MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

When William Morris introduces Old Hammond in the title of Chapter XXII of News from Nowhere as “a Praiser of Past Times” one must stop for a moment and consider the import of the past on the idealized future utopia. The present of William Guest, Morris’ involuntary pilgrim to the much improved world of 2102, is Morris’ present, late 19th century England, an imperfect world agonized by the growing pains of modernization and ill from humanity’s continued practice of greed, hatred, and apathy. An idealized Socialism has made the future arguably a better place, yet Old Hammond, the history enthusiast, praises the literature of Guest’s time being “much more alive than those which are written now.” Morris establishes a theme here that reverberates throughout the continually growing body of works which also look from worse times to better ones—Nostalgia, the longing for a romanticized version of the past, is an inescapable, perhaps involuntary, feature of Utopian, and Dystopian, literature. More so, nostalgia prevents, on the part of author and the reader, any true understanding of a utopia and ultimately leaves us returning to the world we know.

Two works which further this discourse of nostalgia are Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1954) and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011). I will examine the use of nostalgia through the historical, cultural, and personal manifestations. Much can be gleaned from the use of artifacts as they represent nostalgia as well as become over-arching symbols for the past, such as the titular player piano in Vonnegut and the virtual representations of Halliday’s hometown and the continual conjurations of obsolete gaming devices in Ready Player One to the buildings from Guest’s own past which still define the future England’s landscape.