Medievalization Theory: From Tocqueville to the Cold War

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)

This is the nightmare of irrelevance shared by all academics being honest with themselves: the fear that the professorial career will ultimately amount to nothing, and that even the classroom, where we can hope to affect others’ lives most directly, will entomb our best efforts to make a difference. What did we expect?

Yet Stoner attempts to stave off this minor apocalypse, and it does so with a reverential embrace of the most unlikely of intellectual heroes: medievalism. The novel’s opening paragraph had already hinted at William Stoner’s profession as a scholar of medieval literature—though it does so in a particularly morbid way:

When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: “Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.”

(3)

An appropriate token of Stoner’s unremarkable career, the manuscript is unidentified, generic, anonymous: we never learn what writings are inscribed on its folios, nor what role it may have played in his work. His dissertation, “The Influence of the Classical Tradition upon the Medieval Lyric” (41), similarly rings with the desultory, and we must wait until the final paragraphs of the novel to gauge the potentially redemptive possibilities of his scholarship. Here, as Stoner lies dying of cancer, his hand reaches for a book: his only published work, as far as we know, a revision of his dissertation published some 30 years before his death. “It hardly mattered,” Williams writes, “that the book was forgotten and that it served no use; and the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial”; indeed, “a small part of him that he could not deny was there, and would be there” (277). Yet even with this small hint of intellectual survival, the novel ends with a death, a fall, and a haunting turn in narratorial point of view...