Commodifying freedom: horses in The Hamlet.

Langdon, Lance

Scholars of The Hamlet have long debated Flem Snopes's status as a capitalist. Certainly, in the later novels of the Snopes Trilogy--The Town and The Mansion--Flem exploits the profit potential of the South's emerging institutions: "hotels, stores, and power plants, as opposed to cotton and servants" (Clere 455). But little attention has been paid to his sale of Texas ponies in The Hamlet. Using Wolfgang Haug's Critique of Commodity Aesthetics, I argue that the story of the horse sale makes clear the dual nature of the commodity: its promise of wish fulfillment and the creative destruction attendant upon the delivery of said promise. The tale reveals the revolutionary potential in the release of energy necessary to commodity exchange; it also depicts how such exchange can be manipulated by those in power to further enrich capitalists and impoverish laborers.

But what exactly do Flem's "spotted horses" promise? Following Noel Polk, Kristin Fujie has noted that horses in Faulkner's fiction are avatars of self-sufficiency, embodying a freedom of movement about which his protagonists can only dream. However, by drawing upon the depiction of horses and mules in As I Lay Dying and that of horses elsewhere in The Hamlet, I hope to show that Flem's Texas ponies also promise a practical service: the transportation of the farmers to nearby markets where they might trade as profitably as do their wealthier neighbors. Thus, when Flem sets up the horse sale, he literally capitalizes not just on his neighbors' dreams of independence, but also on their hopes for economic power. Yet, though these dreams remain unrealized, the tale is not simply one of promise betrayed. For the horses' release, that violent pageant in which they transform from promise to use, proves more generative than the last pastoral to absorb the hamlet's attention--Ike Snopes's coupling with a cow. Indeed, I argue that by echoing the earlier coupling in depicting the horses' release, The Hamlet allegorizes the socioeconomic changes that were sweeping the South at the time of the novel's writing. Specifically, the tale suggests that a life grounded in one's patrimony is untenable; instead the horse sale finds the hamlet's farmers attuning themselves to a fully realized if ever promissory consumer culture, one every bit as explosive as Flem's passel of Texas ponies.

The first pages of The Hamlet introduce the reader to Will Varner, Frenchman's Bend's "chief man." Faulkner writes, "He owned most of the good land in the country and held mortgages on most of the rest. He owned the store and the cotton gin and the combined grist mill and blacksmith shop." A capitalist interested in long-term profits, Varner not only controls the land and the means of production that convert the fruits of that land into wealth--gin and gristmill--but also the labor necessary to make that conversion, the farmers who must give him his share of their crop. The title of The Hamlet's final book--"The Peasants"--indicates the farmers' place in this scheme precisely. And Varner is careful that those peasants do not seek another caretaker: it is "considered, to put it mildly, bad luck for a man of the neighborhood to do his trading or gin his cotton or grind his meal or shoe his stock anywhere else" (733). Just as this sentence delays its ending by adding verb upon verb, so do those farmers who believe themselves beholden to Varner for only a single service soon find that all business necessary to their survival must be accomplished through him.

However, unlike the factory managers Upton Sinclair describes in The Jungle (1906)--those men who open their doors to a seemingly limitless supply of immigrant labor--Varner's labor supply replenishes itself only through reproduction; there are few migrant farmworkers in this tale. Consequently, as "a farmer, a usurer, a veterinarian," Varner is as careful of the local farmers' health as he is of his mules', as is evident at the novel's conclusion when he uses the tools in his veterinary bag to tend to the wounds of dirt poor farmer Henry Armstid, whose leg has been broken by Flem's horses (733). Late in the book, we learn that, in plowing their land, Armstid and his wife literally take a dead mule's place in the traces alongside their remaining mule (1023-24); when Varner imagines his tenants laboring, he too puts mules alongside them as they dodge "mule-dung up and down a field furrow" (1018). So when a local judge suggests of Varner that "a milder mannered man never bled a mule" the reader infers that Varner is bleeding not just mules, but also the men and women who work the land he owns and mortgages, sapping their wealth and vitality (733).

Thus Faulkner's novel opens with a merchant who both holds fearsome power over his debtor-farmers and depends completely upon their labor for his livelihood. The historical record indicates that such men were anything but imaginary in the postbellum Cotton South. Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch's 1977 study One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation, an assiduous investigation of the economics of the era, finds rural merchants to be indispensable in a Southern economy that often depended upon Northern credit for its development. The study depicts the merchants' relationships with the farmers to whom they extended credit as brutally exploitative: "The rural merchant of the Cotton South was a monopolist who held a local, territorial monopoly over credit. As a monopolist he exploited his customers by charging exorbitant prices" (168). Reading The Hamlet in light of this history, it is clear that Will Varner's power determines the economic interactions and thus the daily routines of all the farmers of Frenchman's Bend, not excluding the Armstids, the Ab Snopeses, the Mink Snopeses, and the Houstons. Mounted on his white horse, touring the country and conversing with his tenants alongside his son Jody, Will Warner sits atop a social ladder that the debtors cannot climb.

However, the farmers of Frenchman's Bend haven't given up hope, and the horse, I argue, might offer them a modicum of independence. I begin by emphasizing the contrast between Faulkner's mules and horses. Richard Godden has written, "The horse trade could be read as one site where men of small means gain an element of independence. Ownership of stock, whether horse or mule, means that a cropper's share of the crop will be larger" (William Faulkner 39). The farmers who purchase Flem's horses explicitly state that they'll use them to accomplish farm work; in the words of one porch sitter, they'll make "a good team" (991). Evidently, if Armstid were successful in his purchase of the Texas horse, then it, not Varner's mule or his own wife and daughter, might pull his plow. And as a result, he would owe Varner less of the profits.

But the horse, and particularly the Texas horses with which this paper deals, produce another use-value than crop production: mobility. (1) I argue that the men buy the horses less for their perceived utility as farm implements than for their signification as vehicles of freedom. With a Texas horse, not only would a farmer not need to give to Varner an additional share of the crop in exchange for the plow power of an animal, he would, more importantly, be able to contact another merchant from whom he could buy necessities and small luxuries, and sell the products of his farm. To polarize what is in reality a continuum, the mule is a means of production, allowing farmers more control over their labor on the farm, but the horse connotes the possibility of leaving the farm altogether.

