Sometimes, true courage requires inaction; that one sit at home while war rages, if by doing so one satisfies the quiet voice of honourable conscience.
After writing a first novel about the life-long effects of childhood trauma and the anguish of aloneness in
The echo of Graham Greene’s controversial and overtly political
When first published in America in 1965,
Tim Kreider’s review of the novel bears out Barnes’s and Brownrigg’s assessments that William Stoner’s melancholy character can be regarded as a counter-measure of how Americans prefer to see themselves. In support, Kreider compares Stoner to sentimental favorite, Jay Gatsby, the “roaring twenties” hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel,
Uncertainty is, however, as necessary as doubt in any learning process. Drawn as a long-suffering son, husband and academic, readers learn that Stoner is an intellectual anxious to preserve his own and his university’s integrity. Given this, Stoner’s fictional persona is recognizable as belonging to what Walter Benjamin calls the melancholic heroic space. As Benjamin has it, driven by metaphysical need, the intellectual subject injured by life’s experiences provides a lens through which new insights into historical situations are made possible. According to Max Pensky, such individuals hold the key to understanding “the aesthetics of self through which the suffering of melancholia is, through force of will, bent back on itself in order to transform the self into a research instrument” (
Page one of
The sequence of events that constitute the narrative proper open by constructing Stoner’s identity from a specific time and place that expose humble beginnings not unlike those of Jay Gatsby. They also correspond in some respects to the fictional family background of Willa Cather’s Professor Godfrey St. Peter. Both hail from the land, although family economic circumstances are markedly different in their individual novelistic worlds. We meet St. Peter as a successful academic in his fifties, married for thirty years to a woman of independent means. St. Peter was “born on Lake Michigan, of mixed stock (Canadian French on one side and American farmers on the other)” (1990: 4) and hails from a large family with “various brother and sisters” (20). He recalls an idealistic childhood spent on a lakeside farm where “the land in all its dreariness could never close in on you” (1990: 20). And, whilst he suffers anguish when his parents sell that much-loved property, Cather’s protagonist also enjoys the privilege of happy student years in France (20). In contrast, Stoner is presented as the only (lonely) child of prematurely aged parents: “born in 1891 on a small farm in central Missouri near the village of Booneville” (2), from which he never strayed until he entered university in his twenties. In the Stoner family’s experience, the hardship of life on the land had been spirit-draining, but had also “bound [them] together by the necessity of its toil” (2). It is no accident that towards the end of the novel this point is reasserted to confirm that Stoner’s unassuming sense of self had been pieced together from the “blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical” (226). What Stoner’s antecedents encouraged the soil to produce had given meaning to generations of Stoners and, by implication, to many thousands of similarly-owned farm enterprises in America’s white history. C.P. Snow points up a truth about the uncertainty of life on the land that is embedded in
Although never heralded, the author is not slow to remind us that, much like rural poverty, slavery is also indissolubly bound up with the history of America and that racial prejudice still exists. Early in the story when Stoner leaves his parents’ farm for university study, they hire “a Negro field hand”
As it is, for the most part the narrative negotiates Stoner’s life from beyond the farm gate. As with Cather’s
As he strives to cope with change, Stoner can be regarded as being in a position of control but also missing from it, an overseer of silent spaces learning to negotiate life (read society) under new rules. There is only silence between the son and his parents who “did not want to disturb him in his new estate” (21) as an academic. Similarly, as a teacher, “he seldom spoke in class” (27) to his students and only ever hears “the silence of the room” (22). In scenes such as these, silence becomes a metaphor for life’s challenging situations and the personal integrity needed to understand and deal with them. The words that might have been spoken but were not, by parents, son and students alike, create in Stoner feelings of loss and a sense of imbalance. He experiences opposed sensations of “inadequacy to the goal he had so recklessly chosen and the attraction of the world he had abandoned” (21). As a consequence, his sense of self-assurance and wonder “remained hidden within him” (26), forcing him to contemplate the wisdom of his decision and marking a significant step towards the narrative uncertainty which is evident throughout the novel.
