WHY DID THE SNOPESES NAME THEIR SON "WALLSTREET PANIC"? DEPRESSION HUMOR IN FAULKNER’S THE HAMLET

When applied to Faulkner’s The Hamlet, the term "depression humor" may at first seem as troublesome as the "jerky" span of mules that the legendary horse trader Pat Stamper palms off on Ab Snopes: "e’en after we was in the road and the wagon rolling good one of them taken a spell of some sort and snatched his-self crossways in the traces like he aimed to turn around and go back . . . they was a matched team in the sense that neither one of them seemed to have any idea as to just when the other one aimed to start moving’" (38).¹ Thoughts of economic depression pull us in one direction: the hints of mortgage foreclosures scattered throughout the novel; the degraded life of the tenant farmer Mink Snopes, who kills his more prosperous neighbor with a shotgun oiled with bacon grease because he can’t afford oil; pathetic, gray Mrs. Amstid, who weaves by candlelight to buy her sons some shoes. The novel’s humor, however, pulls us into a world peopled by a host of intriguing con men, from formidable Stamper with his "eyes the color of a new axe blade" to froglike Flem Snopes to V. K. Ratliff, the shrewd sewing-machine salesman and raconteur(29–30). Yet ultimately Faulkner manages to duplicate the horse-trading legerdemain of the masterful Stamper by convincing us to accept both our mules, economic depression and humor, as a "matched team."

The novel’s theme of economic depression includes not only depictions of financial struggle, class conflict, mortgage foreclosures, and a lowered standard of living, but also a broader inquiry into Southern and, more generally, American economic values. The Snopes’ invasion of Frenchman’s Bend, for example, is sympathetic of the social upheaval brought on by economic forces, an upheaval poorly understood and experienced as absurd. And in countless other instances, economic decline generates what I call dialogue of value in the novel. In both realistic and antirealistic modes, in comedy and in serious narrative, Faulkner dramatizes such issues as the nature of meaningful work, the validity of the Protestant ethnic, the relation of Southerners to the land, the nature of cash money as opposed to tangible goods, the incursion of the machine into the human psyche, and the relation of economics and sex. The novel’s comic theme of the difference between Northerners and Southerners, introduced in Ratliff’s goat-trading scheme, is especially important in this regard, since it evokes the South’s crisis of identity and

crisis of values after the Civil War, including the problems of industrialization in the "New South" and the Northern domination of the Southern economy.

Both the setting and the composition of The Hamlet are closely connected with economic dislocation and depression. The novel takes place from 1902 to 1908, a period that includes the panics of 1903 and 1907, the latter brought on, according to Theodore Roosevelt, by "the speculative folly and the flagrant dishonesty of a few men of great wealth."² In Yoknapatawpha County, the country around Frenchman’s bend has been hurt by the catastrophic decline in cotton prices in the nineties, and we can see a nightmarish image of these hard times in the farm that Ab Snopes rents from Jody Varner; the gate is "choked with grass and weeds like the ribs of a forgotten skeleton"(l8).

The novel was composed during hard times as well. Faulkner began writing The Hamlet (as "Father Abraham") in 1926–27, when the South was already suffering from the decline that was to become the Great Depression; and during the Depression he published several stories that were later incorporated into the novel. In the novel itself, published in 1940, Faulkner addresses some of the crucial economic questions of his time, portraying the evils of the tenant farming and sharecropping system and associating Flem Snopes with usury, manipulative secrecy, and even mechanization. We see similar concerns in such contemporary works as H. C. Nixon’s essay "Whither Southern Economy" in I’ll Take My Stand, which discusses the inadequacy of the tenant system and the "crop lien" system in Southern agriculture and warns Southerners of the accelerating tempo of life in an industrial society, a tendency foreshadowed by Flem Snopes’s buggy with its "speeding aura of constant and invincible excursion"(89).⁴ The Hamlet thus reflects the economic problems of the first decade of the twentieth century and presages the greater depression to come.⁵

Economic decline provides the impetus for the novel’s reenactment of American history on two fronts: as Faulkner charts the evolution of the American economy in The Hamlet, from Ab Snopes’s barter to Flem’s capitalist shenanigans, he also charts a literary history of American humor, from its folk origins, reflected in Ratliff’s mock-oral stories, to literary black humor. Under the pressure of economic decline, however, the more traditional comic stories of the first half of the novel are all invaded in some way by portents of black humor. The critical point in this comic history, which signals the shift from nineteenth- to twentieth-century humor, comes almost midway through the novel, when a pregnant Eula Varner is married off to Flem Snopes. The story of this rustic Venus, a symbol of "abundance and munificence," has evoked the

expansive atmosphere of a tall tale, but Eula’s marriage to squat, bland, passionless Flem precipitates a crisis both in Ratliff’s economic consciousness and in the novel’s humor(159). In portraying Ratliff’s effort to transcend his outrage at the waste of Eula’s marriage and to create humor once again, Faulkner captures the basic tension of depression humor, the need to reconcile the Edenic abundance of America with the realities of waste and hardship.⁶

