Mink Snopes’s Shavasana: Body, Relation, and Exchange in Faulkner’s Economies of Being

Abstract

This chapter will argue for Faulkner's use of bodies, both living and dead, in complicating the historical transition from an economy of relation to an economy of exchange in the US South.Exploring both the corporeal ambiguity of characters like Thomas Sutpen, DarlBundren, Flem and Ike Snopes, as well as a general poetics of bodies across Faulkner's writings, where characters fall into a rhetorical or mythic assembly with the earth itself, what in yogic practice is often referred to as shavasanaor "corpse pose," this chapter will suggest that the bodies of Faulkner's fiction offer a different narrative of the post-1865 US South, as a place of precarity and possibility, where communities and individuals had to redefine and re-inhabit new modes of personhood, agency, and subjectivity in an emergent open market.