Nostalgie de la boue (English: "nostalgia for mud") is a French phrase meaning the attraction to low-life culture, experience, and degradation, found at times both in individuals and in cultural movements.J P Sullivan ed., The Satyricon (Penguin 1986) p. 24
The phrase was coined in 1855 by Émile Augier.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 The art historian Rosalind E. Krauss would observe that, peculiarly, the phrase is not seen in the Francophone world but instead only in the Anglophone world.
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".M Woodman, The Maiden King (Dorset 1999) p. 179
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.H Vendler, Seamus Heaney (London 1998) p. 144-5
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.Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome (Penguin 1966) p. 285 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".J P Sullivan ed., The Satyricon (Penguin 1986) p. 142
Modern The 1890s were notable for a mix of high culture and low experience, as seen in figures like Joris-Karl Huysmans.J P Sullivan ed., The Satyricon (Penguin 1986) p. 24 The youthful Bob Dylan would claim that "The only beauty's ugly, man...the hard filthy gutter sound".Dylan, Poem to Joannie (Bootlegger ) p. 9-10 Jonathan Ames described himself as drawn to prostitutes and the gutter by nostalgie de la boue.J Ames, Essays (2007) 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.Harper's Magazine (November 1989) https://harpers.org/archive/1989/11/stalking-the-billion-footed-beast
See also
References
External links Nostalgie de la Boue Nostalgie de la boue