Memory and Hearsay: Ethnic History and Identity in Billy Phelan's Greatest Game and Ironweed

Abstract

write this book... as a person whose imagination has become fused with a single place. The opening words of 0, Albany!, William Kennedy's of Albany, prepare the reader for a richly detailed rendering of the history of a place where history is inseparable from and (371). Weaving together his own memories with those of other individuals as well as drawing upon historical documents, Kennedy seeks to peer into the heart of [Albany's] always-shifting (7). As in his fiction, he closely ties historical memory to place in a manner that headily mixes nostalgia and political insight. Kennedy finds much to celebrate in his study of Albany's history and its people, and the multitude of reminiscences and anecdotes lends a nostalgic sheen to the text. But he does not uncritically venerate the city, and in his use of oral histories, he is clearly attuned to both the blindnesses and insights of reminiscence and anecdote, of and hearsay, in the retelling of an ethnic past. In his urban biography of Albany and in his Albany novelsLegs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed, and Quinn's Book-he allows memory and hearsay to permeate the boundaries of conventional historical narrative.l In doing so he explores not only the most visible contours of Irish-American history, such as machine politics, but also the everyday encodings of ethnic identity and distinctiveness. In exploring what constitutes Irish-Americanness, Kennedy shows a keen interest in how the ethnic group uses (selects and interprets) history and reinvents the past in the process of self-definition. Ethnicity is not represented as a fixed psychological or socio-cultural entity in his texts, but rather as a dynamic process of identity formation-in which memory plays a significant role-implicated in specific material and political realities. I want to look closely at two of the Albany novels, Billy and Ironweed, as they depict the struggles of Irish-Americans to make sense of this process. Kennedy has produced what is often termed a cycle of Albany novels, documenting and expanding