Abstract
Writing on James Clarence Mangan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was often overtaken by a sense of haunting, of possession, perhaps. Despite my frequent misgivings about the achievement of the poetry I was reading, misgivings amplified by the widespread assumption that few of Mangan’s poems were worth critical consideration any more, the work refused to let me go. It was as if, from beyond the grave, the poet compelled attention. Fantastical as this confession may sound, and I do not know if the sensation is one shared by other readers of Mangan, it remains the case that in a very precise sense, Mangan’s work is itself the scene of hauntings, and by no means unaware of itself as such. I think not only of the poet’s lifelong interest in ghosts and ghost-seers, manifest most notably in his essay ‘Chapters on Ghostcraft’, based extensively on the work of the German poet and spiritualist Justinus Kerner (CW6, pp. 71–92), but also of the ways in which Mangan’s work — as, indeed, I came to argue in my book on him — is itself a tissue of hauntings of various kinds. It constantly invokes the ghosts of other works, reminding us of the close relation between the work of citation and the force of the summons: to quote another work always risks summoning up not merely a brief and aphoristic fragment whose meaning is absorbed into the text that cites it, but the shadow of the whole other text whose appropriate limits as context can never finally be established.
A transition between the two moments of spirit, the ghost is just passing through
Jacques Derrida.1
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Notes
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 136.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 71.
For Mangan’s translation, see ‘Anthologia Germanica, No. XVI: Ballads and Miscellaneous Poems’, Dublin University Magazine, 18, 103 (July 1841), p. 24; and PwBI, pp. 94–5. For Ludwig Uhland’s ‘Auf der Überfahrt’, see Ludwig Uhland, Dichtungen, Briefe, Reden: Eine Auswahl, ed Walter P. H. Scheffler (Stuttgart: J. F. Steinkopf, 1963), pp. 216–17.
For a brief but useful account of Uhland’s career and reception over a century and a half, see Victor G. Doerksen, Ludwig Uhland and the Critics (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994).
This allegorical tendency in Mangan’s work forges another link with Benjamin, in that the latter’s Origins of German Tragic Drama is an extended examination of the baroque use of allegory as the index of a fallen and dead nature. The affinity is striking between the poet who proclaimed in his autobiography that he could see ‘nothing in Creation but what is fallen and ruined’ (CW6, p. 239) and allegories, which are ‘in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.’ Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, intro. George Steiner (London: Verso, 1985), p. 178.
On the ‘laws of contiguity, similarity and opposition’ that inform magical practices, see Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic [1950], trans. Robert Brain (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 64.
Jacques Derrida, Otobiographies: l’enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1984), p. 59. English translation: Jacques Derrida, Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name, trans. Avital Ronell, p. 14.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: Book XI of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W Norton, 1998), p. 143.
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© 2014 David Lloyd
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Lloyd, D. (2014). Crossing Over. In: Sturgeon, S. (eds) Essays on James Clarence Mangan. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137273383_2
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