Faulkner's talent pushed to its limit in The Hamlet

Ratliff the traveling sewing-machine salesman emerges as the true moral center of William Faulkner's The Hamlet, as he intervenes in the incredible cow-chase episode in the 3rd part of the novel, The Long Summer. As I figured - see yesterday's post - the scenes that the men gathered on the verands rush over to peer through a fence and observe is of the severely disabled Snopes family member, Isaac, engaged in a sexual act with a cow; the other men just gape, actually, it's a kind of bullying and certainly craven and ghastly behavior, but Ratliff grabs a board and, using a spare piece or brick as a mallet, nails the board in place, blocking the view. Then he engineers some kind of weird settlement of the matter - paying off the farmer who owned the cow (Houston) and the farmer from whom Isaac stole feed for the cow and then, on advice of a highly spurious minister, arranging for a ritual in which they will slaughter the cow and Isaac will eat the flesh and be "cured" of his obsession - a very ghoulish section the novel indeed but not without its dark comedy, as the Snopes cousins have it out as to who's to pay for what percentage of these expenses. This section of the novel perhaps more than no other passage in Faulkner shows the extent of his talent, maybe the limit of his talent, as he expends some of the most glorious, elaborate, complex, and baroque writing - maybe overwrought, almost nearing the self-parody that he would suffer from in his later works - on the most odd and even repulsive material - the poor man with very limited mental capacities, shunned by all people, getting sexual and emotional satisfaction from his relationship with a cow - and the reaction of the community to all this, including arguing about who owes whom what for the feed and silage. That's the Snopes (bourgeois shopkeepers and deal-makers) ascendant, eclipsing the feudal, non-cash-basis hierarchical culture of the Varners and for that matter of the Old South.