creates and maintains the patriarchal power structures of a society. What we call "language" is public discourse, a male construction that maintains the hierarchies of a culture. That is, the very language a culture uses serves invisibly to preserve and protect the power systems of the culture. For example, in English, the masculine pronoun has always been considered the correct form in sentences such as this: "Does everyone have his book?" Further, the word "man" stands in for the human race as the normative term. Likewise, while we may speak of "women writers," we rarely speak of "male writers."

Further, Lacan maintains that children "fall" into language at about the same time that they recognize themselves as separate beings from their mothers. Certainly, the second chapter of Grendel illustrates graphically both Grendel's separation anxiety and his growing awareness of the function of language. When he speaks of his understanding of himself and his mother early in the chapter, he reports, "We were one thing, like the wall and the rock growing out from it." Later, however, Grendel finds himself trapped in a tree, unable to remove himself. Immediately he screams for his mother, who does not appear. It is in this moment that he states, "I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist." A bit later he describes himself as "an alien, the rock broken free from the wall." These are clear signs of his separation from his mother. Significantly, it is at this moment of separation that Grendel hears men speaking for the first time. "The sounds were foreign at first, but when I calmed myself, concentrating, I found I understood them: it was my own language, but spoken in a strange way."

Lacan further suggests that the male child will begin to identify himself with his father as spokesman of cultural values at about the same time that the child learns language and separates from the mother. For Grendel, however, there is no father. Into this absence, then, steps Hrothgar. Grendel attempts to identify with the king and with his men. On the night that he first hears the Shaper, Grendel tries to join Hrothgar's band with disastrous consequences: "Drunken men rushed me with battle axes. I sank to my knees, crying, 'Friend! Friend!' They hacked at me, yipping like dogs." Although Grendel understands his language to be the same as the men's, they do not understand his speech. Thus, he is an outsider to their community and a threat. For Grendel, the identification with a father, and thus with a culture, remains incomplete.

Further, it is also possible to explain Grendel's fascination with Wealtheow by considering his separation from his mother. French feminists argue that male language is the language of desire. Further, they suggest that male language idealizes and fantasizes about the feminine. This idealization and fantasy is caused by the absence of the mother. The separation from the mother causes an emotional lack in the male child. That Grendel feels an emotional lack is clear as he contemplates his mother, and the separation between them; he says explicitly, "I am a lack." Further, Grendel idealizes and fantasizes about the Queen, Wealtheow. In his eyes, she is all beauty, and offers some hope for meaning in the world. His understanding of Wealtheow, however, is conditioned by the Shaper's songs, more male language. It is not the woman Wealtheow that Grendel wants, but rather the ideal created by the language of the Shaper. Grendel observes that the ultimate act of nihilism would be to kill the Queen. Yet he is unable to contemplate this until he raids the hall and pulls her legs apart. He decides to kill her because of "the ugly hole between her legs." His confrontation with her body destroys his notion of the ideal, but not entirely. Ultimately, he chooses not to kill her, in spite of her body and the sexuality that both fascinates him and repels him. And yet he still finds one of his two minds insisting, "she was beautiful."

In Grendel, language is repeatedly shown to be the province of men. All speakers are masculine. The Dragon, the Shaper, Hrothgar, Unferth, and finally Beowulf each offer Grendel a system for understanding the universe and his place in it. The dragon is a nihilist. That is, he believes there is no meaning to life and that all events are nothing more than random accident. The Shaper is a poet. He creates meaning in the world through his songs; the world becomes what he sings. His is the voice of art. Hrothgar is a politician. His world is constructed by the words of treaties and oaths of fealty. His words reveal to Grendel a world of plots and counterplots, devoid of morality. Unferth is a hero. He argues that only in heroism does the world have meaning. The words that constitute a hero's reputation and fame construct his vision of the world. Finally, at the very end of the tale, Beowulf explains to Grendel the cycles of existence: life has meaning because it continues, in spite of death and destruction. (Tellingly, Beowulf speaks of sperm, not ova.) What these voices all have in common is their masculinity. In each case, their words construct and maintain the power system. What none of these voices includes is room for feminine language or for feminine understanding of the world.

Grendel chooses to look for answers in these systems, ultimately rejecting all but the dragon's view. He clearly sees himself as a superior creature to his mother, primarily because he is a maker of words, someone who possesses language. He walks on two legs; she walks on all four. Yet care should be taken to distinguish Grendel's position on this from Gardner's. Gardner seems to suggests that the language of Grendel's is somehow primeval and pre-existent, outside the system of male language.

Grendel states, "She'd forgotten all language long ago, or maybe had never known any. (How I myself learned to speak I can't remember; it was a long, long time ago.)" Grendel, trying to find meaning through masculine language, fails to recognize that his mother finds meaning in her own creation, even as he states, "I was, in her eyes, some meaning I could never know and might not care to know." Further, Grendel's mother's language is bound up in her body. Her response to Grendel's despair is to clasp him to her breast, offering nurture and sustenance.

