Pan the goat-god
Subtitle: his myth in modern times
By: by Patricia Merivale.
Publisher: Harvard U.P
Published: 1969
Place of publication: Cambridge [Mass.]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 286
Subjects: English literature -- History and criticism.; Pan (Greek deity)
Description: From the Blurb: I have seen the God Pan and it was in this manner - Pan, the god of woods and shepherds, had the hoofs and legs of a goat. This is the core of his nature: the paradox of a being half goat, half god. In a thematic study of this distinctive and unusually varied motif from classical mythology, Patricia Merivale chronicles the many appearances of Pan in modern literature, giving the main emphasis to English writing, where he is in fact most often encountered. The literary structure has been built upon several basic concepts of the goat-god's nature: the Orphic or universal Pan; the pastoral, benevolent Pan; the sinister Pan of sex and terror; and the dual identification of Pan with either Christ or the Devil. It begins with the classical sources and stories that make up the elemental Pan legend-Plutarch's tale of the death of Pan; Ovid's Judgment of Midas, and Pan and Syrinx; Apuleius' Pan and Psyche.

In the first chapter, the author examines the development of these various Pan images from classical through eighteenth-century literature. The rest of the book analyzes more fully the modern literary manifestations of the god: especially the Orphic Pan of the Romantic poets, the Plutarchan Pan of the Victorians, and the double cult of the benevolent and the sinister Pan from 1890 to 1914, when Pan was the most fashionable mythic motif for the minor writer. Some of the most intriguing versions of the theme are found in the benevolent Pan of fable (as in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, or E M Forester's "The Story of a Panic"), and in the malevolent Pan of the horror story, from Arthur Machen to Faulkner. One chapter deals with the richest development of the Pan myth in modern times -D.H. Lawrence's use of the motif to express his own sense of the darkly irrational.

The book concludes with a brief glimpse of the post-Lawrentian literary scene, where, not for the first time, Pan has become a trivial, decorative allusion. Although his long career in literature now seems over, the author observes, paraphrasing Lawrence, that Pan keeps on being reborn, in all kinds of strange ways.