This Civil War-era novel explores the consequences of a decision to enlist in the Union army for a young man of nineteen by the name of Summerfield Hayes. Left unclear at the outset of Nostalgia is the question of whether Hayes’ decision to sign-up and fight is a conscious attempt not only to forget the traumatic deaths of both his parents overseas but also to erase the stigma of an almost unthinkable taboo (an uncomfortably close bond between Hayes and his sister Sarah) that bides its time uneasily at the margins of the novel.
Overarching this is an effort to expose and examine the effects of combat, specifically the at-the-time undiagnosed effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): part of the intention in setting the action of the novel during the Civil War appears to be to draw a parallel with the way returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are treated in the modern era: much has been made of advances in the understanding and treatment of PTSD but, the as the Walter Reed scandal demonstrated, a considerable gap remains between these advances in medicine and their practical implementation.
The novel opens in the immediate aftermath of Hayes’s abandonment on the field of battle (specifically during the three-day Battle of the Wilderness fought in May, 1864): temporarily deafened and suffering from shell-shock, Hayes attempts to find his way back home to Brooklyn. Afraid of being arrested as a deserter, Hayes travels under cover of night: much of the language in this section works spectacularly to convey Hayes’s mental confusion by painting the woods, streams, pastures, stars in the night sky as malevolent apparitions in a claustrophobic universe of pain. Hayes’ fevered wanderings are shot through with flashbacks of his sister Sarah:
“…in the months leading up to his enlistment, he’d dreamed of her, and they were the wrong kind of dreams. He didn’t so much fear his own snarled feelings as he feared what he imagined hers might be.”
After believing he is drifting off to his death, Hayes wakes up in a military hospital in Washington where, when he comes to, he realizes he has been rendered mute and incapable of even signing his own name. One of the nineteenth century names for this condition is nostalgia, understood, from a medical point of view more or less inchoately, as the process of returning to one’s senses – to a state that would be certifiably sane. The crux of this novel, however, rests heavily on the non-medical senses of this term, specifically an ambiguity wound into the etymology of the word itself: not only that the longed-for return home involves pain but also that it is painful precisely because the return reveals home as un-homely or strange – as an alien environment.
This second section of the book dealing with Hayes recuperation wrestles with two themes: the inability of medicine to even diagnose the nature of Hayes trauma, much less actually treat it, and Hayes own indecision over returning to Brooklyn and what awaits him there. At this point Walt Whitman makes his entrance into the story as a hospital volunteer: every aspect of Whitman’s character seems weighted to convey reticence, care, humility and above all a kind of grandfatherly benevolence and understanding.
At a time when it must have seemed that the country was in the process of tearing itself apart, Whitman’s companionship provides each wounded soldier with a constant point of reference and, especially with regard to Hayes, serves as a kind of devoted audience of one who, through repeated bedside visits, facilitates in Hayes a kind of revision of his own personal history: why he enlisted, what remains unthinkable in his relationship with his sister and finally recognition of the fact that he must return home to Brooklyn.
Hayes’s return to his sister and Brooklyn ties together two strands of forgetting: the voluntary effort to forget his desire for his sister (and his inability to do so) overlaid with the involuntary divestiture of everything constant and fixed – the continuing consequences of nostalgia or, more recently, PTSD. This combination eventually culminates in a crisis: Hayes finds himself not physically returned to the long nights he spent stamping aimlessly through anonymous woods and pastures but psychically lurching in and out of the same fugue-like state: now back home, he seems incapable of taking responsibility for the rest of his life and behaves almost as if he is trapped in amber, unable to move forward: the present moment, if it exists at all, only exists in as a repetition of an idyllic family life shared with his parents and Sarah.
Hayes engages in what might be described as a kind of ventriloquism so far does he go in the direction of mimicking aspects of his father’s persona and all his interactions with Sarah completely ignore the reality that her life has changed (she is engaged to be married) in his absence and continually refer back to an earlier period in their shared history that may or may not ever have existed. The novel concludes with Hayes, after receiving a visit from his old friend Walt Whitman, moving part of the way toward coming to terms with his condition and making amends with Sarah. The book as a whole raises far more questions than it answers and leaves the impression that a life lived in the wake of PTSD is akin to a desperate attempt to solve an enormous psychic puzzle in spite of the fact that the resolution itself may be the least desired outcome.
