Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [7]
Much of what matters most to Studs, the beauty of the park, the tenderness he sometimes feels for girls, and his own softer feelings, he labels “goofy” and refuses to talk about. He can’t keep Lucy, the girl of his adolescent dreams, in part because, when a problem arises, he refuses to be the one to try to make it right, and she moves on. His masculine method of protecting his territory is a way of losing it. Studs isn’t wrong, however, that femininity as it is practiced in his world is professional hypocrisy. His rival, the brutal Weary Reilly, publicly insists that the “niceness” girls are socialized into peddling—their continuous protestations of purity, their horror at masculine aggressiveness—is a pretense, and he brings to heel the best-bred, snootiest girl in their group.
Years later, however, when Weary takes a young girl to a party and assumes that her fear of sex is a façade, he makes a terrible mistake. Despite the fact that she automatically dances in a provocative way, Irene is a virgin, and terrified of violation. In trying to defend the calling-the-bluff routine which constitutes his only act of perception, Weary must rape, beat, and nearly kill her. Irene presses charges against him, sending him to jail for ten years. Girls do mouth platitudes even if they don’t mean them; what Weary doesn’t understand is that when they do mean what they say, they still have to use the same platitudes. They possess no socially-sanctioned language by which they can convey sincerity. At one point Studs and a friend discuss the reason that all girls, nice or otherwise, “wriggle when they walk”; they “had to,” the two young commentators conclude. In other words, no matter how they feel, girls should move dirty and talk clean. Helen Shires, the tomboy friend of Studs’s youth with whom he feels uniquely at ease, who is openly disdainful of feminine coyness and circumlocution, has no other gender possibilities that the novel can keep in its sights. Studs and Helen drift apart; she moves away, and rumors circulate that she is a lesbian, in this world an untouchable.
Studs Lonigan is a variant of the stream-of-consciousness novel which James Joyce and Virginia Woolf pioneered in the modernist era just preceding Farrell’s own, but Farrell demystifies, Americanizes, and proletarianizes the form. Unlike Joyce or Woolf, Farrell did not believe that consciousness as most people experience it involves much free play or self-replenishment; it’s not equivalent or superior to reality. Consciousness is not a delight, nor a refuge, for the large masses of people who have no real epistemological mastery over life at all. Studs’s stream of consciousness serves instead as the anxious reflection of social programming and his inchoate desire to escape it.
Farrell never lets us lose touch with the longing for self-fulfillment which animates Studs; he needs to find and be himself, yet he possesses little more than a cross section of the mass mind to achieve that goal. Even when he is dying, his mind is filled with disjointed authoritarian images borrowed from his culture. The Pope demands, “Do you receive the sacraments regularly?” A satiric element enters his hallucinations. George Washington appears to shout, “Your country right or wrong, but your country, my boy, jazz her!” Studs, mute on his deathbed, is still conscious though his family doesn’t know it, and he realizes, “What a joke it was!,” though the joke is surely