Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity

MAN DOES NOT HAVE A SINGLE, CONSISTENT LIFE, explained Fran?ois-Auguste-Rene de Chateaubriand, the nineteenth-century French diplomat and celebrated memoirist, as he reflected on his return as a young man many decades earlier, in the 1780s, to Saint-Malo, the place of his birth: He has several to end, and that is his Friends leave us, others take their place, Chateaubriand added, there is always a time when we possessed nothing of what we now possess, and a time when we have nothing of what we once had.1 This is an eloquent if gloomy apprehension of discontinuity. Chateaubriand did not feel able to repossess the past, which repeatedly evaded his efforts at recollection. The felt absence of a firsthand connection and resulting apprehension of loss at the moment of secondhand reflection prompted feelings of misfortune. These are recognizable as the melancholy of nostalgia. Phrasing his observations in a sonorous universal (Man does not have), Chateaubriand clearly indicated that his nostalgia was not merely the hurt of a single individual but was sensible as shared experience. At the same time, the declaration is something of a revelation: Chateaubriand found the knowledge of corpses sufficiently revealing to account for it by writing his memoirs. The studied terms of his examination-lives laid to end in longhanded reconsideration and laid to end again before readerssuggest a perplexity generated by specific circumstances of unsettlement. Although the graveyard he has stumbled upon is his own, it is a newly configured place in which the remains of past lives are registered as ghostly presences that arouse mourning and nostalgia. Chateaubriand's self-reflection exposes the nineteenthcentury context of revolution and war in which a modern history of remembrance and nostalgia can be conceived. Chateaubriand's graveyard is not the sanctuary of an eccentric old man. Exhuming his bygone lives, Chateaubriand participated in a fundamental reconsideration of history from one based on correspondence and fulfillment to one alert to rupture and difference. His alienation was not personal, an accident of bad luck, or a question of temperament, nor was it a universal, like death. The broken pieces