Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan Essay -- The Great God Pan Essays

In The Great matinee idol Pan (1894) Machen uses ancient Greek matinee idol Pan to serve as a symbol of spiritual candor that lies beyond human perception and knowledge. Machens use of this divine entity and his success in rediscovering a minor figure of the classical pantheon, yet mostly neglected by earlier authors of English literature (Pasi 69), provide what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue to be the epoch-making value of a minor author, by using a number of minority elements, by connecting, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous becoming (106). The Great God Pan uses a detective plot and English upper class male characters search for an elusive figure, Helen Vaughan, who travels by assuming various identities. Helen, through her changeableness of her identity destabilises the humanistic notion of identity as a stable phenomenon, and enters into the domain of becoming Pan. This fluidity and indeterminacy of Helens character is Machens adjudic ate to undo the established notion of canonical subjectivity, and propose an alternative possibility of becoming. Helens insistence on entering into the zone of inhuman god Pan- involves a position of alliance with the elements of her desire, which are beyond human accessibility and control. Helen, with this alliance with the god Pan, which has multiple forms and identities, enters into the flux of becoming Pan.Machen, through the experiment of Dr. Raymond, invokes to reveal the reality behind the veil in his supernatural tale The Great God Pan. In this attempt of removing the veil, Dr. Raymonds practice of transcendental medicine provides the meaning to reach out the reality behind the veil Dr. Raymond surgically changes the structure of a womans brain... ...e. How We Became Posthuman Virtual Bodies in Cybernatics, Literature and Informatics. lucre The University of Chicago Press, 1999.Hillman, James. An Essay on Pan. Pan and the Nightmare. Trans. A.V. OBrien. New York Spring Publications, 1972.Jackson, Kimberly. Non-evolutionary Dageneration in Arthur Machens Supernatural Tales. Victorian Literature and Culture 41 (2013) 125-135.Navarette, Susan J. The Word Made Flesh Protoplasmic Predications in Arthur Machens The Great God Pan. The Shape of Fear Horror and the Fin de Siecle Culture of Decadence. Kentucky The University Press of Kentucky, 1998. 178-201.Machen, Arthur. The Great God Pan and The Hill of Dreams. Mineola, New York capital of Delaware Publications, Inc., 2006.Pasi, Marco. Arthur Machens Panic Fears Western Esotericism and the Irruption of Negative Epistemology. Aries 7 (2007) 63-68.