Diaspora blues: Eileen Myles, melancholia, and the loss of Irish-American identity

Abstract

Notwithstanding a reputation as one of the most electric contemporary voices on sexuality, queer identity and the ecstatic adventures of a tenacious poet in New York – a notoriety belatedly celebrated in a recent increase in popular recognition – a striking sense of loss casts a shadow on much of Eileen Myles’s writing in their 3 works of autobiographical prose and immense poetic output of 11 volumes to date. In applying the psychoanalytic phenomenon of melancholia, Freud’s premier theory of loss, to two of the author’s most popular works of autobiographical fiction – Chelsea Girls (1994) and Cool for You (2000) – this article examines the ways in which Myles represents twentieth-century working-class Irish-American ethnicity as an identity profoundly structured by loss and mourning. As this discussion shows, Myles’s construction of Irish diasporic and ethnic identity in Chelsea Girls and Cool for You traverses the spatial, ideal and bodily remains of histories of loss, and produces, in emotional and imaginative forms, the obsessive refusal to leave the dead behind.

Keywords:

• Eileen Myles
• Irish-American Literature
• diaspora
• melancholia
• ethnicity
• autobiography

Acknowledgements

I would like to offer my sincerest gratitude to Professor J. Jack Halberstam, Dr Fintan Walsh, and Dr Ed Madden for their helpful comments and crucial guidance on an early draft of this essay at the 2017 Queering Ireland Conference, held in May at the University of South Carolina.

Notes

1. The article respects Myles’s use of plural pronouns “they” and “their” to identify their preferred gender identity. For clarity, the article uses “they” when speaking about the author (in interview, for instance), and the pronouns “she” and “her” when referring to the fictionalised character of Myles’s writing.

2. Myles, “Twice,” 349.

3. Myles, “What Tree Am I Waiting,” 4.

4. Ibid., 3, 4.

5. Rogers, Irish-American Autobiography, 8.

6. Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Postmodern Arts of Memory,” 195, 196.

7. Buckley, “Imagination’s Home,” 24.

8. See Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Hauntings: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature, Charlottsville, Virgina: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

9. Coughlan, “Paper Ghosts,” 129.

10. Myles, Cool for You, 27.

11. Myles, “Protect Me You,” n.p.

12. Eng, “Melancholia in the Late Twentieth Century,” 1275.

13. Eng, “Melancholia/Postcoloniality,” 140.

14. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 243.

15. Previously out of print, both Chelsea Girls and Cool for You were recently republished in 2015 and 2017 respectively.

16. Eng, “Melancholia/Postcoloniality,” 138.

17. Georgis, “Cultures of Expulsion,” 4.

18. Eng, “Melancholia/Postcoloniality,” 138.

19. Eng and Kazanijan, “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” 2.

20. Kaplan, “Souls at the Crossroads,” 513.

21. Eng and Kazanijan, “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” 1.

22. Georgis, “Cultures of Expulsion,” 5.

23. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 247. Indeed, in dedicating Chelsea Girls and Cool for You to Ted and Nellie, Myles presents their books, in memoriam, as commemorations of loss. In other words, grief is the very precondition for Myles’s novels.

24. “Eileen Myles and Chris Kraus Read from their Work,” n.p.

25. Kristeva, Black Sun, 3.

26. Myles, Cool for You, 3.

27. Ibid., 27.

28. Aristotle, Problems, 277.

29. For a helpful outline of this gendered history of classical melancholia, see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.

30. See Eng’s “Melancholia/Postcolonality,” 137 and “Melancholia in the Late Twentieth Century,” 1275 for a review of the gendered nature of Freud’s psychoanalytic phenomenon.

31. Myles, Cool for You, 27.

32. Ibid., 31.

33. Ibid., 57, 58.

34. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244.

35. Myles, Cool for You, 143.

36. Ibid.

37. For additional examples of Irish immigrant blues, see Lawrence McCaffrey’s The Irish Diaspora in America, 70–2. Sarah Pierce’s 2015 exhibition, “Pathos of Distance”, at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin further extends the link between migration and melancholia in the public imaginary. https://www.nationalgallery.ie/pathos-distance.

38. Miller, Ireland and Irish America, 114.

39. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 5.

40. Myles, Cool for You, 146.

41. Miller, Ireland and Irish America, 340.

42. Ibid.

43. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244.

44. Myles, Cool for You, 147.

45. Ibid., 143, 144.

46. Lloyd, Irish Times, 6.

47. Ibid., 29.

48. See, for example, Miller’s Emigrants and Exiles, 345–53 and chapter four of Kevin Kenny’s The American Irish: A History, Harlow and London: Longman, 2000, 131–79, for outlines of figures and statistics for the post-Famine period of emigration.

49. There is a rich body of scholarship exploring the occupational, social, and domestic lives of Irish immigrant women in America since the mid-nineteenth century. A few key texts include Diner’s groundbreaking Erin’s Daughters in America, Janet Nolan’s Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland, 1885–1920, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989; Íde B. O’Carroll’s Models for Movers: Irish Women’s Emigration to America, Dublin: Attic Press, 1990; and Gray’s Women and the Irish Diaspora. See also, Miller’s Ireland and Irish America, 302.

