The Panic

Michael Clune’s debut novel Pan shares little beside its title and first-person perspective with the nineteenth-century Norwegian novella by Knut Hamsun about the erotic yearnings and pantheistic visions of a hunter who carries an effigy of the titular god on his cartridge case. Clune’s boldness consists in being altogether more literal. At the novel’s core is a metaphysical vision, which it presents fully, persuasively, and in detail, without metaphorical evasion or (once its hero forsakes the tender mercies of contemporary medicine and psychiatry) rationalizing explanation. The book is a theophany: the manifestation of a god—that is, of Pan, ancient Greek deity of woodland places, of panic, but sometimes also, as his name suggests, of everything, of the cosmos as a whole.

Take it from Sarah, the girlfriend of Nick, Clune’s fifteen-year-old narrator, who has recently moved into a desolate so-called townhouse in Libertyville, in the rural outskirts of Chicago in the 1990s. They have been hanging out in the public library, and Sarah has a stroke of inspiration while consulting the encyclopedia for information on the “panic attacks” that have been destabilizing Nick’s life and forcing him to engage in uncool practices like huffing into a paper bag. “‘Pan is the god,’ she whispered grinning, ‘of the wild. Of, like, shepherds. Of wild music, and …The Greeks considered him also to be the god of theatrical criticism.”

Sarah’s emphasis underlines a special meaning for Nick, an avid reader who has recently been entranced by Wilde’s Salome. But she could just as well have stressed Pan’s role as the god of “wild music.” Whether it’s the “extra dimension” Nick and Sarah have already found in Boston’s “More Than A Feeling,” which they played at Sarah’s house during their first exploratory flirtations, or the recurring vision that comes to Nick while listening to Bach of figures reclining on marble couches beside a gate washed by the sea, the book is full of testimonials to the psychedelic character of music. These visions are those of a teetotaller—unlike the other members of his new friend group, who gather in a special room at a family barn to drop acid and engage in classically 1990s “witchy” behavior, Nick forgoes drugs. This suggests that the novel’s vision of reality could be awakened in anyone, at any time. (Though the fearsome Ian, elder statesman of the friendgroup, will in fact suggest that Nick is the recipient of a special election.)

Pan is a novel about the power of art, which it links to that of the old gods. Once again, Sarah is the voice of wisdom, echoing scholar Aby Warburg’s view of the “rebirth of pagan antiquity”: “The word renaissance, it means rebirth. And what gets reborn is the old gods. The gods of ancient Greece and Rome,” she tells Nick. Later on, she will speak of the power of art, like the power of music, as if it were a particularly high grade of drug: “‘They say,’ she said, ‘that no one understands Renaissance art. […] Especially adults don’t understand.” Or, as Nick will later reflect:  “My own writing, perhaps, was simply too weak to perform the job adequately. But maybe very high quality, powerful art would open a space in which the looseness of thoughts […] would settle.” The analogy is one that the thrill-seeking Clune, previously the author of the addiction memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, as well as of a critical study of aesthetic judgment, can pronounce on with authority...

Yet Pan has another unusual status in antiquity: He is a god who dies. The Greek historian Plutarch tells how, one evening, passing an island off the coast of Italy, the Egyptian sailor Thamus heard a voice calling out: “Great Pan is dead!” This took place, Plutarch tells us, during the reign of Emperor Tiberius—a fateful date for Christian readers, since it was under his reign that Jesus was crucified, and, according to legend, oracles ceased. (Plutarch’s anecdote itself comes from an essay “On the Obsolescence of the Oracles”—though he interprets this obsolescence in pragmatic and pagan, rather than Christian, terms.)

For the young Friedrich Nietzsche, the story had another significance, yet one that was cryptically related. In The Birth of Tragedy, he recalls the death of Pan to tell of the death of his treasured art:

Greek tragedy had a fate different from that of all her older sister arts: she died by suicide, in consequence of an irreconcilable conflict […]. Even as certain Greek sailors in the time of Tiberius once heard upon a lonesome island the thrilling cry, “great Pan is dead”: so now as it were sorrowful wailing sounded through the Hellenic world: “Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself has perished with her!”