Stoner’s academic interests take him back-in-time, as do those of another fictional lover of literature, Cather’s Professor Godfrey St. Peter. Ever conscious of space limitations, the opportunity is taken here to further reflect on similarities and inconsistencies between the two novels. St. Peter is revealed as “selfish about personal pleasures and fought for them” (1990: 17), egocentric traits Williams’s Stoner does not possess. He is also presented as a successful academic in a way that Stoner is not. As though truth’s disguise were irony, however, we read that St. Peter’s “great work” titled
A prominent difference is that, unlike Williams’s linear narrative stream, Cather’s story-space is fragmented, namely: “Family”, “Tom Outland’s Story” and “The Professor”, with relevance one-to-the-other built into each component to allow continuity. Formation of the complete story yields the notion that it is as much about the influence of Tom Outland’s brilliance and imagination on St. Peter’s world view as it is about the identity and history of the Professor and his family. Outland is described as “a foundling boy” (98) and man of few words. He tells St. Peter the story of a discovery he made during an anthropological study of peace-loving Hopi culture that, for Outland had “brought with it great happiness. It was possession”, he says (226). Speaking from his position of unknown heritage, Outland believes he had discovered an antidote to life’s demands and cares: he had “found everything, instead of having lost everything” (227). Recognizable as someone “who had never handled things that were not the symbols of ideas” (236) Outland’s discovery turns on a spiritual rather than real sense of self and place which links the meaning of “possession” to a well-established Indigenous understanding that human beings belong to the land, the land does not belong to them. Just as do silences in Stoner’s fictional world, what remains unsaid in Outland’s story authorizes meaning for St. Peter: its “plain account was most beautiful because of the stupidities it avoided and the things it did not say” (238). And what mattered was not so much its truth, but the lost communal values Outland’s story signified. The lack of superfluous words about Outland’s discovery harks back to Homer’s
With a nod to Cather, Williams reminds us that themed classical literature arising from the work of Homer merged during the Middle Ages into Christian theology which, idealistically, embraces things higher than the pursuit of wealth and fame. Stoner’s dissertation topic, “The Influence of the Classical Tradition on the Medieval Lyric” (40), seems to provide an insight into a character with a private passion for an idyllic time untouched by the idea of progress. But Stoner’s selection of thesis subject is ambiguous. As though attempting to convey deeper meaning, Williams contrives to link Stoner’s interests to what was co-terminously known as The Dark Ages; hundreds of years of human misery, grisly feudalism formed amid long wars and deathly pestilence in both England and Europe. Evoked in this context is the fact that, since the seventeenth century, war and its related discourses have been a defining factor in the formation and shaping of American identity. By association, Stoner’s choice of study can again be regarded as well-suited to the uncertain times in which he lived. By the novel’s end, those times saw a concentration of dark events: wars, economic downturn, unemployment, hunger and poverty, all of which contributed to the grim reality of twentieth-century American social fabric.
In the course of events Stoner marries above his station, summoning the idea of America as the class-free civilisation to which much of the Western world still aspires, but which the novel makes clear is not the reality. Contrary to the frame of poverty and toil in which Stoner’s upbringing is located, his wife, Edith, is described as the only child of middle-class St. Louis parents, the daughter of a father with an ill-conceived idea of his own self-importance (58) and a pretentiously dissatisfied mother “of an old and discretely impoverished [Southern] family” (59). Typical of her time and circumstances, Edith is raised in a formal atmosphere where distant, irreproachable courtesy prevails. Serious issues are never discussed, or rarely even thought about (54), and life is interpreted for Edith by her narrow-minded parents who deny her meaningful engagement with its trials and joys. The imposition of blandness and respectability imposed upon Edith can be seen as a form of familial psychological violence which impacts upon her emotional health. Bereft of warmth and closeness growing up, she suffers from poverty of the spirit, loneliness being “one of the earliest conditions of her life” (54). Consistent with the times out of which she comes, Edith’s moral teaching is prohibitive such that she regards sex in marriage as a duty she feels bound to fulfill rather than as something to enjoy or cherish (54).