Wealtheow, for her part, has little to say in either Beowulf or Grendel. She finds meaning not through the masculine language of politics, treaties and war, but rather through her feminine role as peace-weaver and mother. She creates a truce between her people and her husband's people. Further, as the mother of Hrothgar's children, she engenders new life, opening the possibility of meaning in the world. Because Grendel is repelled by the "ugly hole between her legs," he overlooks the pun that the phrase implies: the "whole" is indeed between her legs. Through her body, Wealtheow weaves together the whole world, at least while she lives. It can thus be argued that the feminine creates and sustains life while the masculine creates words.

It can be argued that Grendel's ultimate failure to find his place in the world springs first, from his separation and longing for his mother; and second, from his incomplete identification with a father figure. He never fully learns to use the language of men in such a way that he can be understood. Instead, he remains suspended between the dark, pre-verbal cave of his mother and the world-as-text of the masculine characters, ultimately falling from the cliff, a fall that mirrors his earlier "fall" into language.

Source: Diane Andrews Henningfeld, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1998. Henningfeld is an English professor at Adrian College and has written for a wide variety of academic journals and educational publishers.

Nothing has become more unfashionable in the last ten years than explication du texte. No doubt in reaction against the New Critics, we have tended to stress "broader" considerations, whether historical, psychological, or philosophical. Sometimes, however, questions of textual interpretation must be faced if we are to avoid the most basic misunderstandings about the works we read and teach. A case in point is John Gardner's Grendel (1971). Gardner is one of our more respected contemporary writers, and Grendel is his most popular work, yet I think this book is usually read in such a way as literally to reverse Gardner's intended meaning. Insofar as Grendel deserves its emerging status, the interpretive problem is unfavorable...

"If the traditional hero is insane, then, who becomes the modern hero? As John Gardner realizes, it must be Grendel—the monster who rejects all traditional values of his world needs only a few slight alterations to become a perfect absurd hero. Gardner's novel fits neatly into the category of contemporary absurdist literature."

Jay Ruud ["Gardner's Grendel and Beowulf: Humanizing the Monster," Thoth, Spring-Fall, 1974]

"What Grendel does is take, one by one, the great heroic ideals of mankind since the beginning and make a case for these values by setting up alternatives in an ironic set of monster values. I hate existentialism."

John Gardner ["Backstage with Esquire," Esquire, Oct., 1971]

As these two quotations suggest, there is disagreement as to Gardner's meaning in Grendel. Indeed, the quarrel between Gardner and his critics is nearly absolute. Robert Detweiler has written [in Contemporary Literature, Winter, 1976] that "Grendel is a retelling of the Beowulf legend from the monster's point of view that depicts him as a relatively sympathetic character and Beowulf as a psychopath." W. P. Fitzpatrick [in Notes on Contemporary Literature, January, 1977] has seen Grendel as an "absurdist hero," comparable to Camus' Caligula, with the following results: "Not only does Grendel challenge our perspective of medieval heroism, but it destroys whatever wisp of the 19th century visionary gleams might remain." And [in Critique, Vol. 23, 1981] Michael Ackland has summarized the experience of most readers—"... by the end of the narrative, the reader shares the deterministic insight that marked Grendel's opening reference to life as being 'Locked in the deadly progression of moon and stars'." These and other critics have agreed with Bruce Allen's assertion [in Sewanee Review, Summer, 1977] that "the meaning is existential," whereas Gardner has said that he hates existentialism. How are we to account for such a drastic difference of opinion?

At this point it is customary to do one of two things. Either one quotes Lawrence's famous dictum that we should trust the tale and not the teller, or one dismisses the many quoted critics as wrongheaded or somehow lacking that crucial insight which will clarify everything. I would prefer to do neither. I happen to think that Gardner's version of Grendel is more reliable than that of his critics...

The standard reading of Grendel assumes that Gardner chose to retell the story of Beowulf because he wanted to champion Grendel's "modern" point of view. In the first chapter, as if to emphasize the point, Gardner has Grendel repeatedly express his haunting sense of life's meaninglessness. Grendel believes that life is a mechanistic process in which "The sun spins mindlessly overhead, the shadows lengthen and shorten as if by plan," although there is no plan, no order, no organizer: "The sky says nothing, predictably ... The sky ignores me, forever unimpressed." It is one of Grendel's central arguments that mankind imposes its hopes and fears on mindless reality, thus establishing an artificial order by means of what Grendel calls "some lunatic theory." Grendel himself is a theorizer, but the difference between him and others is that he knows there is no connection between theory and reality—the heroic ideals that we associate with Beowulf are no more than whistlings in the dark designed to conceal the fact that "The world is all pointless accident."

