Nov

12

Book ‘Em: Beyond Good And Grendel.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

November 12, 2007 |

One-thousand years (give or take a few centuries) after an anonymous poet wrote the epic Beowulf, the novelist, critic, translator, and short-story writer John Gardner wrote Grendel, a strange novel which gives us the story from the monster’s perspective. Gardner’s prose is heavy with adjectives and past-participles which helps give concreteness to Grendel’s stream-of-consciousness. The simple drawings of Grendel by illustrator Emil Antonucci also enhance the novel; in collections of lines we see Grendel’s face confused, sad, or simply thoughtful. He exists because he is perceived.

Grendel’s tragedy is not that Beowulf will eventually before him; Grendel’s tragedy is that of the post-modern human condition: loss of meaning. He is, from the book’s beginning, “naked to the cold mechanics of the stars.” Grendel is living a meaningless life, engaged in an “idiotic”, and very private, war. Early on Grendel meets King Hrothgar for the first time. Grendel is stuck in a tree, having shortly before discovered how to leave the cave where he lives with his mother. He’s trapped and attacked by a bull and comes to a sad epiphany: “I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly–as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back.”

Even as his universe has expanded geographically it contracts mentally. Grendel is the sole occupant of a selfish, brutal world. King Hrothgar and his men intrude on this world, and Grendel pushes back. It is the postmodern dilemma: there is no meaning in anything, but how can we live without meaning? Grendel also meets the dragon who will eventually kill, and be killed by, Beowulf. The dragon tells Grendel that existence is merely a series of accidents. This confuses and upsets Grendel. In spite of his limited worldview, or perhaps because of it, Grendel wants his existence to have meaning and significance.

It’s a concern many of us share. It’s not just that we want our own existence to have meaning and significance, we want the world around us to be meaningful. How do we find meaning in a world where the philosophical dragon has rendered even meaning itself meaningless? It’s not an easy question to answer, but, in a perverse way, seeing the world through Grendel’s eyes provides some comfort and one way to begin to understand.

Update: In the December 7, 2007 issue of The Chronicle Of Higher Education, Columbia College Chicago philosophy professor Stephen T. Asma asks,  “Can Beowulf survive a 21st Century guilt-trip?” Surprisingly he doesn’t mention Gardner’s book, although he does discuss how “in the new liberal Beowulf the monsters are bad because they’re outcasts. And while the monsters are being humanized, the hero is being dehumanized.” This is not entirely fair, though; in the film Beowulf himself is more humanized than he is in the original epic. He has a heroic physique, but has weaknesses the epic never reveals. And what makes it surprising that Asma doesn’t mention Gardner’s book is that Grendel doesn’t attempt to make Grendel a hero. We sympathize with him because he represents the conundrum of our time: what or whom do we believe in when philosophy and science have so thoroughly undermined what we’ve believed for most of history, what the people of Beowulf’s time and beyond believed?


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