“I am a monster, I’ll make you run faster…”

The Zemeckis-Avary-Gaiman Beowulf is some kind of monster—but its actual monster, like so many Grendels before him, has been quasi-humanized, reduced to a pitiful antagonist rather than a creature of perfect evil. As Scott Nokes pointed out last year in his review of the film Beowulf and Grendel, this characterization of the monster is typical of modern adaptations:

This Grendel, though, is what I refer to as the Postmodern Grendel — deeply misunderstood. Way back when John Gardener was re-imagining Grendel as simply misunderstood and flawed, this reading was audacious. Now, it is simply boring and pedestrian. I find that my students are incapable of understanding Grendel as evil, or as an enemy of God.

He’s right: postmodern whimsy sometimes makes it harder to teach a modern work. When so many readers have seen Hamlet as the story of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and far more have considered The Wizard of Oz through the eyes of the Wicked Witch of the West, those of us who teach John Gardner’s Grendel may have a hard time explaining to students why the novel was such a big deal when it was published in 1971.

But maybe novelty no longer matters. As I gear up to talk about Grendel in class in a couple of weeks, I’m finding that not having to fawn over the rather obvious shift in the narrator’s point of view will give me much more time to discuss with students what this novel is really about. Conventional wisdom has always dubbed Grendel a postmodern novel, the tale of “the outsider, the person who walks on the edge”—but the book keeps howling at me that it’s something else entirely.

For example, here’s Grendel soaking in ennui:

So childhood too feels good at first, before one happens to notice the terrible sameness, age after age.

Here’s Grendel on the heroism of Unferth:

“Monster, prepare to die!” he said. Very righteous. The wings of his nostrils flared and quivered like an outraged priest’s.
I laughed. “Aargh!” I said. I spit bits of bone.
He glanced behind him, making sure he knew exactly where the window was. “Are you right with your god?” he said.
I laughed somewhat more fiercely. He was one of those.

Here’s Grendel on the pointlessness of it all:

Stars, spattered out through lifeless night from end to end, like jewels scattered in a dead king’s grave, tease, torment my wits toward meaningful patterns that do not exist.

Here’s Grendel on the unreliability of narrative:

As if all by itself, then, the harp made a curious run of sounds, almost words, and then a moment later, arresting as a voice from a hollow tree, the harper began to chant…

What was he? The man had changed the world, had torn up the past by its thick, gnarled roots and had transmuted it, and they, who knew the truth, remembered it his way—and so did I.

Here’s the young Grendel after getting his foot stuck in a tree-root and facing an attacking bull. Wallowing in solipsism, he throws in a dash of blasphemy for good measure:

I understood that the world was nothing, a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly—as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. I create the whole universe, blink by blink.—An ugly god pitifully dying in a tree!

Here’s Grendel meeting his first humans, who assume he’s a giant fungus or a tree spirit. Of course, Grendel is unable to communicate with them.

“You’re all crazy,” I tried to yell, but it came out a moan. I bellowed for my mother.

So here we have a monstrous parody of the 20th-century protagonist: a narcissistic, solipsistic, nihilistic atheist who bemoans his alienation and wallows in existential angst. He disdains traditional heroism, he blames society for making him what he is—and he has mother issues!

I can see my students feeling pity for this character, maybe a little sympathy, and they’re sure to find him a clever and intriguing narrator. But really, what careful, thoughtful reader has ever admired this nasty, self-obsessed monster?

In 1971, a Time magazine reviewer compared Gardner’s Grendel to Caliban, Milton’s Lucifer, and King Kong, suggesting that the monster “throbs with primal rage, despair, collegiate idealism and existential inquiry.” But like many ersatz idealists, Grendel finds that his world-view literally can’t survive a collision with reality. Here’s Beowulf disabusing Grendel of his solipsism:

Grendel, Grendel! You make the world by whispers, second by second. Are you blind to that? Whether you make it a grave or a garden of roses is not the point. Feel the wall: is it not hard? He smashes me against it, breaks open my forehead. Hard, yes! Observe the hardness, write it down in careful runes. Now sing of walls! Sing!
I howl.
Sing!
“I’m singing!”
Sing words! Sing raving hymns!
“You’re crazy. Ow!”
Sing!
“I sing of walls,” I howl. “Hooray for the hardness of walls!”
Terrible, he whispers. Terrible. He laughs and lets out fire.
“You’re crazy,” I say. “If you think I created that wall that cracked my head, you’re a fucking lunatic.”

