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Home , Charles Gavan Duffy, Ciaran Carson, David Wheatley (poet), James Clarence Mangan, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde

Essays on This page intentionally left blank Essays on James Clarence Mangan The Man in the Cloak

Edited by Sinéad Sturgeon Queen’s University , Northern Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Sinéad Sturgeon 2014 Individual chapters © Contributors 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-27337-6

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the , Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-67024-6 ISBN 978-1-137-27338-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137273383 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the . Cataloging-in-Publication Data Essays on James Clarence Mangan : the man in the cloak / [edited by] Sinéad Sturgeon, Queen’s University Belfast, Ireland. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Mangan, James Clarence, 1803–1849—Criticism and interpretation. I. Sturgeon, Sinéad—editor. PR4973.Z5E87 2014 821'.8—dc23

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India. Contents

Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors viii List of Abbreviations xi A on the Tiles with J. C. Mangan xiii Foreword xiv Jacques Chuto

Introduction: James Clarence Mangan: The Man in the Cloak 1 Sinéad Sturgeon 1 Crossing Over: On Mangan’s ‘Spirits Everywhere’ 14 David Lloyd 2 ‘Fully able / to write in any language – I’m a Babel’: James Clarence Mangan and the Task of the Translator 33 3 ‘Antiquity and Futurity’ in the Writings of James Clarence Mangan 53 Joseph Lennon 4 Cosmopolitan Form: Mangan’s Anthologies and the Critique of Weltliteratur 84 Cóilín Parsons 5 Night Singer: Mangan Among the Birds 102 Sinéad Sturgeon 6 ‘The last of the bardic poets’: Joyce’s Multiple Mangans 124 John McCourt 7 ‘[M]y mind is destroying me’: Consciousness, ‘Psychological Narrative’, and Supernaturalist Modes in Mangan’s Fiction 140 Richard Haslam

v vi Contents

8 The Spiritual ‘Vastation’ of James Clarence Mangan: Magic, Technology, and Identity 163 Anne Jamison 9 Unauthorized Mangan 184 Sean Ryder 10 Mangan in England 201 Matthew Campbell Afterword: Shades of Mangan 221

Bibliography 230 Index 234 Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the contributors to this collection for their elo- quence and generosity; it has been a privilege to work with so many scholars and whose work I have long admired. I would also like to thank the staff of Special Collections in the McClay Library, Queen’s University Belfast, as well as the National Library of Ireland and Irish Academic Press. I should also like to thank my editors, Sophie Ainscough and Ben Doyle, for their advice and support. And, as ever, my heartfelt thanks to Kelly Grovier.

vii Notes on Contributors

Matthew Campbell is Professor of Modern at the University of York. Most of his work is on British and of the past two centuries. He has published Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (1999) and Irish Poetry under the Union, 1801–1924 (2013). He was the editor of the Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry and is currently working on a history of Irish poetry since 1789. Ciaran Carson is Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. He has published some two dozen books of poetry, prose and trans- lation, most recently From Elsewhere, from the work of the French poet Jean Follain, paired with poems inspired by the translations ( 2014). His work has won many prizes including the T. S. Eliot Award and the Forward Prize. He is a member of Aosdána, the affiliation of Irish artists, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Jacques Chuto, retired Professor of English at the University of - Est, has been researching Mangan for over forty years. After writing his PhD thesis on ‘James Clarence Mangan, poète-traducteur’ for the University of Paris 3-Sorbonne nouvelle, he has co-edited the six vol- umes of the Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan (1996–2002), one volume of Selected Poems (2003) and one of Selected Prose (2004), and is the author of James Clarence Mangan, a Bibliography of his Works (1999). His latest publication is a French , with introduc- tion and notes, of a selection of poems by , La Mer hivernale (2013). Richard Haslam is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, , United States. He has published on a range of Irish writers, including Wilde, Bernard MacLaverty, W. B. Yeats, , and . His earlier essay on Mangan, “‘Broad Farce and Thrilling ’: Mangan’s Fiction and Irish Gothic,” was published in Éire-Ireland (Fall/Winter 2006). Anne Jamison is a Lecturer in Literary Studies in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western

