Orchids, too, are parasites; to say that criticism is a parasitical function in no wise demeans it. But art betimes begets art: Homer to Joyce, Aeschylus to Eliot, Tirso to Shaw, etc. and numberless other etcetera. What criticism can do is illumine truth, but creative vision extends truth, shapes the archetype in its own image, commenting imaginatively (and hence more than logically) upon its archetypal mother. This happens all too rarely, but happen it does in John Gardner's Grendel which illustrates the perfect rapport possible between two workings of a single myth. That it can stand beside the epic Beowulf is no small judgment on the achievement of the novel. In the course of considering the interaction of poem and novel, we shall have occasion to describe--a function itself, hopefully, more creative than defining--what is a monster, what a hero and what an artist, for these are the roles which shape the two works. Criticism has long recognized the dominant role of contrast in Beowulf and some critics, frequently grounding their work in J.R.R. Tolkien's provocative and early (1931) study "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics,"1 have pointed out the role of monsters, mortality and/or time-consciousness as organizing principles in the midst of the poem's several forming dualities. Moving from the basic dichotomy of the novel to the structural vision of the poem, these are the elements I propose to treat in comparing the poem and the novel. Central to the novel is the confrontation of chaos and order: Grendel sees chaos in all that occurs and indeed insists upon chaos as ultimate principle; man makes order in the unformed void and, immortalizing, the artist remakes reality from the same elements to his own distinct purpose. The world as given is the milieu of monsters: nature, forests, hostile cold, wild storms, the less than benign climate of Scandinavia. In this death wreaking void, man builds houses, groups them and organizes his society, erects kingly halls, fortifications, links his realms by roads. Out of the untamed world monsters invade the tamed and symmetrical world of man, entering the mead hall to leave, together with death and destruction, their chaotic mark upon the ordered universe. Gardner's Grendel sees man essentially as a maker of patterns: "They'd map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories," he says of them (p. 13).2 They are "thinking creatures, pattern makers" (p. 22). And after they have built their roads, "Hrothgar's whole realm was like a wobbly, lopsided wheel with spokes of stone" (p.39). The archetypal image which the roads here describe hardly demands commentary. Its roots are in the poem, where the Geats note the great road which takes them from the shore to Hrothgar's stronghold. Roads concretize man's control over environment and the unity of a kingdom. Further they reflect, now in the order of intention rather than in completion, the role of volition as a motif of Beowulf and in general of Nordic society. Decision makes the hero: strength and courage in battle, leadership and generosity in governing. Hrothgar is the greatest of the gift givers; Beowulf is elegized by the Geats as the king most open to his people. On both sides of the social bond of king and subject, commitment is paramount: man gives his service and the king gives rich rewards. In this personal avowal of dedication as in the preeminence of personal valour, the Nordic mystic of unyielding will evidences close parallels with that of the Samurai. In Wiglaf's final exhortation to Beowulf, the role of volition is reaffirmed, a commitment even in the face of fate. Beowulf goes to his final battle knowing "the fate close at hand / which the aged man / must greet." (p. 163, 4832-4834).3 Yet at the urging of his kinsman he finds will beyond the normal resources of his now declining strength to best the dragon. To the hero's will to victory and the king's will to order, but above all to the poet's will to artistic reordering, Gardner's Grendel opposes his own absolute, "I knew what I knew, the mindless mechanical bruteness of things" (p. 54). Even as Grendel, in the poem is stirred to violence by the tale of divine creation, Gardner's monster opposes the vision of human purposefulness and historical continuity of which the Shaper sings. He endorses the law of violence which a rustic urges upon Hrothgar. He half grasps the Dragon's affirmation of an absolute law of entropy, random ordering and necessary dissolution. As the monster of Beowulf wreaks violence in reaction against the harper's tale of creation, so Gardner's monster opposes destruction to the Shaper's tale of order and to Hrothgar's vision of purposeful society. To Grendel this is illusion; "All order, I've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal" (p. 157). Reality is nature: "The law of the world is