Some Fools and Their Money

The novel’s economic dialogue begins with a portrayal of the change in the region’s highest social class. Faulkner opens The Hamlet with an unforgettable image of the antebellum Old Frenchman’s place in ruins; by the turn of the century, when the story takes place, the once-fertile plantation has reverted to jungle and the local people have taken to tearing down the magnificent house for firewood, so that the original economic and aesthetic value of the plantation is no longer accessible. Sold to banks during the Reconstruction, the nameless Frenchman’s plantation has been taken over by the chief man in the area, Will Varner. Folksy, Rabelaisian Will performs a complex economic function for the local people, acting as farmer, usurer, and veterinarian at the same time. Skeptical of the Cavalier tradition, Uncle Will affably criticizes the greed at the basis of plantation life: "‘I’m trying to find out what it must have felt like to be the fool that would need all this . . . just to eat and sleep in’"(6). Since Will is good-natured, and the local people seem to accept this ascendancy, the reader glides quickly over the facts that Will and his son Jody deal heavily in foreclosed mortgages, and that the threat of foreclosure hangs over many of the farmers. Jody’s plan to cheat his new tenant farmer, Ab Snopes, maps out a scenario similar to foreclosure: at some point after Ab has planted his crop but before he can reap some profit, Jody will drive About of the country by revealing that he knows of the barn-burning in Ab’s past. If we can identify mean and devious Ab as a "subversive" comic character in the nineteenth-century tradition of humorous rascals and rogues who flaunt the morality of "reputable" society, including Faulkner’s favorite rogue, G. W. Harris’s Sut Lovingood, we can also note that "reputable" Jody is subversive in his own way.⁷ In the metaphor derived from fencing that describes Jody’s habitual levity, the "poste and reposte of humor’s light whimsy," we see reflected Jody’s willingness, at least formerly, to allow some give and take in his economic dealings(10).

In Ratliff the relation between economic activity, social ease, and a humorous psychological poise seems more solidly balanced. Ratliff first appears as a reincarnation of the nineteenth-century oral taleteller; he hides his sharp insight into human nature behind an affable mask. The

son of a tenant farmer, Ratliff combines his shrewd trading in sewing machines, land, and other commodities with a certain egalitarian social activity; functioning as a mail service and one-man news bureau, he knows everyone on his 50-mile route. Though Ratliff must be more prosperous than most of the people around Frenchman’s Bend, his personality seems to transcend class categories, and thus it is appropriate that the first comic story he tells in the novel represents a defusing of a class conflict—clearly one major option of depression humor. Cold and bitter Ab Snopes, who moves from one tenant farm that "‘aint fitten for hawgs’" to another, has—deliberately?—tracked some horse-manure on the hundred-dollar French rug in the house of his landlord, Major de Spain(20). When de Spain insists that Ab’s womenfolk clean the rug, they ruin it, whereupon he demands twenty bushels of corn in payment. Ab then sues him and has the fine reduced to ten bushels. But this partial vindication doesn’t satisfy Ab; the same night de Spain’s barn burns to the ground.⁸

This comic story contrasts two kinds of value: the judge’s concept of value sets up an equivalence between an expensive French rug and bushels of corn, whereas Ab’s psychological scales of value balance his economic exploitation at the hands of landlords like de Spain with his destructive revenge. Ab’s ten bushels of corn are worth as much to a poor man like Ab as a barn is worth to de Spain. By tracking manure on the rug, Ab is probably suggesting that de Spain values the rug more than his tenants—or that landlords treat their tenants like horse manure. The barn-burning thus marks the subversive comic triumph of Ab’s sense of value over the values of law and society. When Ab announces that he is leaving the farm, de Spain reminds him of his farming contract. "‘I done cancelled it,’" Ab says(17). He may be down, but he isn’t out. Ratliff’s good-humored telling of the story and his refusal to assert Ab’s proven guilt suggest that he may still feel some sympathy for the class of tenant farmers he was born into; but we may also assume that Ab does not really pose a serious threat to the prosperity of people like de Spain, the Varners, and Ratliff.

Ab’s attempts at self-aggrandizement also form the core of Ratliff’s second comic anecdote, "Fool About a Horse," which he tells the farmers lounging at Varner’s store. Like the barn-burning story, this anecdote works toward a comic denial of loss and failure in Ab’s life as a tenant farmer. "Fool About a Horse" takes place some twenty years before the narrative present. As a tenant after the Civil War, Ab prizes his eye for horseflesh because it lifts him above his identity as a shiftless and sorry farmer. Ratliff himself, as a neighbor’s child of eight, accompanies Ab to town on the day that Ab is carrying $24.68—his

wife’s savings of four years—to buy her a milk separator. Ab learns that this new horse, which he has acquired by barter, was originally owned by Pat Stamper, who set in motion a series of trades in which eight "‘actual Yoknapatawpha cash dollars’ "had got " ‘to rattling around loose’"(34). Ab then determines to vindicate the "‘the entire honor and pride of the science and pastime of horse-trading in Yoknapatawpha County’" by beating Stamper at a trade(34). Ratliff insists that honor, not profit, is Ab’s motive. But the existence of a cash nexus sets up a different system of values in Ab’s mind, initiating what proves to be a dangerous process of abstraction. Somehow cash diminishes the physical reality of the horses: "‘So here we come,’" Ratliff says, "‘easing them eight dollars . . . up them long hills. . . ’"(35). A less vivid and personal commodity, cash represents a snake in the garden, a value alien to Yoknapatawpha County.

Comparing Ab and Stamper to two "‘first-class burglars,’" Ratliff describes the confrontation between them as a contest of social equals who trade for pleasure as well as gain, even though Stamper is fabulously successful and Ab is not. Ab makes a basic decision about value when he decides to trade his sorry horse and good mule for Stamper’s slightly inferior span of mules. But Stamper’s black hostler, an artist in horseflesh, has groomed the mules to have only a temporary semblance of value. First they won’t pull together; then they go on a rampage and collapse in a heap. Doomed, desperate, and drunk, Ab sacrifices his wife’s new milk separator in a second trade in which he acquires his original mule and a new hog-fat horse. When it starts to rain and the new dark brown horse turns into a bay, he realizes that Stamper has merely disguised Ab’s original horse by dyeing it and blowing it up with a bicycle pump valve. In order to retrieve the milk separator, Mrs. Snopes must trade not only Ab’s original mule and horse but her only cow as well. Still undaunted, Mrs. Snopes runs the milk separator again and again with the same gallon of borrowed milk, enacting a comic version of Camus’s myth of Sisyphus. Though Ab is comically unregenerate, in the manner of nineteenth-century comic rogues, his wife at least has confronted the absurd.⁹

Our fascination with Stamper’s legerdemain blocks our sympathy for Ab’s vulnerability, even though he is now a farmer without a mule or cow; since he tried to beat Stamper, he only receives comic justice when he is whipped. But Stamper has precipitated what Ratliff calls a natural process of "souring" in Ab. At some point after Stamper eliminated Ab from horse-trading, he "‘just went plumb curdled’" and became the mean old man we see at the start of the novel(29). In order for the story to remain comic, Ratliff must end it here, before the unknown moment

when the curdling actually happens.¹⁰ Ratliff must not cross the line between a "depression" story and one that depicts the irrevocable death of Ab’s spirit.