viii Notes on Contributors ix

Sydney. She is a feminist literary and cultural critic with a research focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Ireland and Britain, and has published widely on Irish women writers of this period, including Edith Somerville and Martin Ross, Kate O’Brien, and Alicia Lefanu. She has also published more generally on the intersections of authorship and the law, particularly the development of British copyright law. She is currently preparing a monograph for Cork University Press on Somerville and Ross and female collaborative authorship. Joseph Lennon is the Director of Irish Studies and Associate Professor of English at Villanova University. His book, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (2004), won the American Conference for Irish Studies Donald Prize. Salmon Poetry published his first volume of poetry, Fell Hunger, in 2011. He has published in peri- odicals such as Literary Supplement, New Hibernia Review, and . David Lloyd, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, works primarily on Irish culture and on post-colonial and cultural theory. He is the author of Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (1987), and most recently Irish Times: Temporalities of Irish (2008) and Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity: The Transformation of Oral Space (2011). He has completed a study of ’s visual , forthcoming in 2014, and is beginning a series of essays on poetry and violence. He has also published Arc & Sill: Poems, 1979–2009 (2011). John McCourt is Associate Professor of English at the Università Roma Tre. He is the author of The Years of Bloom: in , 1904– 1920 (2000), and has recently edited James Joyce in Context (2009), and Roll Away the Reel World: James Joyce and Cinema (2010). His new book, Writing the Frontier, Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland, will be published by University Press in 2015. Paul Muldoon is Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor at . Since 2007 he has served as poetry editor of . He has published numerous collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), Maggot (2010) and One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015). x Notes on Contributors

Cóilín Parsons is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. He has published on aspects of the literature and , India, and South Africa, and has completed a book manu- script on Irish and the Ordnance Survey. Sean Ryder is Professor of English at the National University of Ireland, . He is the editor of James Clarence Mangan: Selected Writings (2004), and the author of numerous articles on nineteenth- century and culture. He is also project director for the Archive, a digital edition of Moore’s literary and musical works. Sinéad Sturgeon is a Lecturer in the School of English, Queen’s University Belfast. She has published on a range of Irish writers, including , William Carleton, and Gerald Griffin. She is currently completing a monograph on the representation of whiskey and poitín in nineteenth-century Irish writing. David Wheatley is Senior Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, and edited the Poems of James Clarence Mangan for Gallery Press (2003). He is the author of Essential Criticism of Contemporary British Poetry (2014), and has also published four collections of poetry with Gallery Press and an edition of Samuel Beckett’s Selected Poems 1930–1989 (2009). List of Abbreviations

CW1 The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Poems 1818–1837, eds. Jacques Chuto, Rudolf Patrick Holzapfel, Peter Mac Mahon, Pádraig Ó Snodaigh, Ellen Shannon- Mangan, Peter Van de Kamp (: Irish Academic Press, 1996). CW2 The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Poems 1838–1844, eds. Jacques Chuto, Rudolf Patrick Holzapfel, Peter Mac Mahon, Ellen Shannon-Mangan (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996). CW3 The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Poems 1845–1847, eds. Jacques Chuto, Rudolf Patrick Holzapfel, Ellen Shannon-Mangan (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997). CW4 The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan Poems 1848–1912, eds. Jacques Chuto, Tadhg Ó Dúshláine, Peter Van de Kamp (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1999). CW5 The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Prose 1832–1839, eds. Jacques Chuto, Peter Van de Kamp, Augustine Martin, Ellen Shannon-Mangan (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002). CW6 The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan: Prose 1840–1882, eds. Jacques Chuto, Peter Van de Kamp, Augustine Martin, Ellen Shannon-Mangan (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002). JCM Ellen Shannon-Mangan, James Clarence Mangan: A Biography (Blackrock, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996). NML David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).

xi xii List of Abbreviations

OCPW James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. (Oxford: , 2008). PwBI , ed. Poems by James Clarence Mangan with Biographical Introduction by John Mitchel (New York: P.M. Haverty, 1859). A Night on the Tiles With J. C. Mangan Paul Muldoon