a winter law, and casual" (p. 115). To this interpretation of existence poem and novel oppose several shaping forces: Hrothgar, who will fail; Beowulf, who too must fail, being mortal, and after him so too the Geats; God and the artist. Mortal man bears witness to his own finitude, but art tempts even the monster to accept ":an illusion of order for this one frail, foolish, flicker-flash in the long dull fall of eternity" (p. 110). The remark is dressed in its own irony, self-mockery. But it belies the temptation, just as an admission of response to order in the apparently indifferent universe--to stars which, as Grendel admits, "torment my wits toward meanful patterns that do not exist" (p. 11)--compromises the insistence upon brute chance. God and the Shaper are kinsmen. Each makes the world: the first is sung in the prologue to Beowulf and the latter honored in the structure of the epic as in Gardner's implicit creative homage. The artist is he who "had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it" (p. 43). Even Grendel perceives the nature of one who "reshapes the world" for he makes "the projected possible" (p. 49). What ever the truth of nature, vision will overcome that truth with the illusion of art and in this the chaos of the monster is ultimately and always vanquished. The Shaper of Gardner's novel is ultimately a surrogate for the unnamed author of Beowulf (the eternal type of poet) whose reorderings make meaning even as they make poem and novel. Beowulf is, of course, manifestly grounded in order seen as dualities. These we can divide into inherent or natural dualities, which I prefer to term cosmic and which belong to the realm of chaos and order, and, on the other hand, archetypal or structural dualities which involve figures in the poem and novel in relationships which articulate the theme of each work. In the kingdom of order and chaos we find light and dark, day and night, earth and underground, life and death. Grendel is a creature of a subterranean world, of the dark, who makes night attacks upon his prey. In Gardner's novel he is portrayed as a young monster, though the maturation of monsters apparently involves a lengthy time span far exceeding that of man. Accidentally he discovers the world beyond the mere and at first explores it only by night, fleeing at dawn back to his lair. He visits the meadhall only at night or under cover of winter storm. On the night when he goes to spy upon the nearly arrived Geats, "darkness lay over the world like a coffin lid" (p. 158). As he moves from mere to meadhall, Grendel moves from night to day or, more particularly, to twilight which is their meeting place and to the human illumination of the hall by which man endeavors to dispel darkness. He is slain at night, but in the fastness of men's dwelling, though he returns aptly to his mere to die. Grendel's mother too is a subterranean beast to whose lair Beowulf descends in order to slay her. In like manner Beowulf goes to the dragon who is himself a creature of night. After the dragon has failed to capture the slave who has slipped off with one of his treasures he returns to his tower until night:
In darkness too the dragon has secreted his gold. But Beowulf, dying, having slain the dragon outside this beast's tower, asks Wiglaf to bring the treasure he has won from the tower to him and thus from the monster's dark lair into the light of day and human sight. Darkness, the universal unknown, is also the poet's metaphor for death, consistently identified with Grendel's domination of Heorot:
Darkness, night, depths and hiddenness stand through the epic in radical juxtaposition to the ordering, illuminating deeds of man, the openness and generosity of great kings and the fidelity of kinsmen and subjects. Man comes as man to that interaction which is society and to that light which is understanding. This duality is played out not only in the sphere of symbols but personified in the relationships enacted by characters in poem and novel. Beowulf and Hrothgar embody the poem's preoccupation with the dichotomy of youth and age. By direct references to fate (or necessity, cosmic structure) and by linking images the authors juxtapose Beowulf and Grendel to the Dragon and Beowulf. Finally, in evoking the nature of the hero both works present a dichotomy which binds Grendel and Unferth on one hand and Beowulf and the poet / Shaper on the other. Ordering is, of course, process, a concept we shall encounter again in considering the allied preoccupation with mortality. This concern is embodied in Beowulf's increasing resemblance to Hrothgar. In a sense Beowulf becomes by the poem's end the Hrothgar"old, recalling lost strength, a great king, generous and dedicated to the wellbeing of his people"of the opening adventures. Thus he fulfills the prophecy implicit in Hrothgar's farewell speech which even