Abstract
I begin this essay, which I’ve been planning since I first visited the Exposition Permanente du Débarquement in Arromanches in June 1991, during the 50th anniversary of D-Day celebrations. I have become acutely aware of the ways in which the small world I inhabited at D-Day connects to the present official narrative(s) and the resistance offered to those narrative(s) by my personal history. Out of that resistance comes my understanding of the ways in which national politics molds the uses to which the present puts the past. The premises of my analysis of the Exposition come from the gaps between public memory and my own experience, both heavily influenced by the elegiac nostalgia that colored British national life during and immediately after the war years. I was so accustomed to this pervasive mood that when I read Brideshead Revisited in the late 1940s I did not notice how it permeated the novel.
The war and its aftermath shaped my generation in a number of ways. Its epic scale and scope, seen from a childish perspective, impressed on us a simple patriotic ethic and mythology that were not to be easily or lightly discarded. (How the old emotions welled up again in the Falklands War!)
(Lodge 276)
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Pickering, J. (1997). Remembering D-Day: A Case History in Nostalgia. In: Pickering, J., Kehde, S. (eds) Narratives of Nostalgia, Gender and Nationalism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13598-1_11
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