598
PARTISAN REVIEW
THE JAIL
(Continued from
p.
515)
Wisconsin greenhouses, and in the courthouse (the city hall too) a
courthouse and city hall gang, in miniature of course (but that was not
its fault but the fault of the city's and the country's size and population
and wealth) but based on the pattern of Chicago and Kansas City and
Boston and Philadelphia (and which, except for its minuscularity, neither
Philadelphia nor Boston nor Kansas City nor Chicago need have blushed
at) which every three or four years would try again to raze the old court–
house in order to build a new one, not that they did not like the old one
nor wanted the new, but because the new one would bring into the town
and county that much more increment of unearned federal money;
And now the paint is preparing to weather from an anti-tank how–
itzer squatting on rubber tires on the opposite flank of the Confederate
monument; and gone now from the fronts of the stores are the old
brick made of native clay in Sutpen's architect's old molds, replaced
now by sheets of glass taller than a man and longer than a wagon
and team, pressed intact in Pittsburgh factories and framing interiors
bathed now in one shadowless corpse-glare of fluorescent light; and,
now and at last, the last of silence too: the county's hollow inverted air
one resonant boom and ululance of radio: and thus no more Yok–
napatawpha's air nor even Mason and Dixon's air, but America's: the
patter of comedians, the baritone screams of female vocalists, the
babbling pressure to buy and buy and still buy arriving more instan–
taneous than light, two thousand miles from New York and Los An–
geles; one air, one nation: the shadowless fluorescent corpse-glare
bathing the sons and daughters of men and women, Negro and white
both, who were born to and who passed all their lives in denim overalls
and calico, haggling by cash or the installment-plan for garments
copied last week out of
Harper's Bazaar
or
Esquire
in East Side sweat–
shops: because an entire generation of farmers has vanished, not just
from Yoknapatawpha's but from Mason and Dixon's earth: the self·
consumer: the machine which displaced the man because the exodus
of the man left no one to drive the mule, now that the machine was
threatening to extinguish the mule; time was when the mule stood in
droves at daylight in the plantation mule-lots across the plantation road
