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.