senses to imbue the reader with a sense of the past: street noises, Mediterranean colours, local bands and the aroma of paella set the scene. Indeed, even Valencia’s red-light district is described poetically, with a focus on the senses: it smells like “flor de alcantarilla” and has the flavour of “flujo de cebolla que llegaba junto con el viento sur” (Vicent 76, 77). A particularly clear example of the importance of sensory images in the novel is provided by the following description of a local Valencian fair:
La feria de diciembre en la Alameda. Sonaba la melodía Corazón de Violín dentro del aroma de almendra garrapiñada y el estruendo de las sirenas y los cochecitos de choque se unían a la canción ay Lilí, ay Lilí, ay Lo… y un vientecillo húmedo discurría por el cauce seco del Turia, levantaba los papeles, se llevaba la música junto con los gritos de los feriantes. (101)
(The December fair in the Alameda. The melody of Corazón de Violín sounded within the aroma of sugar-coated almonds and the noise of the sirens and the bumper cars joined the song ay Lilí, ay Lilí, ay Lo… and a humid breeze blew over the dry river bed of the Turia, lifted the papers, took with it the music together with the shouts of the fair-goers.)
The nostalgia evoked by sensory elements in the novel is perhaps best summarised by the narrator himself: “Todos los placeres pertenecían a los sentidos y parecían eternos” (All pleasures belonged to the senses and seemed eternal) (183). The idealised past is gone, and what seemed to last forever at the time is now nothing more than a – sensory – memory.
This foregrounding of nostalgia is not unique to Spain. What we are dealing with here, instead, is a universal, postmodern condition. Scholars agree that nostalgia is omnipresent in contemporary (postmodern) culture, especially since the 1990s. As Linda Hutcheon puts it, “a lot of contemporary culture [is] indeed nostalgic” (190). Gilles Lipovetsky notes, in discussing our current, “hypermodern” culture, that “we now have the emotional-memorial value associated with feelings of nostalgia. This is a phenomenon that is indissociably postmodern and hypermodern” (60). Nostalgia might even be understood as a consequence of globalisation: the fast pace and large scale of contemporary society create a longing for a slower and more compact past. Nostalgia’s importance in contemporary culture becomes clear in works such as On Longing by Susan Stewart, who deals with such cultural phenomena as souvenirs and collections; and it is apparent in more recent studies such as those of John Su and Pam Cook, who analyse nostalgic novels and films respectively.
Nostalgia, then, is a universal phenomenon these days. Moreover, as David Lowenthal points out, it is a sentiment felt by humans throughout the ages: “Nostalgic evocations long antedate our time”, says Lowenthal, and refers to writers as far apart in time as Wordsworth, Petrarch and Virgil (8). In this sense, nostalgia can be seen as a fundamentally human, and thus universally shared, emotion. The feeling of nostalgia has always been a part of the human condition; what is clear, however, is that its importance has intensified over the centuries to become one of postmodernity’s obssesions: “nostalgia … is now a drug that hooks us all” (12). In studying the workings of nostalgia in a specific work of literature, then, we are examining a phenomenon that is locally anchored, yet crosses borders. But does the presence of nostalgia in Tranvía a la Malvarrosa really lift it above its local embeddedness? Does it make of the novel, if not an actual work of world literature, at least a work that is eligible for the title?
Perhaps not. The longed-for past in Vicent’s novel is undoubtedly very local and specific: Valencia in the 1950s, seen against the background of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. We are dealing here with a work in which, paradoxically, a traumatic past and nostalgic memory go hand in hand. It is possible that the embedding of nostalgia in something so location-specific as a collective national trauma might diminish a work’s “world literature potential”. This, at least, is what John Su suggests when he speaks of nostalgia’s ethical potential.
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