Faulkner's distinction between horse and mule is most discernible in As I Lay Dying in the figure of Jewel's horse, "a descendant of those Texas ponies Flem Snopes brought here twenty-five years" before. Jewel, we will remember, is Addie's illegitimate son and has earned this horse by laboring secretly for months on a neighbor's farm in the middle of the night. When Jewel first brings the horse home, Darl notes that he looks like he is "riding on a big pinwheel, barebacked, with a rope bridle" (87). With little capital of his own, "barebacked" Jewel has, improbably, secured a literal descendant of Flem's gaudily attractive animals. Anse would pull the purchase back into the family economy, arguing that Jewel has "[t]aken the work from [his own] flesh and blood and bought a horse with it," a horse he claims he'll have to feed (88). Though Anse eventually recuperates Jewel's labor when he trades Jewel's horse to Snopes for a second time, that recuperation is, for most of the family's infamous journey, unsuccessful. As the journey progresses, and the family makes its way through town and countryside on its laden wagon, Jewel rides separately. Indeed, for a time, so complete is the independence he has secured with the horse that when he disappears his half brother's fear he has left his family for good. By translating his and his family's labor power into a horse, Jewel purchases, albeit temporarily, a measure of independence.

In contrast, Anse's mules, like his sons, labor on his behalf. Early in the novel, as the sons cross the flooded stream that separates the local farmers from the wider world, the mules flounder, "roll[ing] up out of the water in succession, turning completely over, their legs stiffly extended as when they had lost contact with the earth" (98-99). This loss of earthly contact is important for a novelist whose many characters often eke out a living on family farms; how is Anse to survive if not by staying put on his land and, with the help of his sons and mules, pulling worth out of it? But when Jewel fords the same river, he remains seated on his horse, with which he has an almost centaurlike connection; he is able to "lift it bodily between his knees" (98). While the mules drown and Darl and Cash flounder, Jewel emerges intact and in control on the opposite bank.

Similarly, in The Hamlet, a horse's mobility enables Will Varner's control. In Varner's case, however, he controls not just his own labor power, but also that of his tenants through his monopoly on the information and credit economy of Frenchman's Bend--one he enjoys until Flem's rise to power. Like the historical merchant monopolists on whom he is based, Varner makes most of his profits from collecting crop shares on the credit he has extended. And given that only solvent farmers can repay such debts, Varner depends on reliable transportation to canvas the area and monitor his debtors. That transport comes in the form of a white horse, looking as fresh as if it has been "dry-cleaned." A look at history suggests that this odd simile may signal Varner's link to the city and thus to Northern capital. Ransom and Sutch note that the costs of Varner's type of information gathering, when compared with the relatively small amount of money to be earned from any individual farm, precluded Northern capitalists from extending credit directly to Southern farmers. This allowed the merchant-landowners to profit by serving as intermediaries between their tenants and the Northern banks that often financed the merchants' businesses (113ff). At any rate, whether or not Varner's "dry-cleaned" horse signals a relation to Northern capital, it would be conspicuous to the tenants and neighbors he visits, both symbol and substance of his ability to profit without physical labor.

His son Jody also rides a horse that signals his importance, at least until Flem usurps it and joins Varner on his reconnaissance rides, using "the roan which Jody had used to ride" while he and the elder Varner study "fields of cotton and corn or herds of cattle or land boundaries" (814). Though presumably Jody will still be financially well off, standing to inherit what Flem leaves of his father's holdings, he is shamed when he loses his horse to the upstart. The Hamlet's itinerant sewing machine salesman and sometime narrator, V. K. Ratliff, observing this loss, notes that Flem "has passed Jody" and muses "[a] man takes your wife and all you got to do to ease your feelings is to shoot him. But your horse" (808).

Ratliff, no stranger to developing his own business, owns not one horse but a "pair of shaggy ponies" They are "as wild and active-looking as mountain goats and almost as small" (740), and in this they most resemble not Jack Houston's stallion or Varner's white horse but the Texas horses Flem brings to Renchman's Bend, which are "small-bodied" and "larger than rabbits" (983). Despite Ratliff's impenetrability, his neighbors are likely aware that these diminutive animals have allowed economic mobility in more than one sense. He makes his largest profits across state lines in Tennessee, outside of Varner's territory, where he finds "himself not only on foreign soil but shut away from his native state by a golden barrier, a wall of neatly accumulating minted coins" (781). By hitching his healthy though unspectacular pair of goatlike ponies to a traveling home, Ratliff is able to access a large and scattered group of customers. (2)

The leaders of Frenchman's Bend--Will Varner, Jody, Flem, and Ratliff--may be the area's most conspicuous horsemen, but they are not the only ones. Just as Jewel uses the horse to separate from his family farm and make independent contracts in the wider world, so too does Houston leave town to make a deal, or at least he claims to. Historically, the assertion of such independence against a merchant-creditor was a gamble more dangerous than Jewel's familial rebellion. Ransom and Sutch explain: "the acceptance of credit from an outsider might pose serious risks. If he [the farmer] alienated the local merchant by obtaining funds elsewhere, he could find himself cut off from even cash purchases in retaliation" (128). We will recall that shoeing one's stock with anyone other than Varner is considered "to put it mildly, bad luck." Yet Houston, who has both wealth in the form of an independently owned patrimony and the gumption to light out for the territories of California, threatens to do just that. Unhappy with the blacksmithing that is by this point in the book controlled not by Varner and son but by Varner and Snopes, he shouts: "And you can tell Will Varner--if he cares a damn, which evidently he don't ... that I have gone to Whiteleaf to have my horse shod" (799). On horseback, Houston threatens to visit a competitor in a neighboring town "eight miles away" (1032). Though short by the standards of mechanized transportation, this eight-mile distance from Frenchman's Bend to Whiteleaf falls within the range that Ransom and Sutch stipulate was necessary for late 1800s merchant-creditors to achieve local monopolies in rural areas (136-37). Of course, the idea of the horse as a means to actual freedom could be overstated; in this scene, Houston shops not for something as crucial as credit--indeed, he goes to Varner to mortgage his patrimony--but rather for the one-time service of shoeing his horse. Nonetheless, Houston's outburst suggests that the local merchant's monopoly can be broken if one has the proper form of transportation.

