A clash of two cultures in The Hamlet

The first section, Flem, of William Faulkner's The Hamlet (itself the first novel in a trilogy) chronicles the rise of the Snopes clan and the inevitable displacement of the reigning powers in the village/hamlet of Frenchman's Bend, the Varners. Section, more or less, starts off with some very weird and hilarious horse trading - in which one of the characters ends up paying two or three times for the same horse - it's very hard to follow all the machinations - but the episode involves traveling to a neighboring town to buy a milk separator, using a team of one horse one mule, and various horse trades on the way there and back. Then the novel moves along to the introduction of the main character, Flem Snopes - somehow the Varners hire him as a clerk in the general store which is a big part of their wealth and power, and over time Flem pretty much takes over the store: his arrival highlights a clash of two families, two cultures, and two economic systems. Varner ran the store (as well as other enterprises, such as the local cotton gin) with very little oversight and more or less on a system of trust; he was out of the store most of the day, and customers would just pick up what the wanted and drop the payment into a little rat-trap cage. Flem Snopes changed all that - comes to work wearing a tie, keeps regular hours, trusts nobody, later takes over the cotton gin, moves from the rented farmhouse far out of town into a boarding house in town - it's not long before he's totally eclipsed Varner, loans out money at high rates - and the old men who spend their whole days gathered on the porch gossiping can't figure out how he's become so prosperous. Much of this section is narrated by an itinerant sewing-machine salesman, who's quite the raconteur and character - full of wry wit (returning to town after surgery in Tennessee, someone asks what the doctor removed; answer: My pocketbook.) Many side stories very funny as well, including the two cousins or bothers the Snopes clan brings in to run the blacksmith shop, one a nonstop talker (later gets a job as a school teacher) and the other probably the world's least competent blacksmith - but you know somehow the Snopes clan will make it pay. At the outset, the Varners let the Snopes clan rent some property in hopes of chasing them off before they could reap the harvest - and also to get them off the land before they could continue their patter or serial arson; in exasperation at one point Jody Varner, Flem's counterpart, cries out something like: How much do I have to do to protect one goddamn barn full of hay?