Benedict anderson the origins of national consciousness pdf

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Sign in. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Literature Poetry Lit Terms Shakescleare. Download this LitChart! Teachers and parents! Second was the impact of the Reformation, which, at the same time, owed much of its success to print-capitalism. Before the age of print, Rome easily won every war against heresy in Western Europe because it always had better internal lines of communication than its challengers. His works represented no less than one third of all German-language books sold between and Between and , a total of editions whole or partial of his Biblical translations appeared.

Where Luther led, others quickly followed, opening the colossal religious propaganda war that raged across Europe for the next century. The emblem for this is the Vatican's Index Librorum Prohibitorum—to which there was no Protestant counterpart—a novel catalogue made necessary by the sheer volume of printed subversion.

To take Calvin's Geneva alone: between and only 42 editions were published there, but the numbers swelled to between and , by which latter date no less than 40 separate printing-presses were working overtime.

The coalition between Protestantism and print-capitalism, exploiting cheap popular editions, quickly created large new reading publics—not least among merchants and women, who typically knew little or no Latin—and simultaneously mobilized them for politico-religious purposes.

Inevitably, it was not merely the Church that was shaken to its core. The same earthquake produced Europe's first important non-dynastic, non-city states in the Dutch Republic and the Commonwealth of the Puritans.

Francois I's panic was as much political as religious. Third was the slow, geographically uneven, spread of particular vernaculars as instruments of administrative centralization by certain well-positioned would-be absolutist monarchs.

Here it is useful to remember that the universality of Latin in mediaeval Western Europe never corresponded to a universal political system. The contrast with Imperial China, where the reach of the mandarinal bureaucracy and of painted characters largely coincided, is instructive. In effect, the political fragmentation of Western Europe after the collapse of the Western Empire meant that no sovereign could monopolize Latin and make it his-and-only-his language-of-state, and thus Latin's religious authority never had a true political analogue.

The birth of administrative vernaculars predated both print and the religious upheaval of the sixteenth century, and must therefore be regarded at least initially as an independent factor in the erosion of the sacred imagined community. At the same time, nothing suggests that any deep-seated ideological, let alone proto-national, impulses underlay this vernacularization where it occurred. Prior to the Norman Conquest, the language of the court, literary and administrative, was Anglo-Saxon.

For the next century and a half virtually all royal documents were composed in Latin. Between about and this state-Latin was superseded by Norman French. In the meantime, a slow fusion between this language of a foreign ruling class and the Anglo-Saxon of the subject population produced Early English. The fusion made it possible for the new language to take its turn, after , as the language of the courts—and for the opening of Parliament.

Wycliffe's vernacular manuscript Bible followed in Obviously, huge elements of the subject populations knew little or nothing of Latin, Norman French, or Early English. On the Seine, a similar movement took place, if at a slower pace.

In other dynastic realms Latin survived much longer—under the Habsburgs well into the nineteenth century. As such, it was utterly different from the self conscious language policies pursued by nineteenth-century dynasts confronted with the rise of hostile popular linguistic-nationalisms. One clear sign of the difference is that the old administrative languages were just that: languages used by and for officialdoms for their own inner convenience.

Nonetheless, the elevation of these vernaculars to the status of languages-of-power, where, in one sense, they were competitors with Latin French in Paris, [Early] English in London , made its own contribution to the decline of the imagined community of Christendom. At bottom, it is likely that the esotericization of Latin, the Reformation, and the haphazard development of administrative vernaculars are significant, in the present context, primarily in a negative sense—in their contributions to the dethronement of Latin.

It is quite possible to conceive of the emergence of the new imagined national communities without any one, perhaps all, of them being present. In this way he implies that 'true' communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact and perhaps even these are imagined. Javanese villagers have always known that they are connected to people they have never seen, but these ties were once imagined particularistically - as indefinitely stretchable nets of kinship and clientship.

Until quite recently, the Javanese language had no word meaning the abstraction 'society. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. Ernest Renan, 'Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? II n'y a pas en France dix families qui puissent fournir la preuve d'line origine franque. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change, p. No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members of the human race will join their nation in the way that it was possible, in certain epochs, for, say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet.

It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, and the allomorphism between each faith's ontological claims and territorial stretch, nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so.

The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.

Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. These deaths bring us abruptly face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history scarcely more than two centuries generate such colossal sacrifices? I believe that the beginnings of an answer lie in the cultural roots of nationalism.

