Word: flemming
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...impotent aristocrats talking about the code of chivalry but unable to bring it to life. Faulkner is especially adept at portraying the creatures of the decayed South: Gowan Stevens, a gentleman of the old school, who learned to drink in a Virginia college but not to overcome his cowardice; Flem Snopes, who would not hesitate to stamp on every living creature to satisfy his greed; and the famous Popeye, a ghastly symbol of machine-age amorality, with the "vicious depthless quality of stamped tin." Against this background, the violent elements in Faulkner's novels-rape, castration, lynching, bestiality...
Book One is a sort of muted epic on those tricks of sharp rural trading which become the legendary material of country store gossips. It tells how cold Flem Snopes, a tenant farmer's son, gains complete power over Will Varner, who virtually owns the town. Other Snopeses turn up on the horizon...
...story of a queen bee. Eula Varner is a semi-superhuman embodiment of unmitigated sex, already embarrassingly female at the age of eight. As she ripens, the male community establishes itself in quavering, fighting concentrics of courtship: first raw boys, then slick sports in shiny buggies. But it is Flem who finally gets her. He takes her to Texas...
...Book Four Flem returns from Texas with a string of insanely wild piebald ponies and sells them to his neighbors. They break loose in horrendous slapstick and pervade the countryside. Mink gets a life sentence; Cousin Flem doesn't lift a finger to help him. Two bourgeois and a desperate peasant invest all they have in a plot of land where Civil War treasure is known to be buried. They find Flem has hoodwinked them as he has everyone else. When last seen, Flem is on his way to larger operations in Jefferson...