Ab’s "souring" at the hands of a shrewder trader brings about a definitive change in his family’s economic activity, since, in a repudiation of traditional values, Flem decides that there’s no profit in farming.¹¹ Accepting the bribe of a clerkship in the Varner store, which Jody hopes will prevent Ab from burning his barn, Flem becomes the agent of further change. Up to now the raw power relation between Varner and the other farmers has been tempered by a set of social forms; Will and Jody often leave the store untended, trusting people to pay for the goods themselves; when Jody makes a mistake in his own favor in adding up the bills, he also makes a joke: The Varner’s extend credit with an air of generosity, even though they charge interest. Flem, however, is allied with the legalistic and the mechanical. He makes Will pay for the wad of chewing tobacco from his own store, tries to deny everyone credit, and never makes a mistake—or at least never gets caught at it. Most important, through Flem we gain a heightened sense of the mechanical aspect of economic gain in general and the charging of interest in particular, a perception that will fuel the novel’s black humor.

Though Faulkner exploits for comic purposes the incongruity of the blandly repulsive Flem as a big shot in Frenchman’s Bend, he also uses Flem to demystify, through parody, the economic activity of more traditional social leaders like the Varners, and even Ratliff. The process of economic gain can, from a certain distance, seem almost magical; the herd of scrub cattle that Flem owns is "transmogrified" overnight into a herd of superior Herefords(61). But at the bottom of this magical transformation, akin to the magical feats of Pat Stamper in horse-trading, lies a foreclosed lien at a Jefferson bank. Similarly, when Ratliff goes to Tennessee because his sewing machine business forces him to raise cash, we find comedy in his discovery of a territory ripe for exploitation, like "the first white hunter blundering into the idyllic solitude of a virgin African vale teeming with ivory, his for the mere shooting and fetching out" (55). Yet we begin to wonder about the "naturalness" of the economic system of Frenchman’s Bend when we see Will Varner and Flem sitting together at the yearly settling of accounts with Will’s tenants and debtors, resembling "the white trader and his native parrot-taught headman in an African outpost"(61).¹² Part of the mystery behind Flem’s acquisition of capital is illuminated by the comic anecdote that Bookwright, a successful yeoman, tells to Ratliff. Bookwright has overheard a black sawmill worker explaining how easy it is to borrow money from Flem Snopes: "He lent me five dollars over

two years ago and all I does, every Saturday night I goes to the store and pays him a dime. He aint even mentioned that five dollars’" (70). The earlier image of the ceaseless milk separator has thus foreshadowed Flem’s discovery of a true perpetual motion machine: the charging of interest.

Flem’s new citified clothes evoke another theme of depression humor, the emergence of sharper class distinctions. We find comedy in the puniness of Flem’s tiny, machine-made black bow tie. But Flem’s tie and Will’s are the only ones in Frenchman’s Bend, setting them apart from the farmers. It is significant that when we learn of the tie, we also learn of Flem’s ultimate social station: when he becomes president of the Sartoris bank in Jefferson, he will have the little ties made for him by the gross.

The basic social conflict inherent in Flem’s financial machinations—which turns out to be a regional conflict as well—affects the form of the final comic incident in Book One of the novel. The story begins as a traditional high-spirited comedy, as Ratliff appears to us as a confidence man, the Southern version of a clever Yankee peddler. He allows Flem to overhear his telling the farmers that he has a contract to buy goats for a Northerner who wants to start a goat farm. Ratliff wants Flem to rush out to buy the only existing local herd of goats before him, and then to try to sell the goats to Ratliff so that he can confront Flem with a couple of financial notes connected in a complex way with Flem’s cousins Mink and Isaac Snopes. In the story that Ratliff dangles before Flem as bait, however, we find an opposition that deepens the economic dialogue of the novel. According to Ratliff, Southerners are like philosophic materialists: they start goat ranches because they already have too many flesh-and-blood goats; Northerners are idealists who start with abstractions, with rules and syndicates, diplomas and measurements.

Implicit in this Northerner-Southerner dichotomy is the contrast between the traditional concrete barter economy of Frenchman’s Bend, represented earlier by Ab’s pre-Stamper horse-trading, and the new, more abstract economy of the Stamper-inspired cash dollars, Flem’s notes, and Varner’s and Flem’s charging of interest. The "Northern" complexity of Flem’s manipulation of notes in the cash economy dizzies even an experienced man like Ratliff, schooled in the "science and pastime of skullduggery"(82). Flem has given his cousins Mink and Ike two notes in exchange for their two ten-dollar inheritances from their grandmother, and somehow Flem has collected on the notes several times, activating another perpetual motion machine. Moreover, Ratliff finds that he cannot use traditional social pressures to shame Flem for neglecting his cousins. Ratliff is forced instead to undergo the

disorientation characteristic of black humor, which stands in contrast to his earlier folk humor: Issac Snopes, whose inheritance Flem seems to have used as his original fund of capital, turns out to be an idiot.