In this reading Gardner establishes Grendel as a dark but poetic witness in order to comment on man's pretensions to civilization. Grendel has observed Hrothgar's rise to power, for instance, so he offers a sardonic account of how roving bands evolved into savage tribes. Here Grendel's point of view is in dramatic contrast to that of Hrothgar's scop, the Shaper. Where Grendel sees "crafty-witted killers that worked in teams," the Shaper commemorates "the glorious deeds of dead kings ... his harp mimicking the rush of swords, clanging boldly with the noble speeches, sighing behind the heroes' dying words." Grendel is contemptuous of the Shaper's influence on Hrothgar's men ("Did they murder each other more gently because in the woods sweet songbirds sang?"), yet he concedes that even he is "swept up" by the Shaper's music. Grendel's observations on the Shaper are thus thought to point up the dangerous allure of art (the Danes are said to have "gone mad on art"), or, in broader terms, to expose the irrepressible human tendency to substitute consolatory myths for unpleasant realities.

As Grendel reports other attempts to explain or justify the Scyldings' travails, we come to see that what the Shaper does so artfully is indeed a universal practice. The episodes involving Unferth, Wealtheow, Hrothulf, and Ork illustrate this widespread desire to rationalize life's apparent evils by means of saving fictions: that the life of the hero "makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile" (Unferth); that "Meaning as quality" is a viable philosophy despite life's quantifiable futility (Wealtheow); that revolution is a religious activity, amply justified as a visionary alternative to corrupt social norms (Hrothulf); that religion is a "sweet fantasy" which offers relief from the crippling structures of "merely rational thought" (Ork). Grendel's role is to qualify or undermine these efforts to establish objective values in a meaningless world. Therefore Grendel humiliates Unferth, nearly kills Wealtheow, remarks Hrothulf's swinish conspiracy with an anarchist, and dismisses Ork and the other priests as lacking any real conviction. In this way Gardner "inverts the perspective of the heroic Beowulf [according to Fitzpatrick]—an inversion climaxed by his ironic treatment of Beowulf's victory over Grendel. For most readers, Gardner's Beowulf is a moral cipher: a "cold-blooded fanatic," "strangely mechanical, even mad," a "hired mercenary" who is in reality "a moral monster." Beowulf triumphs over Grendel only because the monster slips—a mere accident, as Grendel argues. The point is that the legendary Beowulf is for us an unbelievable, certainly an unsympathetic character. The true hero, as we suspected all along, is Grendel himself.

Two crucial assumptions inform this reading of Grendel. The second, that Grendel is a sympathetic and reliable narrator, follows naturally from the first: that Gardner is a "modern" who shares the vision of such writers as Beckett and Sartre. In fact, however, Gardner has said that Beckett is "wrong" and that Sartre is "a handy symbol of what has gone wrong in modern thinking." The most relevant of Gardner's pronouncements appear in his recent book on contemporary writing, On Moral Fiction (1978). Throughout this treatise Gardner keeps up a running attack on the very writers with whom he has been associated in most readings of Grendel. He berates "the cult of cynicism and despair," arguing that an "art which tends toward destruction, the art of nihilists, cynics, and merdistes, is not properly art at all." Nor does he refer to minor, unrepresentative figures—Mailer, Vonnegut, Heller, and Pynchon are among the many recent writers who are condemned. Such judgments follow from Gardner's belief that "Great art celebrates life's potential, offering a vision unmistakably and unsentimentally rooted in love." As this would suggest, Gardner's literary credo is unabashedly traditional; for him art is good "when it has a clear positive moral effect, presenting valid models for imitation, eternal verities worth keeping in mind, and a benevolent vision of the possible which can inspire and incite human beings toward virtue." For this reason, among others, Gardner insists that "again and again the ancient poets seem right, and 'modern sensibility' seems a fool's illusion."

Everything Gardner has written makes it clear that the "nihilistic" reading of Grendel is improbable, but we do not have to rely on general remarks to determine Gardner's intentions. In a review [in American Scholar, Winter, 1974-75] of Gardner's critical study of the Wakefield Cycle, Martin Stevens objected to "Gardner's apparent low esteem for the medieval consciousness," a view he also found in Grendel, "justly praised ... as a 'revisionist' fiction for its bold, inventive, and keenly humorous perspective of the Anglo-Saxon heroic ideals." Gardner was sufficiently unhappy to respond in the next issue [Spring, 1975] of American Scholar: "Those who have read Grendel will recognize, I hope, that [Stevens] is quite wrong about the book. My monstrous central character, Grendel, will believe in nothing he cannot logically justify. Scorning the Anglo-Saxon scop who reshapes reality into noble ideals, scorning the great Anglo-Saxon values, he grows more and more vicious, more and more helpless, more and more existential until he commits a kind of suicide ... I have been as faithful as possible to the Christian spirit of the epic." We should now see what kind of sense the book makes if it is read as Gardner intended.

