Nostalgie de la boue

Nostalgie de la boue (French: "nostalgia for mud") is the attraction to low-life culture, experience, and degradation, found at times both in individuals and in cultural movements.[1]

The phrase was coined in 1855 by Émile Augier.[2]

Psychological underpinnings

Marion Woodman the Jungian considered that a break or katabasis from the normal social world could leave the protagonist trapped by "a yearning for what I call pig consciousness - wallowing in mud and loving it".[3]

Helen Vendler considered that something of the kind happened to Seamus Heaney when, after a venture in abstraction, he recoiled to ground himself in a material world of mud and dirt.[4]

Examples

Classical
  • Tacitus records the emperor Nero's liking for roaming the streets of his capital in a slave disguise, stealing and assaulting passers-by in the company of his friends.[5]
  • Petronius highlights the kind of Roman lady who "looks for something to love among the lowest of the low...heated up over the absolute dregs".[6]

Modern
  • The 1890s was notable for a mix of high culture and low experience, as seen in figures like Joris-Karl Huysmans.[7]
  • The youthful Bob Dylan would claim that "The only beauty's ugly, man...the hard filthy gutter sound".[8]
  • Jonathan Ames described himself as drawn to prostitutes and the gutter by nostalgie de la boue.[9]
  • Tom Wolfe described a party in New York in 1970: "It was at this party that a Black Panther field marshal rose up beside the north piano—there was also a south piano—in Leonard Bernstein’s living room and outlined the Panthers’ ten-point program to a roomful of socialites and celebrities, who, giddy with nostalgie de la boue, entertained a vision of the future in which, after the revolution, there would no longer be any such thing as a two-story, thirteen-room apartment on Park Avenue, with twin grand pianos in the living room, for one family.[10]

See also

References
  1. J P Sullivan ed., The Satyricon (Penguin 1986) p. 24
  2. In Act I, Scene I of the 1855 play Le Mariage d'Olympe:
    LE MARQUIS. Mettez un canard sur un lac au milieu des cygnes, vous verrez qu’il regrettera sa mare et finira par y retourner. (Translation: You put a duck in the middle of swans, you'll see that he will miss his pond and eventually return.) MONTRICHARD. La nostalgie de la boue!
    See also at Encyclopedia.com
  3. M Woodman, The Maiden King (Dorset 1999) p. 179
  4. H Vendler, Seamus Heaney (London 1998) p. 144-5
  5. Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome (Penguin 1966) p. 285
  6. J P Sullivan ed., The Satyricon (Penguin 1986) p. 142
  7. J P Sullivan ed., The Satyricon (Penguin 1986) p. 24
  8. Dylan, Poem to Joannie (Bootlegger [1972]) p. 9-10
  9. J Ames, Essays (2007)
  10. Harper's Magazine (November 1989) https://harpers.org/archive/1989/11/stalking-the-billion-footed-beast
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