Flem’s brand of economics thus short-circuits what started out to be a traditional comic story.¹³ Though Faulkner presents the blasted face of Ike Snopes as a vision of a generalized absurd injustice toward humankind, the "Gorgon face of that primal injustice which man was not intended to look at face to face," the uncovering of Ike as the original source of the note and of Flem’s capital suggests a more specific, though oblique, questioning of the change in the economy of Frenchman’s Bend(85). Again, the elusive value of cash money, now further abstracted into notes, seems to be the villain. If the Old Frenchman in the plantation economy is a greedy fool, and if Ab Snopes the tenant farmer is a fool about a horse—and the fool of the Cavaliers—Ike Snopes in a capitalist economy is an absurd fool.

Flem’s rise to power in Book One represents a story of social upheaval characteristic of depression humor. Flem Snopes has now replaced Jody Varner as the heir to Will’s power—it is Flem, not Will, who sits in meditation at the Old Frenchman’s place at the end of this Book. Ratliff’s comic poise is not upset by his failure to beat Flem in the goat-trading incident, however. Thinking that he has merely "quit too soon" in his calculations, Ratliff does not abandon his basic conception of economic and social value (88). But Faulkner complicates the situation in Book Two, "Eula," by juxtaposing a radically different system of value to the stable local values that Flem has upset. This "system" is centered and symbolized in Will’s daughter Eula.

Faulkner defines Eula’s Dionysic, paradoxical world of value in part by focusing on the role she plays in disrupting the life of the schoolmaster, Labove, a young man from a poor farming family who teaches school in order to put himself through the state university. A walking parody of the Protestant ethic, ascetic and humorless Labove fills every moment of the day with ceaseless work. His first crisis of value echoes the Southern crisis in traditional agrarian values. He learns that his football skill is more important than his intellect, and that preparing a field for a football game claims more human energy than farming. There is no provision in Labove’s system of value for entering into a relation with Eula; at best he can try to deflower her, to hurt her, or to "kill" her symbolically (121). Comparing Eula to an infinitely fertile field Labove perceives that Eula’s future husband "would not possess her but merely own her . . . by the dead power of money," an analogy that suggests a shallow and futile aspect of American economic life (119).

It falls to Ratliff to forge an explicit interpretation of Eula’s meaning in relation to the dominant system of values. The narrator has spoken earlier of the displacement of a younger group of Eula’s suitors by an older one in terms of the novel’s theme of economic depression: they are "last summer’s foreclosed bankrupts" (l32). When Will Varner married off a pregnant Eula to Flem Snopes—her lover, Hoake McCarron, has fled—Ratliff regrets the death of everyone’s dream of possessing Eula. But he denies the tragedy of Eula’s ruin and marriage, reducing Venus to "gal-meat" wasted on all of Frenchman’s Bend as well as Flem (149). Slovenly, unclean, with her tawdry negligees and cheap shoes, Eula is reduced not only to an offense to the puritanical virtue of cleanliness and propriety, but also to a "moral natural enemy of the masculine race" whose power over men destroys their own system of value(149). Apparently, once the failure of depression calls into question the efficacy of other traditional puritanical virtues like hard work and thrift, the threat of a riotous reaction to these virtues—a threat embodied in Eula—evokes an even stronger repression.

The counterpart in comedy of Ratliff’s declaration of "male" value is the story of Flem in hell that Ratliff spins himself just after he remembers Eula in the train, leaving on her honeymoon. The anecdote relates the confrontation of two supreme con men: Flem Snopes arrives in hell to redeem the soul he sold to the Devil, and by insisting on legal technicalities and resisting mere human temptations, he manages to drive the Prince of hell from his throne, just as the real Flem has driven Jody from his rightful place as Will’s heir. Ratliff’s anecdote marks a subtle but definite shift in the novel’s humor, since, unlike the earlier comic stories that he relates to Jody and the farmers, it takes place only in his head. Though it resembles traditional American comic stories, the isolation of this anecdote, its turning inward, foreshadows the increased psychological and social disorientation that results from Flem’s marriage and concomitant gain in power.

Ratliff’s ultimate view of Eula’s value resolves comedy into a matter of economics. Unable to forget her attraction in spite of his rationalizing, he is left with anger: "what he felt was outrage at the waste, the useless squandering: at a situation intrinsically and inherently wrong by any economy . . . as though the gods themselves had funneled all the concentrated bright wet-slanted unparadised June onto a dung-heap, breeding pismires" (159–60). The death of the dream of Eula like the death of the American dream of abundance for all, propels Ratliff into satire, the form of humor that can best tap his anger. Substituting a physical outrage for a social one, Ratliff relates a crude and bitter anecdote of a poor woman who copulates with Flem in return for a

nickel’s worth of lard, and then says, "‘Mr. Snopes, what you ax fer dem sardines?’" (164). Since the American tall tale is expansive, and dependent on the myth of abundance, the anticlimactic deflecting of the erotic tall tale of Eula into a satire involving Flem and cut-rate sex reflects a basic deflating and satirizing tendency of depression humor.¹⁴

Together with the story of Eula, the sheer proliferation of Snopses in The Hamlet works profound change in the novel’s modes of depression humor. The comic antics of the Snopses in the first half of the novel, evoking nineteenth-century "subversive" humor, pave the way for the twentieth-century humor of the second half. As Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill note, "some subversive humor has a significantly modern flavor. Some of it aims, in one of its channels, directly toward contemporary black humor and comic savagery."¹⁵ In the Snopeses’ skewed relation to the world of meaningful work and coherent social roles and in their destruction of the secure norms of Frenchman’s Bend, we see mirrored an absurd depression America that has broken down.

