ABSTRACT
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the ancestors have made people what they are. A Freudian understanding of memory as a screen-discourse is crucial in analyzing how trauma literature both proclaims and erases its contents over and over again. Franco Moretti asks, and then he answers that the nation-state can in fact be found in the development and evolution of the novel as a "symbolic form".