At the time of the first chapter Grendel has been at war with Hrothgar for twelve years, so the ensuing narrative is an extended flashback designed to explain how Grendel came to believe that the world is all pointless accident. The crucial episode is Grendel's visit to the dragon in chapter five. Gardner's Dragon is a remarkable character, given to quoting Sartre, Heidegger, and Whitehead (without acknowledgment), and certain of one basic truth: that ultimately nothing matters. The dragon "knows" this because he is able to see all time at once, rather like Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians. And what he sees is no cause for celebration. His credo is "Ashes to ashes and slime to slime, amen"; life, he argues, is "a brief pulsation in the black hole of eternity." So much for human aspirations! The youthful Grendel is drawn to the Shaper's ideals, so he protests: "Why shouldn't one change one's ways, improve one's character?" But the dragon will not take the question seriously: "Why? Why? Ridiculous question! Why anything?" The dragon's influence on Grendel is decisive, for after visiting his cave Grendel finds that "Futility, doom, became a smell in the air, pervasive and acrid as the dead smell after a forest fire." Grendel's war with Hrothgar follows, inspired by the monster's now firm conviction that human values are insubstantial myths designed to get us through the night. The Grendel we meet in chapter one is the product of this encounter, where "the old dragon, calm as winter, unveiled the truth."

For Gardner, however, the dragon's "truth" is despicable. "The Dragon looks like an oracle," Gardner has said, "but he doesn't lay down truth ... He tells the truth as it appears to a dragon—that nothing in the world is connected with anything. It's all meaningless and stupid, and since nothing is connected with anything the highest value in life is to seek out gold and sit on it ... My view is that this is a dragonish way to behave, and it ain't the truth. The Shaper tells the truth, although he lies." Grendel makes the wrong choice, then, when confronted with "the alternative visions of blind old poets and dragons." The dragon despises mankind for living according to consoling myths, but Gardner believes that "Real art creates myths a society can live instead of die by, and clearly our society is in need of such myths." Indeed, Gardner has insisted that we should deny "the myth of blind mechanics" in favor of "the myth of connectedness." If the choice is ours why choose chilly visions of an abandoned world and skies which are forever unimpressed? Why not choose such "myths" as love and courage?

Having made his fatal choice, Grendel proceeds to mock Unferth's belief in heroism, Wealtheow's personal integrity, and Ork's religious theory that good comes from evil. These actions do not so much expose man's predilection for comforting illusions as they reveal the disastrous consequences of accepting the dragon's point of view. When he dies, for example, the Shaper is mourned by a female admirer who presents what is obviously a superb image of human dignity. Grendel's response is to regret never having physically abused the poet: "I should have cracked his skull midsong and sent his blood spraying out wet through the meadhall like a shocking change of key." Grendel should have done this to "prove" that the dragon was right—everything is arbitrary, all values are fictional, nothing matters. In fact, of course, he would only have proven how pernicious the dragon's influence had been. From his encounter with the dragon to his death at the hands of Beowulf, Grendel acts very much like one of those contemporary writers Gardner has condemned for celebrating ugliness and futility.

Gardner has characterized the Grendel of Beowulf as a "cosmic outlaw," "a creature of sinnihte, perpetual night." Of the poem itself he has said, "It is just as clearly, on one level, a celebration of the best possible human being living by the best possible human—perhaps divinely inspired—code." If we recall that Gardner wanted to be as faithful as possible to the Christian spirit of the epic, we can only conclude that Beowulf is the novel's true hero. Once again Gardner has been admirably clear about his aims [in Papers on Language and Literature, Summer, 1970]: "So I write a book in which there is a dragon who says everything a nihilist would say, everything the Marquis de Sade would say; and then at the end of the book there is a dragon who says all the opposite things. He says everything that William Blake would say. Blake says a wonderful thing: 'I look upon the dark satanic mills; I shake my head; they vanish.' That's it. That's right. You redeem the world by acts of imagination every time you pick up a baby." The dragon who says all the opposite things is of course Beowulf, whose superiority is not an accident or a matter of physical strength, as Grendel supposes, but rather his commitment to that healthy life of faith which Gardner has so explicitly praised.

The connection between Beowulf and the dragon is made by Beowulf himself as he takes physical control of Grendel. His first words are an exact repetition of the dragon's despairing description of life as a random movement of atoms: "A meaningless swirl in the stream of time, a temporary gathering of bits, a few random specks ... Additional refinements: sensitive dust, copulating dust..." This startling parallel suggests that Beowulf's long speech to Grendel is a conscious refutation of the dragon's beliefs:

As you see it (the world) is, while the seeing lasts, dark nightmare-history, time-as-coffin, but where the water was rigid there will be fish, and men will survive on their flesh until spring. It's coming, my brother. Believe it or not. Though you murder the world, turn plains to stone, transmogrify life into I and it, strong searching roots will crack your cave and rain will cleanse it: The world will burn green, sperm build again. My promise. Time is the mind, the hand that makes (fingers on harpstrings, hero-swords, the acts, the eyes of queens). By that I kill you.

