I recently read the book Stoner by John Williams; a book often praised as one of the ‘great’ American novels. The story was about a young boy born to farmers who is encouraged to study agriculture at the University of Missouri by his father. He takes the opportunity to do so but after an English class going over Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, he falls in love with literature and decides to change his major. Eventually, he enters academia where he continues on to a PhD, and then begins teaching his own class. Over the course of his life (which coincides with the first world war), Stoner experiences love and loss but most importantly (I think), his life is extraordinarily normal.
He falls in love with his wife in a way I imagine most men probably do – or at least did in those days – because she is beautiful and dainty and lets himself talk about himself without really having to learn anything about her. He makes friends who he feels are very different to him but have a big impact in his life that carry out into his old age. He has regrets and affairs and conflicts and everything is written with this beautiful and melancholic prose that reads as sad but also elegant.
As I read this book, I felt a constant (and somewhat painful) awareness that this was a book written by a white man in the 1960’s about a white man in the 1890’s. Painful because as a black teenage girl, each time a person of colour is mentioned in this story (which is precisely twice – one man who works as a hired hand on Stoner’s parents’ farm and a lady who works as a maid for Stoner’s wife) they are referred to as ‘Negro’ and their characters serve only as almost these sidenotes that exist to fill in spaces that don’t really need to be filled.
While the language and stereotypes surrounding black people existed at the time in which this was written and set in, the choice to include these characters feels like a subtle (yet glaring to the right reader) reminder that this character, who supposedly represents the mundanity and same-ness of human existence, that you may think is just like you, views you as less than – not equal.
One of the most harmful instances of this in this novel occurs when William returns home to find that ‘his father had hired a Negro field hand who worked with a quiet, fierce intensity, accomplishing by himself in a day nearly as much as William and his father together had once done in the same time’. Reading this line made me really disappointed in the book because where every other character mentioned is given context that aims to make you understand them, the only characteristic John Williams wants you to know and understand about the only black man in this novel (whose name is Tobe – only mentioned in the last interaction Stoner has with him) is that he is inherently predisposed to physical labour, twice as much as he or his father were.
This implies that Tobe is genetically and anatomically wired to handle grueling labour better than his white counterparts, which seems contradictory to the character of Stoner’s father who was a farmer himself from a long line of farmers. Such understanding of black men and women, i.e. the idea that their anatomy made them ‘stronger’ and less sensitive to physical pain are extremely harmful as this reasoning was used to justify the enslavement and inhumane treatment of black people. Although it is important to recognise that with the abolishment of slavery did not come the widespread abolishment of the harmful stereotypes that justified slavery, the deliberate choice of Williams to use this stereotype in a throwaway comment about the only male black character in this book is nothing short of intentional. This specific sentence hit hard because the consequences of this stereotype still exists today – for both men and women – as people today still hold the unfounded belief that black women experience relatively little pain in childbirth compared to their white counterparts and treatment of black women in medical spaces today still operate under this belief.
The thing I found most beautiful about this novel was the universality of the human experience. That I, at 19, could relate to a white American male in middle age when ‘he wondered if he appeared as ludicrous to others as he did to himself’ or when he describes love as a ‘human act of becoming. a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart’. As a daughter of immigrants, I could relate to his uneducated parents, their pride in his achievements and choices, the ‘mixed pity…and distant love’ he held for them. I saw my own contemplations written before me when ‘he found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been’. But all this is overshadowed by the fact that Williams writes this story and this character not to be related to by black, coloured and ethnic people. His experiences are reserved to be related to the white man only and perhaps the white woman may find traces of herself in Edith or Katherine or Grace or his mother.
This critique of the novel in no way aims to overlook the soft and almost lyrical way that John Williams writes. I think it elevates it in a way because his character and the experiences he gives him are so fundamentally human and universal that even though he may have written with a specific audience in mind, he is unable to exclude those he may not have thought had the capacity to hold the same thoughts, reservations and experiences. In the end, Stoner does an incredible job of portraying humans in their most normal form, living each day as it comes with a life marked by love and loss and conflict and regret. And it was so good that I found myself offended that I could relate to this white middle aged man from Boonesville that I should not understand much less relate to in his turmoiled thoughts, wavering emotions and awkward demeanour. In the end, I was moved. The novel is inspiringly real and echoes of the universal human experience (regardless of race or gender) without knowing it. My final thoughts about the book were that I wondered if a life like Stoner’s is one worth living or if there is no point in wondering whether a life is a worthy one because regardless of that it’s one that has been lived – if that’s all we need to do and if that’s enough.
Overall, I was still disappointed by the stereotypical portrayal of black men and women in the book that is never really challenged by Stoner’s character. And I feel that it would have made sense to do so as he was not only a student but a teacher of literature which I have always seen as an extremely political subject, but instead he seems to just accept the idea that people of colour are unequal and participates in the culture surrounding that belief, so I cannot call it the perfect novel as many others claim it to be – but it was close.
-oknaima💌
