The foregoing chapter should make two facts pretty obvious:
1. Most of Stoner is about a guy getting pummeled.
2. The author of this book is somewhat pathologically inclined toward feuds.
These two facts are intimately bound. The Stoner saga represents a wish fantasy for readers such as me precisely because we take pleasure in identifying with William Stoner as an entirely innocent victim—the perfect martyr.
Stoner always acts with pure intentions. He woos Edith with an abject devotion and reacts to her obvious dissatisfactions by redoubling his efforts to please her. He courts Lomax with the same guileless determination and winds up sandbagged by an implacable antagonist. There is nothing Stoner can do to defuse these folks—nothing within the capacities of his character, anyway. Thus he suffers, extravagantly, exuding the quiet dignity of the persecuted. The battles exhaust and depress him. Yet he never surrenders to cynicism or complaint or even apathy, not once. He carries on with his sacred calling.
If you’re sniffing something distinctly Christic in the saga, that is by authorial design. “The point of the novel,” Williams explained to his agent, “will be that [Stoner] is a kind of saint.”
Stoner himself is wholly unaware of his sanctification. He’s too busy dodging Edith’s slings and grading freshman compositions in the gloom of his office. Thus, the reader is granted the strange pleasure of marveling at his stoicism, a pleasure intensified by the particular features of the modern American inner life.
What do I mean here? I mean that our cultural posture has become one of perpetual complaint. (Note: this observation is itself a complaint.) As citizens of history’s most rabid capitalist cult, we have come of age in a society that profits by making us feel insecure and impatient. We are awash in images of lives more prosperous and pleasurable than our own—luxury hotel suites, pornographic tacos, sun-struck highways.
And thus, as we trudge through a reality of grubby rooms and digestive malfunction and snarls of traffic, we are highly susceptible to the belief that we have been wronged. This is a dominant feeling among our citizens: a virulent self-pity that has been eagerly (and lucratively) cultivated into a booming political and media market.
As I write this, our nation has just witnessed the mass murder of eleven Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. Hours before the shooter went on his rampage, he went online to share his motive, which centered on a Jewish nonprofit that provides aid to refugees. He believed this organization “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
He was convinced that this humanitarian group had infiltrated a “caravan” of central Americans fleeing violence in their own countries and traveling north, toward the United States. In other words, he saw a bunch of hungry, tired refugees, most of them women and children, as an advancing army. Why? Because a raft of paid demagogues and political actors had been spouting this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory for weeks.
He wasn’t convinced in the passive voice. That’s a copout. Specific people, one of them our president, actively convinced this man that he was the true victim, and that only by slaughtering a bunch of Jewish strangers at their weekly religious services would he be able to keep his people safe. This is how terrorists think. They always see themselves as martyrs whose rampages are principled and heroic.
In Trump’s America, this kind of lethal paranoia is no longer quarantined to the cultural margins. It is the ethos of a major political party and the default setting of a population addicted to victimization. Every issue—from taxation to immigration to religious rights—is now routinely framed as a victim drama. The fixation on gun ownership is, at root, an obsession with victimization. Only unfettered access to assault rifles will keep our people safe. Only the gun lobby will protect us from the gun grabbers. Even the debate over something as practical as affordable healthcare becomes a victim drama if you can convince people that a bill intended to make insurance more affordable will include government death panels.
Is it any wonder that half the films churned out by Hollywood are comic book epics that portray a cosmos organized into villainy and victimhood?
*
I realize I have wandered off the reservation of literary tribute again and into the morass of public morality. But I’m after something here, which is the peculiar and pervasive gratification that we all feel, as humans, when we connect to our own sense of victimhood.
In the case of the conspiracy theorist, that victimhood is energetically constructed from a set of stray facts and insinuations, bound by the feverish logic of paranoia. Stoner himself encounters this pattern of thought in the outbreak of McCarthyism, which he rightly diagnoses as a form of mental illness. “He saw hatred and suspicion become a kind of madness that swept the land like a swift plague.”
Such mass contagions thrive in frightened and fractious eras, but they are predicated on a timeless susceptibility, a dire need to regard ourselves as the central victim in any story. This delusion, however cynically promoted, arises from a real set of fears: that we are at the mercy of forces beyond our control.
Literature often functions as a balm to such anxieties by focusing on figures who specialize in overcoming adversity and shaping their own destiny. David Copperfield pondered whether he would be the hero of his own story, after all, not the victim.
But there is an even more ancient tradition to consider. Martyrs are central to and inextricable from our religious mythology: we have only to think of figures such as Job and Christ whose grotesque suffering is exalted as the central proof of their devotion. William Stoner is a throwback to such figures. He is born poor. He dedicates himself to an obscure mission. He eschews egoism and is dependably punished for his virtues. He acquiesces to unprincipled enemies and suffers without complaint. In a characterological sense, he is literally the anti-Trump. Bearing witness to his relentless integrity is a kind of fetish for Stonerians, a secular version of religious faith.
But there’s also a crucial element of escapism at work. The novel portrays a world in which those determined to antagonize Stoner always find a way, and his efforts to avoid that antagonism are therefore doomed. He cannot defuse his rivals. Thus, every time I read Stoner, I am briefly and thrillingly convinced that the same applies to me.
It doesn’t. Because let’s face it: we always collaborate in the creation and perpetuation of our feuds. They arise in response to our particular cycles of idealization and disappointment. They escalate because both parties come to believe they are protecting something sacred. They boil over because we suppress our frustrations and thereby condense them into wrath. We then compound the crisis by underestimating our power in relation to our rivals.