The marriage of Edith and William Stoner is entered into, and played out, in unhealthy circumstances. Signaled by the “cold wind that blew upon them” (56) and mirroring the dismal WW1 social conditions under which they live, mythical conceptions related to the ease of upward social mobility in America are overthrown. As the marriage degenerates, Edith returns to the familiar interests of her pre-marital social life. She joins a theatre group, plays the piano, raises funds for charity and, in the process of meeting people of similar persuasion, shuts her husband out (120–121). But Stoner does “not speak to Edith about her new behavior; her activities caused him only minor annoyance” (121) and were irrelevant to him. Suggestive of a form of humility related to class and a sense of personal commitment that runs deep, he holds himself “responsible for the new direction her life had taken” (121) and the withering of their love for one another. “And so he had his love affair” (194). The innocent are almost always involved in any marital (read national) conflict and Edith responds by turning Stoner’s much loved daughter against him. As though he had been wounded in war, Stoner’s loss of his daughter’s love is described as a form of death whereby he “longed for something – even pain – to pierce him, to bring him alive” (184). With tongue placed firmly in cheek, Williams has Edith exhibit psychological and behavioural manifestations of a descent into madness. From a literary perspective, the author works self-consciously within Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason paradigm, a site of dangerous otherness within the confines of the marital home.
Furthering its interest in war or war-like relationships, the novel presents American participation in the WW1 conflict as a source of collective national duty and sentiment which assigns heroic status to those who choose to participate in its life-or-death consequences (32–36). Yet the passive qualities of Stoner’s character do not fit with a propensity for flag waving expressions of patriotic enthusiasm in times of war and beyond. Rather, Stoner relies on his own way of making sense of the situation and in the process demonstrates there is no courage without difficult choice. Unlike his fellow academics, he does not proclaim loudly what he has to say. Only after silent struggle to determine his position, does he decide that “he would not fight the Germans” (37). His decision not to go to war lends a broader political dimension to the narrative which points to a level of confusion operating alongside the corruption of moral order. As we read:
Once there was a brief-lived demonstration against one of the professors – an old and bearded teacher of German languages, who had been born in Munich […] but when the professor met the angry and flushed little group of students, blinked in bewilderment, and held out his thin, shaking hands to them, they disbanded in sullen confusion. (32, 33)
Stoner chooses not to live according to the political conditions under which war is fought, but recognizes as real the hatred among people that war creates and is sorely tired of it. Neither a patriot nor hater of enemies, he “had talked about the war in Europe with the older students and instructors, [but] he had never quite believed in it; and now that it was upon him, upon them all, he discovered within himself a vast reserve of indifference” (33). Stoner never speaks the language of war. To borrow a phrase from Kittsteiner, instead he “applies the subjective gaze of the melancholic observer” (
There are conflicting elements of the rebellious and the pacifist to be found in Stoner’s character, a paradox that not only speaks to the ambiguity of the entire figure but to the mythology of heroism as a politicised code of behavior that demands action and violence. It remains to his mentor, Arthur Sloane, to remind him of the importance of retaining a sense of humanity beyond political disputes: “A war doesn’t kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men,” he says. “It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back” (35). It has been said that doing nothing in times of war is the same as collaborating with the enemy. However, Stoner’s impartial uncertainties and disinclination to take political sides, suggest there is a need to show compassion for both sides of a struggle. At the most basic level, the character offers a very different lens through which to repudiate some of the trumpeting glamour of war-related discourses which silence the maiming and killing that is the reality of war’s underside. Stoner’s wars are in fact most clearly articulated as “wars and defeats and victories that are not military or recorded in the annals of history” (36). Instead they are fought, won and lost in everyday society’s battlefields, enshrined in the belief that violence or the abuse of power are not ways to resolve oppositional positions or situations, whatever forms of conflict they may take. As we have seen, one such battle is fought and lost by Stoner on the domestic front, which Williams finally presents as a cruel environment in which family members come to learn that they have little to say to one another (279). Another is fought, lost and yet somehow won, within the walls of Stoner’s university where the value of narcissistic behaviour and the self-important system of representation from which it stems, are interrogated. This particular conflict is central to the novel’s layering of representational socio-cultural interests and it would be useful to recall it here.
