When dealing with the foggy subject of nostalgia, you have to go to someone who has studied it thoroughly so you don't end up getting lost. Nabokov and Brodsky are references to the exile's nostalgia, while Sylvia Platz, Fernando Pessoa or Scott Fitgerald are in a prominent place among the many authors who have explored the abyssal depths of melancholy.
But few like the Russian professor of literature Svetlana Boymse have successfully dared to biograph the recent history of the concept to draw conclusions about its validity.
In The Future of Nostalgia (A. Machado Libros), Boym describes how the acceleration of today's world and its conversion into a disquieting game of screens, added to convulsive geopolitics, have intensified the tendency to yearn for a past that we always assume is better than ever. what it was. And he adds that, by doing so without the necessary critical attitude, the advantages of a wise approach to nostalgia are lost.
“The decline of the arts and the humanities –he maintains– has favored the scarcity of scenarios in which to analyze nostalgia, a situation that is compensated by the overabundance of prefabricated nostalgias. In creative nostalgia, the fantasies of each era are revealed and the future is born precisely from those fantasies and potentialities.
Of all Barcelona's urban landscapes, one of the most likely to activate mechanisms of prefabricated nostalgia is La Rambla. According to Boyn's reasoning, all comments such as “the Rambla is no longer ours” or “it has lost its essence” would refer to still photos of idealized pasts. We are talking about the famous image of Ocaña and Nazario showing off proudly along the promenade, or the sweetened postcards of florists, or the portrait of two orderly people having an aperitif on the terrace that was located under the porches of the Liceu, where they have just met install Jaume Plensa doors.
They are images that we tend to consume without their proper context, taking the whole for the part and reaching conclusions that ignore what lies beyond the frame. Like, for example, a Chinatown that housed an industry of intensive exploitation of women and that was in itself an urban artifact designed to perpetuate poverty. Luckily, the fluff promoted by Pasqual Maragall allowed light to enter territories that today, however, are still longed for by those nostalgic for the most rogue Barcelona.
A good exercise in creative nostalgia, in Svetlana Boym's terminology, is to go to a second-hand bookseller to get a copy of Sempronio's Sonata a la Rambla, a work published in 1961 by Editorial Barna.
The vibrant prose of the journalist and writer travels through the commercial and human landscape where the dancers of a Liceu that still had a ballet company walked. But he does so with a markedly nostalgic tone: nostalgia for the decline of flower shops threatened by competition from uptown businesses; because of the closing of charming shops and cafes –a London Bar survives today for whose future the author did not give a penny– or because of the disappearance of illustrious ramblistas without whose presence the promenade –he suggests– will never be the same.
Probably, the walk today is neither better nor worse than then, but different. After two and a half years of the pandemic, the Rambla has some green shoots. The project to reopen the Teatre Principal as a technocultural center is still going on; the Museu de Cera has been remodeled and the Museu de l'Eròtica has been enlarged; The historic headquarters of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona undertakes a long-awaited reform and new commercial premises have been opened.
Sempronio's criticism of his Rambla comparing it to past times is also questionable. We always tend to feel nostalgic for a time that was not necessarily better. The problem is that, nowadays, we do it with more anxiety than before because we are subjected to a dizzying pace of life.
In Boym's words: “It seems that the object of the new nostalgia is not only the past of a specific city, but the general idea of an urban home where time runs its course and does not evaporate at the speed of the click of the lights. computer keys.