Hobsbawm, for example, 'fixes' it by saying that in it numbered about , in a population of23,, See his The Age of Revolution, p. But would this statistical picture of the noblesse have been imaginable under the ancien regime? The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times.

To feel the force of this modernity one has only to imagine the general reaction to the busy-body who 'discovered' the Unknown Soldier's name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange, contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings.

This is why so many different nations have such 1. The ancient Greeks had cenotaphs, but for specific, known individuals whose bodies, for one reason or another, could not be retrieved for regular burial. I owe this information to my Byzantinist colleague Judith Herrin. Consider, for example, these remarkable tropes: 1.

Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and grey, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, honour, country. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of the world's noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless [sic]. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism [sic].

He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. What else could they be but Germans, Americans, Argentinians.

The cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer if one tries to imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals. Is a sense of absurdity avoidable? The reason is that neither Marxism nor Liberalism is much concerned with death and immortality.

If the nationalist imagining is so concerned, this suggests a strong affinity with religious imaginings. As this affinity is by no means fortuitous, it may be useful to begin a consideration of the cultural roots of nationalism with death, as the last of a whole gamut of fatalities. If the manner of a man's dying usually seems arbitrary, his mortality is inescapable. Human lives are full of such combinations of necessity and chance.

We are all aware of the contingency and ineluctability of our particular genetic heritage, our gender, our life- era, our physical capabilities, our mother-tongue, and so forth. The great merit of traditional religious world-views which naturally must be distinguished from their role in the legitimation of specific systems of domination and exploitation has been their concern with man-in- the-cosmos, man as species being, and the contingency of life.

The extraordinary survival over thousands of years of Buddhism, Chris- tianity or Islam in dozens of different social formations attests to their imaginative response to the overwhelming burden of human suffer- ing — disease, mutilation, grief, age, and death. Why was I born blind?

Why is my best friend paralysed? Why is my daughter retarded? The religions attempt to explain. At He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and his achievements. In the course of doing fieldwork in Indonesia in the s I was struck by the calm refusal of many Muslims to accept the ideas of Darwin.

At first I interpreted this refusal as obscurantism. Subsequently I came to see it as an honourable attempt to be consistent: the doctrine of evolution was simply not compatible with the teachings of Islam. In this way, it concerns itself with the links between the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of re-generation. Who experiences their child's conception and birth without dimly apprehending a combined connectedness, fortuity, and fatality in a language of 'continuity'?

I bring up these perhaps simpleminded observations primarily because in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought. The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness. With the ebbing of religious belief, the suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear.

Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary. What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning.

As we shall see, few things were are better suited to this end than an idea of nation. If nation-states are widely conceded to be 'new' and 'historical,' the nations to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past,4 and, still more important, glide which formally accepts the findings of physics about matter, yet makes so little effort to link these findings with the class struggle, revolution, or whatever. Does not the abyss between protons and the proletariat conceal an unacknowledged metaphysical con- ception of man?

The late President Sukarno always spoke with complete sincerity of the years of colonialism that his 'Indonesia' had endured, although the very concept 'Indonesia' is a twentieth-century invention, and most of today's Indonesia was only conquered by the Dutch between and Preeminent among contemporary Indonesia's national heroes is the early nineteenth-century Javanese Prince Diponegoro, although the Prince's own memoirs show that he intended to 'conquer [not liberate!

See Harry J. Benda and John A. Larkin, eds. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny. With Debray we might say, 'Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal.

Nor am I suggesting that somehow nationalism historically 'supersedes' religion. What I am proposing is that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self- consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which — as well as against which - it came into being.

For present purposes, the two relevant cultural systems are the religious community and the dynastic realm. For both of these, in their heydays, were taken-for-granted frames of reference, very much as nationality is today. It is therefore essential to consider what gave these cultural systems their self-evident plausibility, and at the same time to underline certain key elements in their decomposition.

The great sacral cultures and for our purposes here it may be permissible to include 'Confucianism' incorporated conceptions of immense communities. But Christendom, the Islamic Ummah, and even the Middle Kingdom — which, though we think of it today as Chinese, imagined itself not as Chinese, but as Emphasis added. These banks flourish today, and there is no reason to doubt that many Turks, possibly not excluding Kemal himself, seriously saw, and see, in the Hittites and Sumerians their Turkish forebears.

