(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2016)
The 2016 National Meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies will be hosted by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, the new Keough School of Global Affairs, and the University of Notre Dame. It takes place on the University of Notre Dame's campus in Indiana from March 30-April 3, 2016. ACIS is a multidisciplinary scholarly organization dedicated to the study of Ireland and the Irish worldwide. Founded in 1960, it has over 800 members in the United States, Ireland, Canada, and around the world.
The conference theme for 2016 is "The Worlding of Irish Studies" and asks:
Is Ireland transnational? With seventy million people of Irish extraction all over the world, the diaspora was more wildly successful—and more demographically complex—than scholars have yet imagined. This reexamination will weigh whether Ireland might be most productively understood as a post-colonial nation or a fully integrated European country. We will look to other peoples’ experiences in comparative studies; the effects of globalization on Ireland—its economy, literature and people; the north-south divide; and the ownership of the concept of what it means to be "Irish."
With this in mind, my colleague Tramble Thomas Turner (Penn State, Abington) produced a marvelous paper for the conference, “Revisiting Revolutions in Cuba, Albany (as always), and in The Church: William Kennedy’s Chango’s Beads and [the] Two-Toned Shoes.”
The paper is well worth a read and follows:
Notre Dame 2016 ACIS Conference Paper
“Revisiting Revolutions in Cuba, Albany (as always), and in The Church: William Kennedy’s Chango’s Beads and [the] Two-Toned Shoes”
© Tramble Thomas Turner 2016
Just prior to turning 84, William Kennedy published his 2011 novel, Chango's Beads and Two-Toned Shoes. In that work, Kennedy contextualizes his life-long interests in the Caribbean, Irish and Irish-American History, the American Civil Rights Movement in Albany (as he witnessed it as a reporter), and the influence of the Irish Roman Catholic Church in America. He develops those interests through a narrative exploration of the late-nineteenth century and the 1957 revolutions in Cuba. Long before John Harrington’s call in a plenary speech (at the Penn State-hosted ACIS Conference) for opening Irish Studies outwards and prescient of this conference’s “The Worlding of Irish Studies” theme, William Kennedy had been exploring Irish/Irish American/Caribbean/Civil Rights and Catholic Reform Revolutionary trends within his fiction and, earlier, within his early career as a journalist.
And in this commemorative year of the 1916 Rising, I intend to “follow the tracks” of implicit comparisons between the sacrificial heroes of the Dublin Easter Rising and the late nineteenth-century Cuban freedom fighter, Jose Marti, suggested by the oral and written histories that Kennedy weaves into Chango's Beads and Two-Toned Shoes. Amidst the novel’s exploration of his ongoing fascination with the struggle to understand the mysteries of love and passion, Kennedy has also woven a tale that probes the sources of political passions that lead young martyrs to their deaths and the problematics of how the historical record (oral and journalistic) of revolutions (whether Cuban, Civil Rights, or—perhaps—in Ireland) are constructed, curated, and passed on to future generations.
A career-long aspect of Kennedy’s voyage into fiction has been his alternating reliance on aspects of Hemingwayesque direct storytelling and on forms of magic realism and of the fantastic. His non-fiction collection, Riding the Yellow Trolley (1993), includes the transcript of a speech in which he reflected on the relative merits and allure of novels from the High Modernist and from the Post-Modernist canons of fiction. In his Hopwood Lecture, entitled “Writers and Their Songs,” Kennedy commented on a necessary pivotal shift for a journalist who wants to become a novelist, “The fiction writer who puts little or no value on yesterday, or the even more distant past, might just as well have Alzheimer’s disease; for serious fiction, especially novelistic work, has time as its essence and memory as its special tool” (Riding the Yellow Trolley Car 34). The comment applies not only to the Hemingway Kennedy describes in his essay, “His Clear-Hearted Journalism,” and to the Hemingway he presents as a fictive character at the opening of Chango’s Beads, but also to the novel’s central character Daniel Quinn, a journalist who hopes to become a novelist, and self-reflexively to Kennedy himself.
