Byron and Expatriate Nostalgia
2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2330-118X
Autores Tópico(s)Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior
ResumoAnd Loch-na-gar with Ida looked o'er Troy --The Island NOSTALGIA IS A CONCEPT ENDURINGLY FASHIONABLE IN BYRON STUDIES--suggestively discussed in J. Drummond Bone's Byron, Scott, and Scottish Nostalgia, and recently explored to fine effect in Stephen Cheeke's Byron and Place. (1) retrospective mood or feeling we now call might be described as sort of emotional cocktail blending elusively variable portions of fact and fiction, memory and imagination into magical mental beverage that's intoxicating, exhilarating, debilitating, and difficult to mix well. word nostalgia is itself an etymological cocktail, post-Enlightenment blend of two classical Greek words, nostos, return home, and algia, pain. Initially medical term, nostalgia was coined by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who used it to account for physical and mental deterioration of Swiss Guards fighting abroad as mercenary troops. (2) Hofer believed Guards' symptoms signaled pathological version of ordinary homesickness distinct enough to warrant diagnostic category. Hofer's coined term, adopted in subsequent 19th century medical texts, indicates condition in which the patient very early loses his cheerfulness and vigor, and courts in solitude surrender to fixed idea that haunts him, thought of his country. He dwells in charmed representation upon memories connected with place where his early life was spent (384). Hofer and other doctors believed to be most prevalent among young people sent to foreign lands--a claim important to my ensuing argument. Stressing less purely clinical meanings, OED gives first English definition of nostalgia as a form of melancholy caused by prolonged absence from one's home or country; severe homesickness. English examples cited for this meaning go back as far as 1770. second definition of is Regret or sorrowful longing for conditions of past age; regretful or wistful memory or recall of an earlier Note imaginative potential that creeps into this second meaning. OED's citations of looser, figurative sense of nostalgia date back no farther than 1920 to D. H. Lawrence's The Lost Girl. But if Byron never used word in our modern and postmodern way, he knew feeling well. I would argue along Hofer's diagnostic lines that persistent nostalgic feeling associated with Byron's sense of separation from beloved places rose out of his juvenile displacement from Scotland of his childhood. Expatriated from Aberdeen and its environs, distinctively sublime and beautiful district with memorable and musical vernacular, he developed dis-ease of in an early and eloquent form. From 1806 through 1826, Byron's poetic works on such personal topoi as Newstead, Harrow, Lachin y Gair, and Greece both record and create expatriate nostalgia. All are rich sites for imaginative exploration, whether investigation proceeds horizontally through space or vertically through time. Byron's nostalgic blend of melancholy, memory, and fantasy came to be an enduring feature of his sensibility and crucible for much of his art. For over century of colonialism and immigration, as Scotland sent steady stream of voluntary and involuntary exiles to Ulster and Appalachia, South Africa and East Indies, Byron's nostalgic sensibility both voiced spirit of his age and proleptically invoked later expressions of exile and cosmopolitanism. Among others, such writers as Conrad, Joyce, Naipaul, and Heaney can been seen as heirs to different aspects of Byron's expatriate nostalgia. Although Byron waxed romantic about his Scots ancestry, he lived in Scotland for only nine years of his life--between 1789, when his mother decamped from London to Aberdeen, where she and her infant son could more easily exist within modest means allowed by remnant of her wrecked fortune, until 1798, when 10-year-old boy became heir to his paternal great-uncle's English barony and with his mother moved south to Nottinghamshire. …
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