In 1955, Faulkner imagined a way in which owning and riding a horse might enable people to harness these animals' awesome energy. Commissioned by Sports Illustrated to cover the Kentucky Derby, he wrote that the horse "supplies to man" a quality "deep and profound in his emotional nature and need." Men, he continued, "like to watch something in motion, either big or going fast, no matter what it is.... [S]omething alive and bigger and stronger than man, under the control of puny man's will"(24). In seeking to explain why the farmers of Frenchman's Bend purchase horses that all too obviously signal trouble and violence, we might add to the hints already in the novel this evidence from Faulkner's article. Perhaps The Hamlet's "gaudy phantoms" irresistibly offer to make the farmers "alive and bigger and stronger" than the storeowners who control their farms (994). Penned in Will Varner's store and working land they've mortgaged from him or rented from him, the farmers submit themselves to a power of credit that makes their labor worth less, which strips from each hour they've labored a profitable fraction. Mounted on those horses, however, the farmers might amplify their strength, impose their will on a larger motion. Put another way, the men would demonstrate power both through mastery of the horse and through being like the horse that is difficult to master.

Lest we think that the Sports Illustrated paean to the horse is disingenuous and the narrative voice only that required of a sports enthusiast, Faulkner's personal letters reveal similar sympathies. To friend Joan Williams he writes in 1952, "[Y]ou sounded so down and depressed, that the only answer I could think of was to borrow a white horse and ride into your dynamite salon and snatch you up and gallop off forever--provided of course that you would go, and I could find the white horse" (qtd. in Blotner 1411). (3)

Houston's stallion ratifies the letter's suggestion that a horse might allow one to escape a punishing monogamy. The stallion, which kicks and kills his wife, explicitly represents sexual freedom. Faulkner writes of it, "if that blood and bone and muscles represented that polygamous and bitless masculinity which he [Houston] had relinquished, he never said that" (931). (4) That prefatory "if" is scant defense against the text's insistence that the purchased horse symbolizes Houston's refusal to give up his desires, both for other women and for travel beyond the farm. He would be yet a "beast, prime solitary and sufficient." But his future-wife's wooing has drawn him back to the farm where he was born: "bitted now, even if it did not show so much yet" (931).

Houston's neighbors aren't oblivious to the horse's appeal: "the countryside would call, the men to [Houston's] lot to look at the stallion, the women to the house, the new bright rooms, the new furniture and equipment and devices for saving steps and labor whose pictures they would dream over in the mail-order catalogues" (931). The horse is for the hamlet's men what the sewing machine or butter churn is for its women: a desired status object. (5) It follows that Houston's neighbors, confronting Flem's ponies, recognize them as a chance to gain "polygamous and bitless masculinity" through purchase.

The rest of this article demonstrates how the farmers' fantasies of independence are transformed into Flem's profit and their own abasement. For into Will Varner's country has entered that peculiarly modern ailment: Snopesism. It is a disease that I will argue shares much in common with what Marxist critics call "flexible accumulation." (6) Cleanth Brooks memorably documented Snopesism as a "parasitic vitality as of some low-grade, thoroughly stubborn organism" which possesses an "almost selfless ability to keep up pressure as if it were a kind of elemental force" (222). As parasite, Flem grows not on the farms along with the cotton, but in Varner's store, where usury helps him to climb from the stations of clerk and ledger keeper to full membership in the capitalist class as forge owner, land speculator, and, by the second book in the Snopes Trilogy, banker. But usury alone cannot accomplish Flem's rise, nor does his connection to landed capital (Varner) or to the workers he installs in the hamlet (his cousins: the schoolteacher, blacksmith, and storeclerk) fully explain the "elemental force" Flem brings to bear. A marketer who knows his target audience well, Flem makes manipulation of ideology his most profitable business. By financing, as silent partner, the sale of what Ratliff calls "that Texas disease," Flem profits from the tenants' dreams of freedom as only a former laborer could then makes an escape that would be economic suicide to a local monopolist like Varner (1019).

Status, power, profit, freedom of movement, sexual license: all of these dreams, I've argued, are already percolating in the farmers' heads when Flem and the drummer arrive on the scene with their Texas horses. To understand how the sale works, it is useful to heed Haug's description of the role of money in exchange: "From the point of view of needing the use value, the object of the exercise has been achieved if the purchased article is usable and satisfactory; from the exchange-value side this is achieved when the exchange-value is converted into monetary form" (15). In other words, the seller is happy as long as he makes a profit (dollars replacing use-values as the aim) no matter what happens to the buyer afterwards. What better demonstrates how buyers suffer in such a system than a story in which commodities physically assault their purchasers while still enriching their vendor?

And because "[f]rom the seller's (i.e., the exchange-value) position, until the sale is effected, the commodity's promise of use-value is all that counts" (Haug 16; emphasis mine), the seller wants to accomplish an "exaggeration of the apparent use-value of the commodity" (17). Like the used-car salesman of urban legend who polishes the paint but places sawdust in the engine, the horse salesman benefits most if he can inflate the apparent use-value, the promise, of his goods even as he invests little into improving their actual use-value. So long as he can sell dear what he bought cheap, he will profit.

Such deceptive exchange is exactly what Ratliff narrates earlier in the novel when Flem's father Ab is gulled by the drummer Pat Stamper not just into buying two of Stamper's primped but useless horses, but, worse, into buying his own horse, disguised by Stamper, back from Stamper at a markup. There, to inflate the apparent use-value of the horse, Stamper literally inflates Ab's horse with a bicycle pump before painting it black.

