Escaping Realism, Fending off Nostalgia

This has sat in my drafts for almost a month. I have argued elsewhere the Eastern European authors have something to teach us Americans, particularly us here in the Midwest. Another bur under my saddle is nostalgia - as in the sense of insipid sentimentality dragging us back from the grimmer business of our present day lives, from living itself; a drug far more dangerous ever known. This kind of sentimentality, not the sort of filled with empathetic emotions, feeds upon our body politic wearing a red MAGA hat.

I poached Outside the Museum of Literature: On Mircea Cărtărescu by Nicholas Dames from n+1. Here there seems to me an alternative to the sentimentality that kills. I do not think it is one that I can use. Surrealism does not feel like a method I can execute properly at my age. Nevertheless, I post with the hope of someone, someday, finding these ideas useful.

 Finally, then, for all its death-metal magic and hallucinogenic intensity, one has to return to Solenoid’s pervasive sentimental fondness. Even the most grotesque description in the novel is wrapped softly, swaddled in something like care. Cărtărescu is, more than anything perhaps, a nostalgist, with the indiscriminate and generous love a nostalgist has for anything vanishing, obsolete, decayed. Certainly for Bucharest above all else. But here the role of surrealism is an interesting, complicating factor. Surrealism in Cărtărescu enters into a mutually transformative relationship to nostalgia. The surreal, in its peculiar 21st-century obsolescence, opens up new horizons of things to care for, occult vulnerabilities, the palpitating agonized flesh inside the hard walls, all of it far from the antisentimental mode announced by Breton. And nostalgia, by being surrealized, loses its connotations of familiarity, comfort, retreat, and achieves something of the status of an adventure.

sch 7/8