Different aspects of the depression work crisis are embodied in different Snopses. Ab’s "immobile" bovine daughters signal a loss of energy, like "a carved piece symbolizing some terrific physical effort which had died with its inception. . ." (l9). Eck Snopes, moving in slow motion, gives us a dreamlike vision of a chasm between the worker’s intention and the finished product: "there was a definite limitation of physical coordination beyond which design and plan and pattern all vanished, disintegrated into dead components of pieces of wood and iron scraps and vain tools"(66). Economic unpredictability takes the shape of frenetic, weasel-like I. O. Snopes, who explodes in a "furious already dissipating concentration of energy vanishing the instant after the intention took shape"(64). He adds a sardonic wrinkle to the novel’s debate between concrete Southerners and abstract Northerners; inept at any kind of manual work, he eventually installs himself as the new school professor in Frenchman’s Bend, complete with lenseless spectacles. Rodent-faced I. O., who talks in a steady stream of mangled proverbs, is not only a strange new version of the American comic stereotype of the learned fool, but also a parody of Benjamin Franklin’s proverb-spouting Father Abraham, who tells colonists how to succeed in spite of the drain on their wealth caused by British tariffs—another example of a colonial economy.¹⁶

Snopes humor takes yet another form in Issac Snopes the idiot. At first the uncoordinated Ike seems to be another version of the comic work crisis: he does his chores at the boarding house in a mechanical

series of steps, so that if he misses one of the steps he must start over again. Nevertheless, his outrageous mock-heroic love for Jack Houston’s cow helps him to transcend his mental and physical limitations, and in recounting Ike’s story Faulkner joins the bizarre Snopes humor to an exalted lyrical strain. Ike’s idyll with the cow, a travesty of romance, has important ramifications for the novel’s dialogue of value. His love for this bovine Juno links his story to that of Eula, the bucolic Venus, and like Eula he threatens some of the norms of Frenchman’s Bend. In an almost Chaplinesque ballet, Ike innocently handles the fifty-cent piece that Houston has given him as a bribe to leave the cow alone. This scene strips away our notion of the conventional value of the coin, allowing us to see it as something strange and questionable. We never know whether Ike’s dropping the coin involves clumsiness or a repudiation of mercenary values: the action remains absurd.

Ike’s idyll deepens our sense of an absurd universe, since of all the novel’s characters, only an idiot achieves a fusion of work and love: his work in caring for his beloved cow. Faulkner also links Ike unequivocally with the triumphant union of the Northern abstract and the Southern concrete; the diadem of flowers with which he crowns the cow is both concrete fodder and symbolic coronet, imaging forth the glory of their love. In contrast, both the "normal" and the abnormal characters who plague Ike are allied with an array of questionable values. The raging "puritanical" farmer, whose grain Ike steals to feed the cow, has grimly eked out a living in an endless round of labor (191). His hate-filled "marriage" to his embattled land parallels Flem’s marriage to Eula, the human counterpart of an infinitely fertile field. Launcelot "Lump" Snopes, Ike’s cousin, exploits Ike’s love by inviting the farmers to a peep show in which Ike copulates with the cow. Most important, Ratliff himself faces a radical test of his values when he decides to stop the peep show, allying himself with society’s "reputables" rather that the "subversives." He knows that he is robbing Ike of his only happiness, yet he rejects moral relativism in favor of repression and suppression. In one of the funniest scenes in the book, Ratliff forces the Snopeses to convene a family conference to separate Ike from his cow, a conference that creates humor out of a contrast between concrete and abstract measures of value. The local minister employs a traditional Protestant method of interpreting the beefing of Ike’s cow, finding the exalted symbolic value of purification in the actual butchering. When Ratliff insists that the Snopeses buy the cow from Ike, the family wrangles about dividing the price of the cow. Eck asks his cousin I. O., who is trying to bamboozle him, "How do I need fifteen dollars worth of moral value when all you need is a dollar and eighty cents?’"(204).

Holding a wooden effigy of his dead cow, Ike seems to share the fate of the murdered farmer Jack Houston, becoming the "victim" of a useless and elaborate practical joke at the hands of the prime maniacal Risibility. . ." (188). This practical joke turns even grimmer in the story of Ike’s cousin Mink, which signals a turn to grotesque black humor.¹⁷ The beginning of Mink’s story mingles the pathetic, the tragic, and the absurd. Mink, a tenant farmer, murders his yeoman neighbor Jack Houston because he is insulted when Houston demands a repayment for the cost of pasturing a bull that Mink has allowed to wander; this tragic vengefulness repeats Ab Snopes’s vengeful comic barn-burning in a darker key. Moreover, Mink’s marriage picks up on a major theme in Eula’s story, the relation of the economic despoiling of the land to the ruin of women’s virginity. In logging the virgin timber, Mink’s father-in-law has founded a cruel and chimerical economic structure, a "furious edifice of ravished acres . . . which had been erected overnight and founded on nothing, to collapse overnight into nothing, back into refuse. . ."(238). These multiple repetitions of earlier episodes point to the "cyclical" nature of black humor, in which "characters enact constant, recurrent situations rather than live unique histories."¹⁸

In describing Mink’s later life Faulkner makes the most explicit statements in the novel about the degradation of tenant farming and sharecropping; the meager crops, the endless succession of dilapidated cabins for which Mink pays "almost as much rent in one year as the house had cost to build"(219). This somber story modulates into grotesque black humor after Mink kills Jack Houston. Not only does Mink torture his own body with near-starvation and a reversed pattern of sleeping and waking, but he is unable to distance himself from Houston’s corpse after his amoral cousin Lump reveals that Houston had at least fifty dollars in his pockets when Mink shot him. Lump sticks to his cousin like a leech in order to force him to show where he hid the corpse; the sheriff is also skulking around for the same purpose. The comic battle between Mink’s furious grasping at his last chance for freedom and Lump’s loud monomania culminates in a grotesque vision of Mink recovering the stinking mutilated corpse out of a rotting tree while Houston’s dog attacks him. At the end of the episode Faulkner reveals the basic contrast implicit in the black humor of Mink’s story, the contrast between his grotesque degradation and the middle-class society he cannot enter. As the sheriff brings Mink in a surrey to Jefferson, we catch a momentary glimpse of the prosperous town dwellers, the "clipped lawns," the children in "bright garments," the "neat painted gates," the comforting dinners at twilight (257).

