Attraction to low-life culture, experience, and degradation
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.[1]
The phrase was coined in 1855 by Émile Augier.[2] 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.[3]
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".[4]
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.[5]
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.[6]
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".[7]
Modern
The 1890s was notable for a mix of high culture and low experience, as seen in figures like Joris-Karl Huysmans.[8]
The youthful Bob Dylan would claim that "The only beauty's ugly, man...the hard filthy gutter sound".[9]
Jonathan Ames described himself as drawn to prostitutes and the gutter by nostalgie de la boue.[10]
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.[11]
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!
↑Krauss, Rosalind (Spring 1991). "Nostalgie de la Boue". High/Low: Art and Mass Culture. 56: 112 – via JSTOR. ... the peculiar circumstance that the expression nostalgie de la boue is not in fact idiomatic French; indeed, it is not a part of spoken French usage at all, being instead a purely Anglophonic invocation of the English notion of slumming transposed into the magically resonant frame of a supposedly French turn of phrase.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.