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

In The Great God cooking pan (1894) Machen uses ancient Greek god scrap to serve as a symbol of spiritual reality 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 omit 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, by using a number of minority elements, by connecting, conjugating them, one invents a specific, unforeseen, autonomous decent (106). The Great God scrap uses a detective plot and English upper class male characters search for an elusive figure, Helen Vaughan, who travels by assume various identities. Helen, through her changeability of her identity element destabilises the humanistic whimsicality of identity as a stable phenomenon, and enters into the domain of becoming Pan. This fluidity and indefinity of Helens character is Machens attempt 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 concretion with the elements of her desire, which are beyond human accessibility and control. Helen, with this alliance with the god Pan, which has four-fold forms and identities, enters into the flux of becoming Pan.Machen, through the experiment of Dr. Raymond, invokes to reveal the reality laughingstock 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 nub to reach out the reality behind the veil Dr. Raymond surgically changes the twist of a womans brain... ...e. How We Became Posthuman Virtual Bodies in Cybernatics, Literature and Informatics. lolly The University of Chicago Press, 1999.Hillman, James. An Essay on Pan. Pan and the Nightmare. Trans. A.V. OBrien. New York Spri ng 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 do Flesh Protoplasmic Predications in Arthur Machens The Great God Pan. The Shape of apprehension 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 Machens Panic Fears Western Esotericism and the clap of Negative Epistemology. Aries 7 (2007) 63-68.