If a grotesque character like Mink or a subversive character like Ab Snopes can gain revenge against society only by killing their neighbors or burning their barns, Flem can beat the society that would condemn him to tenant farming by turning into what Ratliff has called a Northerner, that is, someone who manipulates abstract values. Throughout the novel the comic resurfacing of the North-South dichotomy has been symptomatic of the dislocation in the Southern economy and culture triggered by the Civil War and its aftermath. Not only does Flem represent the changes that have occurred in the New South, but he also foreshadows even more sweeping changes in the future.

The fourth and final book of The Hamlet, "The Peasants," reflects the comic "Northernness" of two con games that help propel Flem into the world beyond Frenchman’s Bend, the spotted horse auction and the "salting" of the Old Frenchman’s place with fake buried treasure. In essence Flem becomes a comic version of another Faulkner character born into the lower classes, Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!, the man who tries to beat society by joining it. But Flem’s Northernness is also a threat to comedy, since the humor of the spotted horse episode reveals a radically double form, part humorous, part pathetic or tragic; and the basic comic framework of the salted treasure episode is blurred by a curious dreamlike atmosphere and strained by a strong measure of grotesque black humor that threatens to break the form entirely.

The spotted horse story starts out as a traditional comedy. Returning from his Texas honeymoon in the company of an affable cowboy and a kaleidoscopic herd of spotted ponies, Flem bursts into the village with the aura of a circus parade like a Yoknapatawpha P. T. Barnum who will entertain the yokels while he bilks them. In bringing the horses to Frenchman’s Bend, Flem seems to have achieved a comic revenge for his father’s "souring" at the hands of Pat Stamper. Flem is even more of a master of illusion than Stamper was, since the number of horses appears to double in the moonlight and double again when they stampede. We can never ascertain the actual value of the horses because they are intangible, existing as "‘Transmogrified hallucination’" in "mazy camouflage" or "mirage-like clumps" (276). The novel’s debate between the Southern concrete and the Northern abstract thus finds a fitting embodiment in these elusive creatures, who partake of both qualities. They burst out of the lot when the auction is over, and none of the new owners ever succeeds in catching them.

Ultimately, however, the actual relation between Flem and the horses remains ambiguous; as the trial at the end of the episode reveals, no one can prove that Flem owned them. The question of the ownership of the

horses brings to a head a theme that has already appeared in connection with the Snopeses. The farmers have long been aware that Flem has used his numerous cousins as pawns or shills in his economic shenanigans, creating an absurd confederation that challenges the farmers’ belief in honest, rugged individualism. But the traditional value of family bonds—even in a family as bizarre as the Snopeses—obscures the radical newness and impersonality of Flem’s strategy. In the horse auction Flem succeeds in evading his individual responsibility by forming a hidden business relationship with the Texan which represents an embryonic stage of the process that Alan Trachtenberg has called "the incorporation of America": "the emergence of a changed, more tightly structured society with new hierarchies of control, and also changed conceptions of that society, of America itself."¹⁹

Throughout the novel Flem and other Snopeses have been associated with many of the changes in cultural and social values that Trachtenberg discusses. Ab Snopes, hoodwinked by the horse trader Pat Stamper, finds himself a victim of one change: the increasing professionalism of American life. In A. B. Longstreet’s story "The Horse-Swap" (Georgia Scenes, 1835), which has been suggested as a source of Ab’s "fool about horse" story, the seemingly naive old farmer manages to beat the boastful horse trader. But Ab, the amateur doesn’t stand a chance in the late 1870s against the wily expert Stamper. As I have mentioned, the Snopeses also represent an absurd questioning of traditional American conceptions about the value of labor, and Flem’s organization of his tribe to further his capitalistic ends can be seen as a comic image of a corporate body—all Snopeses except Mink usually manage to avoid personal liability. Flem’s usury and other economic activity, linked with calculation and rationalization, embody a new centralized power in the area, for he affects people in all classes of local society.

The novel’s images of mechanization, one of Trachtenberg’s main themes, center on Flem as well. As an early sign of his encroaching on Jody Varner’s power, he takes charge of the Frenchman’s Bend cotton gin, and his constant mechanical chewing of tobacco foreshadows his major feats of mechanization: his transformation of Henry Armstid into a machine in the salted treasure episode and his appropriation of Eula. After Henry Armstid has lost his farm in Flem’s salted treasure scam, he digs himself "back into the earth which produced him to be its born and fated thrall forever until he died"(359). It is fitting that Flem’s marriage to Eula crystallizes in Ratliff’s vision of Eula’s "calm beautiful mask" being whisked away by a train, since the railroad is the "age’s symbol of mechanization and of economic and political change" (147).²⁰ Courted by her lover, McCarron, in a buggy, the new Mrs. Flem Snopes

vanishes behind a "moving pane of glass" at the railroad station(149). Moreover, because of the marriage Ratliff succumbs to the commercial spirit of the age in reducing Eula the earth goddess into "gal-meat," a commodity like the spotted horses. The horse auction thus signals a crisis of value that extends far beyond Yoknapatawpha County. In the new, impersonal society comically mirrored by the horse auction—the Yoknapatawpha equivalent of the Wall Street stock exchange?—a shadowy Flem pulls the strings, backed up by the pistol-toting Texan.²¹