1 Some call for “macerated.” Some call for “stewed.” The prunes are oddly fizzy from narcosis.

2 Not that Francis Bacon. That Francis Bacon. The barcode on the cereal box is Ogham.

3 At least we haven’t misconstrued two eggs over easy as a lace-frilled pair of knickers.

4 At least we haven’t mistaken a bottle of Paraquat for a 1990 Chateau d’Yquem.

5 We’ll swear this is the last time as we swore the rain would never darken our doors again.

xiii Foreword

Jacques Chuto

‘What’s in a name?’ asks Juliet. ‘But what’s in a name?’ echoes an impostor claiming to be the Czar in Mangan’s ‘The Meteor of Kasán’. Although the original is by Baron Auffenberg, Mangan chooses to attribute it to another German , F. G. Wetzel, arguing that the name of the author is not ‘of paramount importance’, for ‘[i]f Wetzel be not the author of the book, somebody else is’. A few pages further on, the two writers are brought together under the portmanteau names ‘Auffenetzel’ and ‘Wetzenberg’. A name, however, might be of greater significance than Mangan pretends it to be here. Indeed, one might ask, ‘What’s in Mangan’s name?’ The poet himself touches upon the matter on a couple of occasions. In 1846, he gives a grimly humorous interpretation of his patronymic in a letter to . Claiming to quote a line from Spenser,

The wretched man ’gan grinning horridlie he suggests that this should in fact read,

The wretched Mangan grinning? Horrid lie!

No such line has been found in Spenser, who however uses the col- location ‘man gan’ several times (for instance, in The Faerie Queene, ‘The wretched man gan then avise too late / That love is not where most it is profest’). Thus, the two syllables of the name ‘Mangan’ are given a meaning: the first is the fairly obvious ‘man’, while the second is seen as the archaic preterite form of ‘begin’. The emphasis thus placed on beginnings will no doubt appeal to critics who claim that Mangan never could carry a project to its end. But there is a much more fascinating interpretation of ‘gan’ than this. It is undeveloped, merely hinted at, submerged as it were in a para- graph of Mangan’s Introduction to The Poets and Poetry of Munster (1849), which unfortunately the editor John O’Daly did not care

xiv Foreword xv to publish. Examining the peculiarities that strike him about Irish poetry, Mangan writes:

A third, and the last, peculiarity that we shall notice, is one of a rather singular order. It is the frequent and almost perpetual employment by the Irish poet of the word gan, without. With him it is always gan –, without pleasure, gan –, without hope, gan sola´s [sic], without light, gan –, without friends. [Except in one instance Mangan has left for O’Daly to replace with the appro- priate Irish nouns.] We are the more struck by this peculiarity, because our translator, a German scholar, has informed us that the favourite Saxon phrase is – in contradistinction to the Irish – mit, with [. . .].

In his translations from the Irish, Mangan, of course, reproduces this ‘peculiarity’ faithfully, using either the preposition without as in Andrew Magrath’s ‘Farewell to the Maig’:

Without help, without hope, without friends, without treasure […] Without health, without wealth, without life, without pleasure or the privative suffix less, as in William Heffernan’s ‘Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan’:

Feastless, houseless, altarless, they bear the exile’s brand.

Both Magrath’s personal and Heffernan’s national laments are about dispossession. It is hard to believe that Mangan was not aware that the second syllable of his own name marked him out as one of the dispossessed. ‘Man-gan’ is literally the ‘Man-without –’ (with a to be replaced ad libitum). Indeed, despite the German poets’ supposed predilection for the word mit (with), Mangan inflicts, though with half-a-smile, the Celtic ‘peculiarity’ on his German per- sona, Selber, in ‘Twenty Golden Years Ago’:

Wifeless, friendless, flagonless, alone, Not quite bookless tho’ unless I chuse […] xvi Foreword

Eventually, the privative suffix ends up attacking the name itself, and Mangan, less than a year before his death, describes himself as the ‘Nameless One’. One might argue that Mangan was dispossessed even posthu- mously, since his work was so poorly represented, so little or so lazily read, and therefore so inadequately studied for so long. With the publication of his Collected Works some fifteen (golden) years ago and now of this volume, the first ever collection of essays devoted to him entirely, one may venture to hope that the curse of that second syllable of his name has been lifted and that the Dispossessed One is coming into his own at last.