Before laughing too hard, we should remaind ourselves of Arthur and Boadicea, and ponder the commercial success of Tolkien's mythographies.

Take only the example of Islam: if Maguindanao met Berbers in Mecca, knowing nothing of each other's languages, incapable of communicating orally, they nonetheless under- stood each other's ideographs, because the sacred texts they shared existed only in classical Arabic.

In this sense, written Arabic functioned like Chinese characters to create a community out of signs, not sounds. So today mathematical language continues an old tradition. All the great classical communities con- ceived of themselves as cosmically central, through the medium of a sacred language linked to a superterrestrial order of power.

Accord- ingly, the stretch of written Latin, Pali, Arabic, or Chinese was, in theory, unlimited. In fact, the deader the written language - the farther it was from speech - the better: in principle everyone has access to a pure world of signs.

Yet such classical communities linked by sacred languages had a character distinct from the imagined communities of modern nations. One crucial difference was the older communities' confidence in the unique sacredness of their languages, and thus their ideas about admission to membership. Chinese mandarins looked with approval on barbarians who painfully learned to paint Middle Kingdom ideograms.

These barbarians were already halfway to full absorption. Such an attitude was certainly not peculiar to the Chinese, nor confined to antiquity. Consider, for example, the following 'policy on barbarians' formulated by the early-nineteenth-century Colombian liberal Pedro Fermm de Vargas: To expand our agriculture it would be necessary to hispanicize our Indians.

Their idleness, stupidity, and indifference towards normal endeavours causes one to think that they come from a degenerate race which deteriorates in proportion to the distance from its origin. Note also, alongside the condescending cruelty, a cosmic optimism: the Indian is ultimately redeemable — by impreg- nation with white, 'civilized' semen, and the acquisition of private property, like everyone else.

How different Fermin's attitude is from the later European imperialist's preference for 'genuine' Malays, Gurkhas, and Hausas over 'half-breeds,' 'semi-educated natives,' 'wogs', and the like.

Yet if the sacred silent languages were the media through which the great global communities of the past were imagined, the reality of such apparitions depended on an idea largely foreign to the contemporary Western mind: the non-arbitrariness of the sign. The ideograms of Chinese, Latin, or Arabic were emanations of reality, not randomly fabricated representations of it.

We are familiar with the long dispute over the appropriate language Latin or vernacular for the mass. In the Islamic tradition, until quite recently, the Qur'an was literally untranslatable and therefore untranslated , because Allah's truth was accessible only through the unsubstitutable true signs of written Arabic. There is no idea here of a world so separated from language that all languages are equidistant and thus inter- changeable signs for it.

In effect, ontological reality is apprehensible only through a single, privileged system of re-presentation: the truth- language of Church Latin, Qur'anic Arabic, or Examination Chinese. And, as truth-languages, imbued with an impulse largely foreign to 6.

Church Greek seems not to have achieved the status of a truth-language. The reasons for this 'failure' are various, but one key factor was certainly the fact that Greek remained a living demotic speech unlike Latin in much of the Eastern Empire. This insight I owe to Judith Herrin. By conversion, I mean not so much the acceptance of particular religious tenets, but alchemic absorption. The whole nature of man's being is sacrally malleable. Contrast thus the prestige of these old world- languages, towering high over all vernaculars, with Esperanto or Volapiik, which lie ignored between them.

It was, after all, this possibility of conversion through the sacred language that made it possible for an 'Englishman' to become Pope and a 'Manchu' Son of Heaven. But even though the sacred languages made such communities as Christendom imaginable, the actual scope and plausibility of these communities can not be explained by sacred script alone: their readers were, after all, tiny literate reefs on top of vast illiterate oceans.

It would be a mistake to view the former as a kind of theological technocracy. The languages they sustained, if abstruse, had none of the self-arranged abstruseness of lawyers' or economists' jargons, on the margin of society's idea of reality. Rather, the literati were adepts, strategic strata in a cosmological hierarchy of which the apex was divine. The astonishing power of the papacy in its noonday is only comprehensible in terms of a trans-European Latin-writing clerisy, and a conception of the world, shared by virtually everyone, that the bilingual intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin, mediated 8.

Nicholas Brakespear held the office of pontiff between and under the name Adrian IV. Marc Bloch reminds us that 'the majority of lords and many great barons [in mediaeval times] were administrators incapable of studying personally a report or an account. This is not to say that the illiterate did not read. What they read, however, was not words but the visible world.