In this eloquent speech Beowulf accuses Grendel of "murdering" the world by denying his own deep but non-rational connections with it. Beowulf's "promise" is that spring will indeed come again, so long as the human mind (imagination) keeps faith with itself, as it has in the exemplary acts of the Shaper ("fingers on harp-strings"), Unferth ("hero-swords"), and Wealtheow ("the acts, the eyes of queens"). Grendel's denial of life's "strong searching roots" has produced that very rigidity he mistakenly perceived as inevitable.

Beowulf's message is indeed Blakean, which should surprise no one familiar with Gardner's other writings. Gardner's Blake is a poet who stands for the redemptive power of the imagination—Gardner's own theme, as he once told John Howell. Blake's message, as Gardner and many others have understood it, demands that we reject the dictates of pure reason (Urizen) and heed instead the creative impulses of the imagination (Los or Orc). Grendel, however, "will believe in nothing he cannot logically justify." This is to say that Grendel accepts the Urizen-like authority of the dragon. It should now be apparent that this nihilistic rationalism is what Gardner wants to caution us against by means of Grendel's negative example. Indeed, Gardner's point is that the logical and despairing Grendel is all too representative. Though we may protest (like Grendel himself), we moderns have become monstrous precisely to the extent that our assumptions parallel those of the Beowulf-poet—and John Gardner's—Grendel.

Source: Robert Merrill, "John Gardner's Grendel and the Interpretation of Modern Fables," in American Literature, Vol. 56, No. 2, May, 1984, pp. 162-80.

In an interview [in The New Fiction by Joe David Bellamy, 1974] John Gardner says of Grendel that he "wanted to go through the main ideas of Western Civilization ... and go through them in the voice of the monster, with the story already taken care of, with the various philosophical attitudes (though with Sartre in particular), and see what I could do." Gardner goes even further to explain the organization of the novel: "It's got twelve chapters. They're all hooked up to astrological signs, for instance, and that gives you nice easy clues." These statements seem to be an instant explication of the novel, but they really only add up to a clue. The problem with the "nice easy clues" is that no two astrologers agree on anything. For example, one tells us that Arians are "outgoing," another that they "like to live in the mind," and a third that they are "originators" and "sympathetic." It is difficult to see how one could blend these traits into a coherent whole, but even more difficult to see how the whole would point inexorably to some main idea of Western Civilization.

In examining each of the twelve chapters, we shall attempt to discern the philosophical center of each. By studying the philosophical discussions that occur between characters and in the musings of Grendel, we should be able to arrive at conclusions at least as reliable as those suggested by astrological charts. The first thing we need to do is to forget everything about Beowulf except its basic plot. True, Grendel is based on Beowulf and the dramatic action is very similar, but the motivation for actions in Grendel is completely different. In Beowulf the focus is always on heroic action and beastly malfeasance; in Grendel the focus is on philosophical ways of living in the world. Grendel dies in each work, but the meaning of his death is radically different...

In Grendel philosophical ideas are always linked to ways of living in the world: a character does not simply describe an idea, he lives it.

Grendel is the arbiter of twenty-five centuries of philosophy because he is not human. Grendel has no vested interest in any one philosophy; he is searching for the best way to live in the world. The ideas that Grendel judges are not presented in a uniform format. Some of the ideas Grendel himself lives for a time; some of the ideas other characters live; and some of the ideas are so subtle that they need to be explained to us. If Grendel completely changed philosophies every chapter, the novel would be as much a story of character as philosophy, but if he never changed character at all, the novel would not show philosophy as having any real effects on action. The mixture of Grendel's action and observation, his mastery over others and others' mastery over him, then, allows us to see a history of philosophy in action.

Aries begins the astrological block and also begins the first chapter of Grendel: "The old ram stands looking down over rockslides." The symbolic importance of Aries is that it marks the beginning of a new cycle just like the cycle that has ended. Grendel tells us he is in "the twelfth year of my idiotic war," and this year appears that it will be substantially the same as the last. The ram acts the same way he did "last year at this time, and the year before, and the year before that." Grendel realizes that he is caught in the same endless pattern: "So it goes with me day by day and age by age ... Locked in the deadly progression of moon and stars." He will go down the hill and attack Hrothgar's village again, and after he has broken down their door they will build a new one to replace it "for (it must be) the fiftieth or sixtieth time." All has happened before; all will happen again. Grendel and his world are trapped in the "progression of moon and stars," the cycle of astrology. Grendel presents us in this chapter with the theory of the world as repetition and endless cycles, a philosophy, one of the oldest in the West, first presented by the Orphic sages.