The narrative permits the assumption that internal power-plays within academic walls are thick with interference in the ebbs and flows of both private and public life. As noted above, a minor character, David Masters, is killed in WW1, a detail which serves as a reminder of the fate of Cather’s Tom Outland. Masters appears in the story of Stoner’s life as a “ghost [that] had held [him], all these years, in a friendship whose depth they had never quite realized” (283). Masters’ assessment of university life is as a refuge for the homeless: “The University exists for the dispossessed of the world” (31), he says. But he is also of the view that, much like Edith’s parents and the pretentious world they represent, academics must have their “pretences in order to survive” (39). Consistent with Masters’ notion that academics lack a sense of the real world, Stoner considers university life as having the potential to provide him with “the kind of security and warmth that he should have been able to feel as a child in his home, and had not been able to” (39). As we have seen, nor was Stoner ever able to be at home within his marriage but, on the contrary, was positioned to see love as a burden rather than a joy.
In the patterned world of the novel, it is possible to regard Stoner’s university environment in similar terms as a site of disillusionment and despondency. What readers are given is an intellectual world of converging professional rivalries which simultaneously speak of the kind of attraction and revulsion, love and loss found within Stoner’s childhood and marital homes. The theme of captivity in both family and university environs constitutes the novel’s principal unanswered (un-American) conundrum: how to be at home in a “world that was like a prison wherever [one] turned” (219). In Williams’s hands, the disharmony of the family, be it academic or domestic, become inseparable from the idea of America as an oft-times alienating, unhomely space rather than a welcoming land of hope, freedom and privilege. Yet it is also within the academic world of the novel that the development of Stoner’s heroic character, albeit a tragic one, reaches its most decisive point. Stoner’s habit of silence is at last broken when he comes to realize how much reality is an effect of language use and that it is naïve to assume academia offers safety and rationality when in fact it does not.
The long-awaited arousal of Stoner’s anger arises from a sense that honour is being sacrificed to the desire to win at all costs. One of the novel’s most powerful dramas develops when outwardly confident vociferousness is pitted against lack of intellectual substance. The scenes are choreographed in an atmosphere of cheating by a student who is proven to know little about the subjects on which he is examined by Stoner and other faculty members. It is played out by warring academic identities who no longer share the same values, namely Stoner and his nemesis, Professor Hollis N. Lomax. The latter is introduced as an unsettling, walking contradiction: a man with “a small hump” a body “grotesquely misshapen” (93) but who has “the face of a matinee idol” (94).
Walker is rendered disruptive, outspoken and unenlightened, someone whose lack of ability is made up for in self-belief. His words are delivered as presumptuous claims to fact, as though his mere utterances were powerful enough to be transformed into knowledge. The character’s loud, immodestly abrasive behaviour is an indictment of the development of gregariousness as a distinguisher of human worth. In class, he interrupts “with questions and comments that [are] so bewilderingly far off the mark that Stoner [is] at a loss as to how to meet them” (141). Along with his craftiness, Walker’s performance is described as a colossal bluff (146), the cause of infinite silences between his fellow students and Stoner alike. In the evolution of events, under comprehensive oral examination, Walker is shown to be a fraud and a trickster. In play are the workings of a shameful venture of collaboration between supervisor and student. And Lomax stage manages it all, surreptitiously leading his weak protégé in the scholarly direction he wants him to go. When, for example, Walker asks that a question be repeated (159): “Lomax pretended a good natured puzzlement and asked for clarification” (160). That done, Walker proved himself able to continue in a voice “fluent and sure of itself, the words emerging from his rapidly moving mouth almost as if” (160) he had been coached. It was, Stoner admits “a masterful performance” (160) by both supervisor and student during all of which he had remained silent. Only when the performance ends does Stoner call out the stage-crafted collaboration based on his professional capacity and authority to do so, providing real evidence upon which to object to Walker’s deficiencies.
