* It seems impossible to do a blurb that would be in the vein of the novel itself. It doesn't seem like this could be the case, but it really is. For starters; the novel's in first person narration: okay, that is do-able, but the problem is that Grendel himself, his character, would not allow it.
He would rail against the self-aggrandizement that a self-conscious backflap blurb would necessitate.
There is a reason why most people use the novel's last sentence to start off or end their reviews: it speaks volumes: "Poor Grendel has had an accident, so may you all."
That sentence makes it clear that Grendel loathes the world, and implicitly; us, the readers. It is a loathing flowing forth from self-pity, from recognition of his being utterly apart, utterly alone, and his knowledge that, knowing what will come from his demise, he will be given a place in a canon that will distort him, that will make of him less than what he was, and he hates us, the enablers, for it.
Grendel is of course a re-telling of that oldest and most influential work of Old-English literature; Beowulf, but in Gardner's novel the story's told from the view of the monster. The Beowulf poem itself however devotes less than half of its page count before the titular hero meets with Grendel and dispatches him, as Grendel is in truth only his first opponent. The poem then continues on into accounts of glory, and battles with both Grendel's mother and a fire-spewing dragon.
John Gardner's novel instead focuses on retelling only the first bit of the epic poem, choosing to end its narrative just past the violent meeting of hero and monster. And in truth it's only chapters 11 and 12 that can be said to overlap with the poem.
There is a great amount of humour within these pages. It is also quite vulgar, in the original meaning of that word; base and crude, but very approachable and relatable to any reader.
The first ten chapters of the novel focus squarely on Grendel and his antagonistic relationship with Hrothgar and that one's steadily blossoming kingdom. Through Grendel's inner monologues, never revealed to the outside world, we learn of his (lack of) upbringing, his ideas, his psyche, and chapter by chapter we follow along as he slowly broadens his philosophical views, becoming more coherent with the passing of years.
There are few other characters that get explored besides Grendel himself, but those that do share the spotlight tend to be highly interesting. Most notable of these are Wealtheow, Hrothgar, Unferth and of course, the Dragon.
Grendel, and the Rest (Definite Spoilers)
The Dragon is a fascinating character in the story, who's mostly here to serve as someone who has both a foot in and out of the story, someone apart, being able to look within (the Beowulf/Grendel story) and from without (as a possible reader, aware of the Beowulf poem, like us).
He swiftly reveals that dragons have a different experience of time than humanity and that besides the past and present, they can also see the future. This allowed him to see his own death at the hands of the hero Beowulf, an event that is still decades and decades away, but that is also, to the dragon's philosophy, despite his foreknowledge of it, inescapable. The Dragon reveals that all are in thrall to destiny, in fetters and chains bound to something that can not be altered. And that destiny is in even the smallest of things.
The Dragon inhabits the lifespan of the universe, and is in full knowledge of it every heartbeat of the way. And so he speaks of being tired of being omniscient. He gifts Grendel with imperviousness to swords and he advises him to seek out his own 'gold' to sit upon, to make the time pass in a pleasant manner. And Grendel does, and as he already has some history with him, Grendel chooses to focus on Hrothgar.
Hrothgar is of course another major character, serving as the main focus for Grendel's ire, his territory the focal point around which Grendel works his desire to make an impact on the world. As the members of Hrothgar's court treat the lonely cave-dwelling creature as a monster, Grendel, in rage and self-pity, takes up their view of him as his own, and deliberately becomes the monster they believe him to be, committing violence and atrocity on whim and later also for his own amusement.
Notable among these acts is a specific one: Grendel's treatment of Wealtheow.
Some ways into the novel, the young and beautiful Wealtheow becomes Hrothgar's wife in return for his showing mercy towards her brother, who plotted to take Hrothgar's kingdom from him.
Wealtheow, now queen, suffers her lot with admirable stoicism despite her obvious sorrow. She is endowed with much beauty and goodness, and as Grendel looks on her he is gripped by a host of conflicting emotions. He is visited by his recurring desire to be a part of things, but ruthlessly stamps it down and, in rage and self-pity, dons the cloak of the monster once more.
Grendel denies the compassion he feels, the desire.
He hates the one he loves, desires, because he realizes the impossibility of the situation and that he will never have her love returned to him. Spite and slurs instead of understanding,
outwardly carrying a grunt while the heart carries a whisper.