Chapter Two, a flashback to Grendel's youth, begins Grendel's journey into the world of men. He leaves the cave of ignorance and enters the world of sunlight for the first time (an obvious reference to Plato's parable of the cave). Because the sunlight blinds him, Grendel always returns to the cave at daybreak. One night, he catches his foot in the crotch of a tree and is unable to free himself. When he accepts that his mother will not come from the cave to rescue him and that he is alone against the world (represented by a bull—this is the chapter of Taurus—charging him), Grendel concludes "that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that I alone exist ... I create the universe blink by blink." When men arrive at the tree and begin to torture him, in order to determine what manner of beast he is, his shrieks of pain bring his mother to save him from the men. Safe in the cave, he repeats, "The world is all pointless accident ... I exist, nothing else." From these statements, Grendel clearly begins his life in the world as a solipsist. His claim of unique existence is the fundamental basis for that philosophy...

Grendel's solipsism is challenged when the Shaper, a poet-minstrel, arrives in Hrothgar's village. Shaper brings history to the village and forces Grendel to acknowledge exterior reality. Shaper creates a better world with his songs, an order untainted by the unpleasantness of certain facts of existence. He creates an order out of the pointless accident, and Grendel confesses that "even to me, incredibly, he had made it all seem true and very fine." Shaper's visions transform the grubby little village into a growing city-state, merely by changing the villagers' perceptions about themselves, their past, and Grendel. Shaper "had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and transmuted it, and they, who knew the truth, remembered it his way—and so did I." Geminis, symbolized by the "wobbly twins" Grendel sees, are supposed to be versatile, superficial, and inventive—all part of their dual-nature. Shaper is all these things, as were the Sophists, who were so skilled at argument that they could argue any side of any question and win. They remade the world with their arguments just as Shaper does with his songs. All who hear Shaper's visionary history believe in it, even though they remember what actually happened. Grendel wants to believe in it but cries out, "Lost!" because he cannot let the dream replace the reality of his experience.

Chapter Four, Cancer the nourisher, shows us the growth of the religion that will nourish the new world Shaper has made Hrothgar's villagers see.

[Shaper] told of how the earth was first built, long ago said that the greatest of gods made the world, every wonder-bright plain and the turning seas, and set out as signs of his victory the sun and moon ... and gave life to the every creature that moves on land.

The harp turned solemn. He told of an ancient feud between two brothers which split all the world between darkness and light. And I, Grendel, was the dark side ... The terrible race God cursed.

God created all things in the world and all was good, but an evil force arose that divided the world into good and evil. The man who follows the good shall go to heaven and "find peace in his father's embrace," but the evil man shall burn forever—basic Old Testament theology. Grendel, the recognized evil of creation, is symbolized as brute nature—not really intelligent at all, merely a force that attempts to draw the villagers into evil. The vision is so compelling that Grendel desires it even if he "must be the outcast, cursed by the rules of this hideous fable." Grendel even rushes into the midst of the villagers and asks for their forgiveness for his role in the fable, but they simply hack at him with swords. Grendel wants the vision to be true because it gives some order and purpose to the world, even if the order demands the vilification of his image.

In Chapter Five, the chapter of Leo the dramatizer, Grendel learns what his role will be in the new order Shaper has provided. Grendel goes to a dragon to ask about his part in this world and meets a metaphysician who explains everything's place in the world. Gardner says that the dragon is "nasty" and "says all the things that a nihilist would say." Much of the dragon's advice is nihilistic and much is materialistic, but the most important part comes from [Alfred North] Whitehead. The dragon begins his explanation of Grendel's place in the world by describing the fundamental connectedness of things and deploring the common-sense notions of reality. He then tells Grendel that:

Importance is primarily monistic in its reference to the universe. Limited to a finite individual occasion, importance ceases to be important ... Expression, however, ... is founded on the finite occasion.

The dragon is explaining the way in which eternal objects are expressed in actual entities, taking his explanation directly from Whitehead [in Modes of Thought, 1938]:

Importance is primarily monistic in its reference to the universe. Importance, limited to a finite individual occasion, ceases to be important ...

But expression is founded on the finite occasion.

The dragon uses Whitehead's metaphysics to explain an ordering of the world even more comprehensible and sensible than the one Shaper provides. The problem is that Grendel can understand Shaper, but not the dragon. The dragon needs to stoop to particulars:

You improve them, my boy! Can't you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last ... You are mankind, or man's condition.

The dragon prevents Grendel from accepting the simplified theological world-view offered by Shaper—"What god? Where? Life force, you mean? The principle of process?"—and helps Grendel recognize a more complex order in the world.

In Chapter Six Grendel finds his role in this order:

I was transformed. I was a new focus for the clutter of space I stood in ... I had become, myself, the mama I'd searched the cliffs for once in vain ... I had become something, as if born again. I had hung between possibilities before, between the cold truths I knew and the heart-sucking conjuring tricks of the Shaper, now that was passed: I was Grendel, Ruiner of Meadhalls, Wrecker of Kings!

