Blake and Grendel

William Blake, a man with little formal education who was thought mad by many, criticized the world and wrote genius ideas about society. His poems are works which display paradoxes and in "Introduction (Song of Innocence)" and "Introduction (Song of Experience)" he comments on the ignorance of the unenlightened and the despair of the enlightened. These contrasting poems still manage to work together, similar to how John Gardner uses the contrasting ideas of innocence versus experience in his novel Grendel. 

In “Song of Innocence”, Blake writes about a child telling a piper to “pipe song about a lamb” which symbolizes Jesus and purity. The piper is then instructed to drop his “happy pipe” and sing “songs of happy chear” then lastly write his songs in a “book that all may read”. These artistic forms of portraying the joyous song demonstrate the association that art and music has with innocence. This relates to Grendel in his early days of inexperience, before he was touched by the knowledge of the evil, pointless world. The Shaper’s song sounds much like the Piper’s song. The song about religion, people weeping with joy, it all sounds very familiar. However, Blake does state that a shortcoming of innocence is that it can be ignorance. This can be seen clearly within Grendel because the people were entranced by the Shaper’s words, ignorant to the truth, or lack of truth, behind his words.

The contrasting poem, “Song of Experience” would then demonstrate the Dragon’s perspective. The Bard “who Present, Past, & Future sees” sounds like the exact description of the Dragon, who is also all-knowing. The dragon’s “ears have heard The Holy Word” of the Shaper, but they have also experienced the darkened world that those who gain knowledge see. Grendel is engulfed into this world when he accepts the dragon’s perspective and is tortured by the darkened world, only seeing the experience side of life.

Blake himself never identified himself wholly with either view of innocence or experience, and he stood on the outside pointing out the fallacies in each. While the balance of both would be perfection, Grendel experienced such a tormented experience because of the imbalance he found in his life. He abandoned the Shaper’s ideals about innocence and inhaled the scent of the dragon, letting experience become his aura. This imbalance can be seen in Chapter 7, where he narrates his story in two parts, Cut A and Cut B- Cut A containing all of the content and Cut B being empty. This imbalance, Blake would likely claim, is what led to Grendel’s death. He was metaphorically torn, and eventually was physically torn, his cause of death.

In both introductory poems an idea of conflicting sides of humanity is expressed. These conflicting views are demonstrated in Gardner’s Grendel with the ideologies of the Shaper and the dragon. The lack of balance between the two states is what leads to Grendel’s end, and the fallacies of both perspectives are demonstrated in the poems and in the novel alike.

Truth

             What is this truth that we keep reading about? That every character within every book we read seems to be searching for? Does it even exist? Is the fact that a truth doesn’t exist- the truth itself? Seen prominently as a motif within Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, this idea is also demonstrated in John Gardner’s novel Grendel, where the melodramatic protagonist is torn between two concepts and confused as to which one is the ultimate truth. Even in Shelley’s romantic novel Frankenstein, we pondered upon the truth behind creation. So what is it?

Each novel we read contains allusions to the Bible’s creation story. In the story a truth is presented in the Garden of Eden. This truth, this knowledge, is seen as the fruit in the tree. The twisted apples in Winesburg, or the shiny apples that Grendel threw at poor, miserable Unferth.  The search for truth can also be seen in the Greek myth concerning the contents of Pandora’s Box and in many more stories across cultures. The opening of the box, or discovery of the truth, leads to disasters of massive proportions. Adam and Eve lose their connection with God and are kicked out of the Garden of Eden, and Pandora’s Box releases miseries of all kinds. In Winesburg, each person was destroyed, turned grotesque by the truth. In Frankenstein once Victor was exposed to the truth about creation, misery found him at every turn. After Grendel finds the truth, whether he believed it to be the shaper’s words or the dragon’s, he lives miserably and ultimately dies. He falls off a cliff. Let’s not pretend he didn’t jump joyously into death. These truths, whatever they may be, do not seem to bring any positive outcomes. No one is elevated to a god-like level; in fact, they all seem to be cast down- like Satan after his attempt to overreach the boundary between angel and God. The characters, like Lucifer, are all cast into a pit of self-pity and misery and chained to their despair. They are doomed to live a wretched, unsatisfied, and isolated life.

Perhaps no one will ever quite know what the ultimate truth is, and these books are only creative, well written attempts by authors who are just trying to figure it out themselves. And maybe, just maybe, we’re best left not knowing, seeing as to how all the stories end.

 

Grendel Vs. Beowulf

Grendel meets Beowulf. The scene we’ve all been waiting for.  We’ve either dreaded or awaited it eagerly, depending on how much we enjoyed reading the novel… Personally, I feel as if I was ready for Grendel to die, and I do not think he minded it much himself, yet a little part of me did feel sad to see baby Grendel go. Beowulf, his undoing, is seen with such a heroic and arrogant light in the epic from Anglo Saxon times, yet John Gardner’s Grendel tells a completely different story.

 Meeting Beowulf is quite the scene. The amount of foreshadowing and irony presented in chapter 11 is incredible and Gardner portrays the hero, or perhaps villain, in a new “twisted” light. Let’s just take a minute and address the admiration with which Grendel looks at Beowulf and the almost infatuated state of mind he was in. He was entranced with his body… stating that he could “drop into a trance just looking at those shoulders” (Gardner 155). The glorification of Beowulf’s body is extremely ironic since it is these beautiful shoulders that will be tearing his shoulder from its socket, leading to his demise. With his “cold eyes” and his dramatic arrival as “gray wind teased lifeless trees”, Beowulf does not seem the least bit heroic or even “good” (Gardner 152). His lifeless stares and boasts that hinder others are evil, and Gardner illustrates the tone towards him very clearly using diction. Everything in the chapter is “gray”, “dark”, and Beowulf is described as “grotesque” more than once, a word which brings back memories of a small miserable town in Ohio. The connotations of the words used to describe the scene are not very favorable, connoting horrible evilness. As Beowulf physically tortures Grendel he decides it is not enough and decides to psychologically infest Grendel’s mind to prove a point. What point? What was Beowulf trying to say? Also noteworthy and similar to Winesburg, Ohio are the allusions to the Garden of Eden. All throughout the chapter Gardner describes objects as twisted, and as Grendel stares at his enemy he gets a glimpse of a memory of “twisted roots, an abyss…” (Gardner 164). This could connect to the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, as a truth is also mentioned throughout the chapter. “They were like trees, those strangers”, just like Hrothgar in the ruling of his kingdom, yet the roots are twisted because of the injustice found in the base of the society. The evil that is the foundation of it all. However, if the Anglo-Saxon society were the true evil and Beowulf/Hrothgar were antagonists within the story, it would make Grendel the true hero of the novel, which would make sense since he is our protagonist.

When looking at Chapter 11 we can see that Gardner truly emphasizes the gray, antagonistic qualities within Beowulf, a very different perspective from that of the much older epic- yet it all makes sense, because all along we’ve wanted to know that Grendel was truly “good”, a protagonist, and a fulfillment of our expectations of what a main character should be like.