Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 15 Number 1, April 2014
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Draaisma, Douwe. The Nostalgia Factory: Memory, Time and Ageing. Transl. by Liz Waters. London, UK, and New Haven, CT, Yale University Press. 2013 [original Dutch publication, 2008]. 158 pages; ISBN 978-0-300-18286-6. US$ 25.00, hbk.
Reviewed by
University of York
Douwe Draaisma, Heymans Professor of the History of Psychology, University of Groningen, has written a lucid and accessible volume on a subject which touches on a fundamental area of human experience. The problem of how we can generalise about the fundamentals of memory and ageing – which sometimes combine with the imagination to create an experience that some call nostalgia – when each one of us experiences it subjectively, is what forms an interesting, though not always acknowledged, tension in this book.
The Nostalgia Factory functions best as an introduction to some of the recent research on – and some of the age-old problems , so to speak, of – memory, ageing and nostalgia. Every reader will, of course, engage with the book from a slightly different perspective, depending on culture and background, personality traits, and age. I found the material on the ‘reminiscence bump’, in which memories of youth tend to cluster at around the age of twenty (p.59), to be a fascinating pattern, but perhaps as an academic, I reflected, I’m quite untypical in my self-consciousness (some would say, self-regard). For example, I vividly remember spending book tokens after my seventeenth birthday, on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Woody Allen’s Side Effects, and thinking to myself, ‘these are the books that will have influenced me when I’m older’. Similarly, it may be true, as Draaisma remarks, that for most of us, ‘what people regard as the music of “my generation” begins at the time they are fourteen or fifteen and ends in their late twenties’ (p.69), but that rather supposes an acceptance of contemporary, mainstream pop music. Speaking for myself, I spent my early twenties listening mostly to the late-1960s albums of Scott Walker, an artist whose songs (‘Such A Small Love’; ‘Montague Terrace (In Blue)’) seemed to me, even then, to be already suffused in the singer’s nostalgia for places and love affairs of just a few months or years before.
Thus, for a fortysomething like me, listening to the hits of Stock, Aitken and Waterman does not provoke nostalgia for the ‘good music’ of ‘my era’ (p.71). Nor, in these observations, is the book able to take account of the more recent experiences of the digital natives of Generation Z, who have seven decades of pop music at their fingertips, and whose future musical nostalgia may be much less predicated on what is topping the download charts, and more based on a patchwork of recycled past youth cultures accessed through Spotify and YouTube (a picture of the present drawn convincingly by Simon Reynolds in his Retromania [Faber, 2011]). In short, Draaisma is only really able to tell us, through the research he cites and comments upon, about the interplay of nostalgia, memory and ageing for the post-war generation. The nostalgic late-life yearnings of people who grew up surrounded by postmodern culture will have to wait another two or three decades to become the objects of study.
Hence, a similar vein, I wondered how far the conclusions Draaisma draws from research on emigrants’ experiences – that ‘For men, home is where they were born, whereas for women it is where their children were born’ (p.133) – if true, would apply to more recent generations. (Draaisma reports the findings of Hylke Speerstra’s study of emigrants who left the Netherlands shortly after the Second World War.) In Britain, at least, the end of the post-war political consensus – the urging of a Conservative Employment Secretary that young people should get on their bikes and look for work, and to keep looking until they found it – was symptomatic of the increase in mobilized, globalized labour and the end of the ‘job for life’. We are all, women and men, more rootless, more mobile, than the adults of fifty years ago.
The Nostalgia Factory attacks a number of myths about ageing and memory with vigour. Draaisma cites research tracing the persistent claim that we only use ten per cent of our brain capacity back to American self-help books of the 1920s (p.43) and adds his own take, that in evolutionary terms, ‘the notion that we are walking around with a kind of neuronal spare tyre is biologically preposterous’ (p.47). Draaisma notes the fear of middle-aged people that they may be prematurely succumbing to dementia, and the industry that has grown up around ‘brain training’ and other activities to ward off perceived mental decline. The book has harsh words for the industry’s pseudo-scientific claims, which can be counted as both symptom and contributory cause of modern society’s ‘shifting of forgetfulness [in older adults] from normal to pathological’. In Liz Waters’ translation, Draaisma comes across as lively and chatty in style, yet also pithy and frank. I found, for example, his downbeat assessment of the help that can be given to dementia sufferers to be almost unbearably blunt: they are people who ‘have little future (despite perhaps being quite some years away from death)’, while ‘they have a shorter and shorter past as well’ (p.98).
In an early chapter, the book makes the perhaps obvious but nonetheless frightening observation that memory depends on brain tissue, which deteriorates and declines; so that while we worry about becoming forgetful, or failing to store new information, it is “as if you are standing at the door to a warehouse anxiously checking that the latest delivery is being stored away properly. But meanwhile behind your back, all kinds of things are disappearing from the warehouse’ (p.28). Furthermore, Draaisma states: ‘If something disappears, then what is left magically closes over the vacant space and everything seems as complete as before’ (p.29). So not only are we losing our memories all the time (“No, no, they can’t take that away from me”, as the old song misguidedly claims), but our brains are conspiring, like crooked night-watchmen, to smooth out the gaps, to make it appear as though nothing is missing from the warehouse. Striking ideas in the book like this sharpen our sense that Samuel Beckett’s plays had it right all along, or that we are like Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who would avoid their fate if only they could remember, but who are doomed not to remember because that is their fate.
The Nostalgia Factory is by no means a complete guide to its three subtitular topics, memory, time and ageing, nor is it a thesis; the inclusion of a long interview with Oliver Sacks, absorbing as it is, in chapter six, serves to defuse expectations that the book is heading towards a grand revelation or clinching argument. And, indeed, the volume ends with several loose threads, which may or may not be deliberate, as if mimicking the tricks that memory can play. The final chapter’s attempt to tie the book’s concerns together under the metaphor of the nostalgia factory does not quite work. If ‘emigration agencies were nostalgia factories’ (p.134), but also centres for asylum seekers are ‘the nostalgia factories of our day’ (p.141), then it does not make sense to claim, on the penultimate page, that ‘the real nostalgia factory is time, which makes emigrants of us all’ (p.143). Surely it is people, and their minds, who ‘manufacture’ nostalgia; emigration agencies and asylum centres do not even provide the raw materials of this nostalgia, which is, one presumes, previously-generated memories of the past, so at best their role is that of an catalyst. And again, time lone cannot make nostalgia, any more than a seed only needs time (and not a fertile environment or water or oxygen) in order to germinate. It also does not feel quite right to take the specific experience of emigration and nostalgia for the old country, and to generalize it as a metaphor for all ageing. To call us all emigrants detracts from the particular vividness with which Draaisma had earlier described emigrants’ experiences of nostalgia. Lastly, the focus in the final sentences on ageing as comparable to living in a different country to ‘the land of your youth’ (p.144) is a form of words that skirts around, but never deliberately evokes, that much-quoted opening sentence from L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ (The Past is a Foreign Country was also the title of David Lowenthal’s 1985 book on heritage and nostalgia). This is not to take Draaisma to task for not using an anglocentric reference point, and indeed it would have been strange to conclude a work in Dutch with such a quotation. But it does add to the sense in the book’s final pages that we will not achieve any neat form of closure from the memory, ageing and nostalgia conundrum. As always, something is missing, but we can’t quite say what, because it’s just beyond our grasp.