The awesomeness of excommunication reflects this cosmology. Yet for all the grandeur and power of the great religiously imagined communities, their unselfconscious coherence waned steadily after the late Middle Ages. Among the reasons for this decline, I wish here to emphasize only the two which are directly related to these commu- nities' unique sacredness. First was the effect of the explorations of the non-European world, which mainly but by no means exclusively in Europe 'abruptly widened the cultural and geographic horizon and hence also men's conception of possible forms of human life.

Consider the following awed description of Kublai Khan by the good Venetian Christian Marco Polo 12 at the end of the thirteenth century: The grand khan, having obtained this signal victory, returned with great pomp and triumph to the capital city of Kanbalu. This took place in the month of November, and he continued to reside there during the months of February and March, in which latter was our festival of Easter.

Being aware that this was one of our principal solemnities, he commanded all the Christians to attend him, and to bring with them their Book, which contains the four Gospels of the Evangelists. After causing it to be repeatedly perfumed with incense, in a ceremonious manner, he devoutly kissed it, and directed that the same should be done by all his nobles who were present. This was his usual practice upon each of the principal Christian festivals, such as Easter and Christmas; and he observed the same at the festivals of the Saracens, Jews, and idolaters.

Upon being asked his motive for this conduct, he said: 'There are four great Prophets who are reverenced and worshipped by the different classes of mankind. The Christians regard Jesus Christ as their divinity; the Saracens, Mahomet; the Jews, Moses; and the idolaters, Sogomombar-kan, the most eminent among their idols.

I do honour and show respect to all the four, Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, p. Emphases added. Notice that, though kissed, the Evangel is not read. What is so remarkable about this passage is not so much the great Mongol dynast's calm religious relativism it is still a religious relativism , as Marco Polo's attitude and language. It never occurs to him, even though he is writing for fellow-European Christians, to term Kublai a hypocrite or an idolater.

No doubt in part because 'in respect to number of subjects, extent of territory, and amount of revenue, he surpasses every sovereign that has heretofore been or that now is in the 13 world. What a revealing contrast is provided by the opening of the letter written by the Persian traveller 'Rica' to his friend 'Ibben' from Paris in '': 14 The Pope is the chief of the Christians; he is an ancient idol, worshipped now from habit.

Once he was formidable even to princes, for he would depose them as easily as our magnificent sultans depose the kings of Iremetia or Georgia. But nobody fears him any longer. He claims to be the successor of one of the earliest Christians, called Saint Peter, and it is certainly a rich succession, for his treasure is immense and he has a great country under his control.

The deliberate, sophisticated fabrications of the eighteenth century Catholic mirror the naive realism of his thirteenth-century predecessor, but by now the 'relativization' and 'territorialization' are utterly self- conscious, and political in intent. Is it unreasonable to see a paradoxical The Travels of Marco Polo, p. Henri de Montesquieu, Persian Letters, p, The Lettres Persanes first appeared in Second was a gradual demotion of the sacred language itself.

But by the sixteenth century all this was changing fast. The reasons for the change need not detain us here: the central importance of print-capitalism will be discussed below. It is sufficient to remind ourselves of its scale and pace. Despite a temporary come-back during the Counter-Reformation, Latin's hegemony was doomed. Nor are we speaking simply of a general popularity.

Somewhat later, but at no less dizzying speed, Latin ceased to be the language of a pan- European high intelligentsia. In the seventeenth century Hobbes was a figure of continental renown because he wrote in the truth- language. Shakespeare — , on the other hand, composing in the vernacular, was virtually unknown across the Channel. And had English not become, two hundred years later, the pre-eminent world- imperial language, might he not largely have retained his original insular obscurity?

Meanwhile, these men's cross-Channel near-contemporaries, Descartes and Pascal , conducted most of their correspondence in Latin; but virtually all of Voltaire's was in the vernacular.

Bloch, Feudal Society, I, p. For in fundamental ways 'serious' mon- archy lies transverse to all modern conceptions of political life. Kingship organizes everything around a high centre. Its legitimacy derives from divinity, not from populations, who, after all, are subjects, not citizens.