The most familiar formulation in existentialist thought is "existence precedes essence." This phrase means that people exist as things long before they create themselves as entities capable of acting coherently in the world. Before his realization, Grendel had possessed no real sense of himself: he accepted the images others had of him (his mother's image of him as "son," the villagers' image of him as "monster," and Shaper's image of him as "devil") for his self-image. Thus, Grendel is reborn but reborn into scepticism. He accepts that beings other than himself exist, but he has postulated them all as enemies. Grendel is a sceptic, one who doubts everything with moral fervor, and has decided that his new role is to be the destroyer of all the hypocritical orders men have created, Grendel feels that all orders blind men to the truth: "So much for heroism. So much for the harvest-virgin. So much, also, for the alternative visions of blind old poets and dragons."

Chapter Seven is the story of Wealthow, "holy servant of the common good." She is given to Hrothgar by her brother as a tribute to Hrothgar's power. She brings such a great sense of peace and has a faith so deep that she protects the village from Grendel's ravages. Libra is the sign of conciliators, and Wealthow brings harmony not only between the two peoples, but within the village as well. Chapters Six and Seven are the heart of the novel just as Virgo and Libra are the center of the astrological year. What we have is the scepticism of Grendel balanced by the faith of Wealthow. He is willing to sacrifice nothing; she "would give, had given her life for those she loved" and has "lain aside her happiness for theirs." He is a sceptic; she is the closest thing we see to a Christian in Grendel. Shaper brought the Old Testament to the village, but Wealthow brings the New Testament ideals with her. At the center of the novel, then, we have the two contrasting ways of viewing the world: Grendel's belief in chaos and futility balanced by Wealthow's belief in order and purpose.

The first seven chapters have transformed Grendel from a frightened solipsistic child into an angry sceptical monster. The village has evolved from a small collection of huts into a city-state. Everything necessary for Beowulf's arrival has been given to us, but Beowulf does not arrive for four more chapters. The plot has been developed; the next four chapters develop philosophical ideas Gardner is interested in. Gardner says that "at about Chapter 8 there is a section in which you are no longer advancing in terms of the momentum toward the end ... it's just the wheels spinning. That is not novelistic form; it's lyrical form." Gardner stretches Grendel to elucidate certain ideas about philosophy and the growth of society, not to add convolutions to the traditional plot. These chapters should reveal just how different Grendel is from a more traditional novel, for its underlying purpose is to explore philosophies, not character.

The purpose is made clear in Chapter Eight when Machiavelli's ideas enter the village. Hrothulf, the "sweet scorpion," learns statecraft from Red Horse:

"Public force is the life and soul of every state ... The state is an organization of violence, a monopoly in what it is pleased to call legitimate violence ... All systems are evil. All governments are evil. Not just a trifle evil. Monstrously evil ... If you want me to help you destroy a government, I'm here to serve. But as for Universal Justice—" He laughed.

Hrothgar's village has arrived at the age of nation-states and all that matters during such an age is the maintenance of power, or, for the disenfranchised, the achievement of power. Hrothulf is an orphaned nephew adopted by Hrothgar and Wealthow, but sentiments and obligations play no part in Machiavellian statecraft. With the replacement of Wealthow's love and charity by Hrothulf's scheming, we enter the modern age.

Chapter Nine shows us another indication that the village has entered the modern age. We saw the village's religion begin in Shaper's passioned delineation between the powers of good and evil, but we see now that the church has evolved into a pallid study of Whitehead's idea of process. Grendel hides among their idols one night and convinces an old priest to tell him the nature of the village's god. The priest tells Grendel,

The King of Gods is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality. No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the reason for rationality. The King of the Gods is the actual entity in virtue of which the entire multiplicity of eternal objects obtains its graded relevance to each stage of concrescence. Apart from Him, there can be no relevant novelty.

When the old priest tries to tell the other priests of his interview with "The Great Destroyer," as he had assumed Grendel to be, they laugh at him and his theories of god. The last great metaphysician speaks and no one will listen to him. Their religion has fallen from Shaper's dualism to Whitehead's process to hypocrisy—the young priests worry that "Lunatic priests are bad business ... One man like him can turn us all to paupers." Grendel is so disturbed by the sight of the younger priests ridiculing the old priest who still has faith that he leaves them all alone. He cannot understand that the young priests are able to preach what they do not believe.

In Chapter Ten we see Grendel once more puzzled by man's insensitivity. Just as Grendel was the only listener moved by the old priest's explanations, so he is the only one truly moved by the Shaper's death. Capricorns are supposed to be pessimistic—and in this chapter Grendel develops a Nietzschean philosophy. Because Shaper is dead, Grendel feels that "we're on our own again. Abandoned." They are alone because only Shaper's art made their world real. Shaper molded their reality and infused it with actuality. When Grendel says, "Nihil ex nihilo, I always say," he is recognizing the emptiness of their world without its creator. All of Grendel's despair and the conclusions he draws from his despair are parallel to Nietzsche's writings when he faced the death of god.

