Jesse’s Reviews > The Great God Pan > Status Update
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, 24 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.
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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, 13 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, 6 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 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, 37 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.
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, 27 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, 57 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, 27 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, 12 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, 26 min ago
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1 hour, 15 min ago
Raymond re-enters the story and brings it back to the roots of gothic horror. He both is and is not Helen’s father, just as he was and was not Mary’s father. Thematically, Helen is haunted by satyrs, and this is what drives Raymond to send her off, financially supported but outside of his conscience. Raymond cloaks his experiment on Mary under the auspices of pursuing knowledge, but there was no intellectual motivation behind his sexual exploitation of his adopted daughter.
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I can’t help but notice that we are never once given a narrative account of Helen. Everything we see is secondhand; she is, within the story, nothing more than her reputation. And what a reputation! Like, what does Helen actually do? I suppose she is a carnal force of nature, but is there a sense of any sort of malice on her part? Not to downplay the horror of Rachel’s assumed rape, but Helen’s otherworldliness appears to mainly translate into having no sexual “scruples”.
For a period of time, I was wondering whether Helen was being implicated as the perpetrator of the Ripper murders. The note that introduces the doctors account specifically pegs Helen’s death as occurring before the canonical Jack the Ripper murders. I was confused, but I suppose that Machen can get away with invoking the murders in the suicides chapter because of how this story is presented as a largely epistolary retrospective. Really, it occurs to me that the way in which the story is presented makes it likely that it is meant to be Clarke’s personal collection of events as registered in his grimoire. This would explain why the only narrative segment with any real weight is the first chapter, which would be his account of the experiment.
I wonder about epistolary novels, since the ones that leap to my mind are most famously Dracula, but at the end of the day epistolary is a narrative device that has no intrinsic affiliation with horror. The desire to use it in a horror story reflects perhaps an attempt at instilling authenticity into the narrative. It’s kind of wild to think that the narrative medium of Dracula consists of largely 19th century text messages, and that this was the predominant form of communication for the people who read Bram Stoker‘s novel. Like, letters were very much in Vogue when Dracula was published, and continued to be in Vogue such that posthumously published letters are one of the foundations for literary criticism.