There is, however, a crucial difference between Flem's horses and Stamper's horses: the former are not painted ponies. Rather, the purchasers "paint" the ponies with their own desires, their ideologically governed perceptions, rather than material pigment. The farmers see in these horses what they want to see: a resemblance to the horses owned by Ratliff, Will Varner, and Houston. For the horses are, unlike Stamper's horse, too violent to be adulterated. Instead of salesmen doctoring their commodities, which is what Haug would lead us to expect in a capitalist exchange, the commodities have marked their handler: the Texas salesman has "a savage and recent gash" on his ear that he admits is horse inflicted (984). The would-be buyers see it and comment upon it, aware of the dangers posed by the goods they will buy. Comedy arises out of the contrast between the glowing praise of the Texan's sales pitch and the violence of the ponies' interruptions:

"Look him over quick. Them shoulders and-" He had relaxed for an instant apparently. The animal exploded again; again for an instant the Texan was free of the earth, though he was still talking: "--and legs you whoa I'll tear your face right look him over quick boys worth fifteen dollars of let me get a holt of who'll make me a bid whoa you blare-eyed jack rabbit, whoa!" (999-1000)

Such explosive violence indicates low use-value. Were the bidding not started by Armstid, who arrives too late to witness this display, the sale may never have taken place, despite the horses' appeal.

Whereas local farmers are clearly at a disadvantage in their dealings with Will Varner, the horse sale places a traveling drummer like the Texan and the local farmers on an equal footing; the men are almost the free agents imagined in contract law, and in that situation language is a powerful tool for constituting just what it is the purchaser purchases and at what price. Take the moment when the Texan asserts, "See? All you got to do is handle them a little," just as a horse slashes his vest in half. Quips the would-be purchaser Quick, "But suppose a man dont happen to own a vest" (985). It is no wonder that the taciturn Flem has hired a fast-talking salesman to do the bargaining for him; his own scant and careful speech would devalue his goods.

The farmers' bargaining is what Michel de Certeau calls in The Practice of Everyday Life a "tactic" of resistance. Such practical cunning allows agency within a field of play dominated by the master "strategy" of the powerful, here the landed merchant's debt peonage. Tactics like horse trading don't offer a way out of such a strategy, but they do offer agency within it.

Flem is equally savvy. The son of a dirt farmer, horse trader, and barn-burning radical, Flem would understand how irresistible the horses' promise of virility and freedom is to the abjected, dirt-poor "peasants" of the hamlet. Using his local knowledge, he has chosen the ideal "showroom floor," a fenced area directly before the gallery of Varner's store. And who is to say he has not timed the horses' sunset arrival to make their figures harder to discern, and thus more mysterious, more filled with possibility? The horses, on first sight:

   a considerable string of obviously alive objects which in the
   levelling sun resembled vari-sized and -colored tatters torn at
   random from large billboards--circus posters, say--attached to the
   rear of the wagon and inherent with its own separate and collective
   motion, like the tail of a kite. (983)

What is that "separate and collective motion" the "obviously alive" horses advertise if not a release from the deadening and monotonous labor of farm life? But the description hints that this "circus" offers more than the simple comedy of errors that Ratliff will later narrate. For the horses upon their arrival are "shackled to one another and to the wagon itself with sections of barbed wire" (983). The shackles might suggest to contemporary readers the specter of slaves, or, more contemporary to the novel's setting, a chain gang of African American convicts. Yet to the poor, white, debt-bound farmers of Frenchman's Bend, the barbed wire of those shackles would also suggest the fences that enclose what once was their public land. (7) The clause that describes Varner bleeding mules, noted in this essay's introduction, finishes with, "Judge Benbow of Jefferson once said of him that a milder mannered man never bled a mule or stuffed a ballot box" (733). J. Crawford King's "The Closing of the Southern Range" provides the history necessary to infer that it is the fenced-stock laws that would provoke Varner to stuff ballots. Older laws would allow small freeholders and tenants to fatten their animals off of public land and thereby avoid buying staples on credit at stores like Varner's; newer laws would "close the range" and effectively prevent landless laborers from supporting their own livestock.

I argue that buying the horse means not just that the farmers purchase a status object, but that they're identifying with the animals whose beauty (and terror) inheres in their energetic resistance to control. Houston's tale suggests that wives bit their husbands, and Varner's actions demonstrate that landowners control their tenants by fencing out their stock. The horses respond to both bit and fence with violence. Houston's stallion shows that "polygamous" masculinity is fatal to the life of a family farmer, and Flem's horses threaten to destroy the credit monopoly enjoyed by Varner and his son Jody. When Jody greets the horses as harmless, as he'd greeted Ab at the novel's outset, they kick at his face. He should know better. They have already damaged their handler's ear and slashed his vest, and it is only with the men's help and some luck that the Texan is able to dodge their whirling, galloping bodies and maneuver them into the fenced enclosure at the center of the hamlet. Once there, they test the fence's ability to hold them and in so doing demonstrate a wildness unsuited to the sort of plow work the men imagine they'll accomplish. The horses

   burst one by one like partridges flushing, each wearing a necklace
   of barbed wire. The first one crossed the lot at top speed, on a
   straight line. It galloped into the fence without any diminution
   whatever. The wire gave, recovered, and slammed the horse to earth
   where it lay a moment, glaring, its legs still galloping in air. It
   scrambled up without having ceased to gallop and crossed the lot
   and galloped into the opposite fence and was slammed again to
   earth. (986-87)

What better figure for farmers who are brought down again and again by a law that fences in their stock and heaps on their debt? "The wire gave, recovered."

Faulkner is also attuned to the way that the horses' pageant of revolution can become an odd kind of pornographic show, not unlike Hollywood's projection of fantasies on the silver screen. (8) When the horses first come to Frenchman's Bend, their bodies, like "large billboards--circus posters say" promise entertainment. I argue that this circus ends up echoing the book's most infamous spectacle--the Ike/cow production--though with telling variations.

In the earlier scene, the men of the town pry the loose plank of a stable wall to witness what Ratliff calls an "engagement" and "performance," about which he asks if they've bought a "general club ticket." That show ends when Ratliff lifts the plank and fits it back in "the orifice" (913). Godden reads the earlier scene of Ike's bestiality as an almost sacramental enactment of the farmers' autochthony; Ike weds himself to the land through the cow, and the men in watching him do so enact in fantasy that same wedding that governs their working lives. (9) Following up on Godden's argument, I note that Flem's horses also substitute as spectacle for that first dream, performing the destruction of the barn that would hold them.

