John Edward Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner represents everything wrong with the Boomer generation and White Americans in general. A “novel” like this is suppose to set in hypothetical “acting” situations in order for the reader to see how condescending the Christian tract is. It’s a pretentious and ethical cry about how the leftover Anglo-Saxon elite in America trying to stand against the revolutionary outbreak of 1969. The American academy has always been corrupted, and to ever assume that their were innocent agents upholding religious emulations of Plato or Jesus, assumes that Williams was rather presenting us with a picture of the pathetic and weak white person who sells out his people, akin to Sinclair Lewis’ 1922 “satire” novel Babbit. “Satire” is often a placeholder of status quo ridicule than of parody, because satire functions as a form of punishment within liberal ethics to condemn those who are not as open-minded and egalitarian as the educated ones. If Babbit was a detailed and compiled hatred of the modern man, then Stoner can be read as the arrogant plea for whiteness in academia.
Why do I have to make this about race? Ironic, considering the most liberal in academia tend to fend off any doubt of difference in favor of American ideas of equality. But acknowledging Émile Durkheim’s Suicide proposal, when a society becomes materialistic and individualized, the suicide rate goes up, and the people no longer find a common bond with one another. Given that admixture European people exist as individual “Americans” without a race, this implies a hostile elite is trying to kill off the unenlightened that is against their game for “truth” and “justice.” What then, is intellectualism if it means a prior role-playing game foisted upon everyone to be “white” like Stoner?
The real culprits are the reactionary Boomer class against the up and coming postmodern thinkers of the time. Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Althusser, Lyotard, and even Lacan all have a place in the criticism of modernism, even though they themselves never though of being “post” any sense of the term. Contrary to the French, the four horsemen of the white middle class compromise consists of David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo. These four authors stretch out “meritocracy” and assume a novel must be an ideological message to keep up a status quo. Then we have Stoner that made these men possible. It just makes the French look like the good guys in the end.
Stoner leaves us with the ugly conclusion of New Historicism that happened in the 1980s. New Historicism believes that studying literature (and books in general) is the highest virtue and that all other disciplines are dependent upon artistic poses and stories. Stephen Greenblatt, it’s founder, is obsessive with the idea of “collecting books” and consuming things of the past that tries to justify the value of reading in an age of accelerating technological illiteracy. Greenblatt takes the same steps as the pretentious Harold Bloom, as they both shun and shame the novel taking on forms against their fuddy-duddy control of European history. As noted before, The English major in this case is an agent for racial supremacy and rigidness, which fails to contemplate the criticism found within the French.
It’s also no surprise that Greenblatt’s wife, Ramie Targoff, tries to change history and insist that women have something to do with the development of Shakespeare. To ideologically inject feminism in the past is changing the goals to fulfill liberal ideas of egalitarianism then to address the real evidence of the English racial nationalism that is being espoused. So in the context of Stoner, it’s the white man ethic to “feel good” about following orders, even if it means death and the fabrication of evidence. Stoner as a character can’t comprehend opposition and difference that goes against his ideological priority of getting things right, hence his mental breakdown against the crippled and intelligent genius, Charles Walker.
According to a review by Dr. Christopher Willard,1
“Walker is a liar and pseudo-intellectual who clearly does not do the work. Holly Lomax is an avenger. Both are described as having a physical disability…”
And,
“Stoner is at first awed by the performance, and of course he response to Shelley’s strange power that floats unseen among us, much like his unaccounted for passion for literature and teaching, this power, or spirit, beauty and truth, that steels him against the onslaught of life and labor.”
Willard takes the side of Stoner, which I find incredibly cringe and mislead on his behalf. However, Willard does acknowledge that Walker is akin to Hollis Lomax, Stoner’s rival, in that both Walker and Lomax posses an outsider quality to their intelligence, which I admire.
Noting Lomax’s queerness,
“Stoner invites Lomax to a housewarming party and Lomax accepts. By ten o’clock he is quite drunk and he speaks of his childhood in Ohio, the isolation that his deformity had forced upon him, his loneliness and the freedom he found in books.”
Willard assumes that Hollis Lomax picked up Charles Walker because both are deformed queers who want to express a new idea of it. So why is Willard assuming a good and bad ethos here? Many undergraduates currently hire essay mill writers to do their work because so much of the English department peddles in pro-neoliberal Americanism propaganda in every source of Shakespeare to Chaucer. These students are smart because if they don’t ideologically repeat about black lesbians saving equality, they will get an “F” in class. What is “work” then if all of it is some David Graeber ranking “Bullshit Job?”
Before Stoner died, the novel ends on the note that, “He was himself and he knew what he had been.” Stoner is everything Max Weber points out in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, knowing well his religious dedication is also the same decadence of the declining white population in America, trading their people for profit, of fictional “meritocracy,” and Christian self-guilt transhumanism.