In the modern conception, state sovereignty is fully, flatly, and evenly operative over each square centimetre of a legally demarcated territory. But in the older imagining, where states were defined by centres, borders were porous and indistinct, and 21 sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another. Hence, para- doxically enough, the ease with which pre-modern empires and kingdoms were able to sustain their rule over immensely heteroge- neous,22 and often not even contiguous, populations for long periods of time.

One must also remember that these antique monarchical states The original French is more modest and historically exact: 'Tandis que l'on edite de moins en moins d'ouvrages en latin, et une proportion toujours plus grande de textes en langue nationale, le commerce du livre se morcelle en Europe.

Notice the displacement in rulers' nomenclature that corresponds to this transformation. Schoolchildren remember monarchs by their first names what was William the Conqueror's surname? In a world of citizens, all of whom are theoretically eligible for the presidency, the limited pool of 'Christian' names makes them inadequate as specifying designators. In monarchies, however, where rule is reserved for a single surname, it is necessarily 'Christian' names, with numbers, or sobriquets, that supply the requisite distinctions.

We may here note in passing that Nairn is certainly correct in describing the Act of Union between England and Scotland as a 'patrician bargain,' in the sense that the union's architects were aristocratic politicians. See his lucid discussion in The Break-up of Britain, pp. Through the general principle of verticality, dynastic marriages brought together diverse populations under new apices.

Paradigmatic in this respect was the House of Habsburg. As the tag went, Bella gerant alii, tufelix Austria nube! Here, in somewhat abbreviated form, is the later dynasts' titulature. This, Jaszi justly observes, was, 'not without a certain comic aspect. In fact, royal lineages often derived their prestige, aside from any aura of divinity, from, shall we say, miscegenation?

The conception of a United Kingdom was surely the crucial mediating element that made the deal possible. Most notably in pre-modern Asia. But the same principle was at work in monogamous Christian Europe. This 'curious document' is cited in ibid. It is characteristic that there has not been an 'English' dynasty ruling in London since the eleventh century if then ; and what 'nationality' are we to assign to the or Bourbons?

During the seventeenth century, however - for reasons that need not detain us here - the automatic legitimacy of sacral monarchy began its slow decline in Western Europe. In , Charles Stuart was beheaded in the first of the modern world's revolutions, and during the s one of the more important European states was ruled by a plebeian Protector rather than a king. But after the principle of Legitimacy had to be loudly and self-consciously defended, and, in the process, 'monarchy' became a semi-standardized model.

Tenno and Son of Heaven became 'Emperors. Petersburg, London and Berlin to learn the intricacies of the world- model.

However, inter-monarchic approval of his ascension as Rama VI was sealed by the attendance at his coronation of princelings from Britain, Russia, Greece, Sweden, Denmark - and Japan! Gellner stresses the typical foreignness of dynasties, but interprets the phe- nomenon too narrowly: local aristocrats prefer an alien monarch because he will not take sides in their internal rivalries.

Thought and Change, p. Marc Bloch, Les Rois Thaumaturges, pp. Noel A. While the armies of Frederick the Great r. Beneath the decline of sacred com- munities, languages and lineages, a fundamental change was taking place in modes of apprehending the world, which, more than anything else, made it possible to 'think' the nation. To get a feeling for this change, one can profitably turn to the visual representations of the sacred communities, such as the reliefs and stained-glass windows of mediaeval churches, or the paintings of early Italian and Flemish masters.

A characteristic feature of such representations is something misleadingly analogous to 'modern dress'. The shepherds who have followed the star to the manger where Christ is born bear the features of Burgundian peasants. The Virgin Mary is figured as a Tuscan merchant's daughter.

In many paintings the commissioning patron, in full burgher or noble cos- tume, appears kneeling in adoration alongside the shepherds. What seems incongruous today obviously appeared wholly natural to the eyes of mediaeval worshippers. We are faced with a world in which More than 1, of the 7,, men on the Prussian Army's officer list in were foreigners. Christendom assumed its universal form through a myriad of specifi- cities and particularities: this relief, that window, this sermon, that tale, this morality play, that relic.

While the trans-European Latin- reading clerisy was one essential element in the structuring of the Christian imagination, the mediation of its conceptions to the illiterate masses, by visual and aural creations, always personal and particular, was no less vital. The humble parish priest, whose fore- bears and frailties everyone who heard his celebrations knew, was still the direct intermediary between his parishioners and the divine.

