This word rings in my mind as a spiritual disease. Apotheosis is the elevation of a person to the rank of a god. We’re living with this disease now, as multitudes chant their God’s name, wear his hat, and twitch with fervor in glorifying the past, again and again and again.
“It was as if all their individual five senses had become one organ of looking…like an apotheosis, the words that flew among them, wind- or air-engendered.” These words are from page 216 in William Faulkner’s Light in August.
In this novel Faulkner explores apotheosis, a diseased state of mind, as depicted through the character, Gail Hightower. This deposed Presbyterian minister, an outcast in Jefferson, Mississippi, is a sad man of “soft and sedentary obesity,” and childless, his wife a suicide, his own father an unwanted phantom. What is it that sustains Hightower? His daily twilight ritual when he invokes the memory of his grandfather, as he rides his horse into Jefferson during the Civil War.
Memory believes before knowing remembers. This Faulknerian claim at the beginning of chapter six can be related to other characters, but especially to Hightower. This sad and lonely man refuses to remember that his grandfather died in a chicken coop, shot to death in the act of stealing. Yet belief in Memory allows Hightower to see his grandfather atop a magnificent horse galloping into Jefferson with a Confederate calvary.
Is Faulkner not relevant now?
No matter that Mr. Apotheosis suggested quack remedies during the pandemic; that he talked with Putin and made sure there was no record of their conversation; that his buddy was the Korean dictator; that the rich got a huge tax break; that he compromised the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Milley; that he instigated an insurrection, and that he is a convicted felon. To multitudes in our nation none of the above matters… because he is divine and God (the Christian one) saved him in Butler, PA.
Okay, comic relief for me if not you. Faulkner created compound words that amaze me. So, to get Mr. Apotheosis out of my mind, I will write a paragraph of description, borrowing from William. Think of the 1930s, a country store in Oxford (Jefferson), Mississippi.
On a shadowdappled Saturday afternoon, outside a country store with its greasecrusted & frictionsmooth counter, three forwardleanin, fanaticfaced, hookwormridden mill workers in stiffbrim hats…sit on a heelgnawed porch. Their fecundmellow voices hum in Augusttremulous light, their bigbuckled hands hold thwartcurled cigarettes. In mansmelling, manstale, sweatfaded shirts, they believe themselves to be white “eagles: hard, sufficient, potent, remorseless, strong. Somewhere a dog barks, mellow, sad, faraway.” One sobereyed man, says, “Hey, what ya all think ‘bout that new guy… Joe Christmas?”
I’ll answer this question next week, por fin (at last). Joe IS the novel’s central character.
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