The Work of (Dis)figuration in John Williams’s Stoner

Abstract

Abstract: This essay on John Williams’s neglected 1965 novel Stoner investigates its treatment of agency and its tension between realism and naturalism. The novel develops a sustained conversation with Faulkner’s Light in August, from which Williams draws a constellation of tropes linked to Stoner’s agency: his major life decisions are driven by misreadings of figure. The essay traces major formal features of the novel’s representation of agency: the rehearsal of images from Light in August and Shakespeare’s sonnet 73; repetition of key figures, including the mask and its related trope of prosopopoeia; the spatialization of time through the linear images of the circle and line; and the engagement of multiple elements of the uncanny, to include the interrogation of language itself. Derrida’s critique of the structure of the decision illuminates both the problem of Stoner’s agency and the novel’s dramatization of the connection between the decision, the secret, and the spectral.