THE DEEP ONES: "The Great God Pan" by M. John Harrison

"The Great God Pan" by M. John Harrison

Discussion begins November 26.

First published in Prime Evil: New Stories by the Modern Masters of Horror (1988)



ONLINE VERSIONS

No legal online versions found to date.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?43820

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Prime Evil: New Stories by the Modern Masters of Horror
The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII
Poe's Children
Things That Never Happen

MISCELLANY

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._John_Harrison
https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/
http://tinyurl.com/p85875w
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intmjh.htm
http://tinyurl.com/mmn2akn

Prime Evil: New Stories by the Modern Masters of Horror for me.

I first read this story (in Things That Never Happen) immediately after Harrison's later novel The Course of the Heart, for which it had served as the germ. It was hard for me to separate it from what I had taken from the novel at that point, and I'm looking forward to re-reading it on a more stand-alone basis.

I'll be reading it out of Poe's Children.

There's a little bit from Harrison's intro to Things That Never Happen that is so awesome, I just have to share it. In looking back on his own development, he writes:

In the 1960s and 70s I thought of myself as complicated. In fact I was a blank slate. Even the scratches on it had been made by other people. At least that made them easy to read. By the mid 90s the reverse had happened. I thought of myself as transparent: in fact I was opaque, buckled, mazy.

The real difference: I knew what I wanted.

Everyone who makes it past fifty is a monster of self-will, inhabiting something between a labyrinth and a jail. It only gets worse. Young people sense this and are rightly appalled.

I'm planning to read it out of Poe's Children.

>5 paradoxosalpha: Interesting observation. I will ponder whether I am a "monster of self-will". Some days I feel like a cloud of velleities though.

In a note about this story appended to Things That Never Happen, Harrison claims that "Apart from its title this 'Great God Pan' has nothing much in common with Arthur Machen's." I'm not entirely convinced, though. The Arthur De Vries quote at the end (from the LT-vexed Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery), while speaking more to Harrison's appreciation, touches on the phenomenon the stories have in common: the abnormal recovery of a "direct sensual perception" denied to the bulk of humanity, with horrific consequences, sexual in essence and/or symptom.

(Here's a link for convenience to the Deep Ones on Machen's "The Great God Pan.")

Coming to this story with the Machen in mind, Ann's psychiatric distress is a sort of red herring, making her out to be a new Mary or Helen Vaughan. But it seems to me instead that Ann and Lucas are equally Mary/Helen, Sprake takes the part of the experimenter Dr. Raymond, and the narrator is Clarke, a witness to and beneficiary of the experiment, entangled with its subjects.

I do think Harrison's "Pan" : Machen's "Pan" :: "Pickman's Model" : "I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket..." And this group is practically the only place I can imagine offering such a synthetic take.

In the same breath that he disavows any substance to the connection with Machen, Harrison claims an influence from "that other genius of British metaphysical fiction, Charles Williams." Nearly all of Williams' fiction seems to be concerned with the eruption of a sacred/weird substrate into the everyday. I would say Harrison's is superior because he avoids the sectarian symbolism that Williams uses (though, to Williams' credit, he varies the sect).

The Williams novel that probably bears closest comparison to this story content-wise is The Place of the Lion. In both cases, there is an originating crisis-event that is left without detail. Also, both have explicit nods to Gnostic theology, although Harrison's is nearly confined to the word pleroma. In his foreword to Things That Never Happen, China Miéville refers in passing to "the pornographic archons of 'The Great God Pan,'" which may or may not be a fair reading so far as archons go, although I would contest the aptness of "pornographic." (It's in this same foreword that Miéville calls HPL and CAS alike idiot-savants possessed of "genius born of structural incompetence.")

>8 paradoxosalpha:

I can see the Machen tale's DNA here, too, with the experiment that goes awry, causing some kind of supernatural change in those involved. As you say, it seems to be more of an Ann/Lucas combination (reflected in the apparition out side the kitchen window) rather than a single Helen Vaughan. The experiment is referred to as a "ritual" in Harrison's tale, possibly making whatever happened a kind of communion with strange gods, too.

Harrison did it first, of course, but the storyline bears a very strong resemblance to that found in Peter Straub's novel A Dark Matter. Curious. Same with Ramsey Campbell's Obsession, if I remember correctly.

I had to let this tale roll around in my head for a bit after I read it for the whole thing to sort of come together in my mind. The ambiguity factor is pretty high in this one, even for a rather literary/arty weird tale, it depicts events that take place across an approximately 20+-year span, and the central event of the tale (the late-60s epiphany of the characters) is never directly depicted (which reminded me of the film Reservoir Dogs). Quite a bit to take in in a story of less than 30 pages!

