When a wry, self-aware novel successfully and subtly takes aim at Jean-Paul Sartre, you know you have a very special novel on your hands. John Gardner’s Grendel, inspired just as much by Beowulf as by Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, does just that in an unlikely yet utterly sublime cross-cultural fusion of literary and philosophical ideas. Essentially, Gardner excavates Sartre’s existentialism from a French mid-twentieth century café context and thrusts it upon a demonic monster of medieval literature who lusts for the blood of poor Danish thanes. One may not expect much of this peculiar effort, yet Gardner himself saw in Beowulf’s Grendel a pre-modern, mythic version of Sartre himself. “I finally worked out an interpretation that I believe in,” Gardner explains, “where Grendel is a cosmic principle of intellectual disorder. He liked unreason, in the same way that Jean-Paul Sartre likes unreason.” Grendel, he continues, manifests a perverse soul that reflects the perverse rationality of Sartre’s existentialism. The two are unlikely heroes, both immensely creative and reflective thinkers yet both equally lost amid the circuitous unreason of their own radical ideas. Make no mistake, Grendel is not an existentialist manifesto, but a sharp critique of Sartre’s philosophical project.
There are so many complex and interwoven themes in Grendel—be it the zodiac allusions, the rival philosophical positions, the subtle and not-so-subtle nods to Beowulf itself—that it is easy to overlook Gardner’s brilliant prose. For one, his epithets for Grendel are extraordinary: Grendel is the “shadow-shooter, earth-rim-roamer, walker of the world’s weird wall.” The novel is also told entirely from Grendel’s point of view, so that the reader finds herself awash in the hyper-observant, self-deprecatory, and wildly anxious mind of the monster whose soliloquies are beautiful and violent and poetic all at the same time. “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—two snake-pits” —thus is the nature of Grendel’s lonely ruminations. Vivid and economical, Gardner’s prose jumps and skips in moments of exclamatory fury and torment— “Oh what a conversion . . . Mercy! Peace!” –before it slowly decelerates into quieter moments of existential dread and isolation— “So much for heroism. So much for the harvest-virgin. So much, also, for the alternative visions of blind old poets and dragons.” It is, indeed, not so unlike the labyrinthine poeticism of Sartre’s most famous philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness, while nevertheless far more excusable, since Gardner has written a novel and not actual philosophy (I pity those who have yet to parse Sartre’s convoluted sentences in their philosophy classes, only to find themselves utterly disappointed in his conclusions).
For many readers, Grendel is an unusually relatable character. Like so many seekers, he feels alone in his futile struggle to create meaning for himself in the typical existentialist manner. “I alone exist,” he proudly and solipsistically declares. “I create the whole universe, blink by blink.” Yet despite the profound realization that he is free to shape his own reality, that he need not accept the reality placed before him by either his mother or the despicable humans whom he observes with contempt, Grendel cannot maintain the rebellion against the absurd that Albert Camus so famously expounds. “Rebellion,” Camus writes, “breaks the seal [of impotence] and allows the whole being to come into play. It liberates stagnant waters and turns them into a raging torrent.” When a subject rebels,” he continues, she “identifies [her]self with other [people] and so surpasses [her]self” —she transcends the identity, as it were, handed down to her by her community and, indeed, by the world itself. Grendel cannot seem to do this successfully—and this is an important point in Gardner’s literary moral project. The Shaper, the dragon, his mother—each grafts onto Grendel an identity that he both accepts and rejects as he vacillates between various iterations of existentialist bad faith. “Grendel the truth-teacher, phantom-tester,” he calls himself at one such moment. “It was what I would be from this day forward—my commitment, my character as long as I lived—and nothing alive or dead could change my mind. . . . I changed my mind.” In effect, like so many of us who continuously cling to simplistic portraitures of ourselves—I am a teacher, or a student, or a brother, or a writer, etc.—Grendel repeatedly must ask himself, “Who really am I? And what is my purpose, if that even exists?” He never really settles on an answer, at least not until (possibly) the end of the novel. In this light, his final words ring truer than ever. “Poor Grendel’s had an accident,” he whispers to the animals that cluster around him in his death throes, keenly aware of his thrownness, as Heidegger might put it. “So may you all.” Yet what might this accident be, if not one that leads to redemption through grace?
