Selina Zheng, Period 1, 04/01/22

I loved Grendel, but most likely because I expected to love Grendel - there’s likely a psychological term for that, but I’m not a psych student, just someone who enjoys noticing patterns and connections. Throughout our reading of Grendel, quite a few of my favorite topics appeared: themes of redemption and forgiveness, philosophy, the commercialization of art, and yes, psychology. Part of why I love Grendel, blogging, and Myth in general is the freedom to simply gush about things that I enjoy. In a way, this isn’t just a love letter to Grendel, but a class that I feel almost nostalgic about leaving although I haven’t even graduated yet. As I was telling a junior in my gym class who asked me for advice on what to pick as their English elective: learning is easy when you choose subjects you care about.


Speaking of making learning easy, although I know people often annotate their readings for greater depth of understanding, I usually don’t. I find that I read less if I annotate, and I’d rather enjoy the book than force myself through an admittedly helpful, but labor intensive process I don’t think is necessary all the time. I made an exception for Grendel, however. Reviewing my notes, Grendel is a veritable mine of Easter eggs and references that provide an opportunity for more profound analysis.


Personally, Grendel’s philosophical lean allows me to cross reference one of my favorite TV shows that got me into philosophy in the first place, The Good Place. While it doesn’t touch on the exact concepts that Grendel explores, one of the main characters, Chidi, is a moral philosophy professor. I’ll avoid spoiling the show, but with a plot that deals with the afterlife, it centers on themes of redemption, forgiveness, and shame. As I was reading Grendel, I was thrust back into the experience of watching this show, struggling to come to terms with expanding my understanding of forgiveness and if there’s such a thing as being ‘deserving’ of it. Perhaps it was a coincidence, or perhaps I’m simply drawn to material of this nature but then, as I was reading Grendel, I also read The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, a play I’ve also mentioned in class. It firmly knocked my previous favorite, No Longer Human, out of the standing as my favorite book. (Coincidentally, there’s a Jewish legend that Judas became the first vampire. I find it funny how my favorite books always end up returning to what we’re reading in Myth somehow.)


I love The Last Days of Judas Iscariot because despite all the trappings of Catholicism, they’re mere means to an end - the play is theological at heart, an outpouring of existential Christian questioning of faith, yet, it’s not about religion in the end, at least not fully. I identified so fully with this play precisely because of its use of religion as a vehicle in order to address universal pains - guilt, shame, and condemnation.


It’s a tragic comedy that plays with the secular setting of a court in a religious background of Purgatory (and the greater landscape of Christian afterlife as a whole) in order to reexamine religion’s greatest theological dilemma: the Epicurean paradox, juxtaposing an omniscient, unconditionally loving God with the concept of eternal punishment. It studies repentance, divine mercy, and free will through the trial of the man who made thirty pieces of silver synonymous with betrayal - the infamous Judas Isacriot himself. Although Judas himself is catatonic with grief throughout most of the novel, leaving the main stage to his defense attorney and prosecutor, he shines in the last pages, where Jesus himself also makes an appearance. Judas, frozen in a personal hell he can’t escape, not due to any outside physical force, but due to his own self-hatred and guilt for betraying Jesus, cries out in desperation when his messiah finally appears to him once again, “Why…didn’t you make me good enough…so that you could’ve loved me?” (Guirgis.)


Judas reminds me a lot of Grendel. Despite tending to stray away from religion as a whole, I’ve always felt for Judas. Perhaps it’s just in my nature to root for the underdog and the iconoclast, but I think there’s something deeper entangled in my inability to condemn him the way the rest of the world has. In the comic, Judas, Judas desperately demands to know if Jesus knew beforehand that he was going to betray him, and upon confirmation, declares, “Then I was wrong. I didn’t betray you. You betrayed me.” (Loveness, Rebelka.) His accusatory finger points directly at Jesus, still wreathed in thorns and blood, eyes downcast. This reinterpretation of Judas as not the greatest traitor, but the greatest martyr in history, more selfless still than even the lamb of God himself - a sentiment also reflected in The Last Temptation of Christ - reflects Grendel throwing himself into becoming a villainous, dark foil for the sake of human improvement.


Both Grendel and Judas have been doomed to their fates from the start. There was never an option for them - that’s the tragedy of books. Had they been given the chance, would they have been able to live for themselves, rather than for the sake of others? Whether a book or a movie or a play, the characters have no ability to change their destiny. Even Grendel can only retell, not rewrite - provide an alternate perspective, not change. The tragedy of Grendel isn’t Grendel’s death, it’s predeterminism. There is no such thing as free will in stories.