The later show of the Texas horses is suitable for younger viewers: the blacksmith's boy, Wallstreet Panic Snopes, sneaks a view of the "gaudy" horses through a knothole in the fence. He is then almost trampled by their "towering parti-colored wave full of feet and glaring eyes and wild teeth which, overtopping, burst into scattering units, revealing at last the gaping orifice and the little boy still standing in it, unscathed, his eye still leaned to the vanished knot-hole" (995). Why again a "gaping orifice"? Both scenes are pornographic, with the men's gaze on the bodies of animals that transform an underlying impulse--union, destruction--into overt act. By establishing this parallel (Ike/ cow show=horse-violence show) Faulkner thematizes the shift in consciousness and (male) desire that accompanied the South's transformation from a cash-crop-production economy to a commodity-consumption economy. The former anchors farmers on the land they till; the latter, especially when those commodities are transportation vehicles like cars and horses, orients people toward distant markets as both laborers and consumers. We might read the "separate and collective motion" that the horses displayed during their arrival in the hamlet as the spectacle of a strike, and the horses' violence as indicative of the ferocity of the farmers' collective will; but after the sale, the portion of that force that does not spend itself in violence breaks up into the "scattering bits" seen in the knothole scene above, then, as we'll see, fades away. This is an extreme depiction of the action of most consumer commodities postpurchase.

Yet there is potential in the horses for something more. For the release of these horses also echoes the imagery of the novel's opening conflict: the barn-burning through which Ab resists his various landowners' control. When the men do eventually purchase and attempt to claim their horses, "the knot-hole" through which Wallstreet Panic watches vanishes "into matchwood" (994). "Matchwood?" The "flint"-eyed Texan (984, 997), with a "splintered kitchen match" in his mouth (996), describes the horses as "hay-burning sidewinders" (984). It's not so much that the horses themselves are revolutionary in their destruction as that the Texan's hawking them in the heart of the town makes them so: "He rolled the match from one side of his mouth to the other without touching it. 'You boys done made your picks, have you? Ready to start her off, hah?'" (996). When Armstid takes him up on this, he starts off not just the bidding but the flames promised by that match. As far as the Varner-dominated local economy is concerned, the horses possess some of that devilish power that the narrator imagines in another of The Hamlet's fantasy sequences, the one in which Flem outfoxes the devil: "hell fire." And "Hell fire" is exactly what the men yell, not just when the horses arrive along with Flem (983), but when they bust loose from the barn and into the fenced enclosure where they stand when the men start their bidding. The barn is burned before the bidding begins, and that first escape foretells the later escape during the sale, for in it "the entire interior explode[s] into mad tossing shapes like a downrush of flames" (994).

In the moonlight scene following the burning and preceding the sale, the setting shifts to a mood of troubled peace. Settling in on the porch to watch the horses, the hamlet's farmers spin out fantasies how they'll use them to render their (or Varner's) land more productive: "Anse McCallum brought two of them horses back from Texas once.... It was a good team," one says (989).

Echoing "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Faulkner depicts both the beauty and the futility of such desires. For in "the dreaming lambence of the moonlight," the farmers sit beside a pear tree whose "frosty bloom" suggests both the land's apparent fecundity and the lie in that appearance. The tree's twigs and branches stand "motionless and perpendicular above the horizontal boughs like the separate and upstreaming hair of a drowned woman sleeping upon the uttermost floor of the windless and tideless sea" (989). The moonlit ambience of this scene suggests not so much Diana's chastity as the miscarriage and abortion borne by The Waste Lands female characters; or perhaps, "motionless," "windless," "tideless," and "drowned," the better comparison is Prufrock, who ends his poem "drown[ed]" (131) by mermaids in the "chambers of the sea" (129) whose hair resembles the frosty blooms of Faulkner's pear tree: "the white hair of the waves blown back" (127). Polk has shown how Faulkner glossed "Prufrock" to summon a vision of a fallen city in parts of his early story collection, These 13; in The Hamlet it's the countryside that has fallen into sterility.

When Ratliff arrives on that moonlit porch, he laughs at the men, calls them children, and attempts to shatter their hopes with a joke: "if Flem Snopes offered me either one of them [horses], I would be afraid to touch it for fear it would turn out to be a painted dog or a piece of garden hose when I went up to take possession of it" (990-91). Ratliff has hit upon that disjunction between promise and use that Haug theorizes. The men pay him no mind. Though they hear the horses in the lot making from time to time "an abrupt squeal, a thudding blow," one man simply repeats the news that bolsters his hope: "Anse McCallum made a good team outen them two of hisn" (991). Meanwhile, in that frozen tree sits a mockingbird whose song is an "idiot reiteration;" it is hard not to read the men's repetition of their hopes in the same way. In this reading, the disastrous consequences of the sale indict the farmers' foolishness, just as Ratliff predicted they would.

But Faulkner presents the men's dreaming more sympathetically: Ratliff scoffs, but Faulkner depicts the farmers' stubborn hope with poetic imagery, just as he had depicted Ike's idiot fantasies in lush prose earlier in the novel. The bird that sings the hopeful, idiotic song is "a shadow, fleet and dark and swift" (989). Like these horses that flow "in a patchwork wave across the lot ... facing the men along the fence," this bird is a feeling beast (992). Animality is no mean station given that elsewhere in this novel Houston is part stallion, that Mink Snopes links his sense of justice to "his rights as a man and his feelings as a sentient creature," and that in the aftermath of the sale Ratliff will defend Mrs. Armstid by saying, "I was protecting something that wasn't even a people, that wasn't nothing but something that dont want nothing but to walk and feel the sun" (935, 1031). In this moonlight scene, the men explicitly empathize with a bird that feels the joy of spring's new life rather than summer's stasis. One man notes that "Gum is the first tree to put out" and suggests "It made it [the bird] feel like singing, fixing to put out that way" (989, 990). The men's hopeful statements make an "idiot reiteration," but they do so beautifully. Faulkner writes of that iteration as a song that "pulsed and purled." In the "drowned silver" of moonlight, the "brilliant treachery" of the moon, the bird tells a tale whose speaking, whose hope (though unfounded and soon to be extinguished), is definitely present (1011).10 In this scene, as in the "Eula" chapter's extravagant evocation of the land, Faulkner evokes the joy of myth even as he savages its practical effects.

