Contingency and Nihilism in John Williams' _Stoner_

What Richard Rorty admires most in Freud is his recognition of the contingency of selfhood. By conceiving of the self as an assemblage of idiosyncratic experiences and chance encounters, Freud undermines moral prescriptions about how one ought to be and instead makes it possible to construct a multitude of identities. The titular character of John Williams' novel 'Stoner' is certainly a figure of contingency. Without a childhood, his career, goals, and relationships are products of chance. What's more, William Stoner is fully conscious of his life's fortuity. But rather than set him on a path of playful self-creation or Nietzschean overcoming, as Rorty would expect, Stoner's awareness paralyzes him. He passively slips into a nihilism that eventually kills him. Looking at Stoner, this presentation will build upon Rorty's argument to claim that if a recognition of contingency is a precondition of a successful psychoanalysis, it alone cannot be its aim.