Looking back at the range of styles demonstrated by Kennedy’s Albany Trilogy (and such later novels as Roscoe 2002) as compared to his adventures into fabulation from his first novel, The Ink Truck, to more recent works such as Very Old Bones and Chango's Beads and Two-Toned Shoes, provides us with contexts for recognizing Kennedy’s assessment of trends in fiction that he has replicated and modulated over the decades. And in his eighth decade, this 2011 novel of Kennedy’s provides readers with a gloss on the most likely link between the Albany Trilogy (and related novels) to the historical fiction and fabulation of Quinn’s Book (1988), Very Old Bones (1992), and Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes. That passage occurs when the Quinn of the newest novel, the grandson of the titular Quinn of Quinn’s Book reflects, while planning questions for his 1957 interview of a young Fidel Castro, “Or a longshot—the link between politics and gangsterism” (94). On that same page [a little more than a fourth of the way into the novel], the narrative voice reflects on Quinn’s critical decision that drives the novel’s plot: “”Getting married in order to see Fidel—this may be Quinn’s ultimate sacrifice” (94).
Given the commemorations of “sacrifice” that we’ve been seeing and hearing during this centennial year [and at this conference], and within the context of the foundational ACIS tenet of interdisciplinary scholarship, Kennedy’s work provides a site for reconsidering how the oral tradition, as represented in fiction, and oral histories of specific events, such as the Easter 1916 Rising, may provide perspectives for reconsidering the historical record. For just as Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars generated hostility by creating a less heroic account of Dublin at the time of the Rising and of its aftermath, so, as literary scholars and historians gradually start to turn more to texts such as Kennedy’s Chango’s Beads, the life of Jose Marti, and to the early events of Cuba’s Revolution in 1957 and ’58, there will be new debates about the meaning of moments chosen for signification in literary and/or in historical texts.
As a step in that direction, this paper relies on a discussion of the theory of oral history to reread and to reinterpret the historical fiction of Kennedy’s account of Cuban, Albany-centered, and church-centered turmoil(s). Applying our conference’s theme, “The Worlding of the Irish” to Kennedy’s 2011 novel, this Irish American’s ability to structurally contextualize oral narratives of racial and religious unrest from 1960s Albany within the framing narratives of Cuban revolutions in 1898 and 1957 provides a starting point.
Drawing on Father Oliver Rafferty’s focus on the nexus of Violence and Religion in the Irish Risings, it’s possible, based on Chango’s Beads and Two-Toned Shoes, to add Music to Father Rafferty’s dyad for developing an analysis of the semiotic significance of the octogenarian’s novel. In this novel, the crucial Religion is Santeria, the source of the power of “Chango’s Beads,” and the central images of Violence in the novel are the machete-wielding, Afro-Cuban Mambi warriors of Cuba Libre. In two weeks, at the Southern Regional of ACIS, I’ll focus on the significance of Santerian and American “race records” music(s) for the novel’s meaning in more depth. Today, as at the wonderful 2015 Fort Lauderdale Beach ACIS Conference, my focus remains on how historical fiction reworks the historic record. And while work at Cuba’s Jose Marti Center will provide a basis for developing this approach, at present I’d note certain parallels between the short lives and careers of Padraig Pearse and Jose Marti (brief accounts of whose significance appear in Chango’s Beads):
An on-line biography notes that though “Martí spent much of his life abroad. In 1895, he returned to Cuba to fight for its independence. He died on the battlefield.” The Cuban-born revolutionary, the son of poor Spanish immigrant parents, like Pearse, showed an early literary flair: “He had several poems published by the time he was 15.” Of his early involvement in anti-colonialist campaigns, the site notes, “He supported efforts to cut ties with Spain, which held Cuba as one of its colonies at the time. Begun in 1868, this conflict between Cuban nationalists and Spanish loyalists became known as the Ten Years' War.” Like Pearse, Marti engaged in writing journalism and in writing poetry for advancing his adopted cause: “To advance his cause, Martí created a newspaper, La Patria Libre. He also wrote several significant poems during this time, including "Abdala," in which he dreamed of liberation.” [On that point, one might think of Roger Casement’s poem that provided the basis for Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel, The Dream of the Celt. 2012 trans; 2010]
“To free Cuba, Martí joined forces with two nationalist generals from the Ten Years' War, Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo. . . .
