The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,115

is captured, and, entering the mother’s lair, weaponless, is forced to use his bare hands. He fights mightily but unsuccessfully. Suddenly and fortunately, he grabs a sword that belongs to the mother. With her own weapon he cuts off her head, and then the head of Grendel’s corpse. A curious thing happens then: the victim’s blood melts the sword. The conventional reading is that the fiends’ blood is so foul it melts steel, but the image of Beowulf standing there with a mother’s head in one hand and a useless hilt in the other encourages more layered interpretations. One being that perhaps violence against violence—regardless of good and evil, right and wrong—is itself so foul the sword of vengeance collapses in exhaustion or shame.

Beowulf is a classic epic of good vanquishing evil; of unimaginable brutality being overcome by physical force. Bravery, sacrifice, honor, pride, rewards both in reputations and wealth—all come full circle in this rousing medieval tale. In such heroic narratives, glory is not in the details; the forces of good and evil are obvious, blatant, the triumph of the former over the latter is earned, justified, and delicious. As Beowulf says, “It is always better / to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. /…So arise, my lord, and let us immediately / set forth on the trail of this troll-dam. / I guarantee you she will not get away, / not to dens under ground nor upland groves / nor the ocean floor. She’ll have nowhere to flee to.”

Contemporary society, however, is made uneasy by the concept of pure, unmotivated evil, by pious, unsullied virtue, and contemporary writers and scholars search for more.

One challenge to the necessary but narrow expectations of this heroic narrative comes from a contemporary writer, the late John Gardner, in his novel, titled Grendel. Told from the monster’s point of view, it is a tour de force and an intellectual and aesthetic enterprise that comes very close to being the sotto-voiced subject of much of today’s efforts to come to grips with the kind of permanent global war we now find ourselves engaged in. The novel poses the question that the epic does not: Who is Grendel? The author asks us to enter his mind and test the assumption that evil is flagrantly unintelligible, wanton, and undecipherable. By assuming Grendel’s voice, his point of view, Gardner establishes at once that unlike the character in the poem, Grendel is not without thought, and is not a beast. In fact he is reflecting precisely on real true beasts the moment the reader is introduced to him. When the novel opens he is watching a ram, musing, “Do not think my brains are squeezed shut, like the ram’s, by the roots of horns.” And “Why can’t these creatures discover a little dignity?”

Gardner’s version has the same plot, characters, etc., as the original, and relies on similar descriptions and conventions: referring to women, for example, only queens have names. If Grendel’s mother has a name it is as unspeakable as she is unspeaking. Seamus Heaney’s introduction to his translation of Beowulf emphasizes the movement of evil from out there to in here, from the margins of the world to inside the castle, and focuses on the artistic brilliance of the poem, the “beautiful contrivances of its language”; Gardner, however, tries to penetrate the interior life—emotional, cognizant—of incarnate evil and prioritizes the poet as one who organizes the world’s disorder, who pulls together disparate histories into meaning. We learn in Gardner’s novel that Grendel distinguishes himself from the ram that does not know or remember his past. We learn that Grendel, in the beginning, is consumed by hatred and is neither proud nor ashamed of it. That he is full of contempt for the survivors of his rampages. Watching the thanes bury their dead, he describes the scene as follows: “On the side of the hill the dirge-slow shoveling begins. They throw up a mound for the funeral pyre, for whatever arms or legs or heads my haste has left behind. Meanwhile, up in the shattered hall, the builders are hammering, replacing the door…industrious and witless as worker ants—except that they make small, foolish changes, adding a few more iron pegs, more iron bands, with tireless dogmatism.” This contempt extends to the world in general. “I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I