Quinn's Book: Reconstructing Irish-American History

Abstract

William Kennedy's Quinn's Book, like Toni Morrison's Beloved, is an act of historical imagination that encourages reader to reconsider events in nineteenth-century America. Both works revive painful memories from American past in order to provide basis for new perspectives. Of his own Irish-American family's sense of that period, Kennedy commented in O Albany!, if they remembered anti-Irishness that prevailed in nineteenth-century America, they repressed it (40). Examining how novel resurrects that aspect of nineteenth-century Irish-American life and establishes basis for reevaluating anti-Irishness through cultural comparisons with African American experience can enable readers to recognize how novel reconstructs of period to encourage comparison between experiences of two immigrant communities forced to America's shores. The illustration entitled and Paddy Go To Town, pictured at right, introduces final section of Quinn's Book (237) and stands as an emblem of novel's bridge-building dynamic.(1) This pairing of stage Irishman and black-faced minstrel visually underscores novel's challenge for reader to explore comparisons between stock types. Such comparisons can lead to recognizing similarities in complex cultural identities that lie beneath. In that way supplementary illustrations in novel suggest thematic issues. For example, just as reader puzzles over significance of disk-like object centered on title page illustration and riddle of whether minstrel in later illustration is white man in blackface, so, throughout novel, Quinn puzzles over the mystery of disk (74) and over mystery of African American Joshua, about whom Quinn claims I have never presumed to truly understand (250). That final illustration reintroduces linkage introduced early in novel when title Tambo and Paddy Go to Town is referred to as music-hall production two genres: minstrel show and Irish frolic (92).(1) How text establishes such bridging of Irish-American and African American traditions is focus of this essay. Within this historical novel that is presented as Quinn's autobiography, Quinn's reflections on Joshua's experience as an African American becomes central in widening his understanding of his own identity as an Irish American. The fiction of Quinn writing his autobiography provides clearest basis for comparing novel's technique with major genre of African American writing tradition. As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has observed, Autobiographies of black women, each of which is necessarily personal and unique, constitute running commentary on collective experience of black women in United (161). Moreover, previous studies of African American autobiographies have asserted applicability of insights about genre to fiction: Autobiography and fiction are simply different means of arriving at, or recognizing, same truth: manner in which and by which African American makes and is made by his historical, political, and social condition in United States of America (Cudjoe 276-277). Morrison's and Kennedy's novels each create commentary on American history, though critical difference results from Morrison's emphasis on pain involved in struggle to remember. Selwyn Cudjoe's comments on fiction and autobiography provide partial frame for an approach to Kennedy's creation of an African American character. Other insights contained in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s collection of contemporary criticism, Reading Black, Reading Feminist, provide means for comparing novels under discussion. In that collection, Hazel Carby writes of Jesse Fauset's attempt to create a new relation to history (80) for black middle class, while Barbara Christian presents perspective more directly applicable to Morrison's novel: we have moved to excavate past and restore to ourselves words of many of our foremothers who were buried in rumble of distorted history (49). …