War, Labor, and Gasoline in “Carcassonne”

Abstract

The story's poetic vision of a young man who sees a horse has often been associated with Faulkner's personal privacy, a mysterious and opaque realm that Faulkner criticism has long attempted to penetrate. In this chapter,Michael Zeitlin reads the story's representation of privacy and poetic subjectivity as an "ideological reflex and echo," in Marx's phrase, of material and economic realities dominated by the Standard Oil Company.A young vagrant, a veteran aviator of the Great War, lies in his garret and dreams of "a buckskin pony with eyes like blue electricity and a mane like tangled fire, galloping up the hill and right off into the high heaven of the world."The Pegasus pony, the knight-aviator, the dream of soaring free from earth toward apotheosis-these motifs from Faulkner circa 1918-1927 all promise a transcendence that never fully arrives, ultimately yielding to the exigencies of the mundane, the immanent, the economic:earthbound labor, earthbound energy, earthbound modernity.