“The death of Greek tragedy,” Nietzsche writes in the same passage, “left an immense void, deeply felt everywhere.” Tragedy's death was a suicide, but it was enacted by Euripides, behind whom, however, Nietzsche saw the ultimate embodiment of the rational-critical spirit: “O Socrates, Socrates, was this perhaps thy secret? Oh mysterious ironist, was this perhaps thine—irony?” The analytic mind, the spirit that stands apart and criticizes instead of sensuously partaking: this, for Nietzsche, was the force that doomed tragedy, and that which—together with its cousin, Christianity, enemy of ancient “health” and vitality—was bringing about the modern world.

Clune’s novel takes its bearings from a world in which Nietzsche’s rationalist desiccation has undergone several thousand ratchetings up, and God is very much dead. Though Nick attends a Catholic school, the religious instruction he receives there is uninspiring. Belief in the numinous, the higher power, comes, for Nick, not from religious texts but from their lurid fin-de-siecle reworking, in Oscar Wilde’s aforementioned Salome. Yet it could just as well be said that the numinous displays a surprising tenaciousness, inhering in a surprising variety of degraded cultural artifacts—say, “Blue raspberry Slurpee, the most magical of flavors,” or the blue sky of Gilligan’s Island reruns, or the ceremonial gate, enclosing nothing, planted uselessly on a traffic island at the entrance to Nick’s Dad’s subdivision, Chariot Courts: proof that “the builders had wrought a few charms against total exposure to time.” Perhaps the gods and their mystique have not altogether departed from earth.

That is not, however, how Nick at first experiences it. At the core of his “panic” is a vision of things as they are—a heightening of consciousness whose first, debilitating instance is the experience of the self as a thing. After an early episode of panic that he only staves off by staying up all night reading Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Nick asks his dad to take him to the psychiatrist, who diagnoses him with  Generalized Anxiety Disorder—for which there is no medical cure. (A possible implication: the horror of existence is not to be cured for as long as existence persists.) The prescribed talk therapy does not help, either. Despite its purported rationalism and practicality (“I don’t work with Freudian gobblygook,” his new therapist declares, “I’m a cognitive behavioral therapist. Everything we do here is evidence-based and scientific”), the advice Nick receives will turn out to be worse than useless: “Concentrating on breathing, I thought, is basically the worst thing you can do if you’re trying to relax. Breathing only works right if you don’t think about it. Like walking. If you concentrate on walking, I thought, you’re more likely to fall over.”

Instead of scientific approaches, Nick will turn to religion: that is, to religions of his own devising, each as idiosyncratic and ad hoc as those “charms” wrought by the builders of Chariot Courts. Interestingly, these successive “Churches of Pan” consist above all of efforts to hold the god at bay. Think of stained-glass windows, or the diaphanous leaves admitting bars of light in a Terence Malick film, and you might think you understand what the book means by a mediation or distancing of the god as a means of making him present. In fact, though, the book’s statement is more counterintuitive and more radical than this: it asserts that holding the god at bay just is the function of the sacred place, with its sanctum sanctorum. “If my Catholic upbringing had taught me nothing else," Nick, writes, "it was that churches aren’t institutions for bringing the god close, but for keeping him distant.” The First Church of Pan consists not in a change of behavior—Nick will keep huffing the paper bag the doctor gave him after his first diagnosis—but a change of attitude. “The symptoms of panic are like a gate in my mind,” Nick thinks, after a particularly troubling episode in which he seems to step outside his own head. “But I don’t have to open the gate.”

The Second Church of Pan is likewise a form of containment. By this point, Nick has been influenced by his deepening association with the group of friends who hang out at the barn owned by Ian and the ominously named Tod’s parents, with their witchy rituals and deepening personal dramas. (The immediate catalyst is his fear that something is going on between Ian and Sarah.) Instead of using a paper bag to regulate his breathing, Nick refocuses his energies on the mind, which he regulates by writing: “I wrote down the fears that came to me in meditation not for one reason, but for two. To see them—to face them—and then to forget them.” In a curious touch, Nick refers to this practice, not (as we might expect) as “description,” but rather as “redescription,” thereby evoking the American neo-pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty’s account of what philosophy does, once it has recognized that the truth we seek is not “out there” in the world, but is fashioned within our language. (There is also a Rortyan tinge to Nick’s rejection of an interpretation of his panic that traces it to his parents’ divorce: “there was nothing you could do with the Divorce theory,” shading into a darker Nietzscheanism in his friend Ty’s comment on interpretations of his own family dynamics: “It’s not about which level is true,’ he said, ‘It’s about who is stronger.” The novel also seems to share a basic orientation towards the American pragmatic tradition of William James, with his interest in the Varieties of Religious Experience—of which Nick’s strange perceptions certainly are one.)

