Stoner by John Williams

If you like your novels bleakly existential, then this one is for you. It is every bit as dark as Camus’s The Outsider. Somewhat bizarrely though, every page turns out to be an absolute delight, though I must confess the last chapter was so gut-wrenchingly depressing that it took an extreme effort simply to turn the next page. And yet there is something quite life-enhancing about this long forgotten novel, something that shines through that existential bleakness that we all must face sooner or later. Forcing its way past the personal, life-long failures of William Stoner, in his marriage, in his family, and in his work, there is a celebration of life itself the sheer act of being and of consciousness.

William Stoner finally comprehends all this, and the astute reader, if they have not totally succumbed to the catalogue of horrors that is Stoner’s unfulfilled life, will grasp this too.

If we care to consider the nature of the human condition in any depth, it soon becomes apparent that the greatest gift, or should I say asset, that three and a half billion years of evolution has bequeathed us is that of consciousness itself. The consciousness to comprehend our own existence and of course our own mortality. The consciousness to appreciate our integration into a much larger eco-system both here on Earth and in the cosmos generally. The consciousness to slowly but surely unravel the physical laws of the universe and to apply those laws to our own needs and comforts. To be able consciously to develop ourselves both as individuals and as part of a collective is a rare gift indeed. To be able to consciously rid ourselves of accumulated superstitions, scientific ignorance and petty one-sidedness is something that, as far as we know, only we humans can achieve. The appreciation of that rare gift ought to be enough, but it rarely is. We all too often busy ourselves with childish, egocentric preoccupations, much of which are simply reflections of our animalistic drives and insecurities And all too often we only really get clarity when we are on our death beds with our gift of consciousness rapidly ebbing away. So it was for William Stoner.

What the Stoner novel highlights above all else, is that first we must recognise the meaningless of our daily preoccupations before we are able to grasp a more universal perspective. Most philosophies, whether they be wrapped up in religious obscurantism, utopian idealism or grounded in materialist realism, attempt to make much the same point. While gazing on the graves of his parents, Stoner starts his embryonic awakening:

He turned on the bare, treeless little plot that held others like his mother and father, and looked across the flat land in the direction of the farm where he had been born, where his mother and father had spent their years. He thought of the cost extracted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase. Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in labour, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves. P110

A little later, Stoner is forced to ponder the emptiness of his own life:

He had come to a moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life was worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which he thought had little to do with himself or his particular fate; he was not even sure whether the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the destiny of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that from what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter. P184/5

These gloomy passages are particular to Stoner’s life, but when we reflect upon them for even a moment, we are forced to realise this is the ultimate fate of our parents, our children and indeed, ourselves; insignificant lives destined to rot in the ground, forgotten and irrelevant.

But whether we should consider this relentless conveyor belt of living and dying as totally meaningless is a moot point. Who remembers the trials and tribulations of those countless millions of unrecorded lives from the great classical civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece and Rome? Only a handful of their philosophers, politicians, warriors and writers remain in the public consciousness today, and then only by a relative handful of academics and scholars. Yet who would deny that somehow the experiences of those great civilizations, including those of the plebeians and slaves, have not informed how we live our lives today. There is a connection; there must be a connection, across the ages and across the continents. Every life must surely, however seemingly insignificant, be part of the collective consciousness, and logically, every life has meaning, even if it is to only highlight the injustice, the cruelty, the stark inhumanity of life itself.

You can argue the case either way, but the case for meaning is every bit as convincing (or unconvincing) as the case against. The trick perhaps is not to look for meaning per se, but to celebrate the fact that we can contemplate the question at all. Celebrate the great philosophers and scientists, playwrights, novelists and artists of every medium, but more so, celebrate the possibility that through an ever expanding collective consciousness, every child has the potential to be a Mozart, a Marx, an Einstein, a Stephen Hawkin or a Richard Dawkins. And celebrate also that neither gender, nor sexuality, neither colour, creed nor geography need be an impediment to such a rich and conscious life. A life freed from material want, freed from the debilitating chains of scarcity. A life fully conscious of its own circumstances. That alone ought to be meaning enough. I suspect that John Williams, through his wonderfully scripted William Stoner, was suggesting just this.

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