as it praises Beowulf calls attention to inevitable mutability, knowing "that he himself may not / through his lack of wisdom / think of his end" (p. 116, 3471-3473). Hrothgar is, in turn, represented as recalling the days of his own great strength and in these terms Beowulf describes him to Higelac, taking upon himself subconsciously the prophetic role which for Beowulf Hrothgar has played. Finally, as Beowulf sets out to fight the dragon he too is described in terms of age, being past his prime, and his strength in former days is recalled. This is one thread in the skein of the narrative, a direct acknowledgement of process which, lends pattern to the recounting. More complex is the complementary thread which proclaims not merely the universality of change, but specifically of fate. For the dragon is Beowulf's fate as Beowulf was Grendel's. This Beowulf sees clearly when he declares his mission to Hrothgar, proclaiming
"Fate," Beowulf acknowledges, "goes ever as it must" (p. 31, 915). When Beowulf rides to the dragon he is declared to ride to his death, with fate against him, and the dragon is identified as his fate. Gardner has fully explored this implication of the poem. When the Geats' ship has beached, Grendel goes to see it: "It drew me as the mind of the dragon did once" (pp. 151-152). Beowulf is described in terms of fire, from Grendel's first vision of him, and the shining images in which he is portrayed recall precisely Grendel's visit to the dragon's lair. Both monsters are creatures of accident. Gardner's Grendel insists that he has lost his mortal encounter with Beowulf because of an accident. Surely by a caprice of fate which can hardly be deemed other than accidental the dragon is roused from his tower and hence comes to embody Beowulf's fatal challenge. A slave counted for nothing in the society of the Beowulf poem; yet a slave's pilfering angers the dragon and sets him upon the Geats. These linking suggestions acquire definition in the novel's climax when Grendel, his arm having been wrenched off, in pain and vision, sees Beowulf in a guise which identifies him with the dragon:
Gardner's dragon, indeed, possesses a temporal overview, all time seen as retrospective, while Beowulf in the poem no less than the novel bears witness to a different kind of vision, that blind mad vision which he shares with the Shaper. On the side of reason, logic and truth as no more than demonstrable experience stand Grendel and Unferth (who is not only, as his name implies, un-peace but also anti-hero). Both enemies of Beowulf, the human who taunts him with a false report of his youthful deeds, and the monster, are consigned by Beowulf in poem and novel alike, to hell. Both are, of course, linked by the sign of Cain: Grendel comes of the race descended from Cain; Unferth in a drunken stupor has slain his brother. The monster is, however, unlike man, unredeemable. With words Unferth attacks Beowulf and with words is defeated. His is precisely a nature which can share with Beowulf at least an acknowledgement that the heroic vision exists. Yet as developed in the novel, his acknowledgment is a factual, visionless, earth-bound stab at the ideal which must of its nature fall short. In Gardner's presentation, Unferth is a mock hero, laughed at by Grendel, pelted by apples (for the monster finds him more a joke than a threat), and a bedraggled literalist who pursues Grendel to his cave:
But as man Unferth is ultimately able to aspire to redemption, lending Beowulf his sword Hrunting to use against Grendel's mother, a symbol of his knighthood that it may be wielded by a better man (pp. 98-99, 2918-2949). Reason makes possible the presumed redemption of the man Unferth who shares with the monsters the mark of Cain but is able to atone for his sin, as the monster is not. But to the estate of heroes Unferth cannot aspire. Reason can bring him to acknowledge Beowulf's superiority but is not the stuff of vision. Ranked against logic is madness: heroic vision in Beowulf and the shaping vision of the poet. The Shaper shares with the archetypal poet Homer and the archetypal prophet Tiresias blindness, seeing obviously beyond the world of fact which Unferth sees. Gardner's Grendel describes Beowulf's eyes as unseeing: "The stranger smiled on, his eyes downward-slanting eyes like empty pits" (p. 161). Later he identifies what he sees in Beowulf's eyes: "I understood at last the look in his eyes. He was insane" (p. 162). Both the deeds which the evidently unseeing eyes of Beowulf see and the kingdom which the Shaper has remade in the image of his dream are visions of a higher order which is for the hero, honor, and for the poet, art. It is praise which unites these orders and praise which is the final word of the poem. In praising the hero the Shaper makes real the vision which madness--vision beyond truth--makes