Dying, Grendel at last sees the world as existing beyond himself:

Every rock, every tree, every crystal of snow cries out cold-blooded objectness. Cold, sharp outlines, everything around me: distinct, detached as dead men. I understand.

In the novel’s final line, Grendel at last has a breakthrough:

“Poor Grendel’s had an accident,” I whisper. “So may you all.”

Too late, Grendel acknowledges the reality of others. That closing line is easily read as a curse—but perhaps it’s a benediction, with the monster hoping that others might benefit from the same enlightening “accident.”

Like many a postmodern protagonist, Grendel embodies the intellectual trends of the day, but he’s not some whining prep-school antihero or an English professor coping with a midlife crisis; rather, he’s a creature of consequence. Julie Taymor has suggested of Grendel that “the monster is the most human of humans,” but I don’t think she’s right. Instead, he’s a truly wretched creature: an abomination cobbled together from the spare parts of modernity—a monster made insane by modernity itself.

There’s much more to say about Grendel, and I suspect my students, an increasingly candid bunch, will surprise and enlighten me with perspectives that aren’t stuck in 1971. Accustomed to other novels that sincerely praise nonconformity, they’ll probably notice, without my prompting, that Grendel isn’t just the story of a sensitive rebel, a Morrissey with bloody claws.

Grendel is a work of stark medievalism. It expresses little sympathy for the prejudices of the modern wit and outright disdain for the fatal affectations of the anti-hero. This Grendel is misunderstood—every time a reader assumes he ought to be seen as something other than the embodiment of doctrines that presumably rot the modern mind. Forget the conventional wisdom: Far from being a postmodern paean to the moody outcast, John Gardner’s Grendel may, in fact, be one of the most reactionary novels an English major will ever read.

[UPDATE, 12/1/07: Welcome, new readers! Whether you’re here from 2Blowhards, Urban Prowlers, StumbledUpon, StevenHartSite, or Unlocked Wordhoard, I hope you’ll stop back occasionally if you’re interested in books, history, teaching, and medievalism.]

“…gearowe oþþe na, her cumað cnihtas suðan.”

Beowulf is out, reviews are in, and blogs will soon be abuzz with the input of Anglo-Saxonists. Compared to other medievalists, Anglo-Saxonists are numerous on the Web, but then they’ve long been a forward-looking bunch. More than a decade ago, the now-vanished Old English Pages at Georgetown were some of the earliest online resources for studying any medieval language; the Anglo-Saxon poetic corpus was digitized even before most academics had personal e-mail addresses; and graduate students in the mid-1990s were already exploring the potential of hypertext editions.

Given access to the same technology as their fellow humanities scholars, why are Anglo-Saxonists such early adapters? A 1952 Time magazine article suggests one reason: they’re heirs to a decades-old “Anglo-Saxon boom”:

After, next week, Beowulf scholars will not have to worry too much about the fate of the original, nor will they have to travel thousands of miles to pursue their studies of Thorkelin, whose mistakes in copying (e.g., 599 “d’s” for “eth”) will still take years to untangle. But Beowulf is only the opening salvo of the new Anglo-Saxon boom. Within the next few years, scholars all over the world will have reproductions of everything from St. Gregory’s Pastoral Care to King Alfred’s translation of Orosins’ History of the World. Next volume on the list: an 8th century manuscript of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the original of which is now in the Leningrad Public Library, where Western scholars would have a hard time getting at it.

After reading the entire article, which summarizes postwar efforts to preserve and publish Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, I wanted to see if the magazine’s coverage of Old English literature had changed in the past half century. I poked around the Time archive and was struck by these excerpts from the magazine’s review of Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf in the year 2000:

“Just don’t take any course where they make you read Beowulf,” Woody Allen advised Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1977). The throwaway line elicited laughs from Allen’s core audience of college grads, especially the one-time English majors among them who had learned to dread—if not actually read—what they had heard was a grim Anglo-Saxon epic filled with odd names and a lot of gory hewing and hacking.

The joke, it turns out, was on the chucklers…

Heaney’s Beowulf…has now been published in the U.S., giving American readers the chance to take the measure of this Harry Potter slayer, the deadest white European male in the politically incorrect literary canon. Judging by the electronic-sales ratings updated constantly by Amazon.com Beowulf is becoming boffo on this side of the Atlantic as well.

