Extollager
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- Aug 21, 2010
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As in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I too can enjoy this.
Here are several thoughts on "The Great God Pan."
Machen's supposal -- that poor Mary of "The Experiment" gives birth to a baby who grows to be the evil Helen Vaughan -- placed him in inevitable and perhaps insoluble difficulties of plotting and imagination.
Let me put it this way. If we take "The Experiment" by itself, then the evil lies with the man who undertook so wrongful an action. The theme and perhaps even the execution are worthy of Hawthorne. His stories are replete with cold-hearted intellectuals. "The Experiment" ends on a note of wonder, horror, sorrow over what people do to people, and pathos.
If Helen, the daughter of Pan/the devil in “The Great God Pan” as it stands, is to be the monster of evil that she needs to be to make the story work, then her wickedness needs to be so extreme as to make the scientist who experimented on Mary seem less evil. This raises two problems.
(1)The enormity of the wrong done to Mary seems to be diminished; it is there in "Pan" largely just as the "origin" of the evil Helen, who is a sort of comic book super-villainess!
One could easily imagine someone proposing that she doesn’t really die at the end of the story after all, and going on to fit her into the Wold Newton mythos.
(2)Machen has to imagine the most horrifying, disgusting wickedness that he can in order to attribute it to Helen as Pan’s/the devil’s daughter. But imagining such evil is not really what he wants to do, and not, perhaps, what any sane and decent person would want to do.
Machen wanted, to be sure, to grapple with the theme of evil, but he wanted too to suggest the dimension of a realm – call it the supernatural – that transcends our common experience and the doctrines of materialism. He understood that attempts to depict it outright were likely to fail. He works with hints: the suicides who have seen and/or done something they can’t bear to remember. But one sees reviewers and critics again and again shake their heads over this aspect of the story, which is generally taken to involve some kind of perverse sexuality. Alas, in our time there is no perversion of sexuality that isn’t common coin of politics and even talk on the playground. In Machen’s day, the authorwas criticized for his unwholesome imagination, in ours he is tut-tutted for being prudishly fastidious about and at the same time titillated by sex.
I’ll say that, in the context of some other things that Machen wrote, one can see why a sexual element in the suggestion of atrocious evil would make sense. He understood the sexual love of man and woman as, in essence, a sacrament (cf. “A Fragment of Life”). Thus sexual perversion is not simply “immoral”in a conventional sense, it is blasphemy, an act that truly cries to heaven for vengeance. But it would be awkward, overly explicit or expository, for Machen to explain this. He can only hope that some of his readers “get the point” without his doing so. Far and away the majority do not. They lack that sacramental sense. To get the real horror of the Helen Vaughan material, one might first have to brood over Canticles/The Song of Solomon in the Bible till one really has absorbed the interpretation that it is simultaneously a celebration of erotic, physical love and a symbolic uncovering of love between God and the soul. With this mystical masterpiece in mind, then read “The Great God Pan.” But anyone who has absorbed the former might prefer not to meditate on the latter after all.