How Walker has manifested “laziness and dishonesty and ignorance,” is absurd. For Christopher Willard to take face value that Walker must be “a liar and pseudo-intellectual” (and perhaps Willard is project his own insecurity here), assumes Walker is the object of ridicule, that of Satan and what the protestant ethic cannot become! What is of values, of “something can be salvaged” from Walker? Why is Stoner upholding the notion of the condescending liberal that can’t understand the queerness of the artist?
Elaine Showalter of the The Washington Post gets it right,
“What is especially disturbing here is that Stoner recognizes Walker’s intelligence. He feels a “perverse admiration” for his presentation and admits to himself that Walker’s “powers of rhetoric and invention were dismayingly impressive.” Nonetheless, he gives Walker an F for the course and dismisses the matter from his mind.”2
Stoner sets upon an irrational attack that there must be an ideological way to be a “teacher.” His whites-only subculture is in decline against a new wave of postmodernists that have came in to doubt modernists thinking and the arrogance of worshiping Western civilization. Stoner is that professional white person denying his own racial consciousness while subconsciously embracing it as being a “teacher,” or “defending literature.” Showalter also mentions Stoner’s comparison of ugliness to evil, that, “This repeated portrayal of Stoner’s antagonists as physically deformed is, perhaps, one of the novel’s nastiest, most outdated strategies. This notion that the beautiful correlates to the good and the ugly to evil can be used to propagate the irrational Protestant ethic.
Alice Rachel Ashe hits hard back in her 2023 Master’s thesis, “The Queer Plot of Stoner.”3 She points out,
“And while I don’t know about “Lomax,” there certainly seems to be some cruel irony in the naming of Charles “Walker”—though I suppose he does, at least, “walk away” from his abysmal oral examination unscathed.”
It is disgusting that Charles as a “walker” is made up as a punching doll for Williams perverted imagination. Ahse notes that Lomax is used as an idol of mimicry for Walker, in that Walker is reminding Stoner of his own envy and anger against Lomax’s intelligence. Walker being crippled or being a “walker” is a scapegoat for the liberal understanding of the text to go against the anti-liberal. Stoner is ideologically biased in that he wants to hear the right answers from Walker.
How is Walker a “fraud?” Because he is handicapped and “incompetent?” And what “skills” of ideological fashion is he missing? Funny, because there are many black academics that have been crying for decades about how evil whitey is, all while the white staff that made Stoner advocates these hypocrites and pushes them forward! Walker is NOT an example of identity politics or a scapegoat of queerness over pure reason. Walker is highly intelligent and a talented speaker. It is Stoner who is insisting that analytical philosophy or logic has something to do with the performance, in the same vein that Alvin Plantinga can see whatever he wants about the existence of God “so as long as it makes sense.” Or what about David Benatar and his irrational “Better Never to Have Been,” or, “The Harm of Coming into Existence!?” Using Peter Singer-esque ethics, it logically makes sense to follow a structural order, but at the cost we should not exist and advocate death over life? Plantinga and Benatar would be celebrated by Stoner, and yet Walker gets the “fraud” treatment because Walker sounds like Nick Land, Mark Fisher, or even Timothy Morton doing a creative theory fiction rant. These names are well admired in the liberal arts world, and it’s Stoner from the 1960s who sees these people as possible threat to his cherished “English studies,” which is actually a synonym for “white nationalist studies.”
David Brooks observes in his 2000 study, Bobos in Paradise, that the new upper middle class of whites developed the same traits of whiteness found in Stoner. Brooks proclaims that “Bobo” is portmanteau of bourgeois and bohemian, where both traits synthesize as one. Bobos are defined as having highly tolerant views of others, often purchase expensive and exotic items, and believe American society to be “meritocratic.” It is this obsession with meritocracy that Brooks gets to the point. It’s the same delusional of meritocracy found within Max Weber’s study on Protestant culture and the development of capitalism in the European world. Stoner was too young to be a Bobo, but his insistence that there had to be elitism, tolerance, and meritocracy in academia meant that his students would all become Bobos.
In my own undergraduate experience, I have seen the same clones of Stoner. Disgusting worms like Timothy Jackson of Rosemont College and Don Z. Block of Montgomery County Community College all reek the same white escapism and arrogant display of English literature against all rational thought. The good news is that generation is on it’s way out. We are now in a society that is becoming hostile against these Boomers of the past.
If you are going to give Stoner a try, acknowledge that Williams wasn’t even being satirical about anything, and rather writing a fantasy how things should be in academia. It feels like Stoner was the last cry of the reactionary modernists types who were pushed out of academia by the postmodern innovation. The four horsemen return to bicker and cry about a return to “Neo-sincerity,” but Wallace, Pynchon, McCarthy, and DeLillo can only echo the celebration of the white academic and his aloofness towards a changing world against America.
Charles Walker is the radical and it is profoundly stupid that Walker is projected as the enemy in the text. To be against Walker means we are hating our own artistic right. The Philistine is Stoner, and we should be up against the prude who continues to police our diverse expressions.
-pe
4-20-2024
Subscribe now
Share
Share Polemics 1
https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1286&context=english_theses
http://dlvr.it/T5nmCy
pilleaters 
Leave a comment