Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [6]
If history is the reality that resists human wishes, if history is, as theorist Kaja Silverman puts it, “what hurts,” its effect a kind of “trauma,” the 1930s may comprise the only fully historical experience undergone by the United States as a nation in the twentieth century. The belief in American “exceptionalism,” its privileged immunity to the human tragedy, the “city on a hill” mythology on which the nation was founded, no longer seemed consistent with the facts. The kind of success for which Studs has been programmed by his community, a form of patriotic individualism paradoxically, hideously, premised on the belief that all individuals should be alike, colliding with a historical moment which (as F.D.R. would see) required collective imagination and broad experimentation, turns out to be a recipe for a most un-American failure. Studs doesn’t entirely believe the clichés on which he’s been raised—how can he aspire to becoming a stereotype?—but he has little of value to put in their place.
The first two books comprise the story of Studs’s miseducation as he is indoctrinated with the pseudo-facts of his own condition. First of all, he is “white,” which putatively makes him superior not only to the blacks moving into his neighborhood, but to the Jews who rent or sell property to them, even to Poles and Hungarians. Because the lines of ethnicity and race—who is white and who is not—were in fact, as they are shown to be in the novel, permeable and shifting, insistence on this point becomes all the more critical. The black novelist James Baldwin once remarked that “No one was white before he or she came to America.” Baldwin, of course, didn’t mean that immigrants’ skin color changed with their entry to the new world, but rather that their status and self-image did. At home, the Irish were sometimes seen by their English conquerors as closer “biologically” to black people than to white; it was only when they arrived in large numbers in the 1840s in a country where actual enslaved Africans monopolized the stigma of blackness that they could claim whiteness.
In the United States, to put it bluntly, there was always someone the poorest, least successful European immigrant could feel superior to; even when white workers’ wages were rock bottom, they enjoyed, in the words of African American theorist W. E. B. Du Bois, a “public and psychological wage”—racial superiority. Such benefits, as Studs Lonigan tells us, didn’t arrive for Jews until the World War II era. Though it sickens him, Davey Cohen (with Paddy Lonigan, the only character other than Studs of whom the reader gets an extended inside view), an uneasy member of Studs’s gang, must join in Jew-bashing as the price of admission. During a “gang shag,” the local teenage slut Iris lets all the boys have sex with her except Davey; whatever he does, he’s still a Jew, ranked below any Irishman. The old association between the Irish and the Africans still occasionally surfaces. One of Studs’s pals asks, “Where’s . . . a difference?” between “the niggers” and the Irish? “You Irish . . . and the niggers can both look up to a snake,” another taunts. But the racial barriers hold. At the end of the book, Studs, seriously ill with a heart condition, is out looking for a job in the rain; he watches a perspiring coalblack negro mopping the floor “rhythmically” in a luncheonette, and wishes he could be “as naturally happy as all the shines were”—blacks, apparently, like menial labor. Then he catches himself. “Suppose he had been born a jigg. Christ! That was one thing to be thankful for!” At the bottom, Studs can still imagine a black face looking up.
The ideas of masculinity Studs picks up are equally limited, though he invests them with far more longing, effort, and detail. The book opens with Studs on the night of his graduation from grade school selfconsciously practicing his tough guy gestures and lingo before the bathroom mirror. “I’m kissin