Nostalgia and Combray

When creating this blog I did not realise that I had to make an important decision regarding the 'design' of the template. Blogspot suggests various different themes for the look of the site and it proved a difficult choice. I had to reflect on which visual representation was most suitable for a blog on 'Memory and Literature' and the end result is the one you see now. Evidently my choice reveals my own 'nostalgic' presumption of the visuality of memory and it obviously doesn't fit into the modern nostalgia of cyberspace. Instead you might consider my choice of theme as a sort of reflective nostalgia, to recall the term used by Svetlana Boym ('Nostalgia and Global Culture').

In this mondays seminar Jakob brought Boyms two concepts of nostalgia to our attention: The reflective and the restorative. But I am not sure I completely understood the difference between these two: "While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one homeland with paranoic determination, reflective nostalgia fears returning with the same passion. Instead of recreation of the lost home, reflective nostalgia can foster a creative self." (Boym, p.354)

The first example of apparent reflective nostalgia that comes to my mind is Marcels 'creative' recollection of Combray in A la recherche du temps perdu. Even though the narrator struggles to 'recreate' the sensations of Combray as he experienced them, the novel shows that the goal moreover is to 'foster a creative self' through reflection. Is this the right way to understand Boyms terms? Is the reflective nostalgia always directed towards the 'mediation' of the nostalgia and not towards a struggle to reach an exact recreation of the past?

When speaking about Proust I am reminded of an interesting fact that is related to the discussion on lieu de mémoire. The fictional town of 'Combray' plays a vital role throughout Prousts novel. Even though it isn't mentioned in the novel, the real town of Illiers is actually the model for 'Combray'. In 1971, when celebrating the 100th birthday of the author who helped to make the town famous, the town council decided to rename the town "Illiers-Combray".
Nowadays certain areas of Illiers-Combray are reconstructed to ressemble the descriptions in Prousts novel and thereby points to a type of memory-site constructed and maintained on the basis of a fictional work. One such area is Aunt Léonies house:



To make an authors hometown 'reflect' certain biographical aspects is of course not a new phenomenon. But I thought that the willingness to actually change a towns name was quite a peculiar fact. Unfortunately I haven't visited Illiers-Combray' myself, so I'm not able to give any detailed description of the museum-like quality of the town (which by the way is an entirely normal french town, just with certain areas dedicated to Proust), Any comments are welcomed.

Links:

La Maison de Tante Léonie

Official webpage for Illiers-Combray