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A review by millennial_dandy
Grendel by John Gardner
5.0
Was Grendel a 'Softboi' Actually?
A blurb from the Christian Science Monitor on the first page of this edition lauds 'Grendel' as deserving "a place on the same shelf as Lord of the Flies, Cat's Cradle, and The Catcher in the Rye."
The similarity to 'Lord of the Flies' I can see, not because the reading experience is at all similar, but because both stories are brutally nihilistic.
I haven't read 'Cat's Cradle,' but from skimming a brief review, it seems that this comparison stems from the fact that both employ the use of black humor.
'The Catcher in the Rye' is probably the best comparison of the three: immature, unreliable first person narrator who struggles to self-actualize and generally oozes 'doomer' energy wanders around unhappily and learns very little. That being said, I loathe 'The Catcher in the Rye,' so I wouldn't place 'Grendel' on the same shelf in any case.
A more fruitful comparison is to 'Lolita.'
Holdan Caulfield, for all that he's a miserable melt, is not the villain of his story. True, he may make some questionable decisions, but he never sets out to hurt anyone, and indeed, we know that he, in his way, wanted to believe the world could be better than it was. In other words, everything is framed as: good person slowly becomes disillusioned as bad things happen around him. At its core, it's a story of how depression colors the sufferer's worldview in muddy, muted shades so that anything positive fades away, and everything negative is magnified one-hundred fold.
That is not at all what is happening in 'Grendel.'
As in 'Lolita,' wherein our narrator (Humbert Humbert) is also our villain, so too is Grendel a 'bad guy.' Like, canonically: Grendel is the first monster Beowulf defeats in the epic poem.
Also, like Humbert Humbert, Grendel is an incredibly charming character. Certainly, he's not as sophisticated, and in fact is incredibly child-like ("I make a face, uplift a defiant middle finger, and give an obscene little kick. The sky ignores me, forever unimpressed." p.2). Nevertheless, something in that absurd immaturity renders Grendel harmless, gets the reader to drop their guard (for God's sake, at one point, he reaches for a vine, realizes it's a snake, gets startled, and falls over). You like him, he's pitiable, perhaps even relatable. He's clumsy, he cries out for his mother when he gets hurt, he bleeds, he feels pain.
He also regularly goes out and murders people.
To be fair, we don't really know these people, and through Grendel's eyes we know that the Thanes are a relative monolith who go around killing each other anyway. So is Grendel killing and eating them really any different from when he or the Thanes kill and eat a sheep? Meh.
Maybe if Grendel weren't so witty we'd feel differently, but come on; this is the same Grendel who described Unferth's nose as a "black, deformed potato" (p.140). The same Grendel who got stuck dangling upside down from a tree after getting chased by a bull. Sure, he kills some Thanes from time to time, but no one's perfect.
I find myself always coming back to the word 'charming' to describe characters like Humbert Humbert, like Grendel, because their very brand of it evokes for me comparison to bewitchment; the lulling into a state of complacency by a dangerous entity. Think: Ka's song 'Trust in Me' from Disney's 'Junglebook.'
"Trust in me, just in me."
It's creepy stuff.
Now, 'Lolita' is pretty much universally accepted in literary circles as Very Good. The well-placed references, the technical writing skill that went into it, the disturbing but impressively immersive characterization of Humbert Humbert.
Far be it from me to contradict any of that, and indeed I agree with it all. And most of all, I think 'Lolita' is Very Good because it suceeds in giving us a protagonist so charming, so convincing, that even going into the reading experience knowing that he's a pedophile who grooms and rapes a young girl, you still find yourself struggling to reconcile that that incredibly bad guy is the same character you've come to sympathize with. And that's what makes it not only Very Good, but also Incredibly Scary.
'Grendel' hits very similar notes. But instead of Grendel charming us through his intellect and inner torment as Humbert Humbert does, he charms us through his apparent harmlessness (he is often the butt of his own observations, and often relays self-depreciating anecdotes)...and also his inner turmoil--in that sense both characters are similar.
As in 'Lolita,' in 'Grendel,' author John Gardner forces the reader to feel that jolt as the spell is broken and we feel horror at having been so manipulated. In 'Lolita,' Humbert Humbert comes to the realization at the very end of the novel that he was the bad guy, actually.