In the night following the sale, Varner, for all his shrewdness, doesn't seem to have entirely gotten the point of the horse sale; he too stares at that same stilled and sterile landscape the farmers found earlier and pronounces it fertile. The pear tree, in which the mocking bird still sings, still rises "in mazed and silver immobility like exploding snow" yet Varner comments, "Look at that tree.... It ought to make this year, sho" (1017; emphasis mine) and "A moon like this is good for every growing thing outen earth" (1018). (11) We have either the irony of a man ignorant of his surroundings or a portrait of a skillful manipulator of popular myth.

Though one farmer agrees with Uncle Will that fertility abounds, the description of Varner's own daughter proves otherwise. For no longer does she wander Frenchman's Bend in a "teeming vacuum" of sexual spectacle; rather, now that Varner has brokered her to the air-chewing, impotent Flem Snopes, she is immured at home as "Flem Snopes' wife" (1016). The "strong faint lift" of her breasts is shrouded in the "marblelike fall of the garment" (1017). Sarah Clere, in "Faulkner's Appropriation of 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' in The Hamlet," argues that the Eula and Flem union makes such a mockery of marriage that Faulkner provides the Labove and Eula subplot to distract readers from the force of that critique. If we follow Clere's insightful exploration, then that "marblelike" impermeability of Eula indicates not just her seclusion as a married woman but the tombstonelike infertility of her marriage.

The violent horses have enlivened this landscape. When the men leave for Eula's, "Henry scream[s] in the house behind them.... 'Ah. Ah. Ah' on a rising note." These screams, consequent to the horses' violence, are labor pains bringing forth new life. In the same paragraph, Faulkner describes, "the tremulous April night murmurous with the moving of sap and the wet bursting of burgeoning leaf and bud," a contrast from the blooms as "frozen" and the tree as a "drowned woman" (1016).

Indeed, Armstid's "Ah. Ah. Ah" is itself the cry of new life, for the bursting buds sentence ends with "thin and urgent cries and the brief and fading bursts of galloping hooves" (1016). Here as elsewhere in the chapter the horses are described as faded or "fading," adjectives that I've suggested indicate their phantom nature postsale; but as they disappear, Armstid, in pain, expresses the "urgent cries" that are their legacy. Will Varner argues that the horse chasing is a harmless kind of "exercise" for the farmers, perhaps a substitute for the tomcatting he says the men are now too old to enjoy (1018). I would suggest that Faulkner confirms that horse chasing does bring forth new life. In other words, though the practical effect of the horse sale is destruction--of Armstid, of another farmer Tull, of the barn door and the fence gate--that destruction is figured as necessary to reinvigorate the land. The horses' "maelstrom" of violence, now loosed beyond the pen that enclosed and intensified it, doesn't deliver the barn burning it had promised, nor the independence that the horse's lone surviving ancestor provides for a time to Jewel. Nor does it provide any use-value, be it transportation or plow power. Yet the horses' potential energy isn't wasted. For, at least momentarily, Armstid and the land are figured as one, both ruptured and born new.

Relief from destruction proves brief and phantasmic. The story's final daylight scenes settle on images that catalogue the costs of the horses' violence. One such image captures the commodity's peculiar transformation during the sale, that move from desired object to possessed use-value that Marx likens to a transubstantiation. Ratliff's prediction proves incorrect: the sale doesn't transform a useful commodity (a garden hose) into a dangerous one (a snake). Rather, it empties out the difference between high exchange-value and low use-value through violence. And that violence doesn't always reinvigorate.

Take Eck Snopes's horse. Marx argues that cashing in a commodity is difficult, calling the sale's shift of commodity into money (in his terms, C into M) the "salto mortale, the death-defying leap, which carries the risk that it might break its neck" (Haug 23). In fact, the only horse caught by "The Peasants" (the title Faulkner gave this section) is one the Texan gave away to spur buyer interest, and it literally breaks its neck by clotheslining itself on the wire laid out by its pursuers, Eck and his son Wallstreet. The tale thus echoes Marx's claim that commodities, laden with desire for use, aren't material. Marx has written, "not an atom of matter enters into the commodity," and the inability of the men to touch the horses until after their sale suggests that inasmuch as the horses are pure commodity, and thus pure promise, they are immaterial. Faulkner insistently describes them as such: "gaudy phantoms" (994) "bodiless, without dimension," gathering in "mirage-like clumps" (988) to become "a splotchy phantom moiling" (993). This is not to say that the objects that are brought forth to be sold aren't real, but that the embodiment of their reality is delayed until after money has been exchanged and the horses have made that "death-defying leap," that transubstantiation, from desired commodity into realized use-value. And these Texas horses are, emphatically, not just useless, but also destructive.

Even as the men tell the story of the death of Eck's gift horse, a new figure arrives at the store: an obese child who with "flipper"-like fingers, feeds voraciously at Varner's candy counter. Both the horses the men buy and the candy that the child steals from Jody's store are described as "gaudy," that is, as showy but substanceless. Faulkner is emphatic on this point: the adjective "gaudy" describes the horses no less than eight times in "The Peasants" and is also repeated in As I Lay Dying. The overweight boy is a comic figure, even a grotesque one, his depiction critiquing the horse-purchasers' indulgence in what Haug would call their moods and whims.

