Abstract
This article addresses nostalgic experience and aims at a definition of nostalgic narrative through textual analysis. The target text is Bo Carpelan’s Berg (2005). The novel is analysed with narratological methods focusing on the narrative modes and the techniques of narrative mediation that invite a nostalgic experience in the reader. This side of the phenomenon—the textual aesthetics of nostalgia—has been explored by few scholars, whereas the contextual and cultural aspects of nostalgia have received a lot of attention. This article suggests further ways of analysing how a text evokes nostalgic experience, and thus considers the nostalgic experience of the reader as the definitive core of nostalgic narrative. The nostalgic experience in Berg is intense, reflective, and ambivalent. These qualities are produced on the level of both the narrative discourse and the story: by changes between the narrative modes and by the nostalgic and non-nostalgic content that builds and breaks the idealised narrative. The article suggests that more attention should be paid to the complexity of nostalgic narratives. Furthermore, it highlights that by creating reflectivity and contradictions, the non-nostalgic content also affects the nostalgic narrative.
Highlights
In this article, I will demonstrate my own use and understanding of the concept of nostalgic experience, and suggest further ways of examining this concept
These qualities are produced on the level of both the narrative discourse and the story: by changes between the narrative modes and by the nostalgic and non-nostalgic content that builds and breaks the idealised narrative
The nostalgic experience of the reader is understood as the definitive core of nostalgic narrative
Summary
I will demonstrate my own use and understanding of the concept of nostalgic experience, and suggest further ways of examining this concept. 271, 274) understands nostalgia as remembering the golden times of the past, as an emotional memory She writes that the target of nostalgic longing is hard to identify in Carpelan’s (lyrical) work because he often describes childhood with rather dark imagery. I will analyse the nostalgic experience evoked in the reader by the features and strategies of narrative discourse.8 In this way, the focus is placed on the private and subjective nostalgic experience and its textual representation, in contrast to the public and cultural context of nostalgia 106) points out that in many of the (classical) narratological models, the story is understood as something that exists first and is turned into discourse by different narrative techniques This view can be connected to the restrictive focus on art about nostalgia, which presupposes the content that makes the story nostalgic. My hypothesis is that in highly self-reflexive texts such as Berg, the mediation of the characters’ experience should be considered a central part of the aesthetics of nostalgia that form the nostalgic narrative. I will analyse how (nostalgic) experience is mediated by different narrative modes in Berg, and invited in the reader
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