One of the more beneficent consequences of the rise of, first, literary weblogs and then book-oriented social media has been the enhanced opportunities to "rediscover" neglected and half-forgotten writers and their underrated books. Over the past decade or so, no better example of such a collective rediscovery could be cited than the American writer John Williams and his 1965 novel, Stoner.
I have until now put off reading this novel myself not only because it seemed to me that the praise being lavished upon it was excessive and would likely provoke a kind of resistance that would interfere with my ability to honestly assess it (and not the phenomenon that brought it to my attention), but also because from what I could determine about its subject, it might seem uncomfortably familiar. Like the titular protagonist William Stoner, I, too, was raised in rural Missouri and attended the state university in Columbia. I as well studied English, despite its obvious lack of practical relevance, especially as seen by those who had sent me to the university in the first place, and found in literature something of a life's calling and set out to be a professor myself. Like Stoner, I gathered multiple degrees at that state university and eventually spent a significant part of my subsequent life (unlike Stoner, not all) teaching there.
In short, I assumed I would see a good deal of myself in William Stoner, no doubt suspecting (unconsciously, at least) I might find in Stoner's story a parallel to my own vexed academic career, which, too, could prove to be a distraction. I do not require that a character in a work of fiction be one with whom I am able to "identify," and perhaps in Stoner a character who in effect forces such an identification would only divert my attention from the novel itself, encouraging instead a preoccupation with personal circumstances separate from any possible relevance to the reading experience. Presumably some people believe that it is one of the purposes of a novel precisely to provoke reflection of this kind on the reader's part, but in my view a successful novel does this only accidentally, as a side effect of its realization of the writer's more purely artistic vision that otherwise avoids reducing literary art to an exercise in self-obsession.
As it turned out, my apprehensions about reading the novel were mostly unwarranted: I was not really tempted to identify with Stoner, because William Stoner is actually not a very interesting character. Perhaps this is partly intentional. Stoner more or less stumbles into the life he winds up leading, as his initial plan (itself not very definite and largely determined by his father) to study agriculture at the university is put aside when he finds himself interested in literature after taking a required introductory course. Even thereafter, when Stoner is ostensibly pursuing his newly acquired ideals as a literary scholar, he seems peculiarly passive, accepting the opportunities the university offers him to establish a teaching career, but showing little ambition to distinguish himself, either as scholar or as teacher. After writing one book that brings him some satisfaction but little recognition, he never writes a second, and although a time comes when he perceives he is becoming more popular as a teacher, that time comes and goes quickly, the remainder of his academic career indeed appearing to confirm the narrator's assertion at the beginning of the novel that at Stoner's death "few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses."
Stoner's failure ultimately to validate an academic calling is certainly exacerbated by the problems in his personal life the novel also chronicles, but here he remains just as submissive to the indiscriminate events that seem simply to happen to him as he is the dissatisfactions of his academic experiences. Most of the disappointments Stoner endures in his life outside the university derive from what is clearly the biggest mistake Stoner makes, his marriage to Edith, the daughter of a prosperous family from St. Louis he meets at a university function she is attending during a trip to Columbia with her family. If Stoner is a rather forlorn if uninspiring figure, Edith is an enigma. On the one hand, she is obviously the product of a social system that expects women to derive satisfaction from their approved role as wives and mothers, but she finds herself unable to do so without quite knowing why. On the other, her behavior toward Stoner, beginning with his initial fumbling attempts to court her, seem designed to burden him with maximum emotional pain even as she settles for the life he offers her (settling as well, it would seem, for the infliction of such pain as her main expression of her discontent).
Stoner also becomes the victim of a colleague, Hollis Lomax, who pursues a vendetta against him when Stoner impedes the progress of a preferred student. When the colleague becomes chairman of the department, he strips Stoner of the advanced courses he had been teaching, leaving him to the drudgework of freshman composition and introductory literature. Both the student and the colleague are portrayed as disabled, and while Stoner does or says nothing that demeans them for their afflictions, nevertheless their roles in the novel seem very peculiar. Exactly why they are depicted in this way is never clear (is it supposed to make Stoner's downward journey even more pathetic that he is surpassed even by the handicapped?), and that Stoner's primary antagonists, responsible for ruining his life, are an uncontrollable woman and a disabled man is, if not a sign of the author's explicit (or even implicit) bias, a feature that certainly has disturbing overtones that today are difficult to dismiss as merely incidental.
Late in the novel, when Stoner has abandoned all hope for happiness in his marriage, he has an affair with a graduate student. Although the affair is portrayed as satisfying for both of them, predictably enough it ends badly for each. Edith doesn't seem to care much about it (the affair becomes more or less an open secret around campus), but when Lomax finds out about it he of course schemes to sabotage it, and in the end the graduate student leaves town and not long after Stoner begins his final descent to his death by cancer. Thus Stoner is allowed one brief period of contentment before it, too, is subsumed to the inexorably luckless course his life was seemingly destined to take.
In this way, Stoner seems to me a late example of American naturalism, that variant of realism that developed at the end of the 19th century and perhaps reached its most important culmination in the first half of the 20th century in the work of Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, and John Steinbeck. This fiction features protagonists who can't escape the controlling influences of their circumstances, usually resulting in misfortune and sometimes death. Stoner is somewhat reminiscent of Dreiser's Carrie Meeber (Sister Carrie), a rural youth who moves to a bigger place (in Stoner's case "bigger" in cultural and intellectual terms) to seek greater opportunity, except that in Carrie's case she achieves unimaginable success (largely adventitious and fortuitous), while Stoner experiences a seemingly random drift through failure and loss. However much Stoner is able to cultivate his innate intelligence and to acquire knowledge that his upbringing otherwise would not have allowed, finally neither really do him much good in either achieving success in his academic life or pursuing happiness in his family life.
Stoner does perhaps succeed in presenting a realistic depiction of academe not as an intellectual sanctuary where dutiful scholars earnestly pursue the life of the mind but as a human institution subject to the same displays of pettiness and ill-disguised malice as all other hierarchical organizations--perhaps even more pronounced because carried out so dispassionately. But this makes William Stoner a sort of sacrificial victim, not the stoic hero some of the commentary on this novel has made him out to be. Stoner abjectly endures his adversities, which supplies the novel with its doom-laden atmosphere, but makes him finally a rather colorless character.
Comments