The Armstids' fate, on the other hand, is pathetic, even tragic. Incapacitated with a broken leg, Armstid knows his young daughter is forced to help his mule in its traces. His wife, who argued impotently against the purchase, takes on her share of the heavy farm work as well. At the end of the story Armstid is among many farmers who are even poorer than they were when the horse sale began. Women and children, rightless laborers, suffer for the men's foolish choices. We witness Mrs. Armstid, who is whipped by her husband as they endeavor to capture "his" horse, struggle at court to retrieve the money Armstid has paid for it, a "wad of frayed banknotes and silver" she has saved up for her children by "weaving by firelight after dark" (1003). She fails. And, in an irony that is crushing given what the horses symbolized to the men, because of this poverty Armstid is less free to select another vendor and more dependent on Flem's or Varner's loans than ever. Rather than setting fire to existing social relations, the horses' passage knocks the men back in the ditch of debt peonage.

Flem's turn against his fellow farmers makes clear that the farmers' common oppression need not engender their solidarity; but The Hamlet also belies the notion that the upper class conspires and colludes against the lower. Indeed, Flem's self-serving sale rends a tear in ruling-class ideology that As I Lay Dying demonstrates is not easily sewn shut: the horses, like the circus posters that the townsmen first think them to be when they appear on the horizon, open to the farmers a view of that same elsewhere that Flem occupies, one of geographic mobility and consequent economic and social freedom.

These particular commodities, the Texas horses, both originate beyond the region's borders and offer the promise of carrying their purchasers across those borders. Thus, Flem's sale, though it takes place in rural Mississippi in the 1880s, anticipates the delocalized future of Faulkner's 1930s. Because it does so it can also guide us in considering the social effects of outside capital's circulation in a local economy. Like those purveyors of the recent credit crisis, Flem is willing to inflict permanent abuse for quick profit, knowing he can be elsewhere when the chips fall. Thus, we might say he is a flexible capitalist, and that it is this flexibility that separates him from Will Varner, whose more slow and steady "bleeding" through the extension and collection of credit at the country store ties him socially and economically to the men whose labor he exploits and to the land in which he lives. Historian Ferdinand Tonnies's characterized the rural to urban shift as a move from Gemeinshaft (community) to Gesellschaft (society), in which both economic and social ties in the former are carried out through face to face interactions that encourage both parties to consider others as beings rather than as instruments. My argument is that Will Varner's method of capital accumulation, though exploitative, occurs in Geimenschaft, in which parties trade face to face. Flem Snopes's better fits Gesellschaft, though his gift of five cents worth of candy to Mrs. Armstid in recompense for her immense suffering demonstrates this fit isn't absolute. When, after Flem's horses have ravaged the men and the town, Varner rides out in the night to minister to their wounds, his considerable local power is shown to be dependent upon his fulfillment of considerable local responsibility. He and the tenants are as mutually dependent as they are unequal. Flem, however, is responsible to no one but himself, a point driven home in the story's next chapter when he abandons his cousin to prison, or in the last section when he again profits off of his countrymen's fantasy, this time by encouraging a rumor about hidden treasure on his property, then selling it.

The closing of the novel makes clear that Flem's horse sale has rendered him a snake in this Eden. His coup de grace against Varner's monopoly has destroyed, at least temporarily, a few of the farmers' laboring bodies and thus their means of subsistence. Worse, with Ratliff making store-front speeches about the sale's injustice, and Mrs. Armstid filing a lawsuit against Flem, the social order of the hamlet threatens to dissolve into violence. As harsh as Varner's exploitation is, he has dealt with his clients face to face and enforced their exchanges under the mutually binding authority of contract. Even under the buyer beware stipulations of nineteenth-century contract, and even with his monopoly over the farmer's credit, Varner has not dared to sell the farmers commodities that, once sold, are so obviously worthless that they actually eat away at their own worth. (12) Again, because Varner profits only if the farmers continue to plant and harvest on their mortgaged properties, it would be unwise for him to do so.

But if Flem is aware that the Texas horses will damage their buyers, that awareness doesn't seem to enter his calculation of the costs and benefits of the sale. Again, I would argue that he differs from Varner in that he intends to move his capital elsewhere. Certainly, like today's flexible capitalists, Flem escapes legal consequences through the thoroughly modern trick of hiring a middleman, the Texan, to retail his product. Thus, at the trial that follows the sale and its disastrous consequences, Flem can do one better than "taking the fifth" He can be absent entirely. And this tactic works: having signed no contracts and said nothing to anyone still in town about his relationship to the horses, he cannot be held guilty for the damage they've inflicted. Ironically, it is likely the capital the farmers forfeited in the sale that makes possible for Flem the very mobility his horses promised. Flush with their cash, Flem will, after another trick or two, move out of the Bend and into town. One imagines he seeks there customers whom Varner has not yet tapped and to whom he has not yet sold anything worthless.

Philip Weinstein has helped me to see that, in typical Faulknerian fashion, the realization of the gap between their hope and their prospects is one that the men of Frenchman's Bend come to only belatedly. Only when they have already given up hard cash for phantom dreams do they become conscious of what they'd intuited all along: freedom cannot be bought. Faulkner provides a figure for this belatedness, one almost as memorable as a young Benjy looking up at Caddie's muddy drawers: Wallstreet Panic Snopes. In the wake of the stock market crash that initiated the Great Depression, his is an apt name for a speculator planning for future values that never materialize. Still leaning, looking through the vanished knothole, unaware of what's just happened, Wallstreet is just as oblivious of the horse's escape as are the men of the horses' denial of use-value. They know the freedom they're seeking is an uncontrollable chaos, but they keep grasping at it nonetheless. (13)

University of California, Irvine

WORKS CITED

Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. 2nd vol. New York: Random, 1974.

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1990.

Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Clere, Sarah. "Faulkner's Appropriation of 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' in The Hamlet" Mississippi Quarterly 62.3-4 (2009): 443-56.

Eastman, Arthur M., ed. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. New York: Norton, 1970.

Eliot, T. S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". 1917. Eastman 996-99.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. 1930. William Faulkner: Novels 1930-1935. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1985. 1-178.

--. The Hamlet. 1940. William Faulkner: Novels 1936-1940. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1990. 727-1075.

--. "Kentucky: May: Saturday. Three Days to the Afternoon." SI Vault. Sports Illustrated, 16 May 1955: 22-26. Web. 27 Nov. 2012.

--. The Town. 1957. William Faulkner: Novels 1957-1962. New York: Lib. of Amer., 1999. 1-326.

