Unnamed Italian Marble Syndicate

Italian marble appears in Yoknapatawpha in 4 different Yoknapatawpha fictions: the marble tombstones Sutpen has made for himself and Ellen are imported from Italy in Absalom!; the marble columns for the rebuilt courthouse in Requiem for a Nun are too; and so is the marble medallion that Gavin Stevens and Linda Snopes order for Eula's monument in The Town, or the monument itself, referred to as an "outrageous marble lie" The Mansion (460). The only mention of the Italians behind these status symbols, however, occurs in The Mansion, which refers to "the Italian marble syndicate" as the only time someone had sold Flem "anything as amorphous as prestige" (358). Whether "marble syndicate" includes the craftsmen who worked with the marble, or just to the executives who managed the transaction, isn't clear.