Crossing over: On mangan’s ‘spirits everywhere’

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.