The trial following the horse auction, in which Mrs. Armstid and the Tulls sue Flem and Eck Snopes, combines pathos, satire, and black humor; the old Justice realizes that legal niceties can’t relieve the pain and uproar caused by the rampage. Like the Prince in Ratliff’s earlier vision of Flem in hell, he cries "‘I can’t stand no more!’"(332). Ultimately Mrs. Armstid fails to get her five dollars back from Flem, receiving a nickel’s worth of candy instead, and the Tulls are awarded possession of Eck’s worthless horse, which has disappeared—a vision of a system in which people get out much less than they put in.²²

The novel’s depression humor culminates in Flem’s ultimate con game in Frenchman’s Bend, as Flem swindles Ratliff, the impoverished farmer Armstid, and the prosperous yeoman Bookwright by salting the Old Frenchman’s place—his wedding gift from Will Varner—with bogus buried treasure. In this episode, Ratliff, usually a solitary traveler, allows himself to be "incorporated" into a group venture that includes an unstable impoverished man like Armstid; the three men dig in frenzy at night and purchase the Old Frenchman’s place from Flem. No longer a recounter of comic stories, Ratliff becomes part of a far blacker joke than the ones he tells. This leveling of Ratliff, now the partner of half-crazed Armstid, reflects another aspect of black humor, "the tendency toward total democratization in which all characters become interchangeable machine parts."²³ Ratliff’s motivation in this episode combines the rational and the irrational. Ratliff has always believed that the Old Frenchman’s place was valuable simply because Will Varner owned it, and throughout the novel has regarded himself as an "heir" of sorts to Will’s affably shrewd dealing. The treasure has not been found, he reasons, simply because people digging surreptitiously at night have not been able to dig deep enough. But Ratliff, caught up in the madness characteristic of grotesque black humor, also falls prey to a money-hunting sickness akin to the "‘Pat Stamper sickness’" that dooms Ab Snopes(31). Ratliff knows that the money he is hunting was supposed to have been coined before the Civil War, but he never looks at the dates on the coins he unearths. With the deception of Ratliff, we have descended to a level where Americans, "democratized" by black humor, are seen as

economic fools, baffled by a puzzle that a child could figure out.

The wholesale process of leveling at the end of the novel insists upon the existence of an economic subtext in The Hamlet. From the beginning of the novel we have seen a close connection develop between Flem and the Varners, which seems to be an "outrageous paradox" at first, but is later cemented by marriage; now we see shrewd and affable Ratliff finally lock horns with Flem—unsuccessfully—for gain rather than honor(89). Perhaps if we scratch a humorous but ambitious man like Will Varner or Ratliff, we will find a Flem Snopes, with his "tiny predatory nose like the beak of a small hawk"—the Yoknapatawpha version of what Teddy Roosevelt, during the panic of 1907, called the "predatory wealth" of the Northern fat cats (89, 51).²⁴

The novel’s treatment of depression crystallizes in the final episode in the financial ruin of Henry Armstid, who in return for his share of the Old Frenchman’s place has given Flem a mortgage on his farm. For Faulkner and for other southerners, Armstid’s failure is an important representative case for the South, since one of the greatest evils of economic depression lies in its destruction of the Southern yeomanry. The prime villain in this threat is the outrageously exploitative credit system with which the Southern farmer was saddled. In order to get money to grow his crops and pay his mortgage, Armstid would have to borrow. In this context, Flem’s identity as a usurer and holder of mortgages becomes central.

In 1938, two years before The Hamlet was published, the National Emergency Council’s "Report on Economic Conditions of the South" informed President Roosevelt that one of the South’s most serious problems was the lack of credit facilities that could deal leniently with low-income farm people. In general, Southerners paid much higher interest rates than did other Americans: C. Van Woodward, writing about the period from 1877 to 1913, reports estimates that under the crop-lien system farmers paid from thirty percent to seventy percent interest.²⁵ Ultimately this credit system funneled money to the North. To use the terminology of Ratliff’s parable of Northern and Southern approaches to goat-ranching, Flem’s extortion of enormous amounts of interest from poor blacks and white farmers brands him as a "Northerner," that is, someone more concerned with the abstract uses of money than with fundamental questions of value and social responsibility. Flem has modeled himself on rapacious Northern contemporaries like J. P. Morgan, Hill, Harriman, Frick, and Rockefeller, men whose frenzied speculation and ruthless pursuit of self-interest helped to bring about the ruin of smaller fish in such events as the panic of 1907. Eck Snopes’s naming his son "Wallstreet Panic," so that the boy could get

rich like the folks who ran the panics of 1907, presents us with a naive comic view of the South spawning its own enemies—people who would not scruple to plunge it into depressions because of their itch for power and personal gain.