possible. This, ultimately, is the ordering principle of the poem, through which structurally the various dualities we have described are reconciled by elements which themselves speak to the concept of praise: by monsters which make heroic praise possible and by mortality and time which make it necessary. The monsters suggest several hierarchies of choice and functions. Gardner chooses the monster who stands, obviously, closest to men, rejecting both Grendel's mother who is principally beast and hence less than man and the dragon which is in Gardner's terms extra-temporal and in traditional lore superior in power to man. Beowulf himself confronts the monsters in an order which suggests their progressive distance from man and slays them through means and with weapons both commensurate with their natures and suggestive of the particular man-enemy relationship involved. Unferth, the brother-killer, appears in the guise of human monster because of the inhuman nature of his crime. He attacks Beowulf with words; and by words, the peculiarly proper weapon of rational beings, he is defeated. Grendel in Gardner's hands resembles man both in his capacity to think and in his sense of relationship. He sees himself as a focus in the world of men: "a new focus for the clutter of space I stood in" (p. 80). And he is described by the dragon in terms of his effect upon man:
But it is in language that Gardner hints most perceptively at the fundamental parallel between man and monster, wherein the monster represents some older form of ourselves, that lone, chaos-proclaiming, violent alien to society from which our fraternal, ordered, ethical selves have sprung. Grendel speaks a language like man's, but "not in a language that anyone any longer understands" (p. 15). When first he encounters men he recognizes that "it was my own language but spoken in a strange way" (p. 23). And when the pagan priests perform their rites they use "a language closer to mine than to their own" (p. 128). Beowulf slaying Grendel slays his own dark origins, much as he slays the archetypal Cain who stands against the entire ordering of society, Beowulf's heroic context, when he defeats (one would not much err in opting for the colloquialism: when he puts down) Unferth. Grendel is defeated without recourse to weapons both because he is like man and can be defeated in the hand-to-hand combat appropriate to single human combat and because he himself is weaponless. In the first chivalric gesture in English literature, anticipating the Arthurian ideals even as Hrothgar's kingdom anticipates Arthur's, Beowulf disdains to use weapons against his unarmed (the pun is, I own, irresistible) opponent:
Against Grendel's mother, a creature more remote than Grendel from contemporary man, a proto-creature of but vaguely human guise whose affinity is more with beast than with humans, Beowulf employs a sword also out of remote time, "Greater than/any other man/to the game of war/might bear forth" (p. 105, 3124-3127). This description recalls, manifestly, epic nostalgia which so often envisions ages past in terms of massiveness, strength and achievement impossible for lesser man of later ages. The contrast is one of the constants of description in the Iliad and, as used in Beowulf, invokes even as do recitations of history and lineage, continuity and the ordered societies upon which the hero's own society rests. Thus does the past lend its strength to the present's endeavor. Grendel's mother shares with man but one evident characteristic, the desire for vengeance which is itself a motive of historical continuity, though the grimmest kind of continuity. Her vengeance takes Hrothgar's dearest friend and so requires a particularly exigent vengeance for the king and in setting out to effect that avenging, it is of the superiority of the avenging action over impotent tears which Beowulf celebrates. The Dragon incarnates the beast who is more powerful than man, yet even as he costs the hero his life, succumbs to the hero's knife because man is capable"unlike monsters"of cooperation and mutual assistance. The Dragon comes out of timelessness and wounds Beowulf without weapons as once Beowulf has wounded Grendel. But Wiglaf offers the total fraternity of man: loyalty to the king, personal heritage, kinship, the lineage of his sword and the history of his people. He brings to the struggle not merely his valor but the unity and order which make man more than the monsters. His exhortation to Beowulf is grounded in continuity and order and makes victory possible. Monsters, then, whose being denies order, give ironically the greatest pattern to man's actions because in confrontation with the monsters man transcends petty human enmity. The monster gives man an opponent worthy of him, effecting ultimately man's self-transcendence, as the dragon had explained to Grendel. If the monsters