The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Looking at the Past: Nostalgia as Technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls

Written by
Bob Batchelor

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Abstract: An examination of nostalgia as technique in The Naked and the Dead and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

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Breit quotes Mailer in The New York Times in 1951: "A great writer always goes to the root, he is always coming up with the contradictions, the impasses, the insoluble dilemmas of the particular time he lives in. The result is not to cement society but to question it and destroy it.”

Nostalgia is a contested word that evokes numerous, often conflicting, definitions depending on its context. In contemporary usage, however, the term most often implies a romantic look at the past, as if history’s difficulties have been bleached out of existence. Through nostalgia, people can make sense of the past in a highly personal way, essentially crafting or re-creating narratives that fit into their broader ideas about self and society. The tendency, however, is to consider this use simpleminded.

What I call the “nostalgic attraction” or the desire to examine the past through rose-colored lenses has become a vital component of popular culture. The general craving for nostalgia has transformed the idea into a commodity, used to advertise, market, and sell products by invoking a return to “the good ole’ days.” The nostalgic idea also drives mass culture. There are numerous examples of nostalgia assuming a kind of starring role across mediums, from blockbuster films, such as Forrest Gump or Titanic to popular television shows, music, books, and fashion. Nostalgia is also closely associated with certain presidents, such as Ronald Reagan, or with presidential eras, like John F. Kennedy’s Camelot.

Much of nostalgia’s allure is in providing people with a way to explain the past in favorable terms, a kind of self-persuasion or possibly even delusion. According to Linda Charnes, “we cannot, nor would we want to, abandon the important project of understanding how people lived in times before ours—what they experienced in their own cultural present”. She contends, however, that scholars also need to “acknowledge the inherent limitations of the cognitive framework that continues to organize our ideological relationship to time”. Since life unfolds in chronological terms, taking measure of past milestones or events seems logical. Yet, when given a fanciful spin, nostalgia is less history and more fairytale.

Despite the overriding negativity surrounding nostalgia—basically that it strips history of its complexities and enables individuals and society to yearn for a mythical past—a careful examination uncovers a different approach to looking at the past. From this alternative perspective, nostalgia can be interpreted as a positive force. Or, as Christine Sprengler explains, “[nostalgia] tells us something about our own historical consciousness, about the myths we construct and circulate and about our desire to make history meaningful on a personal and collective level” (). Rather than simply brushing it off as a form of camp or romanticism, I argue that nostalgia is a central component in enabling individuals to create worldviews, while also discovering ways to maneuver within society. Nostalgia, then, can enlighten and provide nuance as one interprets the past.

Works Cited

• Breit, Harvey (1951). "Talk with Norman Mailer". The New York Times 3 June 1951, late ed., sec 7:20. Print.
• Charnes, Linda (2009). "Anticipating Nostalgia: Finding Temporal Logic in a Textual Anomaly". Textual Cultures: Text, Contexts, Interpretation. 4 (1): 72–83. Print.