Fujie, Kristin. "'The Book of Which Those Others Were but Foals': The Personal, the Aesthetic, and the Mammalian in Flags in the Dust" Imagining the Animal in Faulkner. MLA Annual Convention. Los Angeles. 2011. Lecture.

Fury, Frank P. "Snaffles and Derbies: Horseracing and Southern Folk Culture in William Faulkner's The Reivers." Mississippi Quarterly 59:3/4 (2006): 435-54. Web. 10 Dec. 2010.

Godden, Richard. "Earthing the Hamlet, an Anti-Ratliffian Reading." The Faulkner Journal 14.2 (1999): 75-116. Literature Online. 3 Jan. 2011.

--. William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words. New York: Princeton UP, 2007.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.

Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society. Trans. Robert Bock. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

King Jr., J Crawford. "The Closing of the Southern Range: An Exploratory Study." Journal of Southern History, Vol. 48, No.1 (1982): 53-70. JSTOR. 20 Oct. 2010.

Marx, Karl. Capital. Abr. ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.

Ownby, Ted. American Dreams in Mississippi Consumers, Poverty & Culture, 1830-1998. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1999.

Polk, Noel. "William Faulkner's 'Carcassonne." Studies in American Fiction 12.1 (1984): 29-43.

Ransom, Roger L., and Richard Sutch. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.

Smith, Albert. "'Southern Violence Reconsidered': Arson as Protest in Black Belt Georgia," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Nov. 1985): 527-564. JSTOR. 15 Oct. 2010.

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Yeats, W. B. "Sailing to Byzantium." 1927. Eastman 915-16.

(1) Of use-value Marx writes, "A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use-value, something useful" (13). Yet "A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labor in the abstract has been embodied or materialized in it" (16; emphasis mine). Admittedly, the horses are natural-born rather than man-made, and are thus a curious sort of commodity. Furthermore, Flem's work in harnessing them and transporting them to Frenchman's Bend might not appear as "value-added" in a Marxist economics which deemphasizes the labor involved in distribution, focusing instead on production. Nonetheless, The Hamlets ponies are commoditized when they are displayed and sold, at which time their promise to satisfy the farmers' desires for mobility and plow power suits them to another of Marx's definitions: "A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants" (13; emphasis mine).

(2) In contrast to Flem, Ratliff's rise to the middle class is accomplished through the sale of useful commodities. The sewing machine is a means of production, helping the woman who purchases it both to save herself toil and to avoid the debts that purchase of finished goods would entail. And Ratliff does not always accumulate capital by selling the machines, because he often accepts other goods in barter (for their intended use-values, presumably) rather than cash. Like Varner, Ratliff is a local and socially-bound capitalist, relying not on Texas commodities and tradesmen but on local reputation to support his profits. He must be as good as the word he offers Mink, for instance, when he asks him, "Machine still running good?" and Mink replies, "Ain't you the one that claims not to sell no other kind?" to which Ratliff pleasantly replies, "Sholy" (814). A negative answer by Ratliff in front of the other men would make his future sales more difficult. In Ratliff's case, legal contracts reinforce social ones to limit the degree to which, and the terms by which, he can profit at his neighbors' expense.

(3) That Faulkner calls a specifically white horse to mind as a vehicle of deliverance suggests that the whiteness of Varner's horse represents a quasi-chivalric power, though the "organ tones" of Varner's horse's bowels suggest a less romantic potency.

(4) In The Town Faulkner describes Major de Spain's red car as "alien and debonair, as invincibly and irrevocably polygamous and bachelor as De Spain himself" (12). The repetition of "polygamous" implies the horse as an archaic form of the car. Though Faulkner in a personal letter referencing his father Murry's business failures refers to horses as economically obsolete (cf. Ownby's "The Snopes Trilogy and the Emergence of Consumer Culture" in Fury's footnote 2), the horse is, nevertheless, to use Ted Ownby's terms, a vehicle for the "pursuit of pleasure" and for "easy mobility" even though it does not connote the car's "involvement in cosmopolitan culture" (Ownby 137). Linda Snopes Kohl's exit at the end of The Mansion suggests the car is an escape device; I argue that had such an escape scene occurred in the earlier book, the escapee would have used a horse.

(5) For suggestive parallels between the Houston storyline and Faulkner's own domestic life, see Philip Weinstein's Becoming Faulkner, 203.

(6) See David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity, 1990.

(7) I am indebted to Richard Godden for alerting me to the significance of the barbed wire ("Earthing The Hamlet" 42).

(8) Matthews's and Weinstein's biographies both detail Faulkner's use of Hollywood screenwriting to meet his expenses; I suggest such "pornographic" scenes as the Ike/cow show and the penning and release of the wild horses at once reenact and critique such hack work.

(9) Godden writes, "An autochthon is one who springs from the soil which he/she inhabits." Of the bestiality scene, he writes, "Put crudely, my point is that Ike has sex not primarily with a cow, but with a hole in the ground; and so, by association, that one strand of the hamlet's obsession with Eula involves a desire for intimacy with the soil, focused through the Frenchman place" ("Earthing The Hamlet" 93, 94).

(10) Another intertext: Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" (1928), in which the speaker wishes that he might become a bird of "hammered gold and gold enamelling" "set upon a golden bough to sing" (28, 30).

(11) Faulkner's lyricism contains tensions: whereas the moon might suggest that the barrenness of the land relates to Eula's chastity (enforced postmarriage), "silver" hints that fertile reproduction has ossified into sterile capital or the hoard (as it does in Flem's final sale of the Frenchman's Bend property for coin). Marx writes, "Gold (or silver) is therefore money.... [I]t congeals into the sole form of value, the only adequate form of existence of exchange-value, in opposition to use-value" (84). Use in this scene would be reproduction, which "silver" sterilizes.

(12) Caveat emptor: "'Let the buyer beware.' This saying expresses the old common law rule that a buyer purchases at his peril" ("Caveat Emptor").

(13) My thanks to Richard Godden, Philip Weinstein, and the members of the Academic Writing Workshop led by Andrea Henderson for their review of earlier versions of this manuscript.