The stone wings of the ‘black swan’. On Stoner by J. Williams

Abstract

M. Khlebnikov’s essay is devoted to the ‘rediscovered’ novel Stoner by the American writer J. Williams, published in 1965 but unknown to wider audiences until the early 2000s. Through detailed analysis of the novel’s plot and psychological structure the author offers his understanding of what caused the book to plunge into obscurity for many years and the meaning of its recent ‘rediscovery.’ According to Khlebnikov, the success of Williams’s novel is symptomatic of some serious process that has not come to an end: on the one hand, the enthusiasm for Stoner can be explained by a gradual ‘renewal of the canon,’ highly anticipated by critics, professors and other members of the literary community trying to bring back forgotten books; on the other hand, the attention towards Williams’s work may be viewed as a reaction to the excesses of Postmodernist aesthetics. Overwhelmed by excessive literariness and sheer concentration of quotes, one begins to hanker after ‘life that’s alive;’ thus the novel’s objective flaws, which inevitably caused it to flop in the past, are now hailed as its irrefutable merits.