Communal, Familial, and Personal Memories in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night

Communal, Familial, and Personal Memories in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night JOHN HENRY RALEIGH The human memory, on one of its many levels, manifests itself in three overlapping categories: the historical and communal; the familial and social; the autobiographical and personal. At one end of the scale is the constellation of collective memories, given by one's socia-economic class, ethnic background, education, religion, the historical period ofone's life, nationality, and so on. At the other end of the spectrum, in a purely private shrine in one's own unique ego, there are those individual memories that no one else, past, present or future, will ever share or know. Social-familial memories tend to connect to both categories, the public and the private. At the extremes of the spectrum there appears to be, on the communal side, an assertion: "We are what we are," and at the private end a question: "Who am IT' The most compact - compact because it is a drama, albeit a lengthy one dramatization of this triadic aspect of memory in our literature is O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night; it is also one of the most powerful such dramatizations, powerful because the communal-familial memories are so distinct and intense, and because the private memories, the "Who am I?" constituent, are so moving, poignant and problematical. To take the historical-communal aspect first, the Tyrones are an IrishAmerican family in whose collective consciousness the "Irish" side is probably more important than the "American" side. There were few other emigrant groups in America who so insistently proclaimed their native identity as did the American Irish Catholics, from the middle of the nineteenth century on down into the twentieth (the phenomenon has lessened but has by no means yet disappeared in the 1980S). Indeed the scope, longevity, and intensity of the IrishAmerican fixation on its own, unique past has by now engendered a very large historical-scholarly literature on the subject ofthe Irish emigration to the United States, larger, I believe, than is the case for any other group of emigrants. The latest, and in my opinion the best, book in this area is Kerby Miller's JOHN HENRY RALEIGH massive Emigrants and Exiles (1985), which is not only a description and analysis of the Irish in America but is also a comprehensive history of Ireland itself, Miller's point being that one cannot properly understand the emigrants if one does not fully understand the culture from which they came. Miller's principal thesis is tbreefold: that the Irish regarded emigration as involuntary exile (Irish wakes were held in Ireland for those about to depart, as if they were already dead; they were called both "American Wakes" and "Living Wakes"); that this outlook was a deeply-rooted and long-standing constituent of Irish culture, the product of a world-view long preceding the English conquest; and that this exilic outlook had much to do with their American experience, often not in happy ways. As Miller narrates his lengthy, complex and rich story, at almost every juncture a member of the O'Neill clan comes to mind. The Irish, says Miller, agreeing with other students of the subject, were "the most homesick ofall immigrants.,,1 Letters written home to Ireland, memoirs (Miller had access to some five thousand of these), songs, and ballads all have this pervasive note ofsadness. Many Irish emigrants shared a nostalgia rooted in the idyll of childhood memories, which even success in America could not eradicate. Miller quotes from the autobiography of the fabulously successful financier Thomas Mellon, who himself wondered at the poignancy of his recollections of Ulster after sixty years in America: "It must not only be true that we learn more in the first five years of life than in any ten years afterward, but also that we retain whatever we learn in those five years incomparably better than anything we learn at a later date" (p. 131). Any student of O'Neill is immediately reminded of James O'Neill's seemingly maudlin statement: "It was in Kilkenny, smiling Kilkenny, where I was born one opal-tinted day in October, 1847 [actually it...