After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion

1. Panic Merchants: Prophecy and the Satyr

1 Panic Merchants: Prophecy and the Satyr 25 [T]here are strange Ferments in the Blood, which in many Bodys occasion an extraordinary Discharge; so in Reason too, there are heterogeneous Particles which must be thrown off by Fermentation. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury (14) For where panic is, there too is Pan. James Hillman (33) The Greek god Pan is one of western culture’s most enduring and ubiquitous trickster figures. Half-man, half-goat, Pan dwells in forests and glades trying to seduce nymphs, despite his grotesque demeanor. Born in Arcadia, he has thus become an icon for those who lament the Fall into civilization. Pan’s relationship to both Dionysus and Bacchus has become so confused that it is now difficult to distinguish one from the other. This is hardly surprising, considering their shared characteristics, and their inherently fusional-orgiastic function within classical philosophical and literary fables. As signifiers, “Dionysus” and “Pan” are free-floating archetypes, confused through various interpretations —Friedrich Nietzsche’s being arguably the most influential . This is not necessarily a matter of historical blurring, but rather a sign of the almost Rorschachian ambiguity of his metaphysical presence (or absence) in modern times. As a trickster figure , Pan continues to elude us, and to enthrall the imagination for this very reason. In her literary history of Pan the Goat God (published, significantly enough, in 1969), Patricia Merivale traces the evolution of this myth into the twentieth century. She concludes that his symbolic status as a sexual figure is “only a recent literary characteristic ” (226), initiated by Robert Browning’s vision of Pan as lurking within us, rather than roaming the landscape. This radical reassessment of Pan’s “essential” character forever altered our perception of his mythical status. Consequently, the goat-god—rather like millenarianism itself—is “not exclusively sexual, but largely so” (90). Beginning with Nietzsche’s question—“what does the union of god and goat . . . really mean?” (226)—Merivale explores the general rekindling of interest in Pan during the previous fin de siècle, categorizing different species of literary Pans, and identifying genealogical overlaps between Pan and Dionysus. She reveals that Nietzsche’s famous dialectic between Apollo and Dionysus had many precedents, many of which placed Pan in the antagonistic position. William Hazlitt, for instance, in his Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth (1820), saw the contest between Pan and Apollo as a critical metaphor, given the “repeated claim that Apollo is envious of his sweet pipings” (ibid.: 60). Lyly’s Midas (1592) states that “Pan is a God, Apollo is no more!” (ibid.: 48), while Buchanan’s 1885 poem, “The Earthquake” proclaims, Woe to the land wherein the Satyr reigns, And Pan usurps Apollo’s throne! (ibid.: 110) There was an enormous resurgence of interest in Pan as an ideological icon at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to E. M. Forster, the Pan-effect had not only continued but accelerated into the modern world, which is why in Howards End (1910) “panic and emptiness” accompany the life of “telegrams and anger” (ibid.: 190). Technology is thus identified as a compatible environment for the previously agrarian Pan. Pan’s sardonic laugh was heard across the battlefields of Europe by writers documenting that conflagration of Enlightenment ideals by horrific technologies, the First World War. Osbert Sitwell described the carnage allegorically: “‘Pan and Mars had broken loose together and had set out to conquer the man who wound and set the clocks that regulated civilized living” (ibid.: 221). Here Pan is presented as an inherited blood-lust in an age of mechanical production. Indeed this guilt by association is directly connected to the literary motif of panic as a destructively sublime communion with the Infinite. The undefined “mystical fright” of sensitive nineteenthcentury souls such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, prompted the emergence After the Orgy 26 of the medical condition of “Panophobia,” for which the popular term would soon become panic attack (Nordau 226). Moreover, one character in Arthur Machen’s “Man Who Went Too Far” (1912) declares that “Pan means ‘everything,’ and to see everything would be clearly more than one could stand. And so to see Pan means death” (Merivale 168). To feel the presence of Pan, therefore, means death and/or fulfillment . In fact this “and/or” provides the crucial pivot on which libidinal millenarianism rests, ever-suspended between orgasm and extinction. For if Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are correct in...