Chambers of Consciousness and Houses of Life: Nietzschean Hermeneutics in Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan

Abstract

AbstractThis article provides a comparative study of the underlying cognitive structures laid out in Arthur Machen’s decadent novella The Great God Pan (1894) and Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (1873). It scrutinizes the images of the “chamber of consciousness” and “the house of life”, deployed by the German philosopher and the Welsh author respectively, and explores how the use and the stylistic qualities of both images affect and determine the overall conception of reality exposed in each work. This analysis helps identify Nietzschean undertones in Machen’s novella, which, in turn, allows an interpretation of The Great God Pan through the lens of Nietzsche’s discourses on cognition and reality. The reading resulting from the analysis puts forward two conclusions. Firstly, Nietzsche’s concept of “Dionysian wisdom” brings to light and informs a specific and yet unexplored source of horror in Machen’s novella, i.e., the feeling of revulsion developed by Helen Vaughn’s victims after they experience Dionysian rapture. Secondly, the analysis of the concepts of reality implied in Nietzsche’s and Machen’s imagery contributes an argument for the idea of reality as becoming in the context of Machen’s novella.