Misty Monster Hop

Here, and at long g.d. last, is the Book Report on Grendel, from me rather than Grendel’s poor patron, but unbowed nevertheless. Where does Grendel fit in on the storied number line of book club book appropriateness? It is hard to say. What Grendel is is a barrage of observation, gleaned in various ways, about selves. But the bookishness of those selves, and the seriousness with which we are advised to take the book-like quality of any self, is chimerical throughout the book. It seems to think different things at different times, or even be different times. Which, well and good if you are a novel narrated for a monster. Not for nothing is their purview called cryptozoology.

I often get on the subject of things that came first and command our respect as such. The whole lame tideover bit that constituted the last entry on this engine was such a getting on of a subject, and conveyed what I normally think about these things: with apologies to Robert Johnson, I’d rather take the new and exciting. However, usually when I am at bars and talking about Chaucer (so like eighty percent of the times I am at bars) I will start admiring Chaucer and Shakespeare and other early heroes for their visionary empathetic abilities. Here’s Sir Philip Sidney, on Chaucer: “I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walk so stumblingly after him.” It is a good kind of marvel, that: it is ennobling to imagine mist-surrounded early empathetic pioneers. The problem is that there are a lot more people like William Langland, whose Piers Plowman doesn’t have the same kind of dry-ice cache as the Canterbury Tales, than there are people like the singular Chaucer. So how do you solve a problem like this? One way, is massive, monstrous, pomo anachronism; and so here we have Grendel, rent from his proper, Beowulf-poet-thuddingly dull ways of thinking, and given to talk like he went to Yale in the seventies. That dragon, I guess, is Paul de Man.

How would this book have worked if it wasn’t called Grendel, if it didn’t have Beowulf propping it up? Everyone’s fond of those misty figures, even if they aren’t familiar, and there’s not a lot to Grendel in the source material, so Gardner has plenty of latitude. The parts of the novel that work best in relation to Beowulf are the ones that echo with irony – we know well before our narrator what fate awaits him at the hands of that Geat he never gets around to naming. And his analysis of the power of fiction is very shrewd – Grendel is most interesting when he talks about the Shaper, who had “changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and [the Danes] who knew the truth, remembered it his way – and so did I” (Gardner, 43). One avenue that seemed, at first, to be one that may have been interestingly explored, would’ve been an awareness, or even a suggestion, on Grendel’s part that he was no less invented than the harmonious reign of Scyld. However, the more I think of it, that would’ve been to absolutely kick down the pole that held up the tent, and I am glad that Gardner held off. In fact, the huge importance given the Shaper seems to suggest that he may have at one time thought of such a gesture, but that the rich character of his invented, sorrowful Grendel – sad, sardonic, scourging – refused to sabotage himself.

Up next: I haven’t decided. I am vacillating between our Shadow Correspondent’s suggestion (Proust was a Neuroscientist, which I really want to read but kind of want to read Swann’s Way first) and one of my own personal current intrigue, Author Author by David Lodge (starring a fictionalized Henry James). That, or I’m going to inaugurate a new series where I only read books that have been recommended to me, and then try to judge the character of the recommender by their pick. Stay tuned!