Through his life and writings, Martí served as an inspiration for revolutionaries around the world. Cuban leader Fidel Castro has called him an important influence on his own revolution in Cuba decades later. Although Martí once was sent into exile for his political activities, he is now considered a national hero in Cuba.”
On a first reading of Chango’s Beads and Two-toned Shoes, an Anglo reader innocent of the Cuban history of failed revolutions, Marti (mentioned only eight times in a five page section of the novel) may not seem a significant figure at all. Yet Kennedy positions those few references as the focal point of Daniel Quinn’s interview with a young, idealistic Fidel when “the Commandante” reflects:
“With Marti it may have been the opposite—death becoming more important than life. Distance had come between him and the two major military leaders of the war. He had been given the rank of major general, and people were also calling him ‘El Presidente’ of Cuba Libre. But Maximo Gomez, who made him a general, said that as long as he himself lived, Marti would never be president. And Maceo, a negro general of great intelligence, told Marti to his face that he was not a fighter and not fit to be called a general.
An unverified but enduring part of his legend is that Maceo pulled the general’s epaulets off Marti’s shoulders. If that was how it was for Marti—and we may never know the truth of this alienation—then his galloping into the Spanish guns very soon afterward can be read [my emphasis] as a tactical stroke of recreating himself as a martyr. And revolutions need martyrs [my emphasis]. Leaders plan the revolution, but the force grows from the tyrant’s oppression, and then come the argument and the ideas, and when you are in the season of insurrection, the momentum will overcome very great resistance. The leader sometimes realizes how miniscule he is, another energetic figure, but just a small gust of wind moving with the hurricane” (112).
In that passage I’ve just quoted, Kennedy has Castro comment on the mythic and legendary aspects particular moments of historical signification in world revolutions. And the language of blood-sacrifice built into the recurring link between Jose Marti and the word “martyr” echo much of the scholarship on the Rising from the last forty years. To recur to the triad of Violence, Religion, and Music that I suggested earlier in drawing on Father Rafferty’s approach, Religion enters the Quinn/Castro interview at its outset when Fidel asks, “You are wearing beads of Santeria. Are you a follower?” and Quinn replies “My bride is, but I am learning. A babalawo gave me these beads. They represent Chango” (108). In the historical narrative that precedes the interview, that triad (or Trinity) fuses through Dance when the music of a Santeria ritual leads the ex-slave, former guide to Quinn Senior, and Mambi warrior Nicodemo into an ecstatic dance that frees him from the violence of having beheaded eighteen Spanish soldiers with his machete:
“Quinn said it sounded like the universal language of heat. The women received what Nicodemo was sending them and answered with body language of their own, an exotic dialogue in motion. Nicodemo’s slave persona was nowhere in evidence, his movement was now obeying memory of an instinctual order, his manic excitement transforming him from machete warrior to warrior of the erotic night ” (104).
The same section of the novel (112) contains Kennedy’s reflections on what purpose he finds in writing about the historical record, and in that passage he embeds a phrase that seems to echo the title of that most famous of Irish Rebel songs, “The Rising of the Moon.” A narrative voice reports from within Daniel Quinn’s mind that,
“He’s doing it because it’s a continuation of an earlier life choice to be a witness, a writer, something to do while he’s dying that isn’t boring, and he will write about that, which seems his primary motive. He has a strong impulse to salvage history, which is so fragile, so prismatic, so easily twisted, so often lost and forgotten. Right now a full moon is rising on the revolution, on a day like none other and, if Quinn doesn’t report on it, who will? It will fade into the memory bank of those here, and if they survive they’ll tell what they remember, fragments of the actuality which they’ll skew with their prejudices (and so will you, Senor Quinn). Yet monitoring the whatness of the previous unknown, that seems to be Quinn’s job: I was there and then he said this, then this happened, and then they went that way—following the path of the machete, you might say.
Why bother?
