On Love and knowledge (and the politics of the Novel)

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.― John Edward Williams, Stoner

Stoner, a book first published in 1965, sold 183,000 copies in translation in the Netherlands in 2013.* The book paints a pleasantly heroic (in the manner of Hutcheson) portrait of a quiet life dedicated to a single vocation (teaching undergrads) steeped in nostalgia for a simpler age. Unlike many campus novels, satire is not the dominant theme. William Stoner lacks what the Ancients would have called "spirit" (the most violent and, perhaps, best scene in the novel is a comprehensive exam); he is unable to fight for anything or anybody he holds dear or battle the inevitable changes he deplores. It is no surprise that sensitive, spirit-less readers today are so fond of this elegantly drawn portrait (ignoring the omniscient narrator's hostility toward the protagonist's love-deprived wife and her family).  One may well read the novel's unmistakable anti-war ethos as suggesting that inward dignified withdrawal is sufficient in order to avoid contamination.**   

In the passage above, the omniscient narrator moves from the individual at a given time (Stoner, 43 years) to the universal ("love is"). The narrator offers two claims that one can learn:

1. The person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last,
2. That love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another

The narrator does not explain the conditions of such learning. But it is clear that Stoner's book-knowledge has, despite his love "of literature, of language, of the mystery of mind and heart showing themselves in the minite" not prepared him for the practical experience of the sexual affair with his student--rather, it seems that his book-knowledge has delayed the acquisition of knowledge of the nature of love. (Incidentally, Stoner is not portrayed as a predator; rather, he is blind to his own feelings (and the color of her eyes), and his fierce student initiates the affair with a "shut up and come over here.") Here I focus on the second insight.