Grendel

Grendel is an amazing deconstruction and reconstruction of a story in the way that "it must have happened." John Gardner paints in the erasures of Grendel's character that the original story of Beowulf leaves out. In the original story, Grendel initially attacks Heorot out of anger that men are praising God for His creation while he himself lives under the curse of Cain. This motivation fades though, into a primal thirst for evil that leaves the reader unsatisfied. Aristotle taught us that a character's downfall must be tied to a deeply rooted flaw within him, one that the reader sympathizes with. The author of Beowulf was not working within an Aristotelian framework, but an Anglo-Saxon one in which characters could be simply evil or good, and quite apart from that, are all brought down by Fate and the hand of God. Gardner honors both traditions by giving Grendel a postmodern perspective, one that longs for truth and beauty, but cannot overcome the futility of a material world and the assurance that all things are doomed to inevitable change.

Grendel starts out as a pathetic monster, crying, "Waa!" for his mother when he is frightened, wondering about his position in the world. With no one to guide him (his mother is a brute monster with a smothering love), he observes the world alone. Because of his hideous form, he is forced to view humans from the shadows, and he is keenly aware of being an outsider. His observations of Hrothgar and the Scyldings culminate in his assessment that hegemony, "the will to power," is at the root of all things human. He looks on them with disgust. Then the poet arrives, spinning the bloodshed Grendel has seen first hand into a revisionist myth of human nobility. Grendel loves the poetry against his will. He tries to explain it away. The poet sings "for pay, for the praise of women--one in particular--and for the arm of a famous king's hand on his arm." Yet something within him cries out that he wants the poet's words to be true, even if it means that he must "be the outcast, cursed by the rules of his hideous fable."

It's interesting to me that Grendel's longing for truth and beauty comes through art and not through religion. He's truly a postmodern monster. Grendel tricks Ork, the old priest, into telling him about the nature of God. What comes out is a convoluted theological ramble, the gist of which is that evil can best be defined in terms of time: "'Things fade' and 'alternatives exclude.'" God "is an infinite patience, a tender care that nothing in the universe be vain." This is not the world Grendel thinks he lives in. He reasons that "theology does not thrive in the world of action and reaction, change: it grows on calm, like the scum on a stagnant pool. Only in a world where everything is patently being lost can a priest stir men's hearts as a poet would by maintaining that nothing is in vain." Grendel would rather eat priests than listen to them: "They sit on the stomach like duck eggs."

Grendel learns to overcome his longings from the dragon, the ultimate materialist. He argues that men build arguments on "facts in isolation," on the givens of his particular time and place, but what seems true in a moment, when seen from thousands of years away, or millions, or a million million, would seem ludicrous. There is no "absolute standard of magnitude." The moment is nothing. The dragon tells Grendel, "If man's the irrelevance that interests you, stick with him," but his final advise is to "seek out gold and sit on it." Grendel comes to see in time that the inverse is also true, that the moment is all there is. "Back there in time" is merely an illusion, something that doesn't exist anymore. There is only the moment, and the moment is always lost. We live in aporia. "Nihil ex nihilo."

Thus Grendel spends most of his time trying to kill his longings. He kills just enough of Hrothgar's men to taint the glory of his Meadhall. He toys with Unferth and his sense of heroism. He turns Wealtheow upside down, makes her squeal like a pig to expose the mystique of her beauty. Through it all, he never quite succeeds, and this is what makes him such a tragic character. I don't know if I've ever loved a villain so much.

I know that many high school teachers teach this book in conjunction with Beowulf, but my recommendation is to save it for college. I want my high school kids to absorb some of the grandeur of Beowulf before we have to deconstruct it. I don't want a modern perspective on the Anglo-Saxons in their heads quite yet. Putting Grendel off would actually honor the book's message that we should try to step outside our limited perspective. There are a lot of teen-age Grendels roaming around these days, kids with sad stories who find it easier to tear things down than believe in them.