ABSTRACT
Ernest Renan suggested that ‘the essence of the nation’ was that ‘the people have many things in common, but also have forgotten much together’ (1882:17; see Chapter 2). It is the processes of selecting what is remembered and what is not to be remembered that construct both the nation and identity. Zygmunt Bauman has described how, in the uncertainty of postmodernity,
instead of constructing one’s identity, gradually and patiently, like one builds a house, through the slow accretion of floors, rooms, connecting passages, we encounter a series of ‘new beginnings’, experimenting with instantly assembled yet easily dismantled shapes, painted one over the other; a palimpsest identity. This is the kind of identity which fits the world in which the art of forgetting is an asset, no less if no more important than the art of memorizing, in which forgetting rather than learning is the condition of continuous fitness.