I found it interesting to note that the aforementioned epiphany took place in the late 60s, a time when there was a great resurgence in interest in obtaining altered states of consciousness/alternative worldviews via psychoactive drugs, Eastern religion, and the occult. I see that Harrison was born just before the post-WWII baby boom, so it seems to me this can hardly be a coincidence.

>3 paradoxosalpha:

I'd like to read that novel. It seems to me that the ideas here could be very fruitfully expanded upon in a longer work.

>10 gwendetenebre:

the storyline bears a very strong resemblance to that found in Peter Straub's novel A Dark Matter. Curious.

The collection I read this in (Poe's Children (2008)) was edited by Straub, so we know he read this tale before A Dark Matter (2010) was published. It would be interesting to if he has commented upon the resemblance between the two.

>11 artturnerjr:

The novel is really pretty awesome.

Harrison's characters in this story and The Course of the Heart are basically his own age as he writes them (fortiesish in the 1980s, having been young adults in the late 1960s), which is one of the reasons why I was struck by that quote I posted in #5 above.

Ann doesn't make it to 50, and one gets the sense Lucas might not either.

I'm considering this story so obscure as to make the story a failure. No chills or frission. The world beyond the veil seems pretty bland. We don't even learn what sort of revelation the four sought.

The constant references to Preloma reminded me of the "Newcastle" references in the early issues of the Constantine comic (and they are there in the new tv show). But we eventually learn what happened at Newcastle. Not so with Preloma.

8> I actually read Machen's "The Great God Pan" (for the first time) the night before I read this story. I agree with the similarities you noted.

I did like the details of Ann's migraines and Sprake's place above the Atlantis Bookstore (a real place, as I remember).

>13 paradoxosalpha:

Onto the wish list it goes! :)

>14 RandyStafford:

The constant references to Preloma reminded me of the "Newcastle" references in the early issues of the Constantine comic (and they are there in the new tv show). But we eventually learn what happened at Newcastle. Not so with Preloma.

The Newcastle references presumably tie into the fact that Constantine is based on Sting (who grew up in Newcastle).

I actually read Machen's "The Great God Pan" (for the first time) the night before I read this story.

Cool! What did you think of it?

>14 RandyStafford:

Maybe a bit of blandness, yes, and no clarity on what revelation, if any, was sought, but I thought that Harrison succeeded in conjuring a sense of doom as the characters experience their downward spiral into hopelessness. I found enough existential dread floating around in this tale to classify it as genuinely weird.

The child-like dwarf-thing that stalks Lucas at the end would seem to echo the homicidal dwarf found in Du Maurier's "Don't Look Now".

>14 RandyStafford:

Fair enough. Harrison isn't for all tastes, and he does several things in this story fairly calculated to annoy genre readers who expect certain types of builds and reveals. The whole thing tapers off into a sort of recollected aroma.

>14 RandyStafford:, >15 artturnerjr:

There might have been no original commitment to fill in the Newcastle backstory for Constantine. Given the nature of traditional comic book serial writing, though, one might have considered it inevitable, if the book were to run long enough.

>8 paradoxosalpha:

I do think Harrison's "Pan" : Machen's "Pan" :: "Pickman's Model" : "I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket..." And this group is practically the only place I can imagine offering such a synthetic take.

Good analogies - I agree.

>14 RandyStafford:

As with Art, I'd also like to hear your take on Machen's story.

>15 artturnerjr: Sting as the model for Constantine is obvious enough that I should have seen that.

>16 gwendetenebre: You're right! More dwarf weirdness.

>14 RandyStafford: I haven't read enough M. John Harrison to form a definite opinion, but what you say about his calculated attack on genre conventions matches what I've heard from others. I've read his The Pastel City and found it underwhelming though I'm told it gains significance as part of the Virconium sequence though I'm wondering if that's just literary retrofitting of a bland work into a more interesting suite. The Kefahuchi Tract books look intriguing. I did like his "Settling the World", a mission to kill God.

Originally, I was going to say I'm generally not a receptive reader for literary puzzle stories that thrive on ambiguity and probably don't present answer, just enigma. (The quintessential book seems to be Dhalgren. I've heard few defenders of this book who were able to explain it -- they just like the enduring puzzle.) Incidental enigmas and mysteries don't bother me. Some of my favorite movies have them. It's when the mystery becomes central to the story, and, at some hard-to-define point, I think the author has implied an answer he hasn't provided.

I think use of a first person narrator by Harrison aggravated this impression. I felt the narrator was being cute by hinting at information so necessary to explaining the story and yet deliberately withholding it. Not an unreliable narrator, an annoying coy narrator.

>20 RandyStafford:

Yeah, you've pegged the quality. I'm a Dhalgren fan too.

