HOMERIC NOSTALGIA
2010; Wiley; Volume: 98; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2010.0033
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior
Resumo3 7 R H O M E R I C N O S T A L G I A N O R M A N A U S T I N Sic ait atque animum pictura pascit inani. [So he speaks and pastures his soul on an empty picture.] —Virgil, Aeneid, 1.465 Nostalgia! Now there’s a theme that calls for high poetry. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton – remove nostalgia from their palette and what would we have? Some noble sentences no doubt, but dry as a biscuit when what we crave is cake, Proust’s madeleine, dipped in Madame’s tisane, which crumbles in our mouth and from the crumbs our whole village rises up before our eyes, house by house, street by street, dog by dog, and oh yes, there’s Her Serene Highness , Mrs. Kandinsky’s soporific calico presiding over the scene from her parlor window. Nostalgia is not an ancient word. Webster’s dictionary informs us that it was coined in 1688 by a certain Swiss scholar, J. Hofer, to translate the German heimweh, ‘‘homesickness.’’ The word is built from two Greek words, nostos (homecoming) and alga (pain). But if the word is modern, the idea is as ancient as poetry itself. Virgil gives us one of the great moments of nostalgia in ancient 3 8 A U S T I N Y poetry when he has Aeneas flee Troy as it goes up in flames, driven o√ course by a storm at sea, and cast ashore on Libyan soil. There Aeneas is amazed to find a new city under construction – Dido’s Carthage. In a grove a temple is being built, and Aeneas is even more amazed to see on its walls scenes depicting the fall of Troy. The sight fills Aeneas with unbearable grief. These scenes, like those on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, are described as if in motion, a cinematic technique that transforms a series of still-life pictures into a living memory, or as if we were turning the pages in the family photo album. The e√ect is enhanced by the fact that among the figures in those tableaux is Aeneas himself. How strange to find himself preceding himself, himself already an icon but in an alien land. The nostalgia in this scene is multi-layered, a welter of emotions that arises first in the poet and then is projected into his fictional hero. Aeneas, the fictional character, having just lost his own city and watching an industrious people building a new city from the ground up, would undoubtedly feel some sorrow mixed with envy. But the city under construction is on foreign soil, which would be a reason for alienation rather than joy. At the same time, seeing his own city’s destruction inscribed on the temple walls in this new city gives Aeneas confidence that here his own city is known and loved and its fate treated with religious veneration. Our dictionaries define nostalgia as a bittersweet feeling, and certainly that is the feeling here. ‘‘Put away your fear,’’ Aeneas says to his friend Achates when they see the panorama of their own city; ‘‘our fame will give you security.’’ But as he speaks these comforting words, ‘‘his face is wet with a large river of tears,’’ as Virgil puts it. There may be some joy in these tears, but mostly they are tears for le temps perdu, to borrow from the title of Proust’s great novel, grief for ‘‘lost time.’’ As Virgil expressed it, while he was comforting his friend Aeneas fed his soul on the empty picture. (Author’s translations throughout.) The Trojan scenes in the Carthaginian temple are not of a city in a time of peace, with weddings and harvests, like the scenes depicting a city at peace on the shield of Achilles. These are all pictures of defeat, an empire overthrown, a city burned to the ground, everywhere slaughter, mayhem, and sacrilege. Where is the comfort in seeing your own civilization’s desecration celebrated in a foreign land? These tableaux may be executed with H O M E R I C N O S T A L...
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