Two components of Faulkner's style and sensibility in The Hamlet

In the third section (of 4) in William Faulkner's The Hamlet, the raconteur and gossip traveling sewing-machine salesman Ratliff returns to Frenchman's Bend and the layabouts on the Varner-Snopes store veranda fill him in on the latest news and then they all rush off to see someone "doing it" - Ratliff not sure what they're talking about but they urge him to come see. Then we break to a new section - in which Faulkner revives, in a way, a technique for which he is now best known - from the first section of Sound & Fury, which he narrates not only as stream-of-consciousness but as s-o-c of a boy with pretty severe mental retardation - readers were puzzled and shocked by this in the 1920s and now find it, I'm sure, much less challenging and disorienting. In The Hamlet F tells this next section not thru s-o-c but through very close and intense 3rd-person narration using all of the Faulknerian amplitude of verbiage - but staying extremely close to the POV of the member of the Snopes clan who has retardation. It's still challenging to read this today, but what it appears is happening is the I.Snopes lives in a barn or outbuilding and has developed some kind of love affair with a cow - whom he pursues across several miles of rough terrain when he sees her out lapping from one of the field ponds. We suspect that what the men are rushing off to see is some form of affection - even sexual affection - between I.Snopes and the cow - not sure yet. It's an great tribute to F's style and delicacy and actually sympathies that this section is not grotesque of exploitative in any way - and not told with the bold humor of the similar passages, in part two, when he describes all of the men of the town mesmerized by the sexual beauty and abundance of Eula Varner - whom F also describes as "mammalian" and, I think, as "lactating." The two sections of the novel make for a significant contrast in mode and sensibilities and serve as two poles or counterpoints in helping us gain comprehension of Faulknerian style.