Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T22:39:03.444Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

ARTHUR MACHEN AND THE HORRORS OF DEEP HISTORY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2012

Aaron Worth
Aaron Worth*
Affiliation:
Boston University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In what is surely his best-known “shocker” of the 1890s, Arthur Machen has one of his ubiquitous bachelor heroes (Clarke by name) try to warn another off his pursuit of the truth about a preternaturally dangerous femme fatale figure, a woman responsible for the hideous deaths of a number of English gentlemen. “I am,” he writes to his friend, “like a traveller who has peered over an abyss, and has drawn back in terror. What I know is strange enough and horrible enough, but beyond my knowledge there are depths and horrors more frightful still” (“Pan” 89). But to what “depths,” exactly, does the fearful Clarke refer? What “horrors”? And why, here as elsewhere in this text, do depth and horror seem so intimately interconnected? The tale in question, “The Great God Pan” (1890), bristles with multifarious horrors, to be sure. In the novella's opening episode, a mad scientist figure performs experimental brain surgery on a young woman (“a slight lesion in the grey matter, that is all,” he says to an over-scrupulous chum), causing her to “see the god Pan,” and reducing her to idiocy and death (“Pan” 62, 68). The bulk of the subsequent narrative concerns a sequence of seemingly unrelated tragedies – the mysterious death of one gentleman in London, a rash of particularly horrid suicides by a number of others, the demise of an English artist in Buenos Aires – which prove all to be connected to a single figure of monstrous evil, a woman who goes by the name of Helen Vaughn (among others). She is, it turns out, the offspring of the subject of the surgical experiment and Pan himself, and her own (forced) suicide at the end of the story leads to a gruesome tableau of bodily dissolution reminiscent of Poe's M. Valdemar (or, to update the reference, the gooey, B-movie slime Slavoj Žižek seems to have claimed in the name of the Lacanian Real).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 2012 , pp. 215 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Boardman, John. The Great God Pan: The Survival of an Image. London: Thames and Hudson. 1997.Google Scholar
Calvin, William. A Brief History of the Mind. New York: Oxford UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Daniel, Glyn. The Idea of Prehistory. London: C. A. Watts, 1962.Google Scholar
Eckersley, Adrian. “A Theme in the Early Work of Arthur Machen: ‘Degeneration.’” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 35.3 (1992): 276–87.Google Scholar
Evans, Sir John. The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments of Great Britain. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1872.Google Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Turner, Mark. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Gould, Stephen Jay. Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. 1980. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leslie-McCarthy, Sage. “Re-Vitalising the Little People: Arthur Machen's Tales of the Remnant Races.” Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 11 (2005): 65–78.Google Scholar
Lubbock, John, The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man. London: Longmans, Green, 1870.Google Scholar
Lubbock, John. Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages. London: Williams and Norgate, 1865.Google Scholar
Machen, Arthur. “The Great God Pan.” Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. Ed. Stern, Philip van Doren. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. 61–115.Google Scholar
Machen, Arthur. “The Novel of the Black Seal.” Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. Ed. Stern, Philip van Doren. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. 3–42.Google Scholar
Machen, Arthur. “The Red Hand.” The Black Veil and Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths. Ed. Valentine, Mark. London: Wordsworth, 2008. 49–74.Google Scholar
Machen, Arthur. “The Shining Pyramid.” Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. Ed. Stern, Philip van Doren. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. 184–207.Google Scholar
Machen, Arthur. “The White People.” Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. Ed. Stern, Philip van Doren. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948. 116–154.Google Scholar
Mithen, Steven. The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion, and Science. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996.Google Scholar
Müller, F. Max. Lectures on the Science of Language Delivered at the Royal Institute of Great Britain in April, May, and June, 1861. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner, 1865.Google Scholar
Pearson, Richard. “Primitive Modernity: H. G. Wells and the Prehistoric Man of the 1890s.” Yearbook of English Studies (2007): 58–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Richardson, Alan. “Cognitive Literary Criticism.” Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Waugh, Patricia. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. 544–556.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silver, Carole G.Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smail, Daniel Lord. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008.Google Scholar
Stocking, George W.Victorian Anthropology. New York: Macmillan, 1987.Google Scholar
Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Wells, H. G. “A Story of the Stone Age.” Twenty-Eight Science Fiction Stories of H.G. Wells. New York: Dover, 1952. 360–417.Google Scholar