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point of caricature every trait associated with the stereotype of greaser.
The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 had severely tightened immigration
policies, imposing measures that reflected McCarthy-driven paranoia and
racism.36 In 1954, Congress authorized a program to round up and re-
patriate illegal Mexican workers and to tighten border patrol. The proj-
ect was known as Operation Wetback. El Paso was a center for return.
But what makes the four Snopes Indians, as they are once called, espe-
cially threatening is that they re not workers at all. Besides being adept
at self-defense, they sneak into the Coca-Cola plant and drink the syrup;
they also kill and devour a $500 show dog owned by a Yankee paving con-
tractor s wife a Pekinese with a gold name-plate on its collar that prob-
ably didn t even know it was a dog, that rode in the Cadillac and sneered
through the window not just at other dogs but at people too (318). The
children become suspects in the dog s disappearance when one is noticed
18 john t. matthews
wearing the collar as a necklace. I d say this is Third World consumption
with a vengeance.
Faulkner s uncontained fantasy here suggests the connections between
Cold War defense of the American way of life and the threats sure to ma-
terialize from continued imperialist exploitation and inequality. At the end
of The Town, it is as if Faulkner fully realizes the global framework of
Snopesism, one that will require a more systematic consideration of Cold
War conflicts in its successor. The American host s slashed face symbol-
izes the awful fiction of national innocence, a dopey grin that will dissolve
into the wound it really is if ever he lets his face discompose. You d like to
think the aliens are safely pacified, but you re really working in the dark.
In these most political of his novels, whose time may finally have come,
Faulkner invites us to imagine a day when a stunted Third Worlder, long
out-of-sight-out-of-mind, will cross a border to say, Look at me. If we in-
dulge the conceit of a contemporary sequel to the late trilogy, I suppose
we d have to call it The McMansion. Here s the ending: Like Flem we
watch the stuff just accumulate around us. Our boots are up on the man-
tel. We re enjoying global plutocracy exactly as planned. At the moment
we re doing nothing, apparently thinking nothing the casualties of our
prosperity disregarded. Elsewhere, the Minks await release; the hybrid
bracero to whom it turns out we re related! wants in. Things seem to be
getting a little hotter. We know better, of course, but we prefer self-serving
denial; we ve even found a genius of incomprehension to lead us. When
Mink s grandson, Enron Snopes, shows up, he won t get back what he s
owed either. But imagine if the rest of us get what we deserve.
NOTES
I wish to thank the following individuals for instructive comments on the version of this pa-
per presented at the conference: James Carothers, George Handley, Anne Goodwyn Jones,
Noel Polk, Nina Silber, Jon Smith, and Theresa Towner. I also gratefully acknowledge the
help of Gillian Cohen and Christie Ko, undergraduate research assistants at Boston Uni-
versity.
1. The earliest surviving version of Faulkner s Snopes fiction is a manuscript dating from
late 1926 or early 1927, according to James B. Meriwether, editor of the text eventually pub-
lished posthumously as Father Abraham (New York: Random House, 1984). The fragment
contains narrative segments later reworked for The Hamlet (1940), primarily accounts of
Flem Snopes s early successes, Eula s allure, and the auction of the spotted horses.
2. See Charles Hannon on Ratliff and developments in professional ethnography as re-
flected in The Hamlet: Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture (Louisiana State University
Press, 2005), 104 30.
3. Four years earlier, in its portrait of a shiftless Jones who finally revolts against class
abuse, Absalom, Absalom! superimposed the rage of 1930s tenants upon the resentment of
Many Mansions: Faulkner s Cold War Conflicts 19
1860s peons. See my Faulkner and Proletarian Literature, in Faulkner in Cultural Context:
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1995, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 166 90; Richard Moreland on repetition versus revi-
sion in dynamics of class conflict in Barn Burning, in Faulkner and Modernism: Rereading
and Rewriting (University of Wisconsin Press 1990), 7 20, 130 39; and Richard Godden on
the racialization of class in the story, in Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South s
Long Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 123 29.
4. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in
the text.
5. To the Youth of Japan (Tokyo, 1955 [pamphlet published by the U.S. Information
Service]), reprinted in Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (New
York: Random House, 1965), 84.
6. On Fear: Deep South in Labor: Mississippi (Harper s, June 1956), reprinted in Es-
says, Speeches, and Public Letters, 106, 102.
7. Peter Filene argues, on the contrary, that Cold War concerns were predominantly a
matter for elites and ignored by the populace at large ( Cold War Culture Doesn t Say It
All, in Rethinking Cold War Culture, ed. Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert [Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001], 156 74).
8. See Richard Godden, A Fable . . . Whispering about the Wars, Faulkner Journal
17.2 (Spring 2002): 25 88, for an analysis of how the novel explores the emergence of a post
World War II military-industrial complex.
9. See Joseph A. Fry, Dixie Looks Abroad: The South and U.S. Foreign Relations, 1789
1973 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), for a study of how these contrary
experiences of subjugation fashioned a variety of Southern stances toward U.S. imperialism.
10. Among the major studies that have advanced this front of Faulkner studies, see
Barbara Ladd, Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and
William Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); Édouard Glis-
sant, Faulkner, Mississippi, trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear (New York: Far-
rar, Straus and Giroux, 1999); Deborah Cohn, History and Memory in the Two Souths: Re-
cent Southern and Spanish American Fiction (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999);
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