there is a difference between nostalgia and memory

I''ll have to confess that we had ocassion to rent the latest incarnation of Brideshead Revisited.  The movie lacked a great deal;  it missed many of the central themes of Waugh's work.  Most notable, it mistook mere nostalgia for memory.  In a brilliant little piece of writing, Thomas HIbbs pointed out some of the shortcomings of the film's treatment of Waugh's text:

The desire to arrest time, to hold onto the present as if it could be preserved from age, is a powerful human motive—one at the root of art itself. (In both the book and the film one cannot help but think of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”) While the film’s focus is on guilt and lost innocence, Waugh’s focus is on the way faith overcomes the limits of romanticism regarding innocence and the past. It is not simply, as Lady Marchmain severely puts it, that time and eternity are at odds with one another. Instead, the task of faithful memory, or desire recollected through grace, is to discern the workings of providence in and through the moments of time. Thus, time itself, ordinarily an instrument of decay, can be redeemed, as the moments of time are gathered, rather than dispersed.

What the film makers did was to reduce memory to mere nostagia.  It is the sort of mistake I see again and again in the life of the Christian church.  And I see it operating in at least two ways.  In its most obvious and plain form, nostalgia supplants memory by a sort of romantic longing, with the past as a reference.  It is a form of reference to Golden Age theory (we might call it).  All starts out well and goes downhill from there.  In its fundamental Anglican form, one can see it in the 1549 preface:  "There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established, which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted."  On the other side we have a form of philosophical Darwinism:  remnants in the Church (which is always "behind" the culture) of ideas of progress, evolution, and a necessary moving beyond all that has come before. 

Nostalgia is a convenient tool for both camps:  in the first case it allows for mere longing, and in the second case it is used to reinforce a notion that what has gone before must be treated in a merely nostalgic way.  The notion of memory, however, is quite different.  Memory (and Augustine gives us insight into this) is really a power of the soul - the ability to be free (to some degree) of the contstraints of time.  Memory helps us to be part of the communion of saints, and not merely to be nostalgic about a golden age.

Comments

[Mrs. Spit]

You know, I seem to have this argument with people about the way we remember history. The history of history as it were. I don’t think it’s just religion we do this with, I think we do it with most things. We have an innate tendency, as human’s to make the past seem rosier and simpler than it really actually is.

We remember this mythical age when all mothers stayed home, but we do not acknowledge that the concept of childhood, as we understand it, would have been foreign to our great-grandparents. The apron-clad woman of the 50’s would be utterly alien to a woman from the 1850’s. But we yearn for those days, when everyone knew what their role is. We don’t remember the way the war changed those roles for everyone.

We mistake cliché’s for history – we think because we can see pictures of a woman vacuuming in high heels, it must always have been that way. We don’t understand that just because the media portrays it this way, history was this way.

It often seems to me that the greatest danger of history is that we appear to harken back to a time when men were men, and women were ladies. Or something. It says something, about our laziness, or the quality of our history education or just a yearning to believe that there were times that were less complicated than our own times.

[David]

I haven't seen the film yet; I probably will at some point, but it simply has too much to live up to when compared the TV series - which did such an excellent job of capturing the spirit of the book.

I am sure some of the TV series' appeal is in the languidly read monologues from the book - there would not be enough time in a film.

And who could compete with the wonderful Nickolas Grace?