Grendel jumped straight into performing as a monster because he’s a teenager and a character that was set up to be all-powerful told him this is the only way. We ourselves were caught up in that magic - the idea that humans can only grow through suffering. In class some of us approved the ‘character development’ the humans experienced at the hands of cruel fate. Grendel was looking for poetry - he tried to make it with violence. Of this I wrote in my notes, a few classes into the Grendel unit: “Now we have had the buffer of a few chapters of this monotonous relentless killing and misery to consider: was this really the only way?”


Although I find that religion personally repels me, somehow religion is simultaneously the medium through which I find discussing the topics that concern me the most enlightening. An essay I find fascinating is Devoured by God: Cannibalism, Mysticism, and Ethics in Simone Weil. Simone Weil was, as described by the essayist, “a French philosopher, activist, and mystic.” (Irwin.) Although talented, she suffered greatly from the attitudes of her time - which persist today as well, unfortunately - feeling turbulence-tossed due to her identity as a female Jewish intellectual, perpetually seen as lesser due to her innate nature, leading her to fast to the point that it contributed to her death. Weil viewed her self imposed starvation as obedience to God.


Similarly, throughout Catholicism, and indeed, many religions, wounds have become sacred - Jesus’ stigmata, for example, a miracle performed by God on the pious as a mark of sainthood. Suffering becomes holy. Accordingly in this essay, the author argues for interpreting the divine violence of God as seen in the bible for what it is: frightening, macabre, and disturbing; savage and irrational; life-annihilating and life-giving. Religion is, in a word, communion. In accepting God’s hunger for our flesh, accepting our own desire to consume our God, fully realizing and acknowledging our desperation for ultimate union - “actual incorporation of an object into our own substance [through eating],” - we experience a metamorphosis. (Irwin.) Grendel takes an uncompromising, no holds barred stare into the dark underbelly of humanity in all our darkness and patheticness. If humans are truly nothing more than deluded beasts, worms on the surface of an unforgiving Earth, then God’s destructive love is transcendence. Love, then, is cannibalistic, about consumption at its core. It’s a metaphorical and psychological approach to love (and Grendel’s eating of humans). The essayist asserts that love is about ego, the desire to consume and fill psychological voids. Relationships are about the comfort we seek out in others, the way we can derive it from food. Grendel’s consumption of humans therefore is not simply for sustenance, but driven by a craving for connection.


Besides his anthropophagic nature, taking a psychoanalytic approach to other aspects of Grendel’s identity can provide deeper insight into his character. Few women take roles of import in Grendel for example, only Grendel’s mother and Wealthow in a sea of Grendel, the Shaper, Hrothgar, Beowulf, Hrothulf, and more, speaking to the origins of this tale as an old Norse myth. However, the few women that have a significant impact on the story do so to the extreme. With his mother, Grendel feels simultaneous comfort and hatred. While he calls out for her whenever he feels genuine fear and great risk, he continuously denigrates her and views her as lesser due to her inability to communicate. This lack of speech reverts her to a mere beast in his eyes, yet he himself is tortured by his own illiteracy. Alone in the forest, he bemoans his inability to swear, “We, the accursed, didn’t even have words for swearing in!” (Gardener).


In past chapters, we developed the importance of language as a transformative vehicle through the Shaper and the way he rewrites history. Additionally, in chapter 1, Grendel’s ability to speak separates him from traditional monsters, like his mother. Having no words for something now is a loss of power, agency, and humanity. The ability to communicate is a human trait. Additionally, swearing, while traditionally seen as uncouth or a degradation of language, is actually a powerful tool. In Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language, a sociolinguistic approach to deconstructing gendered speech, author Amanda Montell explains that cursing is one of the most creative ways to use the English language. It’s the only type of word that can be used as infix, like a suffix or prefix, but in the middle of the word, instead of after or before. It can be used to express humor or anger, to shock an audience, to enrage, etc. To be robbed of any part of language, no matter how trifling it is considered, is to be robbed of communication. No wonder Grendel feels so isolated. He can’t even describe how he feels to himself, incomplete with lack of vocabulary. Yet he projects his own inadequacy onto his mother.


Another psychological phenomenon he experiences in tandem with his relationship with his mother is womb fantasy, the desire to return to the womb. Otto Rank, a psychoanalyst and philosopher, proposed that separation from the mother’s body was the first traumatic experience, developing the theory of womb fantasy. Sometimes also referred to as the Thanatos Instinct, it isn’t always the desire for death, but an inorganic state of being. It’s the result of someone feeling unsafe and unsure, the desire to return to perfect security, with no need for actual thought or actions of one’s own. Grendel talks about being clasped to his mother’s breast - mashed to her body as if he could be reabsorbed. Additionally, womb fantasy is sometimes expressed as living underwater or within a cavern - two things Grendel does.


