"Grendel", Chapter 1: John Gardner's Perverse Prologue
Author(s): Joseph F. Tuso
Reviewed work(s):
Source: College Literature, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring, 1985), pp. 184-186
Published by: College Literature
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25111661 .
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NOTES & DISCUSSION
CHAPTER
GRENDEL,
1:
JOHN GARDNER'S
PERVERSE PROLOGUE
by Joseph F. Tuso
JYiost of John Gardner's novels are steeped in ideas and images which have
influenced the author's own thought, and medieval English literature is cer
1 of Gardner's
influences. Chapter
novel
tainly one of those significant
Grendel provides an especially clear example of Gardner's
ability to inter
weave
of medieval
this case
and
transform
elements
literature?in
to The Canterbury
Chaucer's General Prologue
Tales?to
suit his artistic
purposes.
One of the most famous openings
in all literature, the first twelve lines of
Chaucer's
General
and
hearken
back to Petrarch,
Boethius,
Prologue
most
to
and
d?lie
and
Colonne
Guido
closely
Virgil,
verbally probably
The salute to spring is a conventional
medieval
theme which
Boccaccio.1
external
typically features sweetly singing birds and all the other common,
transcends the com
signs of a revivified world, but Chaucer's
description
monplace:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The
Hath
And
tendre
croppes,
in the Ram
smale
foweles
and
his halve
maken
the yonge
cours
sonne
yronne,
melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
NOTES & DISCUSSION
Chaucer's
185
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages (17)
April brings life-giving rain to engender flowers; his west wind
both causes and encourages
the growth of new crops by dis
new
sun
his small birds sing lovely
is
and vigorous;
seed; his
rebirth in external nature parallels a rebirth in internal human
spring is the ideal time for the pilgrimage. Chaucer's
opening is
meter mirroring
the mood of a world gradually awakening,
his
in the first line approximating
the spoken "ah!" sound of in
("Zephirus")
seminating
songs. This
nature, for
smooth, his
long vowels
tense human pleasure.
some five hundred years
In The Wasteland,
a
less
enthusiastic
view of spring:
provides
after Chaucer,
T. S. Eliot
April is the crudest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
and desire,
Memory
stirring
Dull
roots with
rain.2
spring
in Chapter
1 of Grendel, while also parodying Chaucer's
John Gardner,
in
several
opening
significant ways, begins his novel by dealing with an
anti-hero?the
to Chaucer's
a
alienated
social antithesis
pilgrims?with
tone even starker than Eliot's:
"The old ram stands looking down over
I blink. I stare in horror."3 Here Gardner
rockslides,
stupidly triumphant.
transforms Chaucer's
sign of spring into a real ram and April's
astrological
sