Faulkner’s Assembly of Memories into History: Narrative Networks in Multiple Times

Abstract

In Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner develops a processual model for how multivocal narrative history and time can emerge from conversation among heterogeneous subjective voices, both living and dead. Four social processes of memory assembly are involved: individual memories, changing perspectives, symmetry, and resonance. Iterated stories about characters in the past construct layered identities for narrators in the present by synchronizing them into multiple time registers: phenomenological time, episodic time, narrative time, epistemological time, projective time, and historical time. Different selves within the same person, Faulkner implies, emerge from these six ways of remembering, which brains and conversations throw up.

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