And with the woman who all view as a mother, Wealthow, queen-mother of the people, Grendel encounters the madonna-whore complex. He doesn’t love Wealthow - he doesn’t even know her. He loves what she represents, the ideal queen (woman): good, kind, beautiful, pure, unifying. He places her on a pedestal - one that she inevitably topples from, being only human, and thus ever fallible. It is as Grendel says, “The ultimate evil is that Time is perpetual perishing, and being actual involves elimination. The nature of evil may be epitomized, therefore, in two simply but holy propositions: ‘Things fade’ and ‘Alternatives exclude’.” (Gardener)


The madonna-whore complex is a Freudian psychological concept, when men draw a distinction between a ‘degraded’ sexual partner and a ‘respected’ maritial partner, being unable to feel desire for women they ‘respect’/’love’ due to seeing the act of feminine sexuality as defiling. The minute a woman acts on her own sensuality and fulfills her own desires rather than allowing a man to act upon her, it is viewed with disgust, rather than uplifted the way male sexuality is. Men with this complex only ever view women as saintly Madonnas or debased whores, and they will desire what they can take from the ‘whore’ while disrespecting her as a human being outside of her sexuality while desiring what they can project onto their ‘Madonnas’ while disrespecting her agency. It is both infantilizing and dehumanizing - women will never be allowed to exist outside of the male gaze. They will never be their own creatures, but made for consumption. With Wealthow, Grendel views her almost as a possession - he wants to claim her. There’s no understanding of her as a person, but what she exhibits - that is what he wants. There’s even an underlying Oedipal element, where he sees her almost as a surrogate maternal figure, turning to her for the acceptance and connection he sought from his own mother, feeling the urge to fall at her feet and weep. He reacts to her like he has reacted to no other. Mothers represent unconditional love and forgiveness, redemption - as we later see with Unferth, and the way she releases him from his blood curse with just a few. And while perhaps Unferth is the only creature who can understand Grrendel at that moment in the novel, Wealthow is the only one who can absolve him of his guilt. Like a religious confessional - he sought repentance. He wanted her to absolve as she absolved Unferth, only to later decide that like everyone else, she is below him, and it is impossible to seek absolution from those lesser than you.


Religion is a recurring theme in Grendel, though I don’t refer to the Old Gods and the priests. I refer to how Grendel is a very, very warped variant of Jesus. Grendel sets himself up as a caretaker to humanity, albeit a toxic one - it is through attempting to defeat him that they themselves are improved (though I disagree, that’s an argument for another time). When he feels the urge to kill more people, he says, “A night for tearing heads off, bathing in blood! Except, alas, he has killed his quota for the season. Care, take care of the gold-egg-laying goose!” There’s the idea of a ‘keeper’, comparable to Jesus, the shepherd of lambs. In class, David called Grendel a ‘dragon-esque’ figure at this point in time, but the dragon doesn’t watch over people or have a careful and direct hand in their involvements - I wouldn’t say he nurtures, but he certainly cultivates. He sacrifices himself in order to become their monster and push them towards improving themselves, just as Jesus took on all of mankind’s sins and became the ultimate martyr.


Grendel is too multidimensional to restrict to one theme only, but throughout the novel, the complex interplay of good, evil, and everything in-between is explored. Still, even as Gardener dives deeper and deeper into the darkness residing within the human psyche, I think of the quote from Ursula K. Le Guin: “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil is interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” Did Grendel’s violence really lead humanity towards greatness? I recall little in the novel of human improvement that could be marked directly as a result of Grendel or not otherwise accomplished. Personally, I could never accept the idea that violence is the solution.
In the end, despite Grendel’s gray (or perhaps that’s too pale a description) morality and my own personal dislike for both the destructive and self-destructive nature of his character, the effort Gardener has put into layering Grendel with hidden depth transcends all. While no excuses can be made for Grendel and his actions, as evident by my love for The Last Days of Judas Iscariot and The Good Place, I believe the concept of ‘crime’ or ‘evil’ is vastly underdeveloped, and that context is always important in evaluating a person as a whole, and not a simple stand in for the ‘forces of good and evil’. Grendel can be both a monster and a traumatized child seeking love in circumstances outside of his control - these things are not mutually exclusive.

Citations:

• (Irwin, Alec.) “Devoured by God: Cannibalism, Mysticism, and Ethics in Simone Weil.” Crosscurrents, vol. 51, 2001. 
• (Gardener, John.) “Grendel.” Vintage Books, 1989. 
• (Loveness, Jeff; Rebelka, Jakub) “Judas.” Boom! Studio, 2018. 
• (Guirgis, Stephen Adly) “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.” Dramatists Play Service, 2006. 
• Stanton, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, Michael Ballhaus, Thelma Schoonmaker, David Ehrenstein, and Nikos Kazantzakis. The Last Temptation of Christ. 2000.
• (LeGuin, Ursula K.) The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. New Dimensions, 1973. 
• (Montell, Amanda). Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. HarperWave, 2019.