Submitted by lorie.watkins@g... on Fri, 2015-03-13 16:01
The "municipal power plant" (151) where Flem Snopes is the superintendent generates electricity for the town by burning coal to heat water into steam. The job of shoveling coal into the fires is done by Negro "firemen," who are supervised by white men whose job includes making sure that the pressure in the plant's three boilers does not become dangerously high (153) - a job made much harder by Flem's theft of the machinery's brass fixtures.
Submitted by lorie.watkins@g... on Fri, 2015-03-13 15:55
The power plant in Oxford is where Faulkner worked as a night superintendent while writing As I Lay Dying. The power plant in Jefferson is a step forward for Flem Snopes on his path toward wealth and respectability, as described in "Centaur in Brass" and The Town and recalled in The Mansion. When Faulkner first mentions it, in Flags in the Dust, he refers to it as the "light and water plant" (166), but there's no reference to the 'water' in any later text. As the "municipal power plant" ("Centaur," 151), it burns coal to generate electricity.
Submitted by lorie.watkins@g... on Fri, 2015-03-13 15:49
In "Centaur in Brass," Flem lives "in a new little bungalow on the edge of town" (168). The neighborhood is an impoverished one. Half the little houses there are "inhabited by Negroes," and "scrapped automobiles and tin cans" litter the yards and ditches (168). It is, however, within sight of the water tower.
Submitted by lorie.watkins@g... on Fri, 2015-03-13 15:48
In between the sharecropper's cabin Flem Snopes was born in and the bank president's mansion he dies in is this "new little bungalow on the edge of town" ("Centaur in Brass," 168). A 'bungalow' is a low house, usually just one story, and apparently in Faulkner's mind can be found in various parts of town and occupied by people of widely different social classes. In Requiem for a Nun, for example, Temple Drake Stevens refers to the residence she and her husband live in as "a new bungalow on the right [i.e. fashionable] street" (124).
Submitted by lorie.watkins@g... on Fri, 2015-03-13 15:44
Tom-Tom's cabin and corn field are next to a "woods" (162). As he and Turl run fighting through the "trees" (164) they fall into a ditch that, according to Turl's vastly inflated account, is "forty foot deep" and "a solid mile across" (165). It is at any rate deep and wide enough for the fall to end their furious struggle.
Submitted by lorie.watkins@g... on Fri, 2015-03-13 15:41
In "Centaur in Brass" and The Town Tom-Tom's cabin and corn field are next to a "woods" (162, 27). As he and Turl run fighting through the trees they fall into a ditch that, according to Turl's vastly inflated account, is "forty foot deep" and "a solid mile across" (165, 28). It is at any rate deep and wide enough for the fall to end their furious struggle.
Submitted by lorie.watkins@g... on Fri, 2015-03-13 15:36
Tom-Tom lives with his third wife in a cabin "two miles from town and from the power plant where he spent twelve hours a day with a shovel and bar" (152). His property includes "a little piece of corn" - i.e. a small field - behind the cabin, and a barn that is big enough to contain the "corn-crib" where the stolen brass fittings are hidden (156, 159).
Submitted by lorie.watkins@g... on Fri, 2015-03-13 15:34
In "Centaur in Brass" Tom-Tom lives with his third wife in a cabin "two miles from town and from the power plant where he spent twelve hours a day with a shovel and bar," working to feed the boiler fire with coal (15). When Faulkner re-tells his story in The Town, the wife with whom he lives in this cabin is "his fourth" (16). The novel adds the detail that this cabin is "two miles down the railroad track" (16), which we interpret as putting it in the part of Yoknapatawpha that Faulkner uses the least: the southwest quadrant.
Submitted by lorie.watkins@g... on Fri, 2015-03-13 15:21
The narrator of "Centaur in Brass" describes the town's disused water tower, wryly, as Flem Snopes' "monument to himself" (149). As a monument it is "taller than anything in sight," but at the same time a symbol of the threat Flem poses to the rest of the town: it is "filled with a transient and symbolical liquid that was not even fit to drink" (168).
