Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory

4. Scripts for Remembering: Childhoods and Nostalgia

84 chapter 4  Scripts for Remembering childhoods and nostalgia Nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension; only it is no longer directed toward the future. Sometimes nostalgia is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. The nostalgic feels stifled within the conventional confines of time and space. —Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia Where did it all go right? —Andrew Collins, Where Did It All Go Right? Growing Up Normal in the 70s In this study I have argued that autobiographies of childhood are driven by, and need to be read in terms of, a network of textual and contextual relationships . I have also argued that autobiographies of childhood are memory practices. In their initial presentation, these texts promise to tell us an individual’s experiences (and memories) of growing up within a particular cultural milieu. However, I have argued, through their representations and preoccupations, the autobiography of childhood reveals more about what it is possible to remember and forget (culturally) at the time when the text was produced and circulated. In this chapter I investigate one of the most prevalent memory models for writing about childhood: the nostalgic mode. I explore how nostalgic autobiographies work intertextually with another dominant memory practice : the traumatic childhood (which I discuss in the following chapter). In nostalgic autobiography, the past is “idealized”; there is often a “homesickness , a pain (algos) or longing to return home (nostos) or to some lost past” (Steinwand 10). Nostalgia is also a dependence on the past. The past becomes consumable in texts that promulgate the past’s value in the present. Texts that appeal to a communal past assume shared values about the past, childhoods and nostalgia 85 and also the present. In nostalgic texts, the present is commonly perceived as less ideal and less desirable. Nostalgic texts often represent the past imaginatively but inauthentically (Jameson). In chapter 1 of this study I proposed that nostalgia was the dominant mode for remembering childhood in autobiographies of childhood written prior to the 1990s. As Gillian Whitlock argues, the “success of these narratives indicates the ongoing pleasure for many readers of encountering . . . familiar, repeated, cultural patterns” (Autographs xix). The writers of these autobiographies are adults—time has removed them from their childhoods . For each of them, childhood is past and lost. In a multitude of ways, the autobiography of childhood proves to be an ideal vehicle for nostalgic remembering. Jonathan Steinwand proposes that “nostalgia summons the imagination to supplement memory. Because nostalgia necessarily relies on a distance—temporal or/and spatial—separating the subject from the object of its longing, the imagination is encouraged to gloss over forgetfulness in order to fashion a more aesthetically complete and satisfying recollection of what is longed for” (10). Since the early 1990s a wave of traumatic remembering has permeated autobiography. These traumatic writings have unraveled some of the mythologies (about childhood) circulated by the aforementioned nostalgic mode. For example, while nostalgic autobiographies commonly relate childhoods lost through the passage of time, traumatic autobiographies relate childhoods that are stolen or lost through trauma—particularly abuse. Traumatic autobiography has had a radical effect on the way childhood can be depicted autobiographically. Yet traumatic autobiography has not dulled the emergence (and reemergence ) of nostalgia within autobiographical writings about childhood during the 1990s and 2000s. A plethora of nostalgic autobiographies have surfaced from different locations. For example, autobiographies such as Thomas Keneally’s Homebush Boy and Brian Nicholls’s A Saucepan in the Sky (both autobiographies about growing up in Sydney, Australia, in the 1950s) mourn the passing of childhood (and the past)—making statements about the inferiority of adulthood (and the present) in comparison. And there are the “they don’t make them like they used to” autobiographies such as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, which suggest that, despite the difficulties the autobiographer might have faced in the past, the past was a crucial and formative time that instilled them with skills and knowledge needed for adulthood. Certain autobiographies of childhood have written back to the traumatic mode, such as Andrew Collins’s Where Did It All Go Right?: Growing Up Normal in the 70s. On his Web site, Collins describes the book 86 contesting childhood as “an antidote to all the miserable memoirs which seemed ubiquitous at the turn of the millennium but are even more so now. Boy grows up normal in Northampton in the late 60s...