Granted, as we can see, despite calling himself a monster,Humbert Humbert still sees himself as somewhat of a tragic figure.
Grendel as well sees himself as tragic figure. He calls himself 'wretched' and talks constantly of "the unfairness of everything" (p.3)
Towards the midpoint of the novella, he meets with a dragon (the very same dragon who would later meet his match in Beowulf). The dragon is a great character as well. Imagine the Mad Hatter but if he was the size of a building and had the capacity to breathe fire. The dragon is crazy, is what I'm getting at, and teeters back and forth between patting Grendel on the head, and saying things like "fiddlesticks," to rearing up and shooting out jets of flame and showing his fangs at the slightest provocation.
--The dragon smiled. Horrible, debauched, mouth limp and cracked, loose against the teeth like an ancient dog's. "Now you know how they feel when they see you, eh?" (p.50) --
The dragon pontificates (rather around his own rambling philosophical musings) about what place in the world such monsters as they occupy. Ultimately, he convinces Grendel that fate is sealed;
Later on, Grendel uses this rather apathetic take on destiny to justify his own treatment of the Thanes:
Thereafter, he ceases to feel sorry for himself, and the charm he placed on us, the reader, begins to wear off as his decision to double down on his own wickedness becomes impossible to gloss over with jokes.
The jolt that breaks the charm completely comes when Grendel decides to enter Hrothgar's hall and murder the Queen (with whom he himself has become somewhat infatuated). Normally, his raids are painted in absurd terms; lifting up screaming Thanes by their feet, or snapping their necks with complete uninterest and usually accompanied by some clever little observation. But this time, that veneer is stripped back, and we're left with the horrific details of him yanking the queen out of bed, and announcing to us what he wants to do to her:
"I decided to kill her. I firmly committed myself to killing her, slowly, horribly. I would begin by holding her over the fire and cooking the ugly hole between her legs. I laughed harder at that." (p.94).
By this point, he has embraced his 'fate' as the villain of his own story, just as Humbert Humbert does. And just like Humbert Humbert, he believes that he is a victim of fate; they do evil because they never had any other choice.
Debatable.
Certainly Gardner leaves this open-ended. True, the dragon, who claims to know everything, tells Grendel that he exists to live in opposition to humans, and Grendel thinks to himself: "He could lie. He was evil enough." to which the dragon cackles and replies: "You'll never know" (p.61).
At its heart, what makes 'Grendel' so compelling is not the apathy and nihilism dripping off every letter on every page, but the finesse with which Gardner sinks his readers deeper and deeper into the psyche of a creature who claims to want to be 'good' but believes that he is intrinsically incompatable with goodness, and that he should be pitied for it. And we do, until the bewitchment is broken. Or maybe it isn't. Maybe the scariest part is knowing how many people will read 'Grendel' and believe it all.
Was Grendel a 'softboi' actually? No. No, he was not.
There are so many lenses 'Grendel' could be analyzed though that this just barely scratches the surface.
For instance, there's a hefty thread throughout about the roles of religion and art in society:
Another point of analysis could certainly be the interplay between the existance of heroes and monsters. In quite possibly my favorite plot thread (in terms of entertainment value), Unferth makes it down to Grendel's lair and confronts him even though he knows Grendel could easily kill him. Grendel muses to himself:
And then he just...refuses to kill him. Instead, he carries him back to Hrothgar's hall, sets him gently down, and walks away. Unferth becomes increasingly desperate and puts on disguises, trying to force Grendel to fight and kill him so that he can die a hero, and Grendel will not play ball, just for the satisfaction of taking away the thing that gives the lives of the Thanes meaning.
None of this even touches on the writing itself. Even if you have no particular interest in the story of Beowulf, much less the story of Grendel, some of the writing, in and out of context, is a stunning triumph of prose. Here is one of my favorite examples:
A blurb from the Christian Science Monitor on the first page of this edition lauds 'Grendel' as deserving "a place on the same shelf as Lord of the Flies, Cat's Cradle, and The Catcher in the Rye."
The similarity to 'Lord of the Flies' I can see, not because the reading experience is at all similar, but because both stories are brutally nihilistic.
I haven't read 'Cat's Cradle,' but from skimming a brief review, it seems that this comparison stems from the fact that both employ the use of black humor.
