John Gardner’s Grendel

John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) looks at the story of Beowulf through the eyes of the monster. Gardner presents Grendel as a sentient speck in the universe, a creature painfully aware of its archaic-ness, of the futility of his actions, or, indeed, the lack of them. He is jolted into action by the arrival of a new Shaper, or scop, at Hrothgar’s court. His song—of Scyld and the Danish ancestry—moves and confuses him: “The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and they (the Danes, ed.), who knew the truth, remembered it his way – and so did I” (Gardner 29-30). The feeling conjured up by the singer, according to Gardner, is not anger at a Christian message, but rather a conscious rebuttal of propaganda techniques employed by the Shaper. Grendel’s defiance of the singer’s attempt to rewrite history, his own as well as that of the Danes, is breaking into Hart, as Gardner calls it, and killing humans.

When it comes to intelligence, Grendel is outstripped only by the dragon, who knows that he—like Grendel—is destined to die at the hands of man, thus making his species extinct. Gardner’s Grendel presents the society and the surrounding environment in which the events take place as places in a state of devolution, rather than evolution. In the end, the creatures with just enough brains and cunning (just enough not to be aware of their own limitations) conquer and survive, although given their thirst for blood it can only be a matter of time before they make themselves extinct as well, as Grendel observes: “… peace must be searched through ordeal upon ordeal, with no final prospect but failure” (Gardner 88). The monster is not jealous of these creatures, but feels driven to stint their progress, futile though he knows his attempts to be.

In Beowulf, Grendel never speaks and the implication drawn by most critics is that he cannot; Gardner’s Grendel can speak, but he finds it difficult to communicate with the humans. Their language is perhaps an evolution of the old language he speaks; perhaps the humans’ tongue, Danish, is akin but not the same as the language spoken in the fenlands.

Gardner’s Beowulf is a fitting bane for this highly intelligent Grendel: he is a raving lunatic, who fears no-one because he sees himself as belonging to a class of his own. He believes he is better than any ordinary man, and who knows if he is not right, Gardner seems to ask. What is certain is that he is the only one strong enough to kill the arch-nihilist Grendel.

Gardner uses the liberty his medium gives him to create a monster that is monstrous in its behaviour, yet more civilized than the humans in his story. His Grendel is cynical, caustic, full of chagrin and vastly self-analytical. He is an extremely post-modern monster, addressing the reader as though he were speaking directly into a microphone, recording his diary. This creature acts because he realizes he has a choice, but whichever way he chooses, the outcome will be the same.

My own ideas about Grendel—the one in the poem Beowulf—concur with what Gardner expresses up to a point. I think it is plausible that this Grendel is not out to wreak havoc for his own sake, but that he wants to restore things the way they were before Heorot was built. He wants to readmit chaos into the ordered society; and this, I feel, may explain why he does not speak. Not because he cannot, but because language is another system, another order he does not wish to comply with.

Overall the idea of an intelligent, cynical Grendel appeals to me immensely, but I realize that this is due at least partly to the fact that one of my ways of thinking about Grendel involves my trying to step into his footprints and look through his eyes; I find it rather easier to assimilate Gardner’s cogent creature of wrath than Beowulf’s blind force of destruction. Gardner creates a monster that I, and other readers no doubt, can more easily relate to than to the humans he describes. But then, his Grendel was not based (solely) on Gardner’s concept of evil. As Jeffrey Ford observes in his foreword to Grendel, “Gardner was, in so many ways, his monster” (xiii). He, like his Grendel, was immensely strong, full of energy, wit, and curiosity, and at the same time filled with doubt and confusion. The Beowulf poet applies his skill to make the audience identify with certain features of the monster by letting them look at Heorot through his eyes and by describing his feelings. Gardner, it seems, responds by taking the process of identification to its extreme consequence: his text becomes Grendel’s text and he becomes Grendel. His identification with Grendel is complete; his audience can hardly fail to follow.

Whether or not I fully agree with John Gardner’s views on Grendel is of slight relevance; what matters more is that Gardner’s Grendel allows me to look beyond the poem Beowulf. Grendel enables me to free my thinking about Grendel. Gardner, besides creating his own monster, offers possible explanations for several puzzles in the poem, like the fact that Hrothgar and Wealhtheow are never harmed, or the fact that Unferth cannot fight Grendel. They suit Gardner’s story superbly, without being intrusive or conclusive to the poem. I say, let everyone create their own Grendel. Either they will learn something about the poem, or they will learn something about themselves.

~ by thal1a on October 26, 2007.