“Some Beastlike Fungus”: The Natural and Animal in John Gardner's Grendel

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Notes

In interviews, Gardner is unambiguous about his disdain for existential nihilism. He exclaimed “I hate existentialism” in a 1971 interview with Esquire. His thoughts on art and writing express this sentiment in equally unambiguous, though perhaps less direct, terms. Works such as On Moral Fiction (New York: Basic Books, 1978) and The Art of Fiction (New York: Knopf, 1984) offer a traditional celebration of the positive moral purpose of art. See also “Backstage with Esquire” Esquire Oct. 1971, 56; “Letter to the editor,” American Scholar 44 (1975): 340–41; “Death by Art: Or, ‘Some Men Kill You With a Six-Gun, Some Men With a Pen.” Critical Inquiry 3.4 (1977): 741–71; John M. Howell, John Gardner: A Bibliographical Profile (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1980); Joe David Bellamy, ed., The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers; and Allen Chavkin, ed., Conversations with John Gardner (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990).

The novel was published in 1971 as environmentalists achieved early successes and began to raise awareness of the global repercussions of human actions. The publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 is generally credited as the starting point of the modern environmental movement; a number of key events through this decade also served to raise awareness about environmental threats. In 1967, for example, the Torrey Canyon tanker produced the first major oil spill, a 270 square mile area of contamination off the coast of England that killed thousands of birds and sea animals. In 1969, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire, an image that added momentum to a national move towards addressing water quality issues. These and related events precipitated a change in consciousness regarding the relationship between human culture and the natural world that continues to develop in response to the onslaught of human-generated threats. As E.B. White laments in one of the epigraphs to Silent Spring, “Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission” (qtd. in Carson vii). This period represents a triumph over a previously demonized natural world accompanied by a growing realization that we are the real threat. The emergence of ecocriticism as a range of interpretive approaches aimed at exploring the permeable boundaries between the human and the natural comes from the attention garnered by Carson's book which, in turn, shows the influence of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine, 1990). For other foundational articulations of this interconnection, see Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155 (1967): 1203–07; John Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (London: Duckworth, 1974); Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); and Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996).

See Sandra M. Hiortdahl's “Grendel: John Gardner's Reinvention of the Beowulf Saga.” Diss. The Catholic University of America, 2008 for a thorough consideration of the need to read Grendel as a parallel that accompanies Beowulf, rather than a parody that forsakes its source.

Ruud maintains the coexistence of these components and concludes that, of these three, Gardner exhibits a “primar[y] interest in the creature's human side” (8). For Susan Strehle, Grendel is a composite character, part human in that “he shares the language and the hopes of the Danes” and monstrous as “an inevitable outcast from their society” (92). In “The Evil Behind the Mask: Grendel's Pop Culture Evolution,” Jennifer Kelso Farrell pursues a reading of Grendel as not just human, but innocently human. She offers Gardner's Grendel as a deliberate contrast to the monster of the epic that, as Fidel Fajardo-Acosta stipulates in “Intemperance, Fratricide, and the Elusiveness of Grendel,” “possess[es] all the attributes of the devil as they were perceived by Christians in the early Middle Ages” (205). Gardner's Grendel, Farrell writes, is “innocent and alone,” a “child lost in the forest” (943) who cannot be read as an abstraction of evil. Marie Nelson's examination of Grendel's language, in particular his reliance on Old English poetic features such as variation and litotes, reminds readers that Grendel defines himself in human terms (349). While she presents Grendel as a monster, she notes that the narratorial voice of the novel produces a polyphony of the modern and ancient. Grendel's use of a formula such as “Grendel, Ruiner of Meadhalls, Wrecker of kings” (Gardner 80) to define himself shows the paradox underlying Gardner's characterization: the outsider defines himself and the Danes through the same “word hoard” the Beowulf poet used to reveal Grendel as an explicitly nonhuman “mearcstapa.”