This juxtaposition of the cosmic-universal and the mundane-particular meant that however vast Christendom might be, and was sensed to be, it manifested itself variously to particular Swabian or Andalusian communities as replications of themselves. Figuring the Virgin Mary with 'Semitic' features or 4 first-century' costumes in the restoring spirit of the modern museum was unimaginable because the med- iaeval Christian mind had no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and 30 present.

Bloch observes that people thought they must be near the end of time, in the sense that Christ's second coming could occur at any moment: St. Paul had said that 'the day of the Lord cometh like a thief in the night.

For us, the idea of'modern dress,' a metaphorical equivalencing of past with present, is a backhanded recognition of their fatal separation. Bloch, Feudal Society, I, pp. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. Compare St. Augustine's descrip- tion of the Old Testament as 'the shadow of [i.

It can be established only if both occurrences are vertically linked to Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding. He rightly stresses that such an idea of simultaneity is wholly alien to our own. It views time as something close to what Benjamin calls Messianic 33 time, a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present. In such a view of things, the word 'meanwhile' cannot be of real significance.

Our own conception of simultaneity has been a long time in the making, and its emergence is certainly connected, in ways that have yet to be well studied, with the development of the secular sciences.

But it is a conception of such fundamental importance that, without taking it fully into account, we will find it difficult to probe the obscure genesis of nationalism. What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Ben- jamin, an idea of'homogeneous, empty time,' in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, p. So deep-lying is this new idea that one could argue that every essential modern conception is based on a conception of 'meanwhile'. For these forms provided the technical means for 're-presenting5 the kind of imagined community that is the nation.

Consider first the structure of the old-fashioned novel, a structure typical not only of the masterpieces of Balzac but also of any con- temporary dollar-dreadful. It is clearly a device for the presentation of simultaneity in 'homogeneous, empty time,' or a complex gloss upon the word 'meanwhile'. Take, for illustrative purposes, a segment of a simple novel-plot, in which a man A has a wife B and a mistress C , who in turn has a lover D.

What then actually links A to D? Two complementary conceptions: First, that they are embedded in 'societies' Wessex, Liibeck, Los Angeles. These societies are sociological entities of such firm and stable reality that their members A and D can even be described as passing each other on the street, without ever becoming acquainted, and still be connected.

While the Princesse de Cleves had already appeared in , the era of Richardson, Defoe and Fielding is the early eighteenth century. The origins of the modern newspaper lie in the Dutch gazettes of the late seventeenth century; but the newspaper only became a general category of printed matter after Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, p.

This polyphony decisively marks off the modem novel even from so brilliant a forerunner as Petronius's Satyricon. Its narrative proceeds single file. If Encolpius bewails his young lover's faithlessness, we are not simultaneously shown Gito in bed with Ascyltus.

That all these acts are performed at the same clocked, calendrical time, but by actors who may be largely unaware of one another, shows the novelty of this imagined world conjured up by the author in his readers' minds. An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his ,,odd fellow- Americans.

He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity. The perspective I am suggesting will perhaps seem less abstract if we turn to inspect briefly four fictions from different cultures and different epochs, all but one of which, nonetheless, are inextricably bound to nationalist movements. In , the 'Father of Filipino Nationalism', Jose Rizal, wrote the novel Noli Me Tangere, which today is regarded as the greatest achievement of modern Filipino literature.

It was also almost the first novel written by an 'Indio. Although, In this context it is rewarding to compare any historical novel with documents or narratives from the period fictionalized. Nothing better shows the immersion of the novel in homogeneous, empty time than the absence of those prefatory genealogies, often ascending to the origin of man, which are so characteristic a feature of ancient chronicles, legends, and holy books.

Rizal wrote this novel in the colonial language Spanish , which was then the lingua franca of the ethnically diverse Eurasian and native elites. Alongside the novel appeared also for the first time a 'nationalist' press, not only in Spanish but in such 'ethnic' languages as Tagalog and Ilocano. See Leopoldo Y. Yabes, 'The Modern Literature of the Philippines,' pp. My translation. In those days Capitan Tiago had the reputation of a lavish host. It was known that his house, like his country, closed its doors to nothing, except to commerce and to any new or daring idea.

So the news coursed like an electric shock through the community of parasites, spongers, and gatecrashers whom God, in His infinite goodness, created, and so tenderly multiplies in Manila. Some hunted polish for their boots, others looked for collar-buttons and cravats.