Death and Revery in James T. Farrell's O'Neill-O'Flaherty Novels

Abstract

James T. Farrell was born in 1904 and raised in a South-Side Chicago neighborhood that became the setting for much of his remarkable body of fiction. Filling to date some fifty volumes, this work includes hundreds of stories and four large fictional cycles: the Studs Lonigan trilogy, the O'Neill-O'Flaherty pentalogy, the Bernard Carr trilogy, and the Universe of Time sequence, of which nine volumes were published before Farrell's death in 1979. The first two groups, the three Lonigan and five O'Neill novels, share a setting (the South-Side neighborhood around where Farrell himself grew up), a time frame (roughly, 1900 to 1930), and several characters. I believe that these eight Washington Park novels should be seen as comprising one grand design, with two contrasting movements: the downward, negative alternative embodied in Studs Lonigan, who dies pointlessly, and the upward, positive possibility embodied in Danny O'Neill, who lives to become a writer. The tragedy of the wholly inadequate critical response to Farrell's work is that Studs Lonigan has been seen as the whole story, when, in fact, it isn't half of the story not even about Park.1 With a wisdom uncommon in beginning writers, Farrell knew that before he could tell the second part of the story, so much closer to his own experience than Studs', he had first to deal with an attitude that, had it been applied to autobiographical materials, would have negated his aim of objectivity: that is, the young artist's exaggerated hatred and rejection of his background. In part, Studs Lonigan is the exorcism desired by young Danny O'Neill when, in the middle of the Lonigan trilogy, in which he is a minor figure, he vows that Some day, he would drive this neighborhood and all his memories of it out of his consciousness with a book.2 Instead of the tight, fatalistic narrative drive of the Lonigan trilogy, the five O'Neill-O'Flaherty novels are diffused and episodic, and in this