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The Novel and the Nation
45
bien des choses” [In fact the essence o f a nation is that all the individuals
have many things in common and also that they have all forgotten many
things], with a footnote continuing the quotation: “Tout citoyen français
doit avoir oublié la Saint-Barthélemy, les massacres du Midi au X lIIe siè
cle” [Every French citizen must have forgotten Saint Bartholomew’s, the
Provence massacres in the 13th century] {IC, 6). In the preface to the sec
ond edition Anderson notes, “I had quoted Renan without the slightest
understanding o f what he had actually said: I had taken as something eas
ily ironical what was in fact utterly bizarre” {IC, xiv). He calls this a “hu
miliating recognition,” which led him to write the (superb) essay for the
second edition, “Memory and Forgetting.” This is humbling, if not humil
iating, for readers as well as for Anderson himself, for Anderson’s readers,
too, I dare say, had taken Renan’s observation as a version of an amusing,
ironical insight: we could say that what Americans share is that they have
all forgotten The Federalist Papers, for instance.
But now Anderson puts it in a more estranging perspective: “At first
sight,” he writes in the second edition, “these two sentences may seem
straightforward. Yet a few moments’ reflection reveals how bizarre they ac
tually are.” First, Renan feels no need to tell his readers what these to-have-
been forgotten things are. “Yet who but ‘Frenchmen,’ as it were, would
have at once understood” these elliptical references {IC, 200). Frenchmen
are identified by their recognition o f things they are required to forget.
But second and most important, the expression, “/a Saint-Barthélemy”
conceals both the killers and those killed in this religious pogrom, whose
participants “did not think o f themselves cosily together as ‘Frenchmen’ ”
but who (like the Albigensians o f the thirteenth century and the followers
o f Pope Innocent III, who slaughtered them in the other massacre cited)
are now constructed, by the forgotten “memories” o f today’s nationals, as
fratricidal fellow Frenchmen. The peremptory syntax o f doit avoir oublié
[is obliged to have forgotten] casts this forgetting as a civic duty. “ Having
to ‘have already forgotten’ tragedies o f which one needs unceasingly to be
‘reminded’ turns out to be a characteristic device in the later construction
o f national genealogies” {IC, 201). On second encounter Anderson expos
es in Renan’s ironic remark the strange processes by which national com
munities are constructed as ancient, despite their modernity, and are thus
4
б
T H E O R Y
imagined and sustained in a way that forges links with both the dead and
the yet unborn,^
Anderson’s chapter “ Cultural Roots” is another tour de force, suc
cinctly outlining nationalism’s links and contrasts with the fundamental
modes o f organizing experience: with religions and dynasties, which pre
ceded nationalism, but, above all, with a new conception o f time that made
the imagining o f nations possible, a conception o f simultaneity “marked
not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal coincidence, and mea
sured by clock and calendar” (/C, 24). “So deep lying is this new idea that
one could argue that every essential modern conception is based upon a
conception o f ‘meanwhile’ ” (/C, 24П34). The imagined community o f a
nation involves the simultaneous existence o f large numbers o f individu
als, and the most vivid figure “for the secular, historically clocked, imag
ined community” is the daily ceremony o f the simultaneous consumption
o f the newspaper: “each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he
performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of
others o f whose existence he is confident, yet o f whose identity he has not
the slightest notion” (/C, 35). Moreover the newspaper itself is constructed
on the principle o f simultaneity: the only link between the items that ap
pear in it is calendrical coincidence.
The other aspect o f “print-capitalism”— to use Anderson’s key
phrase— that “made it possible for rapidly growing numbers o f people to
think about themselves, and to relate to others, in profoundly new ways”
2.
Homi Bhabha, in his critique of Anderson in Nation and Narration, uses
Renan’s quote as a primary piece o f evidence for Anderson’s neglect of “the alienat
ing and iterative time of the sign.” Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and
the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha
(London: Routiedge, 1990), 309. Renan shows us that forgetting constitutes the
beginning, writes Bhabha: “Listen to the complexity of this form of forgetting
which is the moment in which the national will is articulated. . . . To be obliged
to forget— in the construction of the national present— is not a question of his
torical memory; it is the construction of a discourse on society that performs the
problematic totalization of the national will” (310-11). Bhabha’s reading of Renan
depends on Anderson’s new account of Renan’s obligatory forgetting, published as
“Narrating the Nation,” in the Times Literary Supplement [TLS\ of June 13, 1986,
before being taken up in the revised edition of Imagined Communities.
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