156 pages
Published 1894
Read March 4
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
I don’t know why turn-of-the-century horror and fantasy authors became so fixated on Pan. Clearly it fit into the social reaction against the speed of technological change and social “progress” (we must use that term loosely for this era). There’s a distinct through-line of sexual anxiety as well, of fragile men losing their wits over the possibility of women having sexual agency. Modernism encompasses both the progress and the reaction against it, after all, balanced in uneasy tension. But why Pan?
My best guess is a lingering Victorian fetish for classical Greece, repudiating local British fae lore and nature spirits in favor of the “civilized” myths of a completely different culture.
(Which in turn brings us back to the ideological underpinnings of white supremacy, the myths of a great heritage of classical civilization that Western Europe invented for itself during the Medieval and Renaissance eras, myths which the English honed in the Victorian age. The cultural “heirs” of Greece and Rome — in as much as cultures can have “heirs,” which is a dubious proposition at best — were the Abbasid Caliphate and the Ottomans. Western Europe was always a cultural fringe and economic backwater, dressing up its indigenous systems of kin strife and feudal obligation with Roman trappings after the Western Empire collapsed and left behind a power vacuum. Victorians excelled at editing away actual history in favor of tidy hierarchies that always happened to place themselves at the top. But I digress.)
Whatever the reason, Pan was everywhere, from approximately the 1890s through the 1930s. One of the earliest manifestations of the Pan obsession, and certainly the most famous to this day, Machen’s The Great God Pan has been on my list for a few years now.
For such an influential story, Pan isn’t that good. Machen’s prose is stiff, almost amateurish to modern eyes. As in his story “N” (which I read and reviewed here), much of his narrative is laid out in smoking-room dialogue between gentlemen who witnessed different aspects of the story. After depicting a street-corner encounter in one chapter, he has one character summarize it all over again to another man in the next. At one point, two characters summarize the plot up to this point, then stop to look at the house of one Mrs. Beaumont, “an oddish sort of woman,” who just happens to serve a thousand-year-old vintage of claret to her guests; the two men make no connection between the two strands, and continue their walk. It’s almost comical.
Machen builds his novella’s horrors upon the unrestrained appetites of its femme fatale: “[T]hat woman, if I can call her woman, corrupted my soul.” Helen emerges from an event of horrible misogyny in the first chapter: her teenage mother Mary’s brain was operated upon by a man who regarded Mary as essentially his property, opening Mary’s mind to the horrors beyond human conception, and thence conceiving Helen through presumably metaphysical means (though this is never specified, so maybe I'm being naive). The book, in that light, could be understood as a violated woman’s vengeance upon the rich and titled men of London. I’d certainly love to see this retold as a queer revenge fantasy to highlight that element more. As it is, though, Machen’s story is far more interested in men putting a stop to Helen’s supernatural crimes that it is in her justification.
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