Note the difference in tone. The reporter in 1952 may have been ignorant of the continuing value of the Beowulf manuscript even after its copying and reproduction, but he reports on the state of Anglo-Saxon manuscript preservation without any snark. Amazingly, he even refers to “the famed Thorkelin transcripts” with no trace of irony. Time magazine didn’t expect its readers to know who Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin was, but the mid-century reporter kindly explains the scholar’s importance in four concise sentences—without jokes, without dismissive anecdotes, without caveats about political incorrectness, and without calling anything “boffo.”

Maybe the contrast is unfair. After all, a straight news article serves a different purpose than a book review that takes its subject seriously after three paragraphs of irony. But those three paragraphs sure are telling. The reporter in 1952 takes for granted that Anglo-Saxon manuscripts are important, and he assumes that the average Time reader, when briefed on the basics, is likely to agree. By contrast, the reviewer in 2000 assumes that the reader is inclined to think an Anglo-Saxon poem irrelevant based on a quip in a Woody Allen movie; that the reader needs a Harry Potter reference to make this material palatable; and that the reader requires inoculation against—or permission to enjoy, I’m not sure which—the work of “the deadest white European male.” The 1952 article respects the discernment of its readers, who may be receptive to the obscure. The 2000 review condescends. Really: “boffo”?

What’s especially strange to me is that Time magazine is so out of sync with the literate public’s genuine interest in the past. Except for bored patients in doctors’ offices, most of the people who still read general-interest news magazines must be doing so because they’re at least somewhat curious about the world. I don’t want to overstate the number of readers who might be interested in medieval manuscripts, but the massive success of the Beowulf translation tagged as “boffo” by Time magazine suggests that we shouldn’t understate their numbers either. Why preface a review with cutesy language that camouflages an implicit apology to the larger, incurious public? They’re not going to see the article anyway. How strange to let non-readers set the tone of a book review.

Then again, this is the same magazine whose technology bloggers write movie reviews with skittish disclaimers like this: “The little I remember about Beowulf the poem, which is nothing, since I never read it, is that it was incredibly boring.” Perhaps the writers and editors at a magazine with plummeting subscription rates should think twice before suggesting that reading is somehow uncool.

At the end of Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, Rosamond McKitterick writes, in a line I love to cite, that the Carolingians “imparted to future generations…the conviction that the past not only mattered but was a priceless hoard of treasure to be guarded, conserved, augmented, enriched and passed on.” That isn’t only a ninth-century sentiment. In the past year, I’ve spoken about Charlemagne in church basements full of senior citizens and I’ve met enthusiastic high-school kids who plan to become medievalists. This passion for history is hardly confined to the Middle Ages: One of my colleagues, a photographer and IT professional from Hawaii, recently drove through the Northeast visiting lesser known Revolutionary War sites; another toured ancient cities in Turkey. All of these people honor the memory of McKitterick’s monks and universalize their motives: To seek wisdom in the past is simply the impulse of civilized, literate people.

The big-screen Beowulf looks pretty silly, but its existence was inevitable, a function of the rampant public fascination with the Middle Ages that many of us witness firsthand. If this movie turns out to be one of medievalism’s more lamentable mooncalves, that’s fine; other opportunities will present themselves—at libraries, in classrooms, in the stillness of a museum gallery or in the raucousness of a Renaissance festival. No wonder that after fifty years, Old English experts, so often derided as fusty and dull, now have a better sense of the popular culture than do the editors of Time. The “Anglo-Saxon boom” continues; scholars are happy, but hardly surprised.

“And you touch the distant beaches…”

I haven’t had a chance to see Ken Burns’ new take on World War II, but I was intrigued by a review in Monday’s New York Times that suggests the limitations of The War as a documentary:

The intention, apparently, was to see the war anew, to see it not from the vistas of generals’ maps and geopolitics, not from the perspective given by the doctrines of nations and the lures of ideologies, not even from the war’s context in history. The intention was to view it from the experiences of those who fought in it and those who knew them. If war happens “inside a man,” Mr. Burns wants to bring it home.

[…]

Yet for all the particularity, these are the generic facts of war, not very different from those chronicled by Homer almost 3,000 years ago. They tell us nothing about why this fighting was going on; they give us little information to judge or understand it.

The article mentions that Burns hoped to make an “epic poem,” an ambition I find odd. Ken Burns is good at being a filmmaker who records history from below, a thoughtful, perceptive soul who would gladly bypass Beowulf to squint instead at the peasants in the Luttrell Psalter. It’s comical to imagine him taking up the gusle or praising royalty with soaring tales of “fierce warres and faithfull loves”; his desire to shrink an epic event to human scale is an oddly anti-Homeric endeavor.

It’s also not a thing unattempted yet in prose or rhyme. In fact, Christopher Logue beat him to it.