Well Quinn is young [unlike his creator, I might add] and his motives may be more opaque than they seem, but he has no interest in gaining power for himself. He’s fascinated by those who want to transform the day, the town, the nation for other than venal or megalomaniacal reasons. Is working for the just cause one of his motives? It seems to be on his agenda. He intuits that it’s worth dying for. He also has another mission: he wants to escalate himself in his grandfather’s dead eyes” (112).
And so, in a passage where we re-arrive at the Daniel Quinn of Kennedy’s MacArthur “Genius grant-funded” novel, Quinn’s Book, Kennedy--who had indeed interviewed Castro prior to completing Chango’s Beads--stakes claims for the significance of historical fiction for adding to the historical record and for the genre’s ability to refocus or to correct the gaze of the historian’s lens while serving the earlier social function of the Irish Bard and of the African griot in preserving neglected aspects of the historical memory, Indeed, with this 2011 novel, William J. Kennedy emerges as not only one of our most revered Irish-American novelists, but as one of America’s most productive historiographers [those who theorize how and why histories are written]. [Kennedy’s works that more explicitly invoke narratives from Irish history include Quinn’s Book, The Flaming Corsage, Very Old Bones, and O Albany!
Still needed—examples of the revolution in the Church and the oral account of the Albany informer-instigated “riot.” ///
To quote from a cultural gloss from the early Prophetic Book of Joel (that is the Billy Joel of the 1970s—a cultural moment in which the lives of Quinn and Renata, as well as the lives of Bill and Dana, would have continued in Albany), Kennedy’s fictionalization of politics in Cuba, Albany, and within the Irish Roman Catholic Church in Albany seems to show that it’s true that “the sinners have much more fun” and that “only the good die young.” [Instances of the young ranging from Jose Marti and those who died in the attack on Batista’s Presidential palace back to the young man killed by the rock flung by Francis Phelan during the Albany Labor Strike fictionalized in Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Ironweed.
Given the time constraints for this presentation, I’ll summarize that Kennedy reveals much about Albany’s corrupt, scandal-ridden, and largely effective Democratic Party machine of the 1920s – 1960s in the novel through Quinn’s interview with the city’s current mayor who responds “blah, blah, blah” to the reporter’s question about the state of the city during the period of a race-riot and of a rumored assassination plot against the Mayor.
In terms of how Kennedy presents Revolutionary forces within the Irish American Roman Catholic Church community of Albany, suffice it to note the following passage that presents the devotional and revolutionary theology of young Father Matt Daugherty (the son of Katrina of the scandalous affair with the young Francis Phelan in other Kennedy novels):
“Matt told the chancellor of the diocese about Travis [a squatter in Albany] (during the same visit when he presented his list of twenty-two whorehouses) and said we gotta help this man. The chancellor said the only thing that will save those people is religion, which Matt used without attribution in his next sermon—a discourse on Bonhoeffer’s cheap grace and how it relates to the abstract, nebulous, gaseous blather that passes for morality in contemporary churches. Grace is a high-end item. You’ve got to work at it. Is it a healing church? Is the church the light on the mountain? Oh, yeah, Is the church the salt? Oh, yeah. What Bonhoeffer knew was the imperative to be extraordinary and Matt also threw in Augustine’s take on God: higher than the highest. I’d work day and night down here [meaning the Albany slums and brothers] if they’d let me—that was Matt’s dream. Find a way to help the Travises. I beg for a floor to dance, a room to sing, a floor without walls, a room without ceiling, and when my prayer is outworn there is no sap, no juice, no suckle. When each day is a dead mother. I remember when, and at that point the memory has sap, juice and suckle. Oh, yes it does” (247).
Kennedy builds into that passage about Matt’s sermon to a semi-indigent community rights audience, the typical call and response pattern long noted in African American churches. And while the Priest figure in Colum McCann’s justly famous Let the Great World Spin lives by a similar Dorothy Day-inspired social justice mission, it’s worth acknowledging that Kennedy, nearing 84, kept pace with the younger McCann’s achievement (as well as his social and literary significance).