provide the substance through which man immortalizes himself through great and proper deeds, fulfilling his fate and winning praise thereby, the exigency of this immortality is grounded in turn in consciousness of mortality and the all-embracing reign of time. Mortality bespeaks the fate of individual and society alike and throughout the poem most frequently simultaneously, for the aging of Hrothgar will mark the fall of his kingdom (attack from without and fratricide within) as the death of Beowulf prefigures the fall of the Geats. Mortality is the immediate focus of fate for the Nordic tradition which holds at the center of its epic vision "man at war with the hostile world and his inevitable overthrow in time."4 Mortality provides the transcendent dimension of the controlling contrast of youth and age. Hrothgar embodies mortality in that "he had in his youth the strength of seven men. Not now. He has nothing left but the power of his mind--and no pleasure there" (p. 121). In the poem Hrothgar from experiences summons up the vision of mortality and the passage of time in the midst of Beowulf's triumph (p. 77, 1732-1734). And when Beowulf in his turn tells his king Higelac of Hrothgar it is in terms of mortality and the inevitable wreck of age that he evokes the king:
The overlapping reference to Hrothgar's age and Beowulf's inevitable aging is itself a thread which links the characters even as the king's buried strength bespeaks ultimate burial. The emphasis on human mortality grows in the poem as Beowulf's own end approaches. The poet tells his audience clearly before the encounter with the dragon is joined:
And this mortality is figured overtly as fate. For Beowulf has been victorious we are told "until that one day / when he against the worm / must proceed," (p. 162, 4790-4792). Beowulf himself recognizes "the fate close at hand, / which the aged man must greet," (p. 163, 4832-4835). At this moment for the first time in his life "fate ordained nor for him" (p. 173, 5142). The link between mortality and time, the requisite experience of death, is by Gardner placed in Grendel's mouth, "December, approaching the year's darkest night, and the only way out of the dream is down and through it" (p. 125). Time, to which all bears witness, is the organizing principle greater than and yet containing consciousness of mortality. It embraces even the dragon who sees the future, Grendel's mother who sinks into the past as well as Grendel who mediates between ages and realms and man whose humanity is spelled out in his confrontation with time. In the poem time has two guises: an epic face turned to the deed that wins eternal praise; and a Christian one which through the artist sees all things sub specie aeternitatis. Time explains the process which is caught in the contrast of youth and age, explains history, gives meaning to praise which in turn bestows immortality. Gardner portrays Grendel as insisting upon the meaninglessness of time and the artist. "Back there in Time," he tells us, "is an illusion of language." But as Gardner sees the monster caught in processes which he denies, the Christian poet sees a structure beyond time in which the monster plays an ordained part. At its moment of greatest illumination, the novel portrays Grendel's requisite though unwilling witness to meaning in time:
The vision, dismissed as a bad dream, recurs when Grendel first sees Beowulf:
The vision of time becomes, ultimately, the power through which Grendel, the denier of meaning, is slain; as he grips the monster's arm and Grendel tries not to listen Beowulf speaks to him:
This vision of time gives meaning to process. Obviously the meaning embraces not only Beowulf but the tribe, the kingdom, human society. Hence it gives meaning also to history. At the end of Beowulf's life, appropriately, the poet reviews the history of the Geats, whose ultimate fate is written in Beowulf's. The transcendence of time for man and for nation is immortality realized as fame. To Beowulf Hrothgar affirms:
Similarly the tower which will be built to celebrate Beowulf's victory over the dragon will be
Thus does the poem end with a specific evocation of praise, picturing the Geats who
