I first read John Gardner’s Grendel after Ursula K. Le Guin referenced it briefly in one of her many story introductions—apparently the description “Beowulf as seen by the monster” was enough to intrigue me (I still haven’t read Beowulf, but really, we all have the gist of it through cultural osmosis [he says, justifying his own laziness.]) Grendel is one of those foundational pieces of postmodern literature, rejecting the premises at the base of western prose, and taking a rather bitter position on the entire history of human civilization and even art (isn’t it wonderful when a piece of art questions the ethics of creating art?) Being literary fiction (and particularly idea-focused at that, with long conversations and monologues about the nature of reality and thought), it probably hasn’t had as much of an impact on monster stories as you’d want, despite the large number of “from the monster’s perspective” things that existed after it (countless stories about vampires alone), but it still feels like it should be the forerunner of all subsequent modern reinterpretations of myth.
(I wrote about Grendel before on an older site. I will try my hardest to not repeat any ideas from that, but no promises.)
John Gardner’s version of Grendel is trapped in a nightmare existence where he is completely isolated from others (unable to understand his non-lingual mother, and unable to be understood by humans), and struggles to define himself either by accepting or subverting the expectations projected onto him. Very early in the novel he says “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, finally and absolutely, I alone exist” His existentialist drive is to keep himself defined in a meaningless universe, acting as a self-pitying eternal adolescent who leans on violence to give him any semblance of fleeting purpose; he is offended by the animals he meets because they live on purely mechanistic instinct and are completely ignorant of the pointlessness of their existence (is he jealous of them?) His various attempts to maintain that sense of self are confounded by the artistic Shaper (who, in his songs, creates a world of lies more beautiful than the real one), the phantasmal Dragon (whose fatalistic omniscience renders everything Grendel does moot), and finally Beowulf (who is portrayed as the Dragon in human form.) Petulant and brooding until the very end, Grendel eventually loses all control of his life, even as he attempts to deny it by dismissing his own death as an “accident.”
The concept of self-defined versus other-defined makes a lot of sense for a monster story (especially one of the most influential monster stories in western literature); after all, monsters are created specifically to represent our own fears and prejudices so we can define ourselves against them. By having a force to react against, you are given motivation to act and create, as the Dragon tells Grendel (“You improve them, my boy!…You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last”)—Grendel decides to buy into this because it adds meaning to his own existence, even though he rejects the Dragon’s notion that all of it is just a way to pass your brief moment in a senseless universe. He becomes the monster he thinks he should be, filling his role in an attempt to be something to someone (while still mocking it all in order to live up to his own idea of himself); in the meantime, he is confronted by humans who are attempting to do the same like Unferth, who wishes to die so that he can be a hero remembered in song (heroism seems to be primarily defined as a death drive in the novel.) Grendel, being a cruel ironist, actively prevents Unferth from getting his glory; however, that Beowulf, an outsider who appears seemingly out of nowhere, ends up making a mockery of both Unferth and Grendel shows that they were always quite similar in their goals. Both the heroes and the monsters are mostly based on external validation, having the idea of them made immortal by the words and deeds of others inspired by them.
There’s a lot to Grendel that can be picked over (especially by people who have actually read Jean-Paul Sartre, whose writings Gardner was heavily riffing on), but there’s another part of it that I want to cover. I was so inspired when I read the book the first time that I very quickly sought out its animated adaptation, Grendel Grendel Grendel, because I wanted to see just how they worked with this rather unfilmable narrative. I mean, it was certainly not a mainstream production—GGG (lovely abbreviation) was an independent Australian film, fairly low-key even if it still got Peter Ustinov as the voice of Grendel—but that anyone would make the attempt in any form was a fascinating proposition. So, how did they end up adapting Grendel? Mostly by stripping it down to a few of its core ideas, which makes for a far less weighty experience, but not necessarily a worthless one.
While Grendel in the novel is humanized enough to be considered a sympathetic figure, he was still a selfish, hateful being, finding ways to be repulsive in a way even his origins as a characterless bogey could never achieve; so, of course, for the animated version with Ustinov’s refined vocal stylings, they focused mainly on the pathetic side of him, making him feel like more of a sad, victimized character. That makes some sense considering the highly-stylized approach to the animation, which uses very colourful, flat, rounded shapes without outlines, a very pleasing-looking cartooniness (on re-watching it, I especially like Beowulf’s design)—which, of course, meant that there was no way Grendel could ever be a figure of fear. No matter how much violence they depict (and they surprisingly don’t shy away from it), he’s still a mostly goofy-looking creature, maybe even cute. Despite taking many scenes and even dialogue verbatim from Gardner’s text, the style and format of Grendel Grendel Grendel pushes it in a more comedic direction (the novel itself has comedic stuff in it, but not to this extent) and, yes, also turns it into a little bit of a musical.
In other ways, the movie has characters portrayed as much broader than in the book—King Hrothgar is a bumbling villain more often than not, where the book was more about simply describing the hypocrisy of his existence; Unferth’s frustrations are not just with Grendel’s antagonism, but also with Hrothgar, who he feels superior to (this leads into a sort of unnecessary rebellion subplot with Unferth and the Shaper); Beowulf, too, has had his antagonistic nature made more explicit (as part of the aforementioned unnecessary subplot, he has Unferth murdered and is very clearly planning to usurp Hrothgar), and his relationship to the Dragon is downplayed—but they also have him voiced by the same actor as the Dragon, so the connection is still implied. By the end of the film, Grendel has apparently decided to “rescue” Hrothgar’s wife Wealtheow, which is almost a complete reversal from the novel, where Grendel attempted to kill her because her genuine beauty was an obstacle to his ideals—that change, more than anything, goes to show the level that Grendel was softened for the movie even if he still kills people (another one: the cutting of his amazingly acidic final words, keeping “Poor Grendel’s had an accident” but leaving out “So may you all.”) They also very clearly decided to hone in on the dichotomy implied by the “You improve them” line as seen in the scene with the Dragon: here, he sings a song that mostly frames Grendel’s relationship with humanity as dualism, a much more simplified explanation than what he gives him in the novel (I guess it’s difficult to turn fatalistic materialism into a catchy musical number.)
Still, there’s enough of the original spirit of the book in the film that I find the attempt laudable, even if it ultimately can’t come close to matching the depth of its source material (plus, the animation is really nice.) Without getting into the book’s discussions of philosophy and theology, we still get a story about meaning and who gets to define it. Grendel is portrayed not so much as a misunderstood monster, but as a monster who is longing to find some way to be understood, even if means being the murderous bane of a band of morally dubious humans (Grendel’s sense of moral superiority, while not unfounded, is still mostly a lie he tells himself, which he freely admits.) It’s a search for definition and purpose, to have some sort of relationship with other thinking beings, and in a nothing universe, sometimes working in and around imposed definitions from outside yourself is the only way to find that purpose.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 