Grendel's journey thus far, then, has been from solipsist to sceptic to nihilist. He has listened to the great metaphysicians explain their systems, but he could never believe that an order corresponded to what they described. As Nietzsche is traditionally seen as a predecessor of Sartre, Chapter Eleven gives us the most succinct version of Sartre's thought in the novel. After Grendel sees Beowulf for the first time, he retires to his cave and meditates on his being:

All order, I've come to understand, is theoretical, unreal—a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world ... "Am I not free?" ... I have seen—I embody—the vision of the dragon: absolute, final waste. I saw long ago the whole universe as not-my-mother, and I glimpsed my place in it, a hole. Yet I exist, I knew. Then I alone exist, I said. It's me or it. What glee, that glorious recognition! For even my mama loves me not for myself, my holy specialness ... but for my son-ness, my possessedness.

"All order ... is theoretical, unreal" is Grendel's explicit rejection of the dragon, the priests, and Shaper. Because "I alone exist," he feels that he must create his own order centered around himself and his perceptions of the world. He posits himself as the center of the world and arranges it accordingly: "For the world is divided, experience teaches, into two parts: things to be murdered, and things that would hinder the murder of things." The ideas Grendel expresses of freedom, existence, and possessedness are all Sartre's ideas, all central to existentialism. In this chapter we can truly say that Grendel has become an existentialist. God (Shaper) is dead, and after his initial despair, Grendel has built a new world and new order without Him. Grendel's chosen essence, "absolute, final waste," does not seem very different from what it was before—the important thing is that now he moves beyond a received definition of himself and defines the world in his own terms.

Chapter Twelve, the chapter of Pisces, the end of the astrological cycle, shows us the battle between Grendel and Beowulf. Beowulf has come to Hrothgar's village to kill the monster and bring a new age to its people, Grendel wants to kill Beowulf in order to maintain the village as his fiefdom. Grendel creeps into the sleeping hall, hoping to kill Beowulf by surprise, but Beowulf, instead, tricks Grendel and seizes him. Beowulf twists Grendel's arm behind his back and forces him to listen:

Though you murder the world, turn plains into stone, transmogrify life into I and it, strong searching roots crack your cave and rain will cleanse it. The world will burn green, sperm build again. My promise. Time is the mind, the hand that makes ... By that I kill you. Grendel, Grendel! You make the world by whispers, second by second. Are you blind to that? Whether you make it a grave or a garden of roses is not the point. Feel the wall, is it not hard? He smashes me against it, breaks open my forehead! Hard, yes! Observe the hardness, write it down in careful runes. Now sing of walls! Sing!

Beowulf beats Grendel until he produces his first poem; satisfied with the poem, he lets Grendel wander off to bleed to death. As Grendel dies, he says, "Poor Grendel's had an accident ... So may you all."

About the last chapter Gardner says, "Grendel begins to apprehend the universe. Poetry is an accident, the novel says, but it's a great one." Grendel can no longer say "Only I exist" after he has sung of the beauty of walls. Beowulf forces Grendel to discard his existentialism and view the world without a screen. Beowulf beats Grendel against reality and turns him into an empiricist. Out of such contact comes poetry. Grendel can only understand that all knowledge, all truth, all art grows out of the contact with reality after he has been forced to give up his old philosophy. Grendel does not merely imagine the wall and posit that it is not Grendel; he has his head smashed against it until he rejects everything but experience.

Grendel's philosophical journey is almost circular, just as the cycle of astrology is circular. He begins with solipsism, "Only I exist," and ends with empiricism, for which only objects of experience are real. The major difference between the two is that empiricism accepts the existence of other objects while solipsism denies other objects' concrete existence. These two schools are closely related historically and often difficult to tell apart in certain philosophers, Hume, for example. Once the empiricist questions the existence of external objects, he becomes a solipsist. The cycle of astrology, then, is important as a symbol for Grendel's philosophical development as well as for some clues in the chapters. Grendel's first teacher, the dragon, reveals the beauties of metaphysics and his final teacher, Beowulf, reveals the hard truths of empiricism. Grendel's awareness of the flaws of the former and the limits of the latter allow him to create poetry, a new way of ordering the world.

Grendel's journey is not the only important one in the novel. The village of Hrothgar's people is almost a main character itself, and its journey is also circular: from an unimportant village to the prosperous years of Shaper and Hrothgar, and finally into a decline with neither a great poet nor a great leader. Shaper "sang of a glorious mead-hall whose light would shine to the end of the ragged world." He sang of something that will happen in the future and then helped to bring it about. Grendel sings that "these towns shall be called the shining towns." Shaper's prophecy came true, but its time of truth is already over. The Shaper heralds the village's growth; Grendel's poem signals its decline. Moreover, Grendel's death destroys the last, great symbol of the village's struggle over adversity. Statecraft and religion had already been cheapened, and when Grendel dies even brute nature is gone. Grendel shows in all ways the passing of one age and the birth of the next, and so the novel becomes a complete history of man's progress.

Source: Craig J. Stromme, "The Twelve Chapters of Grendel," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XX, No. 1, 1978, pp. 83-92.