An overview of the derivation of the two names can be found in Friedrich Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight at Finnsburg (Boston: Heath, 1950). Following Friedrich Panzer's Studien zur germanischen Sagengeschichte, I: Beowulf (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1910), scholars have presented Beowulf's name as evidence of the influence of legends of a human/ bear hybrid, though this reading has been contested by, among others, R.D. Fulk in “The Etymology and Significance of Beowulf's Name,” Anglo-Saxon 1 (2007): 109–36 and, with Joseph Harris, “Beowulf's Name” in the Norton critical edition of Beowulf. Readers interested in the issue of names and central characters in the epic should consult Steele's essay as well as related studies including: J. Michael Stitt, Beowulf and the Bear's Son (New York: Garland, 1992); Fred C. Robinson, “The Significance of Names in Old English Literature,” Anglia 86 (1968): 14–58; Robert E. Kaske, “Beowulf and the Book of Enoch,” Speculum 46.3 (1971): 426; Michael Lapidge, “Beowulf, Aldhelm, the Liber Monstrorum and Wessex,” in Anglo-Latin Literature 600-899 (London: Hambledon Press, 1996): 271–312; and R.D. Fulk, “Unferth and His Name,” Modern Philology 85.2 (1987): 113–27.

Gardner's setting, unlike that of the epic, seems to be more of an imagined or mythic forest of the kind encountered in fairy tales. The book refers to some of the historic background of the epic, but otherwise maintains a distance designed to enhance the unity of the novel. The setting of Beowulf, by contrast, offers a more complex fusion of real and imagined places. On the one hand, “The action of the poem unfolds in a recognizable version of Scandinavia: Hrothgar's hall Heorot has been plausibly placed in the village of Lejre on the Danish island of Zealand” (Black 36). On the other hand, the narratorial fusion of legend and history in the epic suggests a manufactured “illusion of antiquity” (37). A comparison of the settings of the two works could serve as a fruitful area for further study.

The most well-known consideration of the central role played by monsters in the epic is, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien's “The Monsters and the Critics.” For more on the monstrous, see Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the “Beowulf” Manuscript (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003); Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982); David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (Montreal: McGill UP, 1996); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999); John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000); Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (New York: Routledge 2002); and Timothy Beal, Religion and its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2001).

This essay does not seek to enter the contentious issue of determining the overall value of Heaney's translation. See Howell Chickering's “Beowulf and ‘Heaneywulf'” for a thoughtful overview of this conflict and an assessment of Heaney's translation. Chickering responds to “Professional Anglo-Saxonists [who] early on derogated it with the name ‘Heaneywulf’ since to them it was ‘just not Beowulf'” by reminding readers that “No translation follows its exemplar exactly, no matter how ‘faithful'” (161). This relationship between the translation and the original has been particularly strained in relation to Beowulf. While new translations of the text continue to appear, “Disagreement over what constitutes fidelity to the original has prevented general acceptance of a standard modern English Beowulf” (161).

See Manish Sharma's “Metalepsis and Monstrosity: The Boundaries of Narrative Structure in Beowulf” for a thorough consideration of the narratological implications of the various “mearcs” or marks that demarcate the complex levels and divisions of the epic. In considering the way that Grendel, through a precondition of his exile, marks the land itself with his evil influence, Sharma points out that “By means of an apparent pun on the term mearc in the compound mearc-stapa, then, the text seems to establish a link between the space upon which the monster treads and the mark that God has set upon Cain” (266).

Bede's use of natural imagery, evidenced through his evocation of the sparrow, extends to his theological formulation of exile as well. He classifies exile, a trope represented in Anglo-Saxon poetry through extended descriptions of miseries endured in fog enshrouded wilderness, as a necessary component of Cain's mark. In commenting on this, Sharma observes that such a fusion of exile and the mark makes “its earliest recorded appearance in Anglo-Saxon England [and that this] should give us pause when we consider the ubiquitous and formulaic preoccupation with this theme in the vernacular Christian poetry” (268).

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Dean Swinford

Dean Swinford is an Assistant Professor of English at Fayetteville State University. He is interested in the relationship between scientific discourse and the development of literary genres, a topic he explores in Through the Daemon's Gate (Routledge, 2006).