Thus, whatever the titular monster’s existential nature, Grendel is ultimately a rejection of the atheistic existentialism embodied most visibly and most influentially by Jean-Paul Sartre. This is perhaps most evident on a symbolic level throughout the novel. Take, for instance, the juxtaposition between Grendel’s encounter with an oak tree just after his loss to Beowulf and Roquentin’s apprehension of a chestnut tree in what is the most well-known scene of Sartre’s existentialist novel Nausea. In the latter work, Sartre describes how the particularity of the chestnut tree is utterly alien and obscene: “It no longer had the inoffensiveness of an abstract category; it was the glue of actuality, this root was molded in existence . . . the diversity of things, their individuality was only an illusion, a veneer. This veneer had melted, giving way to moist solidity, monstrous and chaotic—nude, fearfully and obscenely nude.” This quintessential revelation of the absurdity of reality and of being laid bare makes Roquentin literally ill. Contrast this scene, then, with Grendel’s final encounter with an oak tree just prior to his death. Whereas Roquentin’s existential experience leads to his awareness of being’s absurdity, Grendel’s leads to a moment of clear perception and even joy:
“I am weak from loss of blood. No one follows me now. I stumble again and with my one weak arm I cling to the huge twisted roots of an oak. I look down past stars to a terrifying darkness. I seem to recognize the place, but it’s impossible. ‘Accident,’ I whisper. I will fall. I seem to desire the fall, and though I fight it with all my will I know in advance that I can’t win. Standing baffled, quaking with fear, three feet from the edge of a nightmare cliff, I find myself, incredibly, moving toward it . . . some monster inside me . . . moving me slowly to my voluntary tumble into death . . . I no longer feel pain . . . Is it joy I feel?”
Joy, one may argue, made possible only through grace. To quote Cullen E. Swinson in his thesis on Grendel, “Gardner does more than simply allude to Sartre’s Nausea and its solipsistic view of the world, he tropes it, reversing its meaning by taking one of its most celebrated passages, Roquentin’s experience of the chestnut tree, and making it the moment of spiritual truth for his own Sartrean antihero’s existential journey.”
When one takes this interpretation of the novel to its logical (and chronological) conclusion, it becomes clear that Beowulf, “the Stranger” at the end of Grendel, stands in for Christ and thus makes possible Grendel’s final redemption. First, Gardner repeatedly associates Beowulf with Christian symbols at the moment he appears on scene. Grendel’s mother warns him, for example, to “beware the fish,” and Grendel likewise remarks that “[Beowulf] had no more beard than a fish,” the fish being a prominent early symbol of Christ. There are echoes of the incarnation as well, most notable when Grendel comments, “I found myself not listening, merely looking at his mouth, which moved—or so it seemed to me—independent of the words, as if the body of the stranger were a ruse, a disguise of something infinitely more terrible.” Finally, Beowulf’s physical transformation in his struggle with Grendel and the litany he whispers into Grendel’s ear— “fingers on harpstrings, hero-swords, the acts, the eyes of queens. By that I kill you” –speak to his divinity and salvific power. The litany, in particular, recalls various realities and values that presented themselves to Grendel throughout his life: the meaning created by the Shaper, the heroic code of Unferth, the beauty and grace of Wealthow, each of which he rejects. To once more cite Swinson, “just as Beowulf embodies the rationality of the dragon, he also embodies the creative power of the Shaper; he reconciles all of the contradictions of dualism and affirms the reality of the world from which Grendel has alienated himself.” If the Christian monks who compiled and edited the oral poetry of Beowulf created for the non-Christian monster Grendel a Christian backstory to help explain the evil he represents, then Gardner transforms a thoroughly non-Christian Scandinavian hero into a manifestation of Christ who brings to Grendel ultimate grace.
Clearly, then, John Gardner’s Grendel is a special novel. Do not be fooled by its brevity—Grendel is one of the most symbolically rich and philosophically layered works of fiction I have recently read. Perhaps more importantly, do not be fooled by its existentialist outlook. Gardner takes as his subject the most suitable existentialist character of pre-modern literature only to demonstrate the profound deficiencies of that character’s philosophical project. Grendel is so relatable because, like many of us, he is a seeker who finds in existentialism the semblance of an answer to his alienation from the world. Yet when he realizes, through the help of the dragon, that his atheistic existentialism logically leads to a fatalistic nihilism, he finds himself lonelier and more desperate than ever before. To read Grendel as an existentialist manifesto is, then, utterly misguided. Poor Grendel needs more than Jean-Paul Sartre to save his tortured soul.
The Classical Examiner 