50. Lloyd, Irish Times, 71.

51. On this somber affair, Jay P. Dolan writes in The Irish Americans that the custom “developed from the traditional wake of the dead, when relatives and friends of the deceased would sit up all night in the company of the body, mourning the person’s passage” (76). For a more detailed history, see Miller’s conclusion in Emigrants and Exiles, 556–68.

52. Diner, Erin’s Daughters, 110.

53. For more a more detailed history of Irish immigrant women in the domestic service and the invention of the “Bridget” stereotype, see, for instance, Diner’s Erin’s Daughters in America, 70–105; Peasant Maids-City Women: From the European Countryside to Urban American, ed. Christine Harzig, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997 (especially Deirdre Mageean’s contribution to the collection, “Making Sense and Providing Structure: Irish-American Women in the Parish Neighborhood,” 223–60); Kenny’s The American Irish, 110, 111, 152–4; Miller’s Ireland and Irish America, especially “For ‘Love and Liberty,’” 316, 317; and Christine Palumbo-DeSimone’s essay, “‘Kitchen Queens’ and ‘Tributary Housekeepers’: Irish Servant Stories in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Magazine Fiction,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 33, no. 2, (2014): 77–101.

54. Gray, Women and the Irish Diaspora, 3, 4.

55. Myles, Cool for You, 143.

56. Miller, Ireland and Irish America, 340, 341.

57. Ibid., 331.

58. Myles, Cool for You, 167.

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid., 57.

61. Diner, Erin’s Daughters, 110.

62. Ibid.

63. Eng and Han, “Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” 675.

64. Miller, Ireland and Irish America, 335.

65. Myles, Cool for You, 144.

66. Ibid., 169.

67. See Julia Watson’s “Ordering the Family: Genealogy as Autobiographical Pedigree,” in Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996: 297–326; Stephanie Rains’, “Irish Roots: Genealogy and the Performance of Irishness,” in The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity, and Popular Culture, ed Diane Negra, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006, 130–60; Catherine Nash’s Of Irish Descent: Origin Stories of Genealogy, and the Politics of Belonging, Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2008.

68. Rogers, Irish-American Autobiography, 84.

69. Ibid., 97.

70. Eng and Kazanijan, “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” 1.

71. Eng and Han, “Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” 680.

72. For an excellent criticism of such a truncated view on Irish-American history, see Miller’s essay in the American Historical Review, 93 (1988): 1393, 1394, in which he takes issue with what he observes as an “ahistorical overemphasis on the ultimate suburbanisation and embourgeosiement of the Irish that trivializes the immigrant and even the second generation experiences”. For a particularly revealing vision of the Irish-American “success” story, see McCaffrey’s response to Miller’s criticism in the preface to his Textures of Irish America (xi–xiv).

73. Rogers, Irish-American Autobiography, 32.

74. Fanning, The Irish Voice in America, 313.

75. Myles, Chelsea Girls, 207.

76. Myles, “Merk,” 195.

77. Myles, Chelsea Girls, 23–8.

78. Myles, Cool for You, 146.

79. “Michelle Tea, Eileen Myles, and Jill Soloway in Conversation,” n.p.

80. Myles, “Annihilation in My Blood,” Dialogue Talk, n.p.

81. Eng and Han, “Dialogue on Racial Melancholia,” 673.

82. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 23.

83. Ibid.

84. Eng, “Melancholia/Postcoloniality,” 140.

85. Myles, Chelsea Girls, 209.

86. Ibid.

87. Ibid., 214.

88. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 243 (emphasis mine).

89. Myles, personal communication, September 19, 2016, New York.

90. Myles, Chelsea Girls, 214.

91. Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 132.

92. Ibid., 134.

93. Indeed, Myles’s writing profoundly reveals the ways in which the melancholic incorporation of a lost other has formative effects on the constitution and performance of embodied gender. For particularly revealing examples of such psychic mimesis, see, for instance, the opening to the chapter “My Father’s Alcoholism” in Chelsea Girls, in which Eileen identifies what Butler, in “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”, calls “the disruption of the Other at the heart of the self”, which establishes the very possibility of that self (27). Furthermore, Eileen’s gender identity, the outward sign of psychic incorporation, is developed diversely through identifications with her father in Chelsea Girls and grandmother in Cool for You. As Butler writes, “the psychic subject is … constituted internally by differentially gendered Others and is, therefore, never, as a gender, self-identical” (27).

94. Myles, Chelsea Girls, 181.

95. Ibid., 42.

96. Hirsch, Family Frames, 5.

97. Ibid.

98. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 5.

99. Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” 664.

100. Freeman, “Packing History,” 728.

101. Ibid.

102. Eng and Kazanijan, “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” 1.

103. Morgan, New World Irish, 43.

104. Myles, Cool for You, 151.

105. Myles, Chelsea Girls, 140.

106. Lloyd, “The Memory of Hunger,” 219.

107. See, for instance, O’Connor’s article on alcoholism in Irish and Irish-American culture in Irish America: “Breaking the Code of Silence: The Irish and Drink,” February/March, 2012, http://irishamerica.com/2012/01/breaking-the-code-of-silence-the-irish-and-drink/.

108. Lloyd, “The Memory of Hunger,” 220.

109. Ibid.

110. Eng and Kazanijan, “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” 6.

111. Myles, Inferno, 13.

112. Ibid., 14.

113. Ibid., 227.

114. Cisneros, The House on Mango Street, 110.