In the remaining time, I’d like to address briefly some of the initial critiques of novel’s lack of form or coherence by turning to
[III.] the theme of love and passion as it relates to critical debates about the novel’s form and artistic success. In that regard, it’s worth remembering that the end sentence, which begins with a contraction, of his monumental Quinn’s Book (1988)—the book he wrote after receiving a MacArthur Foundation fellowship—reads as follows: “And then Maud and Quinn were at last ready for love” (289). Setting the novel in the Cuban events of 1957 is, in part, Kennedy’s act of creating a monumental work of fiction to his lover for Dana Sosa Kennedy, whom he married in that same year of 1957. For Kennedy’s familiarity with Bloomsday, see his delightful essay “A Week with the Verbivorous Joyceans: The Quest for Heliotrope,” which reflects on his experiences at the Fourth Joyce Symposium at Dublin in 1975 (77 -92, Riding the Yellow Trolley Car).
On Oral History Theory:
“In oral history, the individual negotiates his or her role within the historical record. Gary Y. Okihiro describes oral history as ‘not only a tool or method for recovering history; it is also a theory of history which maintains that the common folk and the dispossessed have a history and that history must be written. . . . {?} As a result, oral history offers a way for ordinary individuals to evaluate their lives in relation to the historical metanarrative (Ryan 25).
The difference, of course, is that Kennedy has created a fictional reporter/novelist who conveys to the reader the “oral interview” of Quinn with various characters from history and from Kennedy’s fertile, inventive mind.
On the ongoing importance of feminist critical approaches, Ryan summarizes: “Used together, feminist pragmatism and oral history allow the researcher to better understand what is meant by the concept of truth. This is not to deny the verifiable reality of specific historical events, but rather to adopt a new standard for the truth claim. ‘Truths are beliefs confirmed in the course of experience and are therefore fallible, subject to further revision.’11 As Jane Addams eloquently demonstrates in The Long Road of Woman's Memory, the act of storytelling can itself change reality. Not only does the story assert the teller's importance but also it has the potential for transformation. The telling of a story can establish a reconstructed world” (Ryan).
In the context of Addams’ commentary on the fable about a “devil baby” at Hull House, Ryan comments on the interviews she gathered with a remark that can open wider [x] the critical response to Kennedy’s Chango’s Beads, “By reconstructing a story, the narrator transforms the reality of the situation” (Ryan).
Background material for the Question and Answer Segment:
Kathleen A. Ryan’s study of Oral History interviews with female U.S. Navy and Coast Guard veterans of World War II could provide another frame for reconsidering the rhetorical function of sections of Kenney’s Cuban narrative.
In this paper, I will use the women's words to parse what is meant by this rhetorical move. Do the women really believe they did not do anything important? If so, why do they find it necessary to participate in the very public process of oral history, placing their names and life stories within the historical record? Considering both the content and the context of the women's words from a feminist pragmatist philosophical base will help explain this seemingly incongruent act. This article demonstrates that the women do not really mean to belittle their life experiences (and military service), but instead are using the phrase as a way to acknowledge society's expectations. The oral history interview, meanwhile, is used by the women to not only place their experience into the historical record but also to affirm the importance of their wartime work.
(Ryan, Journal of Oral History 36 (1) 25-44)
“In oral history, the individual negotiates his or her role within the historical record. Gary Y. Okihiro describes oral history as ‘not only a tool or method for recovering history; it is also a theory of history which maintains that the common folk and the dispossessed have a history and that history must be written.’5 As a result, oral history offers a way for ordinary individuals to evaluate their lives in relation to the historical metanarrative (Ryan 25).
Ryan cites the influence of work done at The University of Texas by Ann Cvetkovich, praising the latter’s solution for finding meaning in oral narratives
“Cvetkovich's solution is to quote large segments of the interviews without commentary or analysis, placing the words of one person alongside another. The resulting document, in the style of a collage, allows the individual narrator not only to ‘speak’ to the reader but also to engage in a conversation of sorts with the other interviewees within the project. Only after the narrators have spoken does Cvetkovich introduce her own analysis” (Ryan). The difference, of course, is that Kennedy has created a fictional reporter/novelist who conveys to the reader the “oral interview” of Quinn with various characters from history and from Kennedy’s fertile, inventive mind.
