ETHICAL NOSTALGIA AS A LOCAL PHENOMENON
Nostalgia and trauma would seem an unfortunate combination: nostalgia suggests that the past has been revised to excise its painful elements. However, John Su makes a case for nostalgia’s ethical potential – especially in literature. In Su’s view, nostalgia is a way not only of remembering the past – or perhaps reshaping is a better word – but of dealing with it. Su thus adds a distinctly ethical dimension to nostalgia:
[L]iterature can contribute to ethics by virtue of acquainting readers with different worlds and providing alternative ways of perceiving familiar ones. Narratives of “inauthentic” experiences like nostalgia can offer a unique contribution in this regard, encouraging readers to perceive present social arrangements with respect to idealized images of what could have been. (Su 56)
Su proceeds from this to argue that critics of nostalgia as a form of amnesia are not all wrong. Amnesia, especially in the case of a traumatic history, is certainly a potential danger.1 It is up to the writer of the narrative to take an ethical standpoint by facing the challenge of “locat[ing] and recover[ing] experiences that a community has failed to understand and assimilate” (148). Interestingly, Pam Cook, though she does not take as firm a stand as Su in this respect, also argues that “a more interesting and challenging dimension” of nostalgia is that “it can be perceived as a way of coming to terms with the past, as enabling it to be exorcised in order that society, and individuals, can move on” (4).
Both Cook and Su, then, are interested in nostalgia’s potential ethical dimension. Writers who exploit nostalgia’s powerfully emotional effects are able to create contrasting and alternative histories through their nostalgic idealisation of the past. This can be seen, for example, in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, where nostalgic Jane Eyre-style versions of the past define the present “in terms of its failure to satisfy past longings” (Su 56), and also serve to “[foreground] memories of suffering, alternative histories, lost possibilities, and uncertainty” (56). The responsible nostalgic writer, then, is a critical nostalgic: he or she shows an awareness of how unrealistic the idealised version of the past is, and plays with that knowledge by opposing it to versions of the past and present that have not undergone such idealisation. The nostalgic writer, in Su’s vision, is one who evokes the feeling of nostalgia in the reader by making past and present meet, by making the gap between the two palpable and by recognising and showing that the ideal past is irrecoverable simply because it was never perfect to begin with.
Su believes the ethical potential of nostalgia to be especially important in those instances where a traumatic past is nostalgically recalled: he argues that literature has the power to “undo traumatic history to some degree by redescribing the past” (149). Nostalgia can provide a framework against which the traumatic past can be set and thus made manageable. He recognises the potential danger of nostalgia in such texts, but argues: “The longing for a lost or imagined homeland certainly can reinforce trauma … by oversimplifying the past and repressing uncomfortable events, but it need not do so” (149).
The ethical nostalgia that John Su favours is essentially a national phenomenon. It is not a form of general nostalgia that any reader in any context and under any circumstances can relate to. Su’s nostalgia is ethical precisely because it is linked to a very specific, local context. It provides a framework for remembering at a national level and for working through trauma shared by only a very limited group of people. Ethical nostalgia in a literary work may in this sense lessen the work’s chances of becoming world literature.
This certainly appears to be the case in Manuel Vicent’s novel. At first sight, the narrator of Tranvía a la Malvarrosa is precisely the kind of narrator John Su would have wished for. He is, of course, nostalgic, recollecting his own youth from present, democratic times. At the same time, however, he is critical of his own nostalgia. Well aware now of the evil sides of the dictatorship, he repeatedly criticises his own a-political stance and overall innocence as a young teenager; his modern democratic value system dominates the novel and places the dictatorship and its values in a negative light. Does the novel in this sense provide a framework for dealing with a collective trauma, and in this way decrease its viability as world literature?
ETHICAL NOSTALGIA IN MANUEL VICENT’S TRANVÍA A LA MALVARROSA
In Tranvía a la Malvarrosa, a first-person narrator, Manuel, looks back on his adolescence from present, democratic times. He describes his move from a village to the city of Valencia, his discovery of women and literature, his changing attitude towards religion – in short, his coming of age in the francoist Spain of the 1950s. The narrative, as mentioned above, is full of nostalgic sensory images; it is also enlivened with a host of witty anecdotes in which several remarkable secondary characters enter the story. A prime example of this is the series of anecdotes concerning Vicentico Bola, the immensely fat godfather of the narrator, who enjoys riding around on a little motorbike and takes his godchildren to the big city to have them deflowered in the local brothel. The story of Bola’s narrow escape from a forced marriage in particular shows clearly the anecdotal way he is described: the pregnant bride, and the entire wedding party, vainly knock on Vicentico’s door while the groom-to-be quietly sleeps and his mother and aunt tell everybody to keep quiet lest they wake the sleeping boy. There are other anecdotes, too, that interrupt the storyline for no other reason than to add couleur locale to the novel: the mention, for example, of a Valencian girl who, on being groped in the tram, tells the man in juicy Valencian: “Ja té vosté la mà en la figa. I ara qué fem? Ya tiene usted la mano en el coño. ¿Y ahora qué hacemos?” (You already have your hand on my arse. And now what do we do?) (150).
Tranvía a la Malvarrosa’s romantic stance and its setup as a Bildungsroman also help to activate nostalgia. Manuel, the protagonist, grows up in the course of the novel: the period described shapes him personally. He has his first encounters with love and literature. The pure and innocent love he feels for a girl who spends her holidays in his seaside village structures Tranvía a la Malvarrosa and adds to the novel an element of romantic quest. Young Manuel, on coming to Valencia to study, is perpetually looking for pretty blonde Marisa, whom he knows to be living somewhere in the city. The two have never actually talked, but have shared a great many timid looks during her visits to the coast. Manuel’s feelings for Marisa are thus very innocent and represent an ideal of romantic love.
This ideal, like any nostalgic image, is perfect by virtue of its very unattainability. Manuel never gets to know Marisa, and so their love can remain unspoiled by reality. Twice, however, he catches a glimpse of her as she is riding the tram towards the Malvarrosa beach (hence the novel’s title). The image of the girl dressed in pink, always riding away from her admirer, strikes Manuel as poetic: “Podía afrontar algo lírico: la pasión por aquella niña que huía en un tranvía sin que yo pudiera conseguirla jamás” (I could deal with something lyrical: the passion for that girl who fled in a tram and whom I could never seize) (138). She even serves as his muse in his first attempts in the field of literature. The pure and nostalgic nature of this first love is foregrounded by Manuel’s more down-to-earth relationships with other girls: his platonic relationship with the tragic and worldly-wise prositute La China, and, especially, his liaison with a modern, liberal French girl whose free spirit and daring behaviour contrast with Marisa’s shyness and her bourgeois reclusiveness. Marisa stands for nostalgic love, an image of perfection that can never be attained but to which other, later loves may be compared. Significantly, Manuel thinks of Marisa when he is taken to a brothel by his godfather Bola, and later on insists on calling French Juliette by the name Marisa.
Where love is concerned, then, the narrator describes a loss of innocence. In many places it becomes clear that both the narrator and the protagonist experience a nostalgic