Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011)

This chapter explores the question, posed by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, ‘How can one be homesick for a home that one never had?’ Its focus is Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, the director’s most overt and sustained meditation on nostalgia, and the most wooing. The film concerns a twenty-first-century Hollywood screenwriter, Gil Pender, who stumbles effortlessly through the space-time continuum to find himself (in both senses) among Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation, a world he has always believed to be his spiritual home. Through Gil’s time-travelling odyssey, Allen probes the allure and the perils of nostalgia; he shows how nostalgia relies on impossibility or absence to feed it, to lend it piquancy and artistic efficacy. The chapter also examines the Lost Generation’s propulsive nostalgia which was spawned by a tremendous sense of rootlessness and flux, and why the Odyssey was a guiding text for expatriates like Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.

David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter (1982)

The final chapter of Part I examines the theme of impossible nostos within David Malouf’s novella Fly Away Peter, which is set at the time of the Great War. The story traces the journey of a young Australian, Jim Sadler, from an Edenic bird sanctuary on the Queensland coast to the perverted pastoral of the Western Front where he realizes he has hitherto been living ‘in a state of dangerous innocence’. The principal motif Malouf employs is the miracle of bird migration, through which he explores the idea of homecoming, what it means to belong, to leave one’s home, and to return. The chapter concludes by focusing on the unconventional Penelope figure, Imogen Harcourt, whose solitary ruminations extend the book’s philosophical enquiry from the nature of home to the nature of being.

Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

This chapter looks at Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which focuses on a generational subset for whom the past barely exists in memory and the future is inconceivable—a predicament in which war itself becomes a kind of Ithaca, the only home to which the adolescent soldier has any intimate or tangible connection. Narrator Paul Bäumer and his schoolfellows inhabit a No Man’s Land of their own: they are young but have lost hope; they feel old but have no yesteryear; they are refugees whose yearning is without shape or object. Whatever images of home they had when they enlisted, whatever plans for the future, were too nebulous, too lacking in resilience to compete with war’s intensity, its ubiquity and noise. The chapter shows that, despite its apparent pessimism, All Quiet was envisaged as a first step towards finding the ‘way back’ and pointing out ‘the road onward’, and that writing the book was itself a form of nostos.

Tamar Yellin’s ‘Return to Zion’ (2006)

Chapter 7 offers a brief description and analysis of ‘Return to Zion’, the opening tale of Tamar Yellin’s collection of short stories, Kafka in Brontëland. Yellin overlays English suburbia and the Jewish identity with elements of the Odyssey, delicately weaving the mythical and the mundane. As a rewriting of Homer, it is manifestly a minor work, but it is nonetheless an affecting and thought-provoking piece, unsettling in its portrayal of Ithaca as an elusive and illusory destination, the figment of a restive grief. Told from the perspective of Telemachus, this allegorical story identifies an intimate, incurable nostalgia as central to the Jewish heritage. It is a nostalgia that Yellin’s own father knew and that she herself expressed when she said: ‘I belong in two places at once, which sometimes feels like I belong nowhere.’

William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Chapter 3 locates William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives within a climate of problematized nostos in the concluding years of World War II. It approaches the film as a tripartite Odyssey about three returning serviceman and three corresponding Penelope figures. It shows that, in portraying the tensions involved in the characters’ personal nostoi, The Best Years exposes a broader anxiety about the post-war stability, and indeed survival, of both oikos and polis. Through these individual stories, the film manages to suggest an entire generation readjusting to what Willard Waller called ‘this estranged world of peacetime complexity’, and to represent millions of families in their struggle to resume communication at a civilian and domestic level. The chapter delves into the genesis, development, and reception of this modern Odyssey.

Doris Lessing’s Going Home (1957) and Under My Skin (1994)

This chapter examines Doris Lessing’s status as a ‘modern nostalgic’, one who ‘can be homesick and sick of home at once’. It points out that in her novels nostalgia is often depicted as something to be mistrusted and resisted, while at the same time some of her most lyrical prose is deeply nostalgic and expressive of a nourishing melancholy associated with the physical landscape of her childhood in colonial Rhodesia. It then focuses on two autobiographical works, Going Home (1957) and Under My Skin (1994), to show how Lessing’s ambivalent nostalgia issues from the historic circumstances of her birth, the thwarted ambitions of her parents, and her own sense of never wholly belonging to the Ithaca that had made her who she was.

Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003)

This chapter looks closely at Njabulo Ndebele’s novel The Cry of Winnie Mandela, in which he gives a compelling and impassioned voice to five South African ‘descendants’ of Penelope, and to Penelope herself. It argues that the book puts into practice Ndebele’s belief that it was important for South African writing to resist the orthodoxy of spectacle, to rediscover the ordinary, to fashion a new narrative of intimacy and introspection, and thereby envisage a future of promise and complexity. It shows how Ndebele challenges the classical paradigm of the faithful waiting woman and, in so doing, urgently interrogates the notion of Home in the new South Africa.

Afterword

The Afterword considers the concepts of nostos and nostalgia within the extraordinary context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It explains how, in common with Brexit, COVID-19 has put nostalgia under the microscope, but less as a disease than a remedy or, at any rate, a palliative. What was toxic in the context of Brexit is now being recommended as a nourishing psychological resource. The Afterword also addresses the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz; it draws lessons from the experiences of Holocaust survivors about the importance of imagining Ithaca and of nurturing a nostalgia grounded in hope.

John Logan’s Peter and Alice (2013)

This chapter investigates the particular kind of nostalgia at the heart of John Logan’s Peter and Alice, a play inspired by the brief real-life meeting in 1932 between Alice Liddell Hargreaves and Peter Llewellyn Davies (the former muses of Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie, respectively). It argues that the same nostalgia permeates (and generated) Peter Pan and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—a proleptic nostalgia, fed by uniquely human intimations of adulthood. Logan’s eponymous characters seek to isolate that moment of dawning consciousness. In doing so they demonstrate that it is our capacity to anticipate, as much as our capacity to reflect, that makes the human condition inherently nostalgic. The chapter also shows how Barrie himself traced the genesis of his autarkic and amnesiac hero to an improvised version of that founding epic of nostalgia, Homer’s Odyssey.

Carson McCullers’s ‘Look Homeward, Americans’ (1940)

Chapter 11 takes a short essay by Carson McCullers as the basis for a discussion of America’s national trait of being ‘homesick most for the places we have never known’. It considers this phenomenon with reference to the writings of Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald who made nostalgic wonder part of the American vernacular. It also draws a comparison between the forward-looking nostalgia McCullers analyses and Robert Sherwood’s 1935 play The Petrified Forest in which the young heroine dreams of returning to a home she has never known. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—‘a veritable Ulysses of the black experience’—and a short story by McCullers called ‘The Aliens’, both of which urge a mature, hopeful, and inward-facing quest for ‘the homeness of home’.