'The Catcher in the Rye' is probably the best comparison of the three: immature, unreliable first person narrator who struggles to self-actualize and generally oozes 'doomer' energy wanders around unhappily and learns very little. That being said, I loathe 'The Catcher in the Rye,' so I wouldn't place 'Grendel' on the same shelf in any case.
A more fruitful comparison is to 'Lolita.'
Holdan Caulfield, for all that he's a miserable melt, is not the villain of his story. True, he may make some questionable decisions, but he never sets out to hurt anyone, and indeed, we know that he, in his way, wanted to believe the world could be better than it was. In other words, everything is framed as: good person slowly becomes disillusioned as bad things happen around him. At its core, it's a story of how depression colors the sufferer's worldview in muddy, muted shades so that anything positive fades away, and everything negative is magnified one-hundred fold.
That is not at all what is happening in 'Grendel.'
As in 'Lolita,' wherein our narrator (Humbert Humbert) is also our villain, so too is Grendel a 'bad guy.' Like, canonically: Grendel is the first monster Beowulf defeats in the epic poem.
Also, like Humbert Humbert, Grendel is an incredibly charming character. Certainly, he's not as sophisticated, and in fact is incredibly child-like ("I make a face, uplift a defiant middle finger, and give an obscene little kick. The sky ignores me, forever unimpressed." p.2). Nevertheless, something in that absurd immaturity renders Grendel harmless, gets the reader to drop their guard (for God's sake, at one point, he reaches for a vine, realizes it's a snake, gets startled, and falls over). You like him, he's pitiable, perhaps even relatable. He's clumsy, he cries out for his mother when he gets hurt, he bleeds, he feels pain.
He also regularly goes out and murders people.
To be fair, we don't really know these people, and through Grendel's eyes we know that the Thanes are a relative monolith who go around killing each other anyway. So is Grendel killing and eating them really any different from when he or the Thanes kill and eat a sheep? Meh.
Maybe if Grendel weren't so witty we'd feel differently, but come on; this is the same Grendel who described Unferth's nose as a "black, deformed potato" (p.140). The same Grendel who got stuck dangling upside down from a tree after getting chased by a bull. Sure, he kills some Thanes from time to time, but no one's perfect.
I find myself always coming back to the word 'charming' to describe characters like Humbert Humbert, like Grendel, because their very brand of it evokes for me comparison to bewitchment; the lulling into a state of complacency by a dangerous entity. Think: Ka's song 'Trust in Me' from Disney's 'Junglebook.'
"Trust in me, just in me."
It's creepy stuff.
Now, 'Lolita' is pretty much universally accepted in literary circles as Very Good. The well-placed references, the technical writing skill that went into it, the disturbing but impressively immersive characterization of Humbert Humbert.
Far be it from me to contradict any of that, and indeed I agree with it all. And most of all, I think 'Lolita' is Very Good because it suceeds in giving us a protagonist so charming, so convincing, that even going into the reading experience knowing that he's a pedophile who grooms and rapes a young girl, you still find yourself struggling to reconcile that that incredibly bad guy is the same character you've come to sympathize with. And that's what makes it not only Very Good, but also Incredibly Scary.
'Grendel' hits very similar notes. But instead of Grendel charming us through his intellect and inner torment as Humbert Humbert does, he charms us through his apparent harmlessness (he is often the butt of his own observations, and often relays self-depreciating anecdotes)...and also his inner turmoil--in that sense both characters are similar.
As in 'Lolita,' in 'Grendel,' author John Gardner forces the reader to feel that jolt as the spell is broken and we feel horror at having been so manipulated. In 'Lolita,' Humbert Humbert comes to the realization at the very end of the novel that he was the bad guy, actually.
“I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one."
Granted, as we can see, despite calling himself a monster,Humbert Humbert still sees himself as somewhat of a tragic figure.
Grendel as well sees himself as tragic figure. He calls himself 'wretched' and talks constantly of "the unfairness of everything" (p.3)
Towards the midpoint of the novella, he meets with a dragon (the very same dragon who would later meet his match in Beowulf). The dragon is a great character as well. Imagine the Mad Hatter but if he was the size of a building and had the capacity to breathe fire. The dragon is crazy, is what I'm getting at, and teeters back and forth between patting Grendel on the head, and saying things like "fiddlesticks," to rearing up and shooting out jets of flame and showing his fangs at the slightest provocation.