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

NOTES

¹The Hamlet (New York: Random House, 1964). Further page references in the text will be to this edition.
²Caused largely by "an inflexible money structure and the spectacular overcapitalization of trusts," the panic of 1903 seemed "curious" in that 1902 had been a prosperous year; the causes of the panic of 1907 were also the subject of a "heated debate" (George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America, 1900–1912 [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962], pp. 173, 219). The enigma of the business cycle thus encouraged a feeling of normality that contributed to black humor. In The Hamlet, the vagaries of the business cycle are even displaced onto the natural cycle of the seasons, producing an exceptionally cold winter and a "long summer" (the title of Book Three).
³Though mechanization was introduced in Southern agriculture in the 1980s it did not cause social problems in the cotton growing area until the l930s. See Pete Daniel, "The Crossroads of Change: Tobacco, Cotton, and Rice Cultures in the Twentieth century," Journal of Southern History, in press.
⁴Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930). The tenant system and the crop lien system evolved in the South during the thirty years after the Civil War.
⁵For studies of the problems of cotton farmers during the entire period, see Pete Daniel, "The Crossroads of Change" and Breaking the Land (Champaign: Univ. of Illinois Press, forthcoming). In addition to such trials as the disruption of the First World War, the collapse of the cotton market in 1920, and problematic government intervention, Southern cotton farmers had to endure the invasion of the boll weevil, repeated Mississippi floods, and the 1930 drought.
⁶A fundamental aspect of depression humor thus corresponds closely to what Louis D. Rubin, Jr., calls "the great American joke": "the clash between the ideal and the real, between value and fact," between the "theory of equality and the fact of social and economic inequality" ("Introduction," in The Comic Imagination in American Literature, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1973]. pp. 13, 9).
⁷Other subversives include Longstreet’s Ransy Sniffle, James Russell Lowell’s Birdofredum Sawin, Hooper’s Simon Suggs, and Locke’s Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby. See Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill, America’s Humor (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 187-99.
⁸In "Cornbote: A Feudal Custom and Faulkner’s ‘Barn Burning,’" Brenda Eve Sartoris notes the implicit contrast between English and European feudal society and the tenant farming society in "Barn Burning"(1939), a story Faulkner rewrote for The Hamlet (Studies in American Fiction 11, no. 1 [Spring 1983]: 91–94). Ab’s payment in grain, or "cornbote," for de Spain’s rug reflects his low social standing, since feudal "villeins" had to pay in grain and only freeholders had the right to pay in money. In "Barn Burning" Faulkner depicts the anguish of Ab’s son, Colonel Sartoris Snopes, over class differences, but in The Hamlet Faulkner exploits the comparison between feudal and Yoknapatawpha society for comic purposes. We perceive not only the comic incongruity between feudal ideals of social reciprocity and Yoknapatawpha reality, but also the irony that Southern society has not progressed beyond feudalism.
⁹Though he does not mention this episode, Richard Boyd Hauck invokes Camus’s myth of Sisyphus in discussing American absurd humor, including Faulkner’s (A Cheerful Nihilism: Confidence and "The Absurd" in American Humorous Fiction [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971], pp. xi–14,

167–200). The "American Sisyphus," like Mrs. Snopes, chooses creative activity in a meaningless world. Hauck suggests that the characters in The Hamlet "sense that the Snopeses are only part of some universal joke created by some unknown jokester"(185).
¹⁰The comic distortion of a normal economic process—the substitution of a mechanical milk separator for Mrs. Snopes’s naturally productive cow—has a noncomic parallel in Ab’s subsequent alienation. In comparing Ab to milk, Ratliff uses a natural metaphor, but elsewhere the dead and lifeless post-Stamper Ab is compared to rust or iron and seems like a machine, foreshadowing later black humor (97–98).
¹¹As a break with southern tradition, Flem’s repudiation of farming and Ab’s total post-Stamper alienation go hand in hand. In the "fool about a horse" story, Ab’s horse-trading mirrors his identification and solidarity with classes higher than his own: the horse-symbol occurs, of course, in the term "Cavalier" and in the ruling class’s designation of itself as "the chivalry." W. J. Cash attributes the solidarity of common Southern whites and the planter class to their shared—and relatively recent—frontier origins; see The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941).
¹²These two references to imperialist colonies evoke C. Vann Woodward’s analysis of the "colonial economy" of the New South, an economy under the domination of Northern interests. Instead of creating Southern magnates, industrialization put into place an economy controlled by people like Rockefeller, the Morgans, the Mellons, and the DuPonts, who invested in corporations (Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1951], pp. 291–320). Faulkner’s comic references to a colonial economy not only foreshadow this domination but throw into doubt Southerners’ adherence to their traditional values: Varner and Ratliff are acting like Northerners.
¹³We find a nineteenth-century analogue to Flem’s repeated collection on the same note in the "subversive" story of the roguish Davy Crockett reselling the same skin at a trading post over and over; see Blair and Hill, America’s Humor, pp. 196–97.
¹⁴An economic analogue is implicit in Constance Rourke’s description of American tall tales, which were marked by verbal and imaginative "inflation" (American Humor: A Study of the National Character [Garden City, New York.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953], p. 60). Rourke finds in tall tales and talk "an exhilarated and possessive consciousness of a new earth and even of the wide universe." Once people like Labove and Ratliff despair of such a "possession" of Eula, the tall tale is doomed.
¹⁵America’s Humor, p. 199.
¹⁶Father Abraham’s exhortation on the way to wealth appears in Franklin’s preface to Poor Richard Improved of 1758. The germ of The Hamlet, Faulkner’s 1926–27 narrative, was also called "Father Abraham."
¹⁷In Mathew Winston’s formulation, "grotesque black humor has the characteristics common to all black humor," but is marked by an "omnipresent threat of death" that manifests itself in an obsession with madness and with "the human body, with the ways in which it can be distorted, separated into its component parts, mutilated, and abused" ("Humor noir and Black Humor," in Veins of Humor, ed. Harry Levin [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972], pp. 282–83.
¹⁸Ibid., p. 280.
¹⁹The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), pp. 3–4.
²⁰lbid., p. 57.
²¹In contrast to Flem, the farmers are so committed to the traditional value of individuals that they never "incorporate" except in cases of emergency: in order to hem in and capture the spotted horses they form a long line, but the horses break through. Real-life Southern farmers, though they formed associations like the Farmers Alliance and the Farmers Union, never succeeded in duplicating the "incorporating" success of financiers and industrialists.
²²In analyzing the doubleness of the spotted horses episodes, in which victims like Mrs. Armstid reverse the comic caricatures of "unfeeling clowns," Myra Jehlen concludes that "Faulkner has almost succeeded in using [comedy] to comment on its own assumptions, and thus uncover its ideological basis—but not quite, for he does not . . . make the victims . . . completely human" (Class and Character in Faulkner’s South [Secaucus, N. J.: The Citadel Press, 1978], p. 146).
²³Winston, p. 279.
²⁴Quoted in Mowry, p. 221.
²⁵Woodward, p. 180.