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

In â€Å"The Great God Pan† (1894) Machen uses ancient Greek god Pan to serve as a symbol of spiritual reality that lies beyond human perception and knowledge. Machen’s use of this divine entity and his success in rediscovering a minor figure of the classical pantheon, yet â€Å"mostly neglected by earlier authors of English literature† (Pasi 69), provide what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue to be the significant value of a minor author, â€Å"†¦by using a number of minority elements, by connecting, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous becoming† (106). â€Å"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 changeability of her identity destabilises the humanistic notion of identity as a stable phenomenon, and enters into the domain of becoming Pan. This fluidity a nd indeterminacy of Helen’s character is Machen’s attempt to undo the established notion of canonical subjectivity, and propose an alternative possibility of becoming. Helen’s 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 â€Å"The Great God Pan†. In this attempt of removing the veil, Dr. Raymond’s practice of â€Å"transcendental medicine† provides the means to reach out the reality behind the veil: Dr. Raymond surgically changes the structure of a woman’s brain... ...e. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernatics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Hillman, James. "An Essay on Pan." Pan and the Nightmare. Trans. A.V. O'Brien. New York: Spring Publications, 1972. Jackson, Kimberly. "Non-evolutionary Dageneration in Arthur Machen's Supernatural Tales." Victorian Literature and Culture 41 (2013): 125-135. Navarette, Susan J. "The Word Made Flesh: Protoplasmic Predications in Arthur Machen's "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: Dover Publications, Inc., 2006. Pasi, Marco. "Arthur Machen’s Panic Fears: Western Esotericism and the Irruption of Negative Epistemology." Aries 7 (2007): 63-68.