13 Days to Halloween (7) - Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan"

BLOT: (24 Oct 2010 - 11:50:24 PM)

13 Days to Halloween (7) - Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan"

We are now at the halfway point of this year's horror suggestions. Believe it or not, I do not plan these things in advance. Sometimes, an idea for something will strike me a day or two early, but I mostly go with what struck me sometime during the day as being worthy of inclusion. If I do this next year, and I probably will, I plan to plan ahead. It will get rid of some of the brain drain that the thing causes.

For tonight, though, let me direct you to Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan", one of the most cited pieces of Weird Fiction not penned by H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the 1890s (published 1890, then expanded four years later into its current form), "Pan" is one part a simple and heavy-handed Victorian denouncement of science and feminine wiles and one part the progenitor of the sort of fiction that Ramsey Campbell would come to write: a moody, uncertain exploration of nature's reality. The title might be misleading, since it is not [generally] about a satyr-shaped nature god but about peeling back the flimsy "glamor" that humans require in place in order to live in a world more awe-inspiring and terrible than they can properly deal with. In this light, it is an echo of something that Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy: "Those illuminated illusory pictures of the Sophoclean hero, briefly put, the Apollonian mask, are...necessary creations of a glimpse into the inner terror of nature, bright spots, so to speak, to heal us from the horrifying night of the crippled gaze." Lines which themselves reflect a moment from Moby Dick: "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!" The Machenian-cum-Campbellian sentiment is perhaps most charged by Lovecraft's opening lines of "The Call of Cthulhu": "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

These two halves, or parts, of "The Great God Pan" are unfornately heavily weighted towards the simplistic "She's a witch a slut and she kills men of good standing!" storyline. In the recent Chaosium print of The Three Impostors, the best parts of "Pan"—only at the beginning and the ending—take up about 10 of the novella's 70 pages. The rest is an interestingly styled hint at sex and strange wonders, and more than once made me think of some Victorian era Hell-Bound Heart. Those other 60 pages are not without merit, I just think you could get the entire gist of the story, and all of its horror and implication, by sticking to only the first section, named "The Experiment". During this section, a scientist tells his friend that he has found the way to pierce the veil and to see the truth of the world, what the ancients called "seeing the great god Pan". The subject of his experiment is a young girl, named Mary, whom the scientist considers his plaything since he rescued her "from the gutter" and has no compunction against working on her brain in such a way. Machen briefly hints that the girl is in love, trusting this older scientist, and gives in. After she wakes up from the experiment, she is obviously seeing some truth that the others cannot, and strange wonder gives quickly away to terror. She does not recover, laying in bed broken. The scientist waves it away with, "'Yes,' said the doctor, still quite cool, 'it is a great pity; she is a hopeless idiot. However, it could not be helped; and, after all, she has seen the Great God Pan.'"

From here, we learn of another girl, named Helen, who was regularly out in the woods as a youth. Those who would sometimes follow her or hang out with her would report seeing strange, horrible things. One friend, in particular, was broken by some experience in which Helen took part. Another youth, a boy, reports seeing a strange man with Helen. Later, Helen is in the city, and lots of strange going ons occur, mostly involving well-to-do gentlemen sleazing it up around her. I am not sure if auto-erotic aphyxiation was a thing in Victorian England, but modern readers might note that most of the men killed are hung from bed posts, or wall hooks, or similar. It becomes known that the two women are somehow connected, and one of the male characters goes off to tend Helen's vagina-centered evil.

If you do read it, I suggest you first stop at the end of section one, and then only later go back and read the other seven sections.

You can read the full thing, and a decently typeset version thanks to kobek.com. Click that link for the PDF.

TAGS: 13 Days Until Halloween

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 42
BY MONTH: October 2010