It is this that makes Grendel as a character so compelling; though he is monstrous and violent and terribly quick to anger, he can also be touched by the beauty of mankind, to the joy of their various creations; to music, beauty, art and love, but rejected by mankind as he is, spoken of as the monster, said to be cursed and cast out by a loving God, he can only carry this in his heart, and even then he has no other choice than to suppress these feelings, to call them meaningless, pointless and vague. He does this in order not to be grasped and destroyed by his loneliness, by his complete separateness, and what once had the capacity for good; these emotions and sentiments conducive to sharing, to build, to bond, these things he can not possibly acknowledge anymore in order to not be driven insane, mad, to death. Inability for love is the pointlessness of existence. And so he forces himself to latch expressly only onto this knowledge of the pointlessness of existence. He looks at the beauty, the love, and the art of the people he watches and pretends to scoff, pretends to hate, tries to laugh at all the imposed importance of all these ephemeral things.
And yet, he can not do anything but look at them. Because he recognizes that love gifts meaning to all. And so, to save himself, he can do nothing but respond as they expect him to.
He presents himself as their enemy. Self-actualization through others.
He enters Hrothgar's hall with great violence and noise. Impervious to the swords of the defenders due to the Dragon's gift he stalks unstoppable through the halls. Arriving in the King's chambers he finds Wealtheow, naked in her room, and grabbing her, he holds her aloft, a claw to each leg, and holds her there, to pull her apart like a wishbone. Everyone looks on in horror and anguish.
He can not be stopped in this, and everyone, Grendel included, is fully aware of this. And more than this; Grendel knows that they know, and that they think it is inevitable that this ends with the death of Wealtheow.
And then, having it let sunk in, Grendel lets the moment linger, and then drops Wealtheow to the floor. As he exits the building he leaves behind him a shocked and confused crowd, mystifying them with the actions of a reasoning creature, rather than the monster they think him to be.
But in shape and form he is still the monster to be slain, and it must be true that for every monster there must be a hero to stand his opposite. And so we arrive at Unferth, who would be that hero. But who makes the mistake, at their first meeting, of revealing the reasoning behind his actions to Grendel, who then promptly makes it his mission to deny Unferth both a hero's death and a hero's grace.
In some truly hilarious and yet pitiable scenes, Grendel mocks and humiliates Unferth, who has the soul of hero and decent qualities besides, but who is so overmatched by Grendel that he should have just been killed outright at their first meeting, were it not for Grendel's malice and intelligence. And as sad as it might seem, the scenes with Unferth are a highlight of the novel.
Important too, is Grendel's Mother, though she is not very active and is kept nameless throughout both novel and poem, she is nonetheless crucial for the development of Grendel's character. When we meet her Grendel's mother has already devolved back into a mute animal, devolved away from humanity, the idea behind which is that she is supposed to be unable to actually rear and teach Grendel, so that he can be an empty vessel to explore philosophical points of view through. This does not mean she does not love him, because she clearly does as evidenced by various parts of the novel, but she can not possibly communicate in a relevant manner with her son. She is a sad and strangely heart-warming character, capable of eliciting both pity and good-will.
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The Shaper, though not too active a character in the story is nonetheless crucial to some of the ideas Gardner wanted to present and as such I'll talk about him in the next segment.
Beowulf, when he finally shows up in chapters 11 and 12 is of course also hugely interesting and rather important, but Gardner had something very specific in mind when he wrote this version of Beowulf and as such I'll be talking about him separately a little further on.
A Post-Modern Monster
But this novel is more than just a re-coating of what is already known. Gardner was an ambitious sort of fellow, and actively set out to explore Sartre's philosophy and ideas, and, with having the coming novel's ending already predetermined, and so having that troublesome story-bit already out of the way, he was also determined to make his novel stand out using Western ideas of structure and postmodernism.
Grendel was basically a bit of a grandstanding endeavor embarked on by an author interested in making a name for himself.
As such, on its completion, Grendel turned out to be a masterclass in post-modernism. The novel switches at various points from first-person narration to third, and even at a certain point, in imitation of the poem that informed it, it also switches to verse, and later it goes further by morphing into a script format, as if the story was written to be a play. By adhering to no specific style the novel demonstrates an unwillingness to adhere to convention, and it undermines the traditional expectations of what a novel should be.
But there is a bigger idea at work in Grendel: the rejection of the Grand Narrative. Postmodernism in literature is often marked by a rejection of conventional storytelling, and one of the main ways this manifests itself in postmodern works is that the work in question turns out to not have a conventional overarching narrative, and that it is devoid of climax or resolution.
This concept of the novel without an actual narrative, in Grendel, happens in three steps.
