GRENDEL OR THE SIN OF HUBRIS

Grendel, published in 1971, was Gardners first novel to attract genuine and
lasting critical acclaim. It is Gardners reworking of the Beowulf epic, and yet it
is more than a mere retelling. He takes as his narrator the monster, the
benighted, fated Grendel.
Gardner compresses the chronology of the original legend by neglecting the
story of Grendels dam, and only hinting at Beowulfs final battle with the
dragon. The story is told in flashbacks, cinematic cuts by Grendels memory to
events in the monsters twelve year harassment of the Danes. Moreover, the
voice of Grendel is a blend of old and new; in one moment it speaks in the
rolling, alliterative tones of the medieval scup and, in the next, in the comic,
almost cartoonish language of contemporary slang or street talk. Grendels
discovery of his proper narrative voice is, in fact, a major developmental thread
in the book. Undoubtedly, there is a more significant and serious side to
Grendel. Among the other strains in the monsters character and thought, that of
Jean Paul Satre (Gardners philosophical mentor) is dominant. In his fiction, his
criticism, and in his interview comments, Gardner has consistently attacked the
whiny despair of the existentialist position.
Grendel, as a critique of that position, has been exhaustively studied by
numerous previous critics, as has the novels relation with its ancient poetic
source. There can be little doubt that one of Garners main intellectual targets is
the dominant philosophical school, a philosophy that runs counter to everything
Gardner urges in his writing. From Aristotle to Plato he took the ides of spiritual
harmonics and balance and he filtered it down to medieval theology.
In a June 1977 interview, Gardner commented: What I have done in medieval
studies is try to understand poems. I didnt come to the poem (Beowulf) in the
usual scholars way, among medievalists at least. I came to it by trying to
understand the poem, simply.
There is, following this approach, a definite significance of Beowulfs
successive confrontations with monsters. God, in his wisdom, can enable a
shrewd and valiant hero to overcome the enemy of rational order, Grendel. And
the God who won the war with the giants can enable a man to overcome

perverse power, the perverted irascibility of Grendels dam, whose loyalty is not
to Law but to an outlaw.
For Gardner, Beowulf is a hero working against a spoiled, post-Fall trinity. His
several victories and his lone defeat are emblems of mans eternal warrying with
the sin and contamination inherited from Christianity. Gardner believed the early
reader of Beowulf to have understood this scheme just as he expects the modern
reader to modestly comprehend his Grendel.
He wanted to apply in modern settings some basic things of that poem, one of
them being the tripartite soul, and the breakdown of reason and mans desperate
attempt to hang on to reason against a rigid system. That system comes up in
disguise after disguise and it can always be modernized ; it can be Vishnu,
Brahma, Siva, or God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, or ego,
superego it just keeps shape shifting. In fact, nobody has come along with any
kind of faculty psychology to supplant or to adequately criticize it even.
The idea is that before the Fall all three elements in the tripartite soul were
noble; after the Fall all three were corrupted. The Fall dimmed the mind so that
we now cannot see God; but though we are made that we now cannot see God;
but though we are made gross by Nature, we are still born virtually innocent.
Original sin makes necessary Gods extension of grace, but the child who has
been baptized, that is granted grace, goes directly to heaven if it dies before
sinning on its own. Thus the Fall is reenacted in every individual life. Every man
comes sooner or later to its Eden.
Coming back to Grendel, Gardner is exploring here the spiritual and
psychological slippage of the twentieth century. Bombarded by disaster and
cataclysm, by cheapness and falsity, and by corrosive, malignant philosophy,
modern man struggles to maintain some kind of rational and physical order. Man
is lower than the angels and a little above the monster; he takes three steps up
and two steps down, at times rising to the heroic, at other times sinking toward
the bestial.
In Gardners own fictional design, Beowulf emerges as the hero, as the
embodiment of the unified medieval soul. He comes as the superman and as
demigod; his mortality is spiritualized and exploded by the perfect combination
of classical virtue.

In contrast stand the three configurations of corrupted virtue. There is the

irascibility of Hrothgar, whose political gains have been bought with sure
brutality and ruthlessness and whose life now shows cracks and lacks. There is
the dragon whose materialism has been bred in a case and whose viciousness is
profound.
And there is also the irrationality of Grendel whose anger and purposefulness
are the results of a flawed intellectual system. Grendels defect is the most
important because it is rationality that rules the other two faculties (as Plato tells
us) and it is this wrong reason that has misled twentieth-century man so
dramatically. Grendels distress is our distress, his embarrassment is our
embarrassment