In the final stage of Nick’s enlightenment, redescription falls away. In the Third and Final Church, he experiences the theophany itself, sans gate: “The calmness and the stillness of Pan’s gaze.” This vision is apocalyptic—in the precise sense that the literary critic Northrop Frye would have recognized, with his critique of descriptive language as a falling-away from the true vocation of literature which is to present a vision of ultimate reality.

As Frye wrote in the Anatomy of Criticism, “the tendency to verisimilitude and accuracy of description, is one of two poles of literature. At the other pole is something that seems to be connected both with Aristotle’s word mythos and with the usual meaning of myth.” Frye’s ultimate horizon of literature lies beyond the mythic, however

In the anagogic phase, literature imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought of a human mind which is at the circumference and not at the center of its reality. […] When we pass into anagogy, nature becomes, not the container, but the thing contained, and the archetypal universal symbols, the city, the garden, the quest, the marriage, are no longer the desirable forms that man constructs inside nature, but are themselves the forms of nature. […] This is not reality, but it is the conceivable or imaginative limit of desire, which is infinite, eternal, and hence apocalyptic.

Yet if the apocalypse at the end of Clune’s novel shares something with this vision, it presents it in more limited form. Nick’s vision consists not in seeing the world from the standpoint of ultimate desire, but in standing outside time, and hence seeing the world of temporal sequence as spatial and already completed: “My redescriptions, I realized now, are basically and essentially decorations. They are like Christmas-tree ornaments hung on the ordinary tree of life.” Why is that? Because:

I saw that when you’re outside the body, beings that move in time look like trees and the world of beings that move in time resembles a forest.

            The calmness and silence of Pan’s gaze.

So Pan is a woodland god, after all. The woodland he inhabits, however, is not the forested mountain uplands, but rather our world itself, when seen from a perspective outside it—from a perspective outside of time, when the movements of individuals, like the buzzings of a fly, are frozen into shapes of trees.

This moment, the final one in the book, is the culmination of several in which characters have other intimations of godlike status. One such is that of Nick’s friend Ty, an upper-middle-class black kid with whom he skips school and engages in minor acts of delinquency before they are both sucked into Tod and Ian’s web: “Ty said once that when he was moving along the earth and then switched to map mode, seeing his position from a perspective where the chaos of nature turned in to cleans lines and dots, he felt like a god. Like a god. Those were his actual words.”

It is likewise to Ty that the novel owes the following, philosophically freighted account of the family—something that Ty in principle knows more about than Nick (though not everything is so rosy behind his home’s closed doors): “The family is pretty basic, right? I mean, it’s biological. It attaches us, kind of, to the earth, to other species and shit. It’s like when you’re in a family, part of you, maybe most of you, isn’t totally in you, isn’t totally there at any given moment, but is sort of spread out through time—backward and forward—through the people in your family who are dead and the people in your family who aren’t even alive yet.” This sounds like Edmund Burke, though the novel will deploy this wisdom in the service of a most un-Burkean spiritual enthusiasm.

We arrive there by way of another of Ty’s insights: “And you’re not very tied to the earth, let’s face it. You’re loosely attached to the earth, too loose. […] It’s why Jason and them make fun of you. They call it pussyness, but it’s not. Looseness. Isn’t that what you say your panic attacks make you feel like? Like you’re about to come loose from your body, from all this stuff, from the earth?”

Nick will not come to a position of greater attachment to the earth. He will, however, by pursuing detachment to the bitter end, achieve some compensatory vantage-point—thereby recapturing, at the level of vision, that sense that Ty describes of something that “isn’t totally there at any given moment, but is sort of spread out through time—backward and forward.” The vision at the end of Michael Clune’s Pan is, strikingly, non-consolatory—instead of making Nick at home, it recalls that sense of transience and vulnerability first felt in the novel’s opening pages in the windswept homes of Chariot Courts: flimsy, ephemeral, exposed to the knife-like Midwestern wind. What has altered is the vantage-point. At the novel’s end, Nick experiences ecstasy as an influx of power. The world is the flimsy dwelling. Nick is the wind.

Paul Franz has contributed to Bookforum, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, among others.