1
Through the crucial character of the Shaper, a bard at Hrothgar's court, Grendel becomes aware of the concept of subjective and objective reality, when he notices that the acts of the past are rewritten by the Shaper, who in order to entertain his audience, dresses up the the history of Hrothgar in his songs. And what's more, that from then on, rather than remembering the truth, those actual squalid beginnings of Hrothgar's kingdom, the listening audience begins to believe it to have begun as gloriously as the Shaper made it out to be. And Grendel himself, though railing against it, finds himself compelled by the myth, wanting to believe in the glory and the virtue that it offers.
He knows that it was random chance that shunted Hrothgar and his kingdom into greatness and yet...
It is at this point, holding on to the meaningless of existence itself, that Grendel realizes that this is all that humans do. That they re-write history to make of it a grand and glorious narrative.
2
3
But Gardner also goes a step further. And entices us to also try and find a grand narrative in the structure of the novel itself.
Though I've seen and read various interpretations on the use of the traditional (western) Zodiac in Grendel, and even quite a few compelling arguments wherein it is explored more fully, I believe that this is also part of the Post-Modern agenda in Grendel. I'm not sure how far that Gardner chose to go with this, whether he also incorporated the four elements in his structure or whether he even used the accompanying traits in his characters, but it is clear that at the very least in every single one of Grendel's 12 chapters a reference can be found to one of the signs of the Zodiac, either explicitly or through metaphor: The signs of the Aries (1), Taurus (2), Cancer (4), Virgo (6), Scorpio (8), Sagittarius (9), Capricorn (10) and Pisces (12) are probably the easiest to find as their signs have direct physical representations, or at the very least a mention or a comparison, in the text.
Gemini (3), Leo (5), Libra (7) and Aquarius (11) are a bit more difficult to see as they are are more obliquely explored. Gemini, the Twins star-sign, is explored in chapter three through the use of the Shaper, who, with his music, creates a subjective reality to stand alongside objective reality. Leo, the lion in the cave under the element of fire, has his representation in the Dragon. The scales of Libra, are explored though Wealtheow, who keeps both her brother and Hrothgar balanced in peace through her marriage to the latter. Aquarius, as the carrier of water, is represented by Grendel's cave where an underground river flows.
The question then arrives; What does the presence of the Western Zodiac mean in Gardner's Grendel?
Humans are, as the novel has already offered, primed to find grand narratives in life. Accidents and circumstance will always turn out to be meaningful and crucial occurrences, inspired by the self-importance of each individual in the human race, and will always have been put together by design. There are no accidents, and circumstance must always have been shaped.
But the truth is that it means nothing, of course. The use of the Zodiac in Grendel is Gardner making us see signs (literally) that seem to point to a grander narrative, while it is precisely the novel's point that there is none. Gardner chose the Zodiac system for it, because that system is highly interpretative, and points that overlap can and will always be found; humans will always find meaning (even) where there is none.
Post-Modern Monster (continued)
4
Which brings us to the last part.
The presence and importance of Christianity in the original Beowulf text can not be understated. Mighty deeds are constantly attributed to be achieved only by the grace of God and the deity is constantly thanked and venerated by the pretty much unanimously pious characters of the poem, which itself, after all, stems from a time when Christianity had just finished bloodily carving its place into the every-day lives of the Scandinavian peoples.
So then, Gardner also needed to somehow incorporate this religious element into his philosophical character piece, an element which is not really all that useful or conducive when you're trying to construct a narrative that will explore ideas of reason and logic-based thinking. Which is why he ended up making it another red herring: yet again, the way that Gardner chose to weave it into the narrative is something that will infallibly bait mankind's (or at least the followers/ and those familiar with the West's most dominant faith's) tendency to find meaning where there is none. Hook, line and sinker, this time with blatantly religious phrasing and imagery.
I admit, I fell for it, hard.
I kept trying to construct a working theory around the presence of Beowulf's undeniably religious trappings and speech, veering from denouncing it all as a figment of Grendel's fevered mind in the throes of pain and terror, to making an argument for the hero Beowulf's obvious angelic nature, only visible to his foe and counterpart during their fateful clashing, and then at the end there I even found a theory I was all-round pleased with, but it is very likely that it is none of these things, that this is again; just Gardner placing elements in his text with the knowledge that it would be analyzed by beings desperate for meaning and resolution.
Conclusion:
Grendel is endlessly re-readable, as it's such a tight novel, so full, and so perfectly itself. There's probably no other book like it, a genuine masterwork of literature.
It is an obtuse novel, and definitely not for everyone. And though it is short and easy to read, there are so many elements hidden that even a fan of the book will always be able to find some new revelation waiting in its pages.
There'll be another post because I couldn't do anything less than completely analyze the last chapter since I found it so baffling, but this post is already long enough as it is.
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