Abstract

Panography is a series of linked poems that develops a disjunctive narrative from a simple premise: it transplants the figure of Pan into the backwoods of contemporary northern Ontario, on the fringes of a rural community. This idea owes much to Knut Hamsun's novel Pan , which places a Pan-like protagonist on the outskirts of a Norwegian village. Unlike Hamsun's Pan, Panography overtly acknowledges Pan's multiplicity as a cultural figure by juxtaposing its own Pan-narrative with nods to (and appropriations of) his appearances in classical mythology and literary iconography, and his rare invocations in contemporary popular culture. Panography is an examination of rural Canadian ideas of masculinity, an exploration of the backwoods story as social cement, a love poem to the details of the northern Ontario landscape, and a vaguely Jungian study of what happens when psychology embraces the natural world as its substrate (claiming that, despite cosmopolitan postmodernity, this is still possible). Panography is neither transcendentalist nor environmentalist in its primary agenda. Pan, as a hybrid of the human and the bestial, and as an archetype that has been carried to the present exclusively through artistic and scholarly works, is an ideal nexus for a deconstruction (or even a synthesis) of the received binary of art and nature. Panography allows its readers to escape the filtered aesthetic of much literary nature writing, in which the process of artistic representation places nature itself in a subordinate position, fit merely for terror, sentimentality or pathetic fallacy.