Abstract

Following Walter Benjamin's distinctions between story and novel, "Storytelling in The Hamlet" explores Faulkner's use of stories told in the novel to revise the community's history. In stories, characters and narrator produce diffuse directions for history to take, extending into virtual events and so accomplishing what Roberto Esposito calls a counter-actualization of events. In the novel, as Flem Snopes steadily progresses to power, stories told by others offer histories that cannot be reduced to the progressive and linear development of his rise. They guarantee no sequence but recover missing pasts to discover history as a process always subject to change.

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