Jethro Tull’s Protegee: Vernon Tull’s Helping Hand and the Equine Dialectic

Abstract

Faulkner Journal Cliff Staebler Jethro Tull’s Protegee: Vernon Tull’s Helping Hand and the Equine Dialectic V ernon Tull, the Bundrens’ helpful neighbor and a major narrator in As I Lay Dying, is an intertextual character in William Faulkners apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County, prominently reappearing in different versions of the spotted horses story.1 His surname and sound husbandry evoke Jethro Tull (1674-1741), the influential agronomist of the British Agricultural Revolution. Vernon successfully manages his mules and farm with a Protestant work ethic that distinguishes him from his poor hill farmer neighbors in Frenchman’s Bend. Curiously, he holds his own within Mississippi’s warped, ossified socioeconomic system, which is controlled by progressive racist rednecks and paternalistic Redeemers (Bourbon Democrats), whose hegemony is maintained by ideology but backed by medieval laws and paramilitary violence. This culture, arising from the embers of slavery, distorts the work ethos as it racially divides, exploits, and eventually eviscerates the agrarian community. As a sharecropper, the future banker Flem Snopes tells Will Varner, in The Hamlet, “Aint no benefit in farming. I figure on getting out of it soon as I can” (750).2 Faulkner’s simultaneous idealization and subversion ofVernon’s values are reflected in the equine dialectic—a historical tension within rural Mississippi symbolized by the predictable, sterile domesticated mules employed by the toiling farmers, and the unpredictable, primordially powerful spotted horses, which are supernatural entities that embody both the farmers’ escapist dreams of romantic action and the ambitions of the impoverished hypersexual supe­ rior male riders, such as Jewel Bundren and Buck Hipps.3 The farmers, with ‘Joanne Creighton, in William Faulkners Craft of Revision, describes how Faulkners spotted horses story evolves from its origin in the urtext Father Abraham, circa 1926-1927, through “at least seven differ­ ent versions (with six different titles)” before its inclusion in The Hamlet (12). Comparing The Hamlet with earlier short story and manuscript versions demonstrates both the utility and problematical nature of an intertextual analysis (Creighton 18). Confusingly, two typescripts of the spotted horses story carry the title “As I Lay Dying” (35). 2I would like to thank Professors Jeff Allred, Sarah Chinn, and Jennifer McMahon, in whose classes this essay was conceived. ’In an unpublished introduction to The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner speaks disdainfully ofthe linger­ ing escapist fantasy of Old Dixie: “a makebelieve region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds” (qtd. in Cohen and Fowler 279). The spotted horse auction in The Hamlet feeds upon the farmer’s dream ofbeing like Sir Walter Scott’s chevaliers mounted upon charging stallions. Mark Twain, in Life on the Mississippi, famously blames Ivanhoe for creating the Southern ideology that foments the Civil War: 23 24 CliffStaebler Jethro Tull’ s Protegee their primitive mule-drive plows, follow what Warwick Wadlington deems the “sacred economics”—a Calvinistic outlook leading Mississippi farmers to ac­ cept heaven as the compensation for earthly reversals (83-108). By contrast, Faulkners spotted horses epitomize the hill peoples ambivalence toward com­ munity and their desire for a lawless, unregulated lifestyle. While the farm­ ers with their flesh and blood mules are ruined by the Great Depression and evicted by mechanization, the spotted horses, which Faulkner derives from his challenging early vignette “Carcassonne,” are metaphorically electric, incorpo­ real, supernatural entities capable of morphing into new forms, such as fast cars, fighter planes, or even Flannery O’Connors Dixie Limited.4 Paradoxically, Vernon occupies an indeterminate liminal speace within the equine dialectic because he is both a successful farmer within Frenchman’s Bend and an hon­ orable entrepreneur with outside ties to the townsfolk of Jefferson. While he exhibits the traits ofthe successful superior male, he also accepts his responsi­ bilities to family and community and avoids the hubris and greed that ensnares many of Faulkner’s ambitious characters. In The Hamlet, Flem Snopes’s fraudulent spotted horse auction fundamen­ tally alters the aesthetics of dealmaking and destroys the traditional balance of the equine dialectic. Whereas horse trading once provided a caveat emptor diversion, the unsaleable spotted horses are a worthless commodity foisted on a gullible community sold on dreams, greed, and desperation. While the greedy rubes are humorously fleeced, the speculative mania indiscriminately...