Harrison's novels tend to have something like a climactic payoff (missing from most of his short stories and also from the cyclical structure of Delany's Dhalgren), although not to the extent of furnishing a full explanation, more a matter of tying together enigmas that had seemed disparate.

>20 RandyStafford:

Yeah, the story of his creation is pretty great. Made it a lot easier to get my ex-wife (who is a huge fan of The Police) into Alan Moore comics. :)

Both Constantine co-creator Moore and Hellblazer writer Jamie Delano claim to have met Constantine in real life, if you can get your head around that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Constantine#In_real_life

I took delivery of a copy of Things That Never Happen this morning, and read "The Great God Pan" straight away.

I've got the UK mass market paperback which omits all Harrison's notes. Whilst its arguable how much his Pan has in common with Machen's, the story has more than one nod to Machen's supernatural stories. The apparition that follows Lucas at the end of the story, and causes poltergeist activity, is straight out of the short novel The Green Round; the streets around the British Museum are the stamping ground of Mr Dyson in The Three Impostors and a handful of short stories; and the "hallucination" outside Ann's window is surely inspired by the title of the story "The White People".

I had to look up the word "pleroma" ("generally refers to the totality of divine powers" - Wikipedia). Although I haven't been able to read all of Harrison's comments on how the pleroma differs from Machen's Pan, there's no question that the idea of accessing or plugging into it does very much follow in the footsteps of Machen's story. The outcome is very different of course, it's much more low key: Ann, Lucas, and the narrator (unnamed, unless I missed it) are more like '60's acid casualties than the devil-woman of Machen's imagination (and I'm still not sure, exactly, what his idea of evil is. There's something of a horror of materialism, of commerce and science, and disenchantment, more than anything else, I think).

Harrison's prose is, like Machen's, wonderful in its ability to both evoke reality and at the same time to make it strange (this is evident even in a non-genre work like the ostensibly realist novel Climbers).

Overall, I get the sense that this is, at root, a work of the 60's generation looking back from the viewpoint of early middle age and of the Thatcherite '80's and wondering "where did we/it all go wrong".

I've been on the sidelines, slightly frustrated as I've not put my hand to a copy of the story and can only soak up your comments. I've added Harrison to my wish list, though, based on the comments here as well as reviews of other stories / novels.

>9 paradoxosalpha: and >23 housefulofpaper:

My exposure to pleroma comes primarily from Jung via Gregory Bateson's cybernetic take on the sacred, and some glancing discussion of its use in the Gnostic tradition. From that standpoint, Harrison's use of the term is intriguing, as it points to "blank matter" insofar as it is beyond the subjective senses of living creatures. As I understand Jung and Bateson, pleroma is used in contrast to creatura or the living matter of the cosmos, that part of the cosmos we can differentiate specific facts or characteristics, and so make out individual objects and subjects, and not be limited to one overwhelming block of background noise. From this perspective, pleroma is an apt term for supernatural forces insofar as they exceed our capacities for understanding and perception; at the same time, typical ghost stories would manifest the supernatural in forms more similar to what we see in the living world around us, from creatura.

I'm curious what others took from Harrison's choice of pleroma, as well as any non-Jungian interpretations of the term which can be brought to bear.

The literal meaning of pleroma is "fullness," and in Gnostic theologies it is generally used to refer to the divine pre-existent to the creation of material existence. In the memorable figure of Jacques Lacarriere, it is the realm of unbounded light that exists outside of the opaque sphere that imprisons the world: when the sun is not patrolling our cosmic jail we see the pleroma through tiny holes which are the stars.

>23 housefulofpaper:

For all that some may be put off by Harrison's suspended and unresolved plot-forms and often unsympathetic characters, I think he's unimpeachable as a prose stylist.

>14 RandyStafford:

The Atlantis Bookshop (it's in the UK, after all!) is indeed a real place. I popped in yesterday to look through their small selection of Weird small-press books (Tartarus Press, Sarob Press, Side Real Press. They've got a hardback of Mark Samuels' The White Hands (too expensive for me).

>26 paradoxosalpha:

On Harrison's prose style, I first read him in an anthology of stories from the British Science Fiction magazine New Worlds, which was famously experimental under Michael Moorcock's editorship in the 1960s. After the fireworks of the work published in that decade it was something of a shock to encounter his story Running Down. There was a sort of return to tradition and a solemnity or gravity there. I think it's also present in the work of other writers of the same generation or a little younger - Christopher Priest, Garry Kilworth, Robert Holdstock immediately spring to mind.

Resurrecting this thread as the most apposite place to mention that I've just read Harrison's novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, and I have (of course) posted my review to LT.