Medievalization Theory: From Tocqueville to the Cold War

Abstract

There is a poignant moment near the end of John Williams's Stoner (1965) that strikes a cautionary note for those invested in the study of American medievalism. Williams's novel traces the career of a man named John Stoner from his birth on an “arid patch of land” in Booneville, Missouri, in 1891, to his retirement from the Department of English at the University of Missouri, followed immediately by his death, in 1956 (4). From his beginnings as a dirt-poor farmer, Stoner arrives at the campus in Columbia, matriculating as an undergraduate who finds his calling in the study of English literature before moving on to graduate school and, eventually, a faculty position—all at the same institution. For reasons both personal (a dismal, distant marriage) and professional (an enemy as his department chair), Stoner never rises above the rank of assistant professor, his gentle ambition thwarted by circumstance and his own dogged principle. The wider world too seems to pass him by: he stays home from World War I even while his close friends enlist (one of them returning to become the dean); his life is only vaguely affected by the cataclysms of World War II; and the Cold War lays just a thin patina of institutional and social conservatism over the narrative. This sense of quietism is deeply affecting, though it has shattering consequences for the protagonist. As he lies on his deathbed, Stoner looks back on his teaching career as a largely failed effort to instill a measure of wisdom and integrity into his students’ lives: And he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one; yet he knew, he had always known, that for most of his life he had been an indifferent one. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else? What did you expect? he asked himself. (274)

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