On the ongoing importance of feminist critical approaches, Ryan summarizes: “Used together, feminist pragmatism and oral history allow the researcher to better understand what is meant by the concept of truth. This is not to deny the verifiable reality of specific historical events, but rather to adopt a new standard for the truth claim. ‘Truths are beliefs confirmed in the course of experience and are therefore fallible, subject to further revision.’11 As Jane Addams eloquently demonstrates in The Long Road of Woman's Memory, the act of storytelling can itself change reality. Not only does the story assert the teller's importance but also it has the potential for transformation. The telling of a story can establish a reconstructed world” (Ryan).
In the context of Addams’ commentary on the fable about a “devil baby” at Hull House, Ryan comments on the interviews she gathered with a remark that can open wider the critical response to Kennedy’s Chango’s Beads, “By reconstructing a story, the narrator transforms the reality of the situation” (Ryan). Kennedy’s 2011 novel, I hope you’ll agree, reconstructs Revolutionary stories that range from those of Jose Marti and Fidel Castro, to the sacred, secular, and profane loves and passions of Father Matt, Daniel Quinn of his wife, Renata (who continue that exploration of preparing to learn of love that we encounter first in Kennedy’s work through the Civil War-era Daniel Quinn and Maud Fallon in the end sentence of Quinn’s Book.
Marti on-line biography cuts:
“[“By 1875, Martí had moved to Mexico, where he continued to campaign for Cuban independence. He contributed to several newspapers there and became involved in Mexico City's artistic community. But he soon became disenchanted with the country's government, and moved to Guatemala in 1877. Martí became a college professor at the Universidad Nacional, where he taught literature, history and philosophy.
Martí returned to Cuba when a general amnesty was declared in 1878 after the Ten Years' War had ended. He tried to practice law there, but the government refused to let him. Instead Martí found work as a teacher.”
“Another uprising, known as the Little War, erupted the following year [1879]. Farmers, slaves and others clashed with Spanish troops in Santiago de Cuba. Martí was arrested and charged with conspiracy in the wake of the rebellion. Again, the revolutionary writer was forced to leave his homeland. . . .
By 1881, Martí had settled in New York City. . . . He wrote well-received essays about such poets as Walt Whitman and he shared his impressions of the United States as a correspondent. In one of his most famous essays, "Our America," he called for Latin American countries to be united. Martí suggested that these countries learn from the United States, but establish governments that are based on their cultures and needs. . . . Traveling to different cities, Martí developed ties with other Cubans living in exile in the United States. . . . ]
* * *[He raised funds from Cuban exiles and political organizations to support their efforts. On January 31, 1895, Martí left New York City to make his way to Cuba. He and his fellow nationalist supporters arrived in Cuba on April 11 and began the fight for independence. . . .
· Among his ideas for a new Cuban government, Martí sought to prevent any one class or group from taking total control of the country. He also wanted to overthrow the existing leadership quickly, to prevent the United States from intervening in the matter. While he admired much about the United States, Martí had concerns that Cuba's northern neighbor would try to take over the island. . . .
·
He died on May 19 during some fighting in Dos Rios. . . . ]”
Peace, Tramble T. Turner
TTT3@PSU.EDU
215.868.5848 (mobile)
former ACIS Executive Board member
former ACIS Mid-Atlantic Representative
Though all plenaries and featured events for ACIS 2016 may already be set, in the context of “The Worlding of Irish Studies” and of Revisiting Revolutions, I'd like to suggest that the host committee consider inviting William Kennedy to attend the conference. [He and his wife, Dana, did attend the Albany, NY ACIS Conference and attended sessions.]
Had I not been ill for the last five months, I’d have tried to organize a panel on this topic and would have invited Professors Ed Hagen and Vivian Valvano Lynch to participate in the panel.
I hope that you’ll consider this brief proposal to be appropriate for an International ACIS Conference focused on contextualizing the events of 1916 in terms of global revolutions. As at the wonderful 2015 ACIS Fort Lauderdale, I’ll be drawing on approaches derived from the new international journal, The Journal of Cognitive Historiography.
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