Pan by Paul Robichaud

Author:Paul Robichaud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

As ‘All’, Pan is what cannot be apprehended by the physical eye – the totality of everything. Only the mysterious power of our ‘third eye’, which Cartwright identifies with ‘darkness’, can perceive Pan within things. When Lou asks if Pan could be seen ‘in a horse, for example’, Cartwright tells her, ‘Easily. In St Mawr!’ Lou’s mother suggests that ‘it would be difficult . . . to open the third eye and see Pan in a man.’ Cartwright agrees, suggesting that in a man all that is visible is ‘the old satyr: the fallen Pan’. His comments develop Lawrence’s contrast between an original, formless Pan and his transformation into the goat-footed god.

In private, Mrs DeWitt expresses her frustration to Lou, who agrees that Pan is not to be found in modern men, picking up another theme from Lawrence’s essay. Lou can find Pan easily enough in St Mawr, where he is a frightening presence for Mrs DeWitt, but confesses, ‘When I look at men with my third eye, as you call it – I think I see – mostly – a sort of – pancake.’49 Modern men are pancakes compared with the dangerous and primordial splendour of the living Pan. Mrs DeWitt despairs of finding ‘the unfallen Pan’ in any man she has met in the last fifteen years, including Cartwright: ‘Isn’t it extraordinary, the young man Cartwright talks about Pan, but he knows nothing of it at all. He knows nothing of the unfallen Pan: only the fallen Pan with goat legs and a leer – and that sort of power, don’t you know.’50 Modern men can be lecherous seducers, but such sexual power is merely the fallen form of the deeper and more authentic power to enchant that Lawrence identifies in his earlier essay.

For the rest of St Mawr, Pan is evoked symbolically rather than directly. His most powerful symbol is the horse itself, which nearly kills Rico on an expedition to a Shropshire landmark called the Devil’s Chair, suggesting the Christian conflation of Pan with the Devil. Lawrence describes it as ‘one of those places where the spirit of aboriginal England still lingers, the old savage England, whose last blood still flows in a few Welshmen, Englishmen, Cornishmen’.51 None of the characters is able fully to inhabit ‘the living universe of Pan’, although Lewis, the Welsh groom, and Phoenix, Mrs DeWitt’s half-Mexican, half-Navajo servant, come closest.52 As in ‘Pan in America’, Indigenous people are more symbolic than real for Lawrence in St Mawr, and his portrayal of Phoenix is marred by the racialized thinking typical of early twentieth-century writers. Both Phoenix and Lewis embody Lawrence’s idea of ‘aboriginal’ races, being darker and closer to the earth, and therefore to Pan. Lewis, for example, is described as ‘walking his horse alongside in the shadow of the wood’s-edge, the darkness of the old Pan, that kept our artificially lit world at bay’.53 They have an innate understanding of the ‘Pan-power’ embodied by St Mawr, who ultimately finds freedom of a kind on a ranch in the American Southwest, where he is brought by Lou and Mrs DeWitt.

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