Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–27337–6 Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Sinéad Sturgeon 2014 Individual chapters © Contributors 2014 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, London 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, company 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 United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–27337–6 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 British Library. Library of Congress 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. ISBN 978–1–137–27337–6 (hardback) 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. Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–27337–6 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–27337–6 Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors viii List of Abbreviations xi A Night on the Tiles with J. C. Mangan xiii Paul Muldoon 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 David Wheatley 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 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–27337–6 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–27337–6 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 Ciaran Carson Bibliography 230 Index 234 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–27337–6 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–27337–6 Introduction James Clarence Mangan: The Man in the Cloak Sinéad Sturgeon In November 1838, James Clarence Mangan published a reinvention of Honoré de Balzac’s novella ‘Melmoth Réconcilié’ (1834), renaming it ‘The Man in the Cloak’. From then on, the phrase became one of the Irish writer’s favourite nom de plumes, augmenting both a lifelong obsession with the veiling of identity and – since to conceal one’s identity is also to complicate and intensify it – the conviction that the self is at once hidden, unstable, and multifarious. Two years later, Mangan signed a letter to a friend (journalist Charles Gavan Duffy) with a deftly drawn pen-and-ink rebus that shows his continuing attachment to the name, as well as a handsome penmanship. ‘The Man in the Cloak’ provides an apt metaphor for Mangan’s rôle in Irish literary history. As readers, we are still struggling to see him in clear light: few writers have left a body of work that is at once so diverse, so significant, and so difficult to pin down. The magiste- rial six volume The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan (Irish Academic Press, 1996–2002), edited by Professor Jacques Chuto and a team of scholars, appeared almost 150 years after his death, and com- prises around a thousand poems and dozens of prose pieces, written in an astonishing variety of styles and genres, and published under 1 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–27337–6 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–27337–6 2 Introduction a seemingly endless array of pseudonyms. Conversely, little remains in the way of archival material – the manuscripts, letters, diaries, journals, notebooks – that solidifies and expands a writer’s critical and biographical afterlives. Even in the Irish literary canon, let alone further afield, Mangan remains a shadowy figure. While the Collected Works has provided new opportunities for analysis and appraisal, critical assessment of Mangan continues to be incommensurate with his importance. ‘The Man in the Cloak’ remains a resonant soubri- quet for a writer about whom we still have much to learn. Among the fourteen words with which Mangan is credited the first (and often the only) usage in the Oxford English Dictionary, are the neologisms clanless, flagonless, gloomful, storyful, unchainable , undulled. The words convey something of Mangan’s life and temperament in a tempestuous Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century. Born in 1803, just months before Robert Emmet’s doomed rising, Mangan was from the start beset with difficulties and disadvan- tages: ill-health, poverty, and a fraught family life. He described his father, an improvident Dublin grocer, as ‘a human boa-constrictor’, whose paternal guidance was akin to how ‘a huntsman would treat refractory hounds’ (CW6, p. 228). Mangan’s formal education was prematurely ended in 1818 when, to help support his family, he was apprenticed at a scrivenery in York Street. In the same year, his first verses appeared in Dublin almanacs, puzzle-poems and riddles whose precocious verbal ability augurs the extraordinary achievement of his mature work. Such literary play was in stark contrast to the mind- stifling rigidity of legal copying. Mangan loathed the stultifying grind of scrivening, but to support his family he kept at it for much of the next two decades, managing simultaneously to cultivate a literary career in the lively periodical scene of pre-Famine Dublin. By the mid-1830s Mangan had taught himself German and acquired a regu- lar slot in the prestigious, unionist publication, the Dublin University Magazine, as a translator of German Romantic verse. The transla- tions were accompanied by substantial prose commentaries. These acclaimed articles, known as the ‘Anthologia Germanica’ series, were soon followed by the ‘Literæ Orientales’ on Persian and Turkish poetry; as before, the verse was embedded in lengthy and intelligent disquisition, and the ‘translations’ themselves were often radically different from their originals, or, not infrequently, had no such ‘original’ at all. While Mangan spent virtually his entire life in Dublin Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–27337–6 Copyrighted material – 978–1–137–27337–6 Sinéad Sturgeon 3 (apart from a stay in 1847 with his mother’s family in Co. Meath), imaginatively he traversed the globe, and the markedly transnational scope of his work renders him an early practitioner of Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur – a writer consciously engaged not only in the international circulation of texts, but also of the intellectual implications and effects of such translation and transmission. ‘The mind, to be sure, properly to speak, is without a home on the earth’, he writes in the first article of the ‘Literæ Orientales’, ‘for Mind – it is restless, rebellious – a vagrant […] It is a Cain that may build cities, but can abide in none of them’ (CW5, p. 129). In 1838 Mangan was able finally to leave scrivening for a job with the Ordnance Survey, working first as a copyist and then as a versi- fier of prose translations of ancient Irish poetry. He also began to work more concertedly in prose, contributing two short stories (‘The Man in the Cloak’ and ‘The Thirty Flasks’) to the Dublin University Magazine. A fellow employee at the Ordnance Survey, the antiquary and artist W. F. Wakeman, conveys a vivid sense of the poet’s eccen- tricities in his description of his colleague’s working habits and style of dress: We were supposed when on home duty to meet daily in the office at 10 a.m. All were usually punctual except Mangan, who, as a rule, was late, would often not appear before eleven or twelve o’clock, and would not infrequently be absent altogether. […] At times he would be very dull and silent, but occasionally he was apt to make puns and jokes. He generally had some awful story of a super- natural character to tell us as he was sipping his ‘tar-water’. … At the time I speak of Mangan could not have numbered more than thirty-five or thirty-six years, yet he was then physically worn out – aged, in fact – as far as the body was concerned. His mind however, was still that of the poet …. He possessed very weak eyes, and used a huge pair of green spec- tacles; he had narrow shoulders, and was flat-chested, so much so, that for appearance sake the breast of his coat was thickly padded.