Who is Christopher Logue? He’s an activist, autodidact, occasional actor—but he’s also the guy who for nearly half a century has used all the gimmicks of modern poetry to craft a loose, idiomatic version of Homer’s Iliad.

Literally irreverent, Logue frees himself from the tyranny of his source material through one curious disadvantage: he’s ignorant of ancient Greek. As a result, his Homer—currently collected in three separate volumes—easily comes into its own as a fresh modern poem. Recent additions include scenes that aren’t in the Iliad; at one point, Logue even cribs a passage from Milton. Sensitive to the distinction between scholarship and artistry, the poet calls what he’s doing an “account,” not a translation—and if that makes classicists cringe, they may be missing the point.

Known for his gleeful use of anachronisms—like his description, often cited by reviewers, of Ajax “[g]rim underneath his tan as Rommel after ‘Alamein”—Logue deploys evocative modern language to create quick, crisp snapshots. Here’s his description of Agamemnon’s champions in “All Day Permanent Red”:

Nestor, his evening star.
Ajax, his silent fortress. Good—even on soft sand.
Odysseus (you know him), small but big.
Fourth—grizzled and hook-tap nosed—the king of Crete,
Idomeneo, who:
“Come on!”
Would sign a five-war-contract on the nod.

Logue’s Homer resounds with the diction of war, but he can also craft domestic scenes with a deftness that other poets should envy. In “The Husbands,” an exchange between Zeus and a petulant Athena neatly reveals the condescension that defines their relationship:

The armies wait. “Dearest Pa-pa, the oath said one should die.
The Trojan was about to die. He did not die.
Nobody died. Therefore the oath is dead.
Killed by a Trojan. Therefore Troy goes down.”

Drivers conducting underbody maintenance.

“Father, You must act.
Side with the Trojans, Greece will say,
Were we fools to believe in His thunder?
Why serve a God who will not serve His own?”

And giving her a kiss, He said:

“Child, I am God,
Please do not bother me with practicalities.”

Ah, but when battle calls, Logue can craft a passage as thrilling as anything in 300, combining heroic deeds with colloquial diction while never undercutting the tone, as in this passage from “Patrocleia”:

The air near Ajax was so thick with arrows, that,
As they came, their shanks tickered against each other;
And under them the Trojans swarmed so thick
Ajax outspread his arms, turned his spear flat,
And simply pushed. Yet they came clamouring back until
So many Trojans had a go at him
The iron chaps of Ajax’ helmet slapped his cheeks
To soft red pulp, and his head reached back and forth
Like a clapper inside a bell made out of sword blades.
Maybe, even with no breath left,
Big Ajax might have stood it yet; yet
Big and all as he was, Prince Hector meant to burn that ship:
And God was pleased to let him.

Is this campy, even ironic? You bet. But this is also poetry that moves, and thrills, and entertains. It makes you feel just a little queasy for reveling in verse about war, but it also makes the timeless colloquial without impugning the dignity of its ancient source.

Why did Logue, a self-described pacifist, decide to take on Homer? Unlike many of his contemporaries, Logue deliberately sought out a vast external subject for his work. “I would not like to be a writer whose only subject is themselves,” he told an interviewer in 1994. “You need something else.” For Logue, that “something else” is war—not merely the Trojan War, but the capacity for war and violence at the core of human nature. Fortunately, Logue is under no pressure to put that experience in context, unlike Ken Burns. Logue is also unencumbered by public familiarity with his own artistic tics—again, unlike Burns, whose reverent pacing and signature quirks have lately become the stuff of parody.

Burns and Logue have similar purposes. Both use epic material to craft lengthy narratives about love, loss, anger, envy, family, patriotism, loyalty, and power. But Logue is clever enough not to try crafting a epic in the proper sense of the term. To show how war happens “inside a man,” he’s exploited his sources, developed a style, and mastered a medium that suits his particular genius; at 80, he has yet to exhaust himself.

As for Ken Burns—well, reviews of The War make me wonder if he’s attempting something that, while not beyond his intellect, may exceed the limitations of documentary, even if the film is successful by other standards. Having mastered the conventions of a genre that can easily stifle the loftiest intentions, Ken Burns could learn a few things from Christopher Logue, who, by sprinkling his verse with references to camera angles, points out the difference between documenting human nature and interpreting human nature in art. Burns is ambitious—“What in me is dark, illumine,” he seems to be praying, “what is low raise and support”—but his premise undercuts his purpose. A documentary surely may be art, but it’s just no way to write an epic poem.