--The dragon smiled. Horrible, debauched, mouth limp and cracked, loose against the teeth like an ancient dog's. "Now you know how they feel when they see you, eh?" (p.50) --
The dragon pontificates (rather around his own rambling philosophical musings) about what place in the world such monsters as they occupy. Ultimately, he convinces Grendel that fate is sealed;
My knowledge of the future does not cause the future, it merely sees it [...] and even if, say, I interfere [...] even then I do not change the future, I merely do what I saw from the beginning. [...] so much for free will. (p.54)
Later on, Grendel uses this rather apathetic take on destiny to justify his own treatment of the Thanes:
My enemies define themselves (as the dragon told me) on me. As for myself, I could finish them off in a single night […] yet I hold back. I am hardly blind to the absurdity. Form is function. What will we call the Hrothgar-Wrecker when Hrothgar has been wrecked? (p.79)
Thereafter, he ceases to feel sorry for himself, and the charm he placed on us, the reader, begins to wear off as his decision to double down on his own wickedness becomes impossible to gloss over with jokes.
The jolt that breaks the charm completely comes when Grendel decides to enter Hrothgar's hall and murder the Queen (with whom he himself has become somewhat infatuated). Normally, his raids are painted in absurd terms; lifting up screaming Thanes by their feet, or snapping their necks with complete uninterest and usually accompanied by some clever little observation. But this time, that veneer is stripped back, and we're left with the horrific details of him yanking the queen out of bed, and announcing to us what he wants to do to her:
"I decided to kill her. I firmly committed myself to killing her, slowly, horribly. I would begin by holding her over the fire and cooking the ugly hole between her legs. I laughed harder at that." (p.94).
By this point, he has embraced his 'fate' as the villain of his own story, just as Humbert Humbert does. And just like Humbert Humbert, he believes that he is a victim of fate; they do evil because they never had any other choice.
Debatable.
Certainly Gardner leaves this open-ended. True, the dragon, who claims to know everything, tells Grendel that he exists to live in opposition to humans, and Grendel thinks to himself: "He could lie. He was evil enough." to which the dragon cackles and replies: "You'll never know" (p.61).
At its heart, what makes 'Grendel' so compelling is not the apathy and nihilism dripping off every letter on every page, but the finesse with which Gardner sinks his readers deeper and deeper into the psyche of a creature who claims to want to be 'good' but believes that he is intrinsically incompatable with goodness, and that he should be pitied for it. And we do, until the bewitchment is broken. Or maybe it isn't. Maybe the scariest part is knowing how many people will read 'Grendel' and believe it all.
Was Grendel a 'softboi' actually? No. No, he was not.
“They were doomed, I knew, and I was glad."
* * * *
There are so many lenses 'Grendel' could be analyzed though that this just barely scratches the surface.
For instance, there's a hefty thread throughout about the roles of religion and art in society:
Theology does not thrive in the world of action and reaction, change: it grows on calm, like the scum on a stagnant pool. And it flourishes, it prospers, on decline. Only in a world that is patently being lost can a priest stir men's hearts as a poet would by maintaining that nothing is in vain.
Another point of analysis could certainly be the interplay between the existance of heroes and monsters. In quite possibly my favorite plot thread (in terms of entertainment value), Unferth makes it down to Grendel's lair and confronts him even though he knows Grendel could easily kill him. Grendel muses to himself:
Except in the life of a hero, the whole world's meaningless. The hero sees the value beyond what's possible. That's the nature of a hero. It kills him of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile. (p.77)
And then he just...refuses to kill him. Instead, he carries him back to Hrothgar's hall, sets him gently down, and walks away. Unferth becomes increasingly desperate and puts on disguises, trying to force Grendel to fight and kill him so that he can die a hero, and Grendel will not play ball, just for the satisfaction of taking away the thing that gives the lives of the Thanes meaning.
None of this even touches on the writing itself. Even if you have no particular interest in the story of Beowulf, much less the story of Grendel, some of the writing, in and out of context, is a stunning triumph of prose. Here is one of my favorite examples:
December, approaching the year's darkest night, and the only way of the dream is down and through it. The trees are dead. The days are an arrow in a dead man's chest. Snowlight blinds me; heatless fire; pale, apocolyptic [...] The trees are dead, and only the deepest religion can break through time and believe they'll revive. Against the snow, black cuts on a white, white hand. (p.109)