*
As an example, let me revisit another dispute with a publisher, for whom I wrote a book about the moral atrocities of football. The central point of contention between us was the cover that would grace this volume. I wanted an image reflective of my radical position—ideally, a photo that captured the savagery at the heart of the enterprise. The publisher favored an image without violence, which his sales team feared would alienate female readers.
Soon, the dispute had gone beyond the cover. It was about us, our egos, the trench warfare of trust and respect. My job was to write the book. His job was to decide how the book would be presented to the world. He needed me to understand that he held the power. This was why he disregarded a series of emails and phone calls, a pattern I found humiliating.
When I finally exploded, I made sure to inflict maximum humiliation. I told him that I had decided to work with him because I thought he truly cared about art and social justice, that he wasn’t just a corporate suit who answered to the folks in marketing. I implied that he was the very thing he had spent his life attempting to prove he wasn’t: a sellout. I also assailed his power by announcing that I would have nothing further to do with the book if he insisted on a cover I didn’t approve of, and that I was happy to return my advance and shop the book elsewhere if he had a problem with that.
I will spare you the arias of rage that followed because I never actually heard them. The publisher did put the book out, but he never spoke another word to me, dispatching underlings to carry out that odious task.
Was I intransigent? Out of line? Even sadistic?
Yeah, I guess I was.
And yet, when I go back over the steps that led to this falling out, I don’t see how we could have avoided it. He was always going to impose his agenda as a publisher, which I was always going to experience as bullying. I was always going to lash out at him, which was always going to infuriate him. We were always going to do this particular dance because we were programmed, long ago, to do so.
*
I saw myself as the doomed hero in this scenario, the trampled artist. There is something in me—that residue of having been bullied as a kid, of struggling to control my own aggression—that bristles when I sense someone trying to roll me. I latch onto offenses, overt or perceived. I nurture my victim status and use it as a justification for high-handed literary attacks.
To indulge in a meta moment, I’ll point out what has no doubt occurred to many of you: the very act of writing about all these feuds is, at least in part, prompted by a desire to reignite them. This is how it works with us perfect martyrs: combat is our form of intimacy, our path back to the place where the pain began. Consciously, we want to punish other people. Unconsciously, we want to punish ourselves.
And this does actually steer me back to William Stoner, whose martyrdom arises from a bottomless well of masochism. Nearly every decision he makes over the course of the novel—to woo and marry Edith Stoner, to surrender his daughter to her care, to withstand Lomax’s assaults—causes him distress.
But don’t talk my word for it. Toward the end of the novel, Grace visits her dying father. “Poor daddy,” she says, “things haven’t been easy for you, have they?”
“No,” Stoner responds. “But I suppose I didn’t want them to be.”
I shouldn’t be heartened by these words. But I always am. It’s so rare to encounter a person, even a fictional person, who can cop to his masochism. Most of us walk around doing everything we can to not recognize the ways in which we conspire against ourselves. We pretend that our central desire is always contentment. It’s not. Our central desire is to feel alive in the ways that are most familiar to us. In this sense, as we’ll see further on, Stoner has no precedent for the joy he finds in literature and teaching. His childhood has prepared him only for a life of agricultural hardship. He has make things hard for himself.
But it’s also true that he finds ways to contend with his tormentors over the course of the novel. After years of being an exile who basically lives on campus, for instance, Stoner returns home. Edith goes nuts, but this time Stoner refuses to acknowledge her provocations, and she finally accepts his presence.
His response to Lomax’s academic abuses is ingenious: he begins teaching his freshman comp classes as if they were the advanced seminars over which he once presided. Rather than primers on rhetoric, he assigns his students sophisticated texts on medieval English. Lomax tries to intercede but Stoner cheerfully notes that it would be dangerous to interfere with the teaching method of a senior faculty member. Outwitted, Lomax hands his rival the classes he should have been teaching all along.
Stoner takes no great pleasure in these triumphs. He just wants what he’s due. That’s what I genuinely admire: the humility with which Stoner navigates his misfortune. He comes to understand that the world and its wounded are going to come after you, and that you have to find ways to defend yourself without doing the dance.
Reading Stoner makes me wish I were better at that. I regret all the hours I’ve squandered defending my honor when I should have been asserting my rights, and working to accept the limits of my power in the world. William Stoner’s dignity makes me feel undignified. To put it more gently: beholding his virtue has brought me closer to a version of myself I can stand.
At the same time, I’ve learned a good deal from Stoner about the excesses of self-sacrifice, especially in the context of my personal life. In my marriage, and even more so as a parent, I’ve caught myself engaging in a pattern of feverish and reflexive service to my children, sanctifying their happiness while ignoring my own. Not only does this foster ingratitude and entitlement within them, it turns me into a guilt-provoking schmuck, the kind of dad who volunteers to drive his daughter to school on a rainy day (as I did just this morning) then says to her just before she gets out of the car, and in true drama queen style, “Gee dad, thanks for taking time away from your work to give me a ride!”
In this case, miraculously, my daughter did thank me. It was a lovely moment. But it had the fingerprints of the perfect martyr all over it. Generosity isn’t supposed to be transactional, after all. It shouldn’t come with a receipt of assumed victimhood. What I’m getting at here is that there is no such thing as a perfect martyr because life isn’t a suffering pageant. It should be possible—even for modern parents—to move beyond the role of “poor daddy” (or poor mommy), to ease the burdens of their children without making things hard for themselves.