Praise is, of course, ultimately the business of the poet who embraces the conflicts and inconsistencies of man and time and orders them"hence rendering them coherent and consistent"in and through the structure of his poem. The primary structure of Beowulf derives, as we have already seen, from the monsters (and near-monster) proceeding from Unferth to Grendel, thence passing from human guise to the more remote animality of Grendel's mother and finally to the transcendent bestiality of the dragon. This structure which equals the poet's vision of the life of the hero--Beowulf's life, not in sequence as lived, but in meaning as ordered by the poet--is a creative vision which contains and illumines history, rather than being contained and explained thereby. History, then, through the poem's interpolated passages, is made to serve art. The tale of creation rouses Grendel to violence. Beowulf is first introduced as hero and then, in the traditional retrospective view of the hero's youth, his earlier achievements, which justify his claim to present greatness, are retold. The tale of Finn with its motif of human revenge fixes the events in history as well as providing from history an analogy for future devastation, also based on revenge, within Hrothgar's kingdom and a touchstone for the mortality of all nations. When Beowulf returns to his own land he takes, as it were, his deeds on Hrothgar's behalf with him, by recounting those deeds to Higelac. The accounts of Beowulf's deeds among the Geats compress time and thrust the poem toward its final fated encounter, much as the tale of Grendel and Grendel's mother, as recounted by Beowulf, has compressed distance and thrust another place into the framework of the Geats' nation. Logically then, within the context of Beowulf's final battle which is to prove mortal, the poet provides a resume of the enemies and past conflicts of the Geats, for Beowulf's death will end more than his own life and in this compression of space (enemies, other peoples) and time (past conflicts, motives for revenge), the total vision of fate is fitted to the single expression of fate which is Beowulf's struggle with the dragon. When Wiglac goes to Beowulf's aid the history of his family and the lineage of his sword are provided, for his act is not merely his but the enactment of his role in a providential order, involving his kinship and-subject-ship as well as the obligations of his society, an order which of its nature must look back to history and ahead to fame. In Wiglac's exhortation as in the poet's vision, the present comes to embody process and its consequence, achievement and its reward. Beowulf is itself uniquely a summation, for it exemplifies the meeting of myth as subject matter (folklore, legend, the accounts of history) and myth as meaning (the artist's interpretation of legend, history, etc.) with a perfection almost nowhere else to be encountered in occidental literature. As such it makes possible Gardner's novel, for Gardner need not and does not tell the entire tale. All that transpires in the rest of the poem is present in the Beowulf / Dragon comparison of Grendel's last encounter and moribund vision. This vision is grounded in the myth of the poem and in its structure and analogies, out of which the novel's vision rises and to which it pays consummately perceptive homage. Fate in Beowulf establishes a sense of absolute extratemporal order against which Grendel impotently rages and which the mortal Shaper affirms, and a heroic (in the Aristotilean-Sophoclean sense) tension between what is and what is willed, between, therefore, necessity and freedom. Grendel denying pattern appropriately speaks a prophecy in his curse and an ironic summation of fate in his ultimate denial of causality. His arm torn off, wandering through the winter countryside and recognizing the proximity of his death, Grendel watches the animals--his old enemies--gather to observe his death. He defies, curses and spells out structure paradoxically for them, as he interprets his own fate in the novel's closing lines: "Poor Grendel's had an accident. So may you all." Grendel ignores--perforce must ignore--that man can interact and transcend his origins, while he, the monster qua monster cannot. In this he defines monster. Beowulf knows the nature of courage, man's mortality and immortality as fame. Thus he defines the nature of the hero. The Shaper knows one truth beyond the truth of time: that vision which orders things and makes new truths. Commentary can illumine truth but changes nothing. Gardner's dragon would make a wonderful critic. But vision extends truth, because it extends insight itself, as in this novel, which bears witness to the power of the poem, which is the power and the will of myth to create. NOTES 1 Proceedings of the British Academy, XXII (1936), 245-295. Reprinted in An Anthology of Beowulf Criticism, ed. Lewis E. Nicholson, (South Bend, 1961), pp. 35-50. This collection also includes articles by Herbert G. Wright ("Good and Evil; Light and Darkness; Joy and Sorrow in `Beowulf'") and R. E. Kaske ("Sapientia et Fortitudo as the Controlling Theme of Beowulf") which exemplify the emphasis on complementary and contrasting concepts and images in the poem. 2 John Gardner, Grendel (New York, 1971). Quotations will be identified in the text by page number. 3 Beowulf, trans. Benjamin Thorpe. (Great Neck, 1962). All references to the poem are cited from this translation and are identified by page number and line in the text. 4 Tolkien. Anthology, p. 67. |