Jesse’s Reviews > The Great God Pan > Status Update
Jesse
is 59% done
“The Letter of Advice”
The dialogue between Villiers and Austin is incredibly awkward. Machen gives them no chemistry; Austin is just a vehicle to link Helen to this mysteriously arrived South American Mrs. Beaumont, and by the way he had a painter friend who just died in Buenos Aires, and by the way, his legacy is this gross book he made of illustrations of satyrs and other adjacent pagan creatures.
— 3 hours, 35 min ago
The dialogue between Villiers and Austin is incredibly awkward. Machen gives them no chemistry; Austin is just a vehicle to link Helen to this mysteriously arrived South American Mrs. Beaumont, and by the way he had a painter friend who just died in Buenos Aires, and by the way, his legacy is this gross book he made of illustrations of satyrs and other adjacent pagan creatures.
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Jesse’s Previous Updates
Jesse
is 99% done
“The Fragments”
Three epistolary accounts. We get a doctor who describes Helen’s death, transforming into myriad things both male and female before what I assume is a satyr before her final dissolution; we get Clarke suggesting that the earlier-mentioned Rachel was raped by satyrs, Helen’s playmates, prior to an unmentionable death; and we have Raymond bookending the piece.
— 1 hour, 22 min ago
Three epistolary accounts. We get a doctor who describes Helen’s death, transforming into myriad things both male and female before what I assume is a satyr before her final dissolution; we get Clarke suggesting that the earlier-mentioned Rachel was raped by satyrs, Helen’s playmates, prior to an unmentionable death; and we have Raymond bookending the piece.
Jesse
is 88% done
“The Encounter in Soho”
Villiers continues to dig and ties everything together. There is a sense of gothic horror as he is compelled, after making eye contact with Helen, to go out and get a stout rope. He knows that it’s either Helen or him. I already know the way the story ends, but Villiers’s account of his uncanny motivation to purchase the rope is still pretty haunting.
— 2 hours, 11 min ago
Villiers continues to dig and ties everything together. There is a sense of gothic horror as he is compelled, after making eye contact with Helen, to go out and get a stout rope. He knows that it’s either Helen or him. I already know the way the story ends, but Villiers’s account of his uncanny motivation to purchase the rope is still pretty haunting.
Jesse
is 76% done
“The Suicides”
Well to do London men are hanging or strangling themselves!! What could possibly be going on??
The implication based on Villiers’s account of Crashaw’s face is that Helen is seducing these socialites and, once they are mired in her pagan rituals, spurning them: “Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope and horror that seemed to shriek aloud to the night”
— 3 hours, 4 min ago
Well to do London men are hanging or strangling themselves!! What could possibly be going on??
The implication based on Villiers’s account of Crashaw’s face is that Helen is seducing these socialites and, once they are mired in her pagan rituals, spurning them: “Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope and horror that seemed to shriek aloud to the night”
Jesse
is 51% done
“The Discovery in Paul Street”
Villiers just happens to know Clarke and goes to him, ignorant of Clarke’s closeted fascination with the occult. This is an almost painful segment as Villiers somehow manages to avoid telling Clarke Helen’s name, allowing him to play the rational skeptic, until Clarke sees the sketch of her face. This seems HIGHLY unlikely, unless this is just gentrified chauvinism.
— 14 hours, 25 min ago
Villiers just happens to know Clarke and goes to him, ignorant of Clarke’s closeted fascination with the occult. This is an almost painful segment as Villiers somehow manages to avoid telling Clarke Helen’s name, allowing him to play the rational skeptic, until Clarke sees the sketch of her face. This seems HIGHLY unlikely, unless this is just gentrified chauvinism.
Jesse
is 39% done
“The City of Resurrections”
A young man named Villiers runs into a college buddy who has fallen on hard times. Seems he married a woman named Helen, an unearthly beauty who he blames for the corruption of his soul. After he lets the tramp away, Villiers pokes into his buddy’s past, finding that he was implicated in a mysterious death of a well-to-do man: slain by mortal terror.
— 14 hours, 55 min ago
A young man named Villiers runs into a college buddy who has fallen on hard times. Seems he married a woman named Helen, an unearthly beauty who he blames for the corruption of his soul. After he lets the tramp away, Villiers pokes into his buddy’s past, finding that he was implicated in a mysterious death of a well-to-do man: slain by mortal terror.
Jesse
is 25% done
“Mr. Clarke’s Memoirs”
Clarke is an interesting character whose obsession with the occult led him to the ill-advised witnessing of Dr. Raymond’s experiment. His “Memoirs to prove the Existence of the Devil” make for something akin to a Necronomicon. We are introduced to the mysterious Helen, who is patently the end product of Mary’s brush with the Great God Pan.
— 15 hours, 25 min ago
Clarke is an interesting character whose obsession with the occult led him to the ill-advised witnessing of Dr. Raymond’s experiment. His “Memoirs to prove the Existence of the Devil” make for something akin to a Necronomicon. We are introduced to the mysterious Helen, who is patently the end product of Mary’s brush with the Great God Pan.
Jesse
is 13% done
“The Experiment”
“No, I think not, even if the worst happened. As you know, I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine to use as I see fit.”
Forget anything else that happens in this for a moment. The story makes it plain that Dr. Raymond took in an orphan named Mary and raised her and it’s implied that he had sec with her as well.
— 21 hours, 9 min ago
“No, I think not, even if the worst happened. As you know, I rescued Mary from the gutter, and from almost certain starvation, when she was a child; I think her life is mine to use as I see fit.”
Forget anything else that happens in this for a moment. The story makes it plain that Dr. Raymond took in an orphan named Mary and raised her and it’s implied that he had sec with her as well.
Jesse
is starting
heyyyy it’s time to reread this since it’s chronologically Machen’s next work in the collection!! I haven’t seen a lot of discourse on Pan online—not as much as some others—but it’ll be interesting as a more recent re-read compared to, say, if I was going through Poe again, given that it’s been 25 or so years since I read most of it.
— 21 hours, 24 min ago
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rated it 4 stars
3 hours, 29 min ago
Clarke begs off of the whole angle in an epistolary aside, presented by Villiers to Austin. Clarke is not motivated to operate against whatever forces are at play. This reads as several things, for instance, a continuation of his disassociation with Mary’s operation, albeit with a wracked conscience manifested in his morbid obsession with the product of the experiment.
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Clarke isn’t Raymond but he’s not a great guy. So, you have a book cataloguing occult events happening in the real world to prove the existence of the devil. And then what?? Machen demonstrates that observing evil does not intrinsically inspire every human being into fighting evil, a fact that is demonstrated in the Information Age and the vast amount of evils that we are exposed to, eroding our collective empathy.
Also being fluent in Latin would help in being immersed in Machen’s prose. Here, there’s an inscription on the painter’s book. Via Google Translate, it reads:“The whole place is silent by day, and its solitude is not without a sense of dread; at night it glows with fires, and the chorus of Aegipans resounds on all sides; the strains of flutes and the clashing of cymbals can be heard along the seacoast.”
we still don’t have a good sense of what makes Helen EEEEEVIIIIIIIIL in-universe. Like, the influence of Pan apparently lingers as it made Villiers horribly ill. We are left to imagine at this point that Pan is opposed to rationality. Its influence either drives people insane or causes them to die from sheer terror. Like, from seeing a satyr? Like, granted, I would be pretty shocked if I was out walking at night and saw a satyr run across the road, but in this story it underpins the destruction of our security in our perceived reality.