Download Grendel by John Gardner

Grendel by John Gardner
Quotes from John Gardner:
 “You redeem the world by acts of imagination”
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“No hero is ever righteous: a hero makes mistakes and tries to do something about them.”
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“Man is happiest when he is behaving well. When he is being faithful. When he knows he has certain duties
and performs them. When he has boundaries.”

“You have to look out at the world to find value. We have a history, and history moves on.”

“I absolutely believe every artist is in the position of the scop. I think that the difference right now between good
and art and bad art is that the good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating, out of deep
and honest concern, a vision of life-in-the-twentieth-century that is worth pursuing. And the bad artists, of whom
there are many, are whining or staring, because it’s fashionable, into the dark abyss.”
Existentialism:
This philosophy emphasizes “existence over essence.” In other words, one’s physical existence does not
assume any particular reason for being. The foremost existentialist of the 20th century, and whose philosophy is being
examined in Grendel, is Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre writes that people have no innate reason for being (essence), that
existence is random, chaotic, without any overall meaning. Obviously, this philosophy is rejected by most religions,
which see man’s existence as part of a meaningful, divine plan. Sartre tells his readers that, since man’s life is without
any inherent meaning, man must make his own existence meaningful without divine aid. Some might give their lives
meaning in their community service, some in their art, some in their family, etc. But when the individual dies, so does
that meaning, because the meaning was self-imposed and not part of any rational “plan” in the universe.
Men make choices, and the choices determine what their natures are. In other words, who and what we are is
up to us: we decide through the choices we make. We must, Sartre says, be prepared to deal with the results of our
choices – we must accept the responsibility for what we do in life. Since the existentialist believes that there is no
meaning in the universe, he is often afflicted with a feeling of dread. You often hear about “the existential void” in
reference to this philosophy, which is the lack of ultimate meaning in life and in the world – there is nothing, just a void,
and that knowledge is frightening and depressing.
Revisionism:
A revisionist work is one that revises something established, often through a different point of view. Grendel is a
revisionist novel because it takes the established heroic story of a Geatish warrior, told from the warrior’s point of view,
and revises the legend by retelling it through the monster’s point of view.
Gardner wrote this revisionist novel in order to criticize writers like Heller and Vonnegut, whom he considered to
be “bad” artists. As you can see from his quotes above, Gardner believed that an artist had a mission to create a vision
of life that is noble: he must offer the world imaginative redemption. Accordingly, he sets up Grendel as the Sartre-type
monster who has no meaning and despises meaninglessness around him. Grendel is contrasted with the Danes at
Herot, who have values and believe that though life is dark it can be better if they themselves become better.
In each chapter, a different heroic value is championed by the Danes, and in each chapter Grendel attacks it as
meaningless and ridiculous. So this novel is really an anti-existentialist novel. Gardner’s protagonist, a product of
existentialism, is lost and unhappy, unlike the Danes, who see life as meaningful and orderly.