Seth & Nostalgia By Jeet Heer National Post (February 16, 2002). The Guelph, Ont.-based cartoonist Seth has long made his reputation invoking the past. His sketchbooks, recently collected in a beautiful volume titled Vernacular Drawings, are filled with images taken from the early 20th century -- music-hall comedians, showgirls, dilapidated buildings and superheroes from the 1940s. There are drawings copied from "old magazines, yearbooks, mail-order catalogues, snapshots, comic books, outdated encyclopedias, girlie magazines, discarded photo albums and many, many other forms of paper ephemera." In person, too, Seth displays this attachment to the past. Usually dressed in an elegant suit that conjures up romantic comedies from the 1930s, Seth draws cartoons of himself weeping over pictures of "the sweet vanished past." As fellow cartoonist Dave Sim once noted, what is impressive is the attention Seth gives to details; even his pocket watch and fountain pen fit the part. Yet Seth's engagement with the past is not some private quirk, but part of a larger cultural trend whereby our ideas of history are subtly changing. We live in the age of the Antiques Roadshow. Many ephemeral objects from the past not only survive, but are seen as objects of value. Old newspapers, clothing, toys and furniture can all fetch a keen price. More than this, though, because artifacts from the past survive and are easy to replicate, we live in an age where the most common form of historical understanding derives from popular culture. Nostalgia, which can be seen in hit movies as well as the latest fashion, is the cultural manifestation of how the past has become lighter. Until the Victorians invented the modern study of archeology, the past was always associated with large public monuments such as the pyramids or the Great Wall of China. Day-to-day items — cutlery, clothing, furniture — were fragile and not seen as being momentous enough to pass on to posterity, so they quickly disappeared. When writers like Shakespeare or Tolstoy used history in their work, they would focus on large public events such as the overthrow of a king or the Napoleonic wars. They weren't really concerned with the minutiae of the past, such as how people dressed or what furniture they sat on. When Shakespeare's history plays were first performed at the Globe Theatre, medieval kings would be dressed in Elizabethan garb without raising any eyebrows. By contrast, contemporary artists who deal with the past are obsessed with the little details of texture that characterized an era. When a contemporary movie deals with a historical event, the filmmakers expend enormous effort to get the period details right. The real pleasure of Pearl Harbor, for instance, is not in the plot but in the glamorous period dresses, the big-band music and the metallic gleam of old propeller airplanes. Perhaps not surprisingly, the nostalgia phenomenon has critics who believe it is a psychological disorder, a popular delusion that trivializes history. Social critic Christopher Lasch, echoing a widespread sentiment, has complained that nostalgia "evokes the past only in order to bury it alive. The atmosphere of sentimental regret with which it surrounds the past has the effect of denying the past's inescapable influence over the present." But Lasch's complaint runs parallel to that of historians such as Keith Windschuttle and Jack Granatstein, who believe we are living in a culture that's increasingly ignorant of history. There has been a steady stream of books like Windschuttle's The Killing of History and Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History? decrying the fact that the general public is increasingly unaware of the key moments in national political history. Every Canada Day, newspapers in this country run polls showing how little Canadians know about our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. Yet a more positive view of nostalgia is possible. As the late, great social historian Raphael Samuel noted in his last book, Theatres of Memory (1994), we actually live in a culture saturated with historical consciousness, where ordinary people learn about the past through popular culture as well as at school. Historical knowledge is not in decline, Samuel argues; rather, we are living in a time when more and more people are becoming interested in the past in a variety of ways. It is no accident that a TV series such as Canada: A People's History gets high ratings, and historical novels by Margaret Atwood and Richard Wright continue to top the best-sellers list. It is no coincidence that four of the six novels nominated for the Giller Prize last year had a historical theme. Many academic historians have long had a sniffy disdain for the type of history found in popular culture or even highbrow novels. However, as Samuel rightly pointed out, popular history is much more democratic and pluralistic than the nationalist myths concocted by academic historians. We are no longer interested in just the great figures like Caesar or Napoleon; we also want to know how our grandparents lived. (As anyone who does historical research knows, it is difficult to go to an archive without tripping over a middle-aged couple tracing their roots, or antiquarians researching local traditions.) For critics like Lasch, nostalgia turns the past into a theme park, a fun place to visit but with no bearing on our lives. For celebrants such as Samuel, nostalgia manifests a popular need to connect to the past. Part of Seth's achievement as an artist is that he combines these contradictory attitudes toward nostalgia. He is acutely aware of the dangers of escapism, but he also responds deeply to the aesthetics of the past. As Seth notes in the introduction to Vernacular Drawings, he is attracted to old images that are "widespread, ordinary, beneath notice." For Seth, the past is not a refuge from the present but a way of criticizing the modern world. In his images of factory workers or high-school students from the 1940s, we can feel the weight of those lives and how different they are from us. Seth's subject matter may be ephemeral, but his approach isn't. Especially in the second half of his collection, each drawing is invested with a loving attention. Because of the care that goes into every page, his book cannot be flipped through lightly. It has a steady calmness that forces us to slow down and look. The very stillness of the art constitutes a critique of the modern cult of speed and relentless technological progress. The complexity of Seth's relationship with nostalgia can be seen best in his graphic novel Clyde Fans, currently being serialized in his comic book Palookaville. Clyde Fans tells the story of two brothers, Abe and Simon Matchcard, who run an electric-fan company. A successful salesman, Abe embraces progress and lives in the present but this attitude doesn't help him in his old age. Simon, by contrast, cannot deal with the present and retreats into becoming a collector of old postcards. Although in some ways a more sympathetic character, Simon, with his obsession with postcards, points to the ways in which nostalgia can lead to arrested development. In his complex portrayal, Seth shows how the collector's tendency to turn old objects into a personal fetish can hamper a more meaningful relationship with the past. Like everything else, nostalgia can be turned into a commodity and made the subject of shallow entertainment (think of the sitcom That ‘70s Show). However, in the hands of an artist, the past can be a source of emotional depth. Few artists have thought about it as much as Seth. Both his drawings and his comics show how an engagement with history enriches the present.