John Williams’s Augustus

Over the last few months, I’ve been thinking about John Williams’s novels Stoner and Augustus. The latter was particularly on my mind as I continued my rather quixotic effort to re-read Ronald Syme’sThe Roman Revolution and to ponder its relevance, less, perhaps as a treatment of Augustus’s reign, and more as commentary on the mid-century (and ongoing) struggles against totalitarianism and fascism. 

Augustus and Stoner deal with similar themes. In fact, an uncharitable reader might say that in Augustus Williams imagines William Stoner as emperor of the world. Like Stoner, Augustus seems trapped in a series of inescapable binds, he confides in only a small group of friends, and struggles with the responsibilities of family life and his own personal happiness. Both Stoner and Augustus struggle with daughters who they love dearly, but ultimately lose as they become victims of family “politics.” Both Stoner and Augustus manage civility with their spouses but little beyond that and find love in affairs. Augustus and Stoner both reflect on their lives as they realize the end is near. Stoner dies feeling like he was successful; Augustus (in a series of brilliant ruminations) dies feeling more ambivalent. To be clear, I’m not the first to make this comparison.

Both Stoner and Augustus (the novels and the individuals) exist within a world that they can’t control. This offers a distinctive perspective on Augustus when compared with Syme’s view of the emperor. For Syme, despite his emphasis on individuals, manifest in the endless litany of names, there is something impersonal lingering behind the machinations of Augustus. Our sources have obvious limits and a historian respects these limits in a way that a novelist doesn’t have to. That said, the impersonal character of Augustus’s transformation of the Roman system feels deceptively modern. 

Here, Syme’s Augustus meets Williams’s. For Williams, Augustus is subject to forces beyond his control and deftly works to navigate them. For Syme, Augustus creates new systems which allow him to expand his power and authority in unprecedented ways. One wonders how far these systems go before they imply a kind of bureaucracy.

Bureaucracies are designed on the basis of some kind of morality or maybe even ideology that ultimately is impersonal, even if it speaks to the human condition in a profound way. In Western society, we tend to assume that ideologies generalize basic human morals across global systems. When these ideologies are activated or implemented, they manifest as bureaucracy. Bureaucracies allow individuals, then, to hide behind frameworks that are ostensibly steeped in moral or ideological thinking, but function on the basis of impersonal rules. This is the irony of bureaucratic states: policies, processes, and procedures are inherently impersonal despite having goals to produce a better more moral, more ideologically, pure world. This allows bureaucrats to  make very difficult decisions in ways that seem completely impersonal. They’ve effectively offloaded the challenging moral thinking to a system.

Maybe I’m preoccupied with the impersonal character of bureaucracy and seeing it everywhere. Or maybe I’m conflating modern bureaucracies with other forms of impersonal social systems that constrain human behavior. It seems intentional, thought, that Williams would set Stoner on a university campus. There are few places where impersonal systems and a deep commitment to individuals exist in a more awkward way. Augustus likewise is set atop a massive empire and beset by forces that push him to make decisions that challenge his personal commitments. Syme’s Augustus, in contrast, as the author of these forces and systems, seems set apart from the world that he has created. Anticipating modern dictators, Syme’s Augustus holds no value higher than power itself; Stoner’s Augustus sees only futility and failure.