Contemporary society, however, is made uneasy by the concept of pure, unmotivated evil, by pious, unsullied virtue, and contemporary writers and scholars search for more.
One challenge to the necessary but narrow expectations of this heroic narrative comes from a contemporary writer, the late John Gardner, in his novel, titled Grendel. Told from the monster’s point of view, it is a tour de force and an intellectual and aesthetic enterprise that comes very close to being the sotto-voiced subject of much of today’s efforts to come to grips with the kind of permanent global war we now find ourselves engaged in. The novel poses the question that the epic does not: Who is Grendel? The author asks us to enter his mind and test the assumption that evil is flagrantly unintelligible, wanton, and undecipherable. By assuming Grendel’s voice, his point of view, Gardner establishes at once that unlike the character in the poem, Grendel is not without thought, and is not a beast. In fact he is reflecting precisely on real true beasts the moment the reader is introduced to him. When the novel opens he is watching a ram, musing, “Do not think my brains are squeezed shut, like the ram’s, by the roots of horns.” And “Why can’t these creatures discover a little dignity?”
Gardner’s version has the same plot, characters, etc., as the original, and relies on similar descriptions and conventions: referring to women, for example, only queens have names. If Grendel’s mother has a name it is as unspeakable as she is unspeaking. Seamus Heaney’s introduction to his translation of Beowulf emphasizes the movement of evil from out there to in here, from the margins of the world to inside the castle, and focuses on the artistic brilliance of the poem, the “beautiful contrivances of its language”; Gardner, however, tries to penetrate the interior life—emotional, cognizant—of incarnate evil and prioritizes the poet as one who organizes the world’s disorder, who pulls together disparate histories into meaning. We learn in Gardner’s novel that Grendel distinguishes himself from the ram that does not know or remember his past. We learn that Grendel, in the beginning, is consumed by hatred and is neither proud nor ashamed of it. That he is full of contempt for the survivors of his rampages. Watching the thanes bury their dead, he describes the scene as follows: “On the side of the hill the dirge-slow shoveling begins. They throw up a mound for the funeral pyre, for whatever arms or legs or heads my haste has left behind. Meanwhile, up in the shattered hall, the builders are hammering, replacing the door…industrious and witless as worker ants—except that they make small, foolish changes, adding a few more iron pegs, more iron bands, with tireless dogmatism.” This contempt extends to the world in general. “I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. 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. I create the whole universe, blink by blink.”
But the fundamental theme of the novel lies in Grendel’s possibilities—first, his encounter with shaped, studied, artistic language (as opposed to noise, groans, shouts, boasts) and, second, his dialogue with the dragon who sits atop the mountain of gold he has been guarding for centuries. Regarding the first, his encounter with the poet, who is called the Shaper, offers him the only possibility of transformation. Grendel knows the Shaper’s song is full of lies, illusion. He has watched carefully the battles of men and knows they are not the glory the Shaper turns them into. But he succumbs to the Shaper’s language nevertheless because of its power to transform, its power to elevate, to discourage base action. He defines the poet’s potency this way: “He reshapes the world….So his name implies. He stares strange-eyed at the mindless world and turns dry sticks to gold.” It is because of this shaped, elevated, patterned language that Grendel is able to contemplate beauty, recognize love, feel pity, crave mercy, and experience shame. It is because of the Shaper’s imagination that he considers the equation of quality with meaning. In short he develops a desperate hunger for the life of a completely human being. “My heart,” he says, “was light with Hrothgar’s goodness, and leaden with grief at my own bloodthirsty ways.” Overwhelmed with these reflections on goodness and light, he goes to the mead hall weeping for mercy, aching for community to assuage his utter loneliness. “I staggered out into the open and up toward the hall with my burden, groaning out, ‘Mercy! Peace!’ The harper broke off, the people screamed….Drunken men rushed me with battle-axes. I sank to my knees, crying, ‘Friend! Friend!’ They hacked at me, yipping like dogs.” So he reverts to the deep wilderness of his hatred. Yet he is still in turmoil, torn between “tears and a bellow of scorn.” He travels to the dragon for answers to his own cosmic questions: Why am I here? What is God? What is the world?
At the end of a long and fascinating argument, loaded with the dragon’s cynicism, bitterness, and indifference, Grendel receives one word of advice from the dragon: “Get a pile of gold, and sit on it.” Between Grendel’s suspicion that noble language produces noble behavior (just as puny, empty language produces puny, empty behavior) and the dragon’s view of man’s stupidity, banality, and irrelevance, his own denial of “free will and intercession,” right there, exactly there, lies the plane on which civic and intellectual life rests, rocks, and rolls. Grendel’s dilemma is also ours. It is the nexus between the Shaper and the dragon; between Saint Augustine and Nietzsche, between art and science; between the Old Testament and the New, between swords and ploughshares. It is the space for as well as the act of thought; it is a magnetic space, pulling us away from reaction to thinking. Denying easy answers, and violence committed because, in crisis, it is the only thing one knows how to do.
Absolute answers, like those Grendel wanted, cynically poised questions, like those the dragon offered, can dilute and misdirect the educational project. In this country, where competition is worshipped and crisis is the driving force of media-salted information, and where homogeneity and difference, diversity and conformity are understood to be the national ideal, we are being asked to both recoil from violence and to embrace it; to waver between winning at all costs and caring for our neighbor; between the fear of the strange and the comfort of the familiar; between the blood feud of the Scandinavians and the monster’s yearning for nurture and community. It was the pull of those opposites that trounced Grendel and that trouble and disable national, educational, and personal discourse.
Crisis is a heightened, sometimes bloody, obviously dangerous, always tense confluence of events and views about those events. Volatility, theatricality, and threat swirl about in crisis. Crisis, like war, demands “final answers,” quick and definitive action—to douse flames, draw blood, soothe consciences.
Sometimes the demand for quick and definitive action is so keen all energy is gathered to avoid the crisis of impending crisis. The effect of militarizing virtually every fluid situation and social problem has been encroaching inertia, if not established paralysis. It has also produced an increased appetite for ever more thrilling, intense presentations of crisis. (Note the plethora of televised entertainment devoted to ersatz, fake crises—survival in third-world countries among people for whom survival is an unremarkable condition of life.) This hunger is not different from numb insensitivity, is, in fact, a vivid expression of it. Once the taste for the blood images of conquest is introduced, it may not be easily slaked.