the end of civilization.

But which is a continuation or a reflection of something else.

Exactly. 

Going back to that idea of the golden old days. Could the fact that we are in an age of anxiety, and a loneliness epidemic, not be used an evidence that we are more atomised than ever before and ergo, that people were more content 50 or 100 years ago? I guess it’s that debate about internal vs. external progress. Less disease, improved literacy - but more anxiety.

My response to that is always, “But how do we know that we are less happy now than we were before?” The terminology for anxiety only exists in the 20th century. We didn’t have the language of anxiety in the world before then. And even when you find [a passage that uses the word ‘anxious’ or ‘anxiety’] they might be referring to the same thing we feel now, but maybe they are not at all. 

So it comes back to the futile project of mapping past emotions, or diseases, onto current ones in order to try and do a like by like comparison.

That’s the challenge and temptation! We so desperately want to know how people felt in the past and you sort of have to come to terms with the fact that you cannot know. It’s very tempting to say people used to be happier, or that they are lonelier now, but I’d levy some scepticism on that. We just don’t know.

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BITS

I interviewed Rebecca F. Kuang about her gossipy satire Yellowface (which has sold more than 1.5 million copies) for The Sunday Times Style and found her to be a giant brain and very entertaining to boot. “Becky, you slut!”

Some book events I have coming up (all in London)!

I’ll be interviewing Vanessa Walters about The Lagos Wife for The Feminist Book Club on 3rd June - tickets here

And Coco Mellors about Blue Sisters at the Reformation store in Covent Garden on 4th June - tickets here

Aaaand Katy Hessel about The Story of Art Without Men for Intelligence Squared on September 17th - tickets here

Be there or be square(d).

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Overheard on the tube this week: “life is crazy, and I’m running around like a total knob”. Never felt so seen.

Speaking of catchphrases, my husband reminded me of José Mourinho’s infamous non-apology: “I was rude, but I was rude to an idiot.” I now recall it every time my 4-year-old non-apologises to me.

I found this piece by American critic Freddie deBoer on the modern curse of over-optimisation really interesting. It skewers something nebulous, with precision - which is the feeling that too much of culture has become rote and practised and seamless and known. Does the hack even exist anymore?

The £5 coffee is coming for us!! Can the neighbourhood cafe survive it? Read and weep along with this piece by my Unreal co-host Sirin Kale for The Guardian.

Who knew the off-screen drama around Baby Reindeer would prove a match for the on? I’m not going to link to that exploitative interview (just because you can interview someone, doesn’t mean you should), but I found The Rest is Entertainment’s segment on compliance in TV super interesting.

I’m only two eps in, but I’ve been telling everyone I know to watch Big Mood on Channel 4. In writer/director Camilla Whitehill’s debut tv comedy series, Nicola Coughlan plays a playwright with bipolar disorder (Maggie) who comes off her lithium because she worries it’s stunting her ability to write, while Lydia West (Eddie) plays her best friend and foil. It’s not always easy to watch - and some of the characters like Klent really don’t work - but I found it painfully tender and funny and big-hearted. The Love Actually party that Eddie throws Maggie had me laughing out loud with its attention to detail.

Speaking of friendship, I adored this interview with Rob Rinder and Rylan Clark by Polly Vernon for The Sunday Times magazine, ostensibly on their new show in Italy about art, but mostly about how much they love each other. (Platonically. The headlines today are full of them denying a romance.) I’m a huge fan of both broadcasters and love how different they are on paper vs. how similar they are in brain and heart. And some bits just made me laugh out loud.

“[In the 17th century young aristocratic men] headed off to learn about art, to see the world and come back with this wealth of knowledge to start their lives. What they ended up doing was coming back with chlamydia — like Rob did.”

I was researching an upcoming episode of Book Chat on The Talented Mr Ripley (!!) and I went down a Philip Seymour Hoffman hole on Google. I came across this 2017 interview with his partner Mimi O’Donnell and was moved to tears by the way she spoke about their partnership and his emotional generosity.

“Even as I started getting out more, I couldn’t bring myself to go to the theatre. Phil had been my favourite person to go with. He was so enthusiastic and open and generous - he was floored by actors all the time - and at the end of any play, I would look over and he’d be crying.”

The is a riveting piece about a local legend, the Hackney Mole Man, by one of my favourite long-read writers Francisco Garcia for The FT mag. (His one on the ‘Ndrangheta informant for GQ is eye-popping.) In 2001, the council discovered that William Lyttle had dug a 20 metre by 8 metre hole below his house in De Beauvoir, causing a sinkhole to open up on the pavement outside. But for what? It’s a strange and sad story, entrenched in East London history. Well worth a read.

The caption on a now deleted post on Kate Beckinsale’s Instagram profile gave me pause for thought. The game of trying to spot what a celebrity has had done to their face/ body is a lively one - but as Beckinsale explains here, it is far from harmful. I can’t embed the post it as it no longer exists, but here’s an excerpt:

“I hate talking about this because I hate adding to this conversation but I’m doing it because insidious bullying of any kind over time takes a toll. Every time I post anything — and by the way, this has been the case since I was about 30 — I am accused of having had unrecognizable surgery/using Botox using fillers/being obsessed with looking younger and it’s really such a tiresome and subtly vicious way to bully a person.”

That’s all for now. See you Friday with a new episode of Book Chat!