PAN: The Great God’s Modern Return by Paul Robichaud

Author:Paul Robichaud [Robichaud, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf, pdf
ISBN: 9781789146905
Amazon: 1789146909
Barnesnoble: 1789146909
Published: 2021-08-05T15:48:09+00:00

‘That’s it. Pan. And he would send them little fellows

that was half a goat to scare them out –’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘A faun.’

‘That’s it. A farn. That’s what I was once.’

Midgleston’s tale begins in New York, where he worked as

a draughtsman for an architect named Middleton. The wife

of one of his clients, Mr Van Dyming, has bought a rural

property where wild grapes grow, and where the former

owners have met with violent accidents. After Mrs Van

Dyming has moved into her new house, Midgleston is sent

to bring her the portfolio for a theatre she hopes to build on 192

pan in the twentieth century

the property. As he sits in the train sipping iced water, the world begins to swirl around him, and he sees a mysterious face through the window: ‘It was not a man’s face, because it had horns, and it was not a goat’s face because it had a beard and it was looking at me with eyes like a man and its mouth was open like it was saying something to me when it exploded inside my head.’82 The nature of what really happens is left ambiguous; when a doctor on the train attempts to revive him, Midgleston, a temperance man, realizes he is drinking whisky. When they arrive at the railway station, Midgleston purchases a tin whistle and continues drinking in the wagon that takes him to the Van Dyming estate.

At this point in telling his tale, Midgleston pulls out a newspaper cutting that serves to explain what happened next.

The newspaper quotes Mrs Van Dyming’s account of seeing

a naked man in her garden who wields a blade that shines

in the moonlight, and who makes a strange whistling sound as she flees. She is pursued by a local bull, which she escapes by pressing her body against a tree as the bull circles her. So ends Midgleston’s brief career as a faun. He reveals to the narrator that he fled the United States in embarrassment, leaving his wife to collect on a large insurance policy, and she has subsequently remarried. Faulkner concludes his story with a sense of ambivalence over Midgleston’s true identity, as well as over the precise nature of what happened. Did a man who had never drunk alcohol before simply lose control, or was he visited by the woodland god who always protects his mysterious vineyard hidden deep in the Virginia mountains?

193

pan

Modern poetry

In 1912 the modernist poet and impresario Ezra Pound pub-

lished his poem ‘Pan Is Dead’ in Ripostes.83 Being dead, Pan himself does not appear in the poem, but the work shows

that his death has had devastating consequences for the natural word. Despite Pound’s proclaiming the new modernist

style of ‘Imagism’ in the same volume, ‘Pan Is Dead’ is very much a poem under the influence of nineteenth-century language. Partly an elegy for Pan, it opens with an announcement of his death: ‘Pan is dead. Great Pan is dead. / Ah! bow your heads, ye maidens all, / And weave ye him his coronal.’ The maidens respond

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.