Abstract
In December 1839, after revealing that he had been prevented from reading or translating German poetry for several months by an attack of ‘intellectual hypochondriasis’, Mangan commented, ‘Whence it originated we ourself can hazard no conjecture; for who shall fathom the abysses of the human mind?’ (CW5, p. 309). Who indeed? But many artists have tried, not least Mangan himself. The imaginative bathyspheres he built to ‘fathom the abysses’ included what we might call ‘psychological narrative’, a term borrowed from the subtitle of his story ‘The Threefold Prediction’ (1845). This same term can serve to classify several other of his fictional and semi-fictional works, such as ‘An Extraordinary Adventure in the Shades’ (1833), ‘My Transformation: A Wonderful Tale’ (1833), ‘The Thirty Flasks’ (1838), and the posthumously published Autobiography (1882). Mangan produced these texts for many purposes, including making money, providing entertainment, and (in the case of Autobiography) seeking atonement, but they also function as narrative laboratories for pursuing psychological investigations. Discerning significant convergences between questions about consciousness raised by psychology and those raised by another perennial interest — the supernatural — Mangan weaves into these narratives a variety of supernaturalist modes, from Gothic to ghostly, from spiritualist to Orientalist.1
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Notes
For detailed examinations of Mangan’s use of the Gothic supernaturalist mode, see my articles: ‘“Broad Farce and Thrilling Tragedy”: Mangan’s Fiction and Irish Gothic,’ Éire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies, 41, 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2006), pp. 215–44; and ‘Maturin’s Catholic Heirs: Expanding the Limits of Irish Gothic,’ in Irish Gothics: Genres, Forms, Modes, and Traditions, 1760–1890, eds. Christina Morin and Niall Gillespie (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 113–29. These essays build upon the insights of Seamus Deane, who was the first to direct critical attention towards the possibility of treating Mangan’s Autobiography as a manifestation of Irish ‘Catholic or Catholic-nationalist Gothic’. See Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 126. In the present essay, I principally consider Mangan’s use of other supernaturalist modes.
Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. E. Behler and R. Strug (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), p. 86. For a detailed examination of Mangan’s use of romantic irony, see
Haslam, ‘“Broad Farce and Thrilling”’ (2006, pp. 229–38). On the rapid switching between tones that is such a crucial feature of romantic irony and of Mangan’s work, see Patricia Coughlan’s articles: ‘“Fold over Fold, Inveterately Convolv’d”: Some Aspects of Mangan’s Intertextuality’ in Anglo-Irish and Irish Literature: Aspects of Language and Culture, eds. Birgit Bramsbäck and Martin Croghan, 2 vols. (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell International, 1988), II, pp. 191–200; and ‘The Recycling of Melmoth: “A Very German Story”’ in Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World, eds., Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok, 3 vols. (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987), II, pp. 181–99.
On Mangan and Orientalism, see NML, pp. 117–28; and Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008), pp. 160–2.
For an analysis of the relationship between references to the nervous system and the representation of consciousness in fiction between 1825 and 1880, see Nicholas Dames, ‘1825–1880: The Network of Nerves,’ in The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, ed. David Herman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), pp. 215–39.
Terry Castle examines in detail the use of the phantasmagoria metaphor in European Romanticism; see her The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 140–67. On Le Fanu and phantasmagoria, see James Walton, Vision and Vacancy: The Fictions of J. S. Le Fanu (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007), pp. 166–93. On Yeats and phantasmagoria, see the frequent references in
Roy Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 2003).
For an analysis of Mangan’s essay as a Catholic-inflected rebuttal of ‘German Ghosts and Ghost-Seers’, a Protestant-inflected essay published in the Dublin University Magazine the previous year by Irys Herfner (an anagrammatical sobriquet for Henry Ferris), see Andrew Cusack, ‘Cultural Transfer in the Dublin University Magazine: James Clarence Mangan and the German Gothic’, in Popular Revenants: the German Gothic and its International Reception, 1800–2000, eds., Cusack and Barry Murnane (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), pp. 94–7. As Cusack notes, Ferris’s tone is ‘flippant’ (or romantic ironic), and he appears to believe in some psychic phenomena (for example, ghostly visitations) and not others (for example, magnetism, p. 94). Nevertheless, Mangan cites approvingly the concluding chapters of Ferris’s essay, so it is unclear how directly or consistently Mangan was challenging Ferris’s stance (CW6, p. 308). On Catholic dimensions in ‘Chapters,’ see also JCM, p. 257.
The references to addiction and to ‘fires’ that appear to ‘burn in [... the] brain’ provide another link to ‘The Thirty Flasks’. As Dolores Buttry notes, when describing his gambling addiction, Basil says, ‘[M]y brain was on fire,’ and the narrator states that, after Basil drinks the similarly addictive ‘elixir,’ his ‘eyes were lighted by a tierce and unwonted fire’ (CW5, p. 179, 192). See Dolores Buttry, ‘The Negative Side of Fantasy: James Clarence Mangan’s “The Thirty Flasks”’, The Journal of Irish Literature, 22, 2 (1993), p. 42.
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Haslam, R. (2014). ‘[M]y mind is destroying me’: Consciousness, ‘Psychological Narrative’, and Supernaturalist Modes in Mangan’s Fiction. In: Sturgeon, S. (eds) Essays on James Clarence Mangan. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137273383_8
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