Monsters are making serious coin. Zombies add $5 billion to the economy, according to a Wall Street financial analyst. The Mummy has generated $1.5 billion at the box office in recent years—enough to buy his own Pyramid and a lifetime supply of tana leaves. Frankenstein and Dracula don’t file tax returns, but they must earn as much as investment bankers. I was hardly surprised when the leading job website called itself Monster.com —there's gold in scaring people.
So I feel sorry for poor old Grendel. He was the first monster in the English language— making his appearance in the Old English epic Beowulf, the first great literary work in the language. Yet where is his movie franchise? Where are his licensing deals? You can't even find a lousy Grendel T-shirt, let alone a scary Halloween costume.
Thank heavens for John Gardner, our forsaken monster's only advocate. In his 1971 novel Grendel, Gardner flip-flopped the Beowulf epic and made it about the villain. Gardner had published two previous novels, without much success, when he tackled the unlikely project of updating a story that was more than one thousand years old, and almost never read except by students assigned Beowulf as a class assignment. (Count me in that group: I read Beowulf only because Stanford wouldn't give me a degree in English literature if I didn't do so.) Yet Gardner had learned, when teaching a class on Anglo-Saxon literature, that this old story made more sense to students when described in terms of modern philosophical currents.
Gardner told his class that "Grendel is symbolic of the rational soul gone perverse." He continues: "Somebody asked me in class if that was just old-fashioned Christian talk, or was it possible in the modern world for the rational soul to go perverse. I said 'Sure, Sartre’s Existentialism is perverse rationality.' As soon as I said it I realized what I was going to do, I and I began planning Grendel."
The time was ripe for Grendel. As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, the mass audience had gone beyond the concept of the anti-hero and was embracing the more radical notion of the noble evil-doer. This could be seen in cinema—in breakthrough films such as Bonnie and Clyde , Easy Rider , Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , and The Godfather . It was evident in music; “Sympathy for the Devil” was getting airplay even as Gardner worked on his manuscript and "“I Shot the Sheriff" was recorded shortly after Grendel’s release. It was especially evident in fiction, demonstrated in books as diverse Wide Sargasso Sea , In Cold Blood , The French Lieutenant's Woman , and Carrie .
In this new state of affairs, Grendel the monster became the loveable rebel without a cause, and the traditional heroes—Hrothgar, king of the Danes, Unferth and Beowulf himself—emerge as tainted representatives of the establishment, upholders of a system built on self-serving lies and barely-disguised violence. This gives Gardner a pretext for turning his novel about a sixth century hero into a critique of twentieth century sociocultural practices. Indeed, the most riveting interludes in this novel are not the fights or 'action scenes' but rather those moments of insight in which we see the familiar attributes of our own day in strange new guises.
In the worldview of Gardner’s Grendel, culture is a deceitful construct that hides the essential meaninglessness of existence. The most intriguing character in the novel is neither the hero Beowulf nor the monster Grendel, but the bard who sings mesmerizing songs for the King and his court. This poet possesses the most magical power of all: he can turn the brutality of the everyday world into something glorious and inspiring. Even Grendel is fascinated by these songs, wanting to believe their lies, though he knows better. Grendel has heard the inside scoop from a cynical dragon, who can see all past, present and future, and warns against believing these beguiling fairy tales. But even a monster finds it impossible to resist the charm of the poetic imagination.
Reading these passages, I couldn't help but recall my favorite scene from Homer’s Odyssey . Odysseus has returned to his native Ithaca, and is killing off the suitors one at a time. He doesn’t stop until his vengeance is sated, and all the freeloaders in his household are slain . But he makes one exception: the bard who was singing for the entertainment of the suitors is spared. I can’t help but believe that Homer saw himself in that role, and demanded what we might nowadays call poetic license. All the revelers get punished, in this roughshod Homeric jurisprudence, but the poet is above the law. The same kind of license is exercised by the bards of Gardner’s novel, who actually have more influence than kings in shaping the attitudes and aspiration of the royal entourage.
In the Beowulf epic, the appearance of Grendel is never described, but we are told that he is sceadugenga , which translates as a shadow-goer . He strikes in darkness, much like the vampires of superstition and pop culture. We are told, also, that Grendel is a descendant of Cain, one of the few direct evocations of Christianity in a narrative that is drenched in Pagan attitudes. Grendel is eventually slain by the warrior Beowulf, who upholds the values of courage and blood justice. Perhaps, in a technical way, Beowulf might be called a savior—he has saved the lives of Hrothgar and his thanes. But he couldn’t be less similar to the Christian concept of a savior, with its celebration of self-sacrifice and meek surrender to the violence of others.
Grendel is the real sacrificial victim here. He approaches his death at the hands of the hero, with a strange mix of repulsion and attraction. To the end he holds on to the cynicism learned from the dragon, insisting that only mere chance g iv e s Beowulf the victory. But he also grasps that the persnickety and willful ignorance of humans will allow them to turn this meaningless incident into something foundational and constitutive—in this case, an epic poem at the heart of Anglo-American self-identity.
This is never explicitly stated in the novel, but it doesn't need to be. We already know Grendel's fate: he is destined to serve as the archetypal monster of English literature. He will be studied by future centuries, a monster allowed into the canon of great literary sagas. Even I will be forced to imbibe his tale and its justifications of Girardian reciprocal violence —to the extent that my bachelor’s degree will be withheld from me if I refuse! And if, as some suggest, all cultures are defined by what they oppose and exclude, what they attempt to extirpate, then Grendel becomes that supercharged kind of victim—one who brings a new world into life through his bloody demise.
Is it a beautiful world? Is it a peaceful world? Hardly. In this instance, the circle of reciprocal violence will continue. In the Beowulf epic, the slaughter of Grendel is followed by the killing of his mother—an incident prefigured in Gardner’s novel, but left out of the narrative. But more than that, we also know the long, bloody history of the succeeding centuries of English history, and can’t help but see the dominance of the values of vengeance and blood justice celebrated back at the dawn of Anglo-Saxon storytelling. This history may look grand in the rearview mirror, perhaps even heroic, but one of the lessons of John Gardner's Grendel is that we do well to question the nature of this glory, even when (or perhaps especially when) we fall under its spell.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.
He was the first monster in the English language, but where is his movie franchise? Where are his licensing deals? You can't even find a lousy Grendel T-shirt.