Lonely apotheosis

But they would drink together under the scuppernong arbor on the Sunday afternoons, and Father said how for that moment Wash’s heart would be quiet and proud both and that maybe it would seem to him that this world where niggers, that the Bible said had been created and cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin, were better housed and even clothed than he and his granddaughter—that this world where he walked always in mocking and jeering echoes of nigger laughter, was just a dream and an illusion and that the actual world was the one where his own lonely apotheosis (Father said) galloped on the black thoroughbred, thinking maybe, Father said, how the Book said that all men were created in the image of God and so all men were the same in God’s eyes anyway, looked the same to God at least, and so he would look at Sutpen and think A fine proud man. If God himself was to come down and ride the natural earth, that’s what He would aim to look like” Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! (226)

In Faulkner’s typically complicated arrangements of identification, Wash Jones, the poor white squatter who lives at Thomas Sutpen’s abandoned fishing cabin, views his identity as merged with that of the great (if failed) patriarch Sutpen, but only through a kind of fantasy, by dismissing the everyday world as a dream and imagining in its place a world where Wash and Sutpen are friends, colleagues, equals. Disempowered, emasculated, bitter, Wash recreates his world (at least in Mr. Compson’s view) as a world where he fraternizes with men like Sutpen, where he rides a thoroughbred alongside Sutpen. I suspect that Wash’s identification with Sutpen is similar to the identification that appears in some forms of conspiracy theory, that, more often than not, conspiracy theory, despite its protests about decrying power, is actually about identifying with power, in particular the men who wield it.