Most revealingly, recalled in this scene and acting in symbiosis with love and war, are the early words of Stoner’s mentor, Archer Sloane: “the scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build” (36). As with protests against war, however, Stoner’s lone challenge to the state of affairs hardly matters in the face of the corrupt nature of power within the confines of the University. The narrative gives every sense that Lomax and Walker have reparations to make for their part in attempting to manipulate an academic process “designed not only to judge the candidates general fitness, but to determine strengths and weaknesses, so that his future course of study could be profitably guided” (157). Insofar as Stoner having mastery (pun intended) over the situation, however, the rules of war and the rules of power prove to be the same. The “winner” has already been decided and Stoner’s efforts to bring either Lomax or Walker to account are defeated. After the event, the ambitious Lomax battles with the hypocrisy of his actions: “his face was red, and he seemed to be struggling with himself. Stoner realized that what he saw was not anger, but shame” for trying to dupe those he felt threatened by (182). Yet the battle was not over: “Stoner was willing to concede defeat; but the fighting did not end” (180). Rather than admit to tactical cunning, Lomax accuses Stoner of a lack of sympathy towards Walker’s “unfortunate physical affliction” (181). Disability, not responsibility for subverting the system, becomes the opportune strategy in the maintenance of power, with long term effects. For more than twenty years, silence reigned between them and “neither man was to speak again directly to the other” (182).
These scenes construct and interrogate the university community as an extension of a world which, historically, always ‘wins’ on the basis of hierarchies of power. They also stress that people in positions of power still listen to those who speak the loudest and that systemic unpredictability in matters of integrity and responsibility continue. Worth recalling at this point is David Master’s view that University life was “a refuge from the world, for the dispossessed, the crippled” (172). But as Stoner has it, Masters “would have thought of Walker as – as the world. And we can’t let him in. For if we do, we become like the world, just as unreal” (172). By virtue of Lomax’s self-deluding vanity and abuse of power, the transgressing Charles Walker is allowed to return unpunished to the university, the undeserving beneficiary of his mentor’s powerful position. Notwithstanding this, in the closing stages of the novel, a form of honour without fame “began to attach to [Stoner’s] name, legends that grew more detailed and elaborate year by year, progressing from personal fact to ritual truth” (237). As though this is the end point to which the story of the melancholy Stoner has been moving towards, he becomes “an almost mythic figure” (238) an unexpected and unlikely American hero.
Over time, defiant false-hope peddlers of new and old political persuasion have consistently fostered the idea that America could, on its own terms, be a nation filled with confident, heroic individuals bent on the pursuit of freedom and happiness. Williams’s meditation on the nature of silence and the heroic space offers a crucial difference in the way heroism is enacted. Encountered is a melancholy, ambiguous character damaged by life; a man who has not so much achieved success at his personal level of experience, but become resigned to disappointment and failure. Indeed at the close of the novel, Williams has Stoner dispassionately and quietly contemplate the failure that his life must appear to others (284). Yet Stoner dies knowing just who he was and believing “that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been” (287). In the figure of William Stoner, we are given a new-old sound that explores the more commonly tread cultural terrain of heroism to show that thoughtful silence can be both constructive and father to the deed. Stitched into his quiet, thinking self is a constant measure of tragedy which accepts sadness and loss as part and parcel of all life stories, including those of a nation. As with other Western European countries, America has its own myths about itself and its heroes which give shape to people’s aspirations but at the same time cannot be spoken without reference to historical realities. The subdued acquiescence typical of the fictional Stoner acts as a sustained metaphor for the uncontrollable socio-political processes which helped to define his and his country’s character. Silently on the page, it gives voice to the socio-historical identity of a nation which, like so many others across the world, has been forged from unforgettable moments of both greatness and unspeakable sadness.
Stephen Walt contends that America’s self-congratulatory notion that it and its people enjoy exceptional qualities, values and way of life is a myth. Americans are blinded to the fact that they are similar in many ways to other Western-European nations across world. That people come together in pain and sorrow as much as they do in pleasure, is universal. Walt, Stephen M.
See also
Williams’ use of the word “Negro” is a sign of the times in which the novel was first published. There is no place for this term in contemporary literature. Either “black” or “African American” are now acceptable.
See for example Jill Lepore.
Critics such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar regard the othering of the Bertha Mason character as a problematic patriarchal construct, discussion of which lies beyond the scope of this essay. (see
Consciously or unconsciously, the mischievous little hunchback, a German fairy tale figure, is conjured up by Williams in the figure of Lomax. The little hunchback appears throughout stories concerned with the life of Walter Benjamin. (See Arendt introduction to
By way of examples, metaphorically speaking, the deformities of Shelley’s Frankenstein represent not only his otherness but an effect of his crimes whereas Rymer’s Varney’s wrongs are signified by his monstrous body (see
The author has no competing interests to declare.