Stoner, John Williams, Novel, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Existential life
Stoner begins with an epitaph – a description of a
non-descript, inert person, dead and buried and remembered only vaguely with a
memorial attribution that will be seen by no one. Stoner is the original Seinfeld
episode – a book about no one. William Stoner, the heroic nobody who headlines the novel.
It is also a book about a person the author characterizes,
in a quotation in the introduction, as a hero.
A person who labored in the traces – did what was expected, but also
what was unexpected, all within the confines of the narrow arc available to him
in which to live a life and he ended up maximizing his space with that arc,
living by its rules, while pushing them as far as he was able.
As a friend said when describing this book, “It is a
feminist novel. It is about how the patriarchy
is as problematic for men as it is for women.”
While I agree with that statement, I think I am also more resigned to
the patriarchy, as I think Stoner and his parents before him were resigned to
their lot in life. Yes, we can rail
against the patriarchy (and we should), but the inevitability of the need for a
structure – and the inevitability of that structure impinging on our
functioning, but also creating a container in which we may be able to reach a
version of our full flowering potential – however meager that may be – creates an
existential boundedness that seems to me, within the constraints of this world, all but
inevitable.
Stoner is a coming of age novel, but unlike other coming of
age novels, it does not end with “and he/she/they lived happily ever after”,
but with the hero's death. This is the
arc of a person from cradle to grave and we get to follow him, from being a mediocre
high school student who found his studies to be as hard as his work on his family’s
Missouri farm at the turn of the 19th into the 20th centuries,
to the University where he went to learn agricultural practices, but was ultimately equally
intrigued and puzzled by English literature, pursued graduate education in that feild, taught, married, had an affair, demonstrated academic integrity, and took his diagnosis of cancer, leading to his death.
The last paragraph may seem like a spoiler and you may be
criticizing you for not warning you about that, but it was an outline –
essentially one that was given in the introduction – and that outline – that skeleton,
if you will – is not the point of this story.
It is not a story of a life, but the story of how that life is lived.
On one level, it is an enviable life. In my fantasy memoir, I tell the story of the
members of my life who have lived the various tracks that my actual life avoided. At each life choice point – moving from here
to there, the version of me that moved somewhere else, or chose to stay rather
than move – meets up with the others and talks about the impact of those
choices and the versions of me and how
we differ, but also how we are similar.
The apparent choice points for Stoner are next to none. He could have gone to war. He could have pursued an administrative track
at the University. He could have married
someone else. He could have fought to
maintain his connection to his daughter when that was threatened. But there is no real sense that any of these
alternate pathways were actually open to him.
He lived within the furrow that had been plowed for him. I suppose the one place he jumped the track was staying at school rather than returning to the farm. Once he made that mammoth leap, he did not sway from the direction that his
life now impelled him.
On the one hand, he was raised in a family that had no
gumption. They were seemingly on the
parcel of land they inhabited entirely by accident with no sense that they hoped
for anything else. He moved by accident
into a space that afforded him infinite opportunities for growth. He worked diligently at pursuing them, but
he was not able to master them in a way that allowed him to transcend the landscape
he was still trapped within. He guarded
that landscape, and its integrity, while also violating what was expected of
him, in a very predictable way, and he glimpsed something greater, that he then
enacted in his teaching, making him a better human being, all seemingly by
accident, or as a matter of fate.
On the other hand, this was a man who played the cards he
was dealt. It was not the strongest
hand, but because he didn’t try to exceed what was given him, he seems to have
gotten the greatest value out of it.
When he was teaching a course initially, he did not have the chops to
articulate all that lay within him. When
he was assigned a course late in his career that would interfere with his being
able to articulate what he now was able to, he redesigned it, finally being
able to convey the complex knowledge he had accumulated to the freshmen he was assigned to teach. He taught the specialized to the masses, and
they responded to his teaching what he was passionate about with their own ardor.
How often have I stood in front of a classroom at a loss for
how to communicate what I deeply know to be true? How often have I blamed my students for my
inability to communicate with them?
In writing these blog posts, have I turned to a medium of communication that allows me to
be semi-anonymous, offering to those searching for something a morsel that
might interest them? Have I done this
without the constraints (and support) that an editor might offer? Do I rely on an impersonal algorithm to guide
readers to these thoughts? Are many of
my readers inhuman machines (AI) who will take what I have and spread some small
part of it in front of the eyes of someone who may or may not be influenced by
it?
Who will remember an author who never takes ownership of the
writing he has done?
Stoner both does and does not take authorial control of his
life. His refusal to pass along a
student who clearly does not belong in the academy but is the darling of a
person in power leads to his professional demise, but also elevates him in the
eyes of the person who affords a pathway out of his dull approach to his scholarship,
teaching, and loving others. She brings him
to life, but the illicit nature of their relationship dooms the relationship
while freeing Stoner to pursue the things he has felt, to that point, were outside
of his grasp. After the loss of the
relationship, he invests in his teaching with a new vigor, teaching not the
graduate students who would be key to his immortality, by referring to him in
their own scholarship and teaching, but opening the minds of the kinds of
students he had been – young, uncertain, and untested. These students would, presumably, carry a
version of him forward, but they would do this into their own fields, not
his. Even if they did go into his, it
would not be under his tutelage. His
academic epitaph was sealed.
On the personal side, the young Stoner idealized a woman from
afar, awkwardly courted her in the ways of the day, married her, and discovered
her to be a person who was strange to him – and perhaps to herself. But married they were, and therefore they
would stay that way. Their child proved
to be perhaps the first love in his life.
When his wife stole his daughter back, he did not protest. Perhaps he
was constrained by the gender roles, but perhaps also by the limits of his
awareness of the importance of attachment, and not yet appreciating how his
attachment to his daughter was critical to both of them. When, as an adult, she becomes an alcoholic,
he is relieved that she finds comfort in the alcohol and appears to overlook
the devastation that same alcohol is wreaking on her body.
His affair allows him to embody himself. He feels, for the first time, at home in his
body and fully at home with another human being. The awkwardness of this second courtship is
contrasted with the first. Here he is
afraid of imposing rather than pursuing and he is shocked to discover that he
matters to the other. Though this
relationship, with a student, would be forbidden today, based on the power
imbalance, we can see that, from Stoner’s position, it is his student, not he,
who wields the power; her desire is ultimately what allows his to finally
flourish.
The broader relational context for Stoner is amazingly
thin. His parents on the farm, and the
relatives on the farm near the University do not understand his interest in the
world beyond the concrete. He befriends two
fellow faculty, one of whom dies in the first World War, the other of whom runs
interference for him later when he alienates the faculty member with power. He tries to befriend the man who comes to
power and uses that power against him, but that man will have none of it.
Stoner’s primary relationship, from shortly after arriving
at the University, is with the books. He
is taken with words and he lives in an Ivory Tower of isolation, insulated from
two world wars, his daughter’s cries for attention/affection that bring an
unwanted marriage, and, in this “asylum”, he develops the capacity to share
with students his passion for what lies on the page. His impact is limited, even marginal. His epitaph modest, but his life was as fully
lived as he could make it – and perhaps as fully lived as any of ours could
hope to be.
We all live, I suppose, in towers of isolation - connecting with the world in various ways - influencing those around us, hopefully in ways that improve them and ourselves, but surely also in ways that are damaging and problematic. Ultimately our impact will be less than we would have hoped, but perhaps ample based on who we are, the gifts we brought and those we obtained, the opportunities afforded us by the structures in place during the time that we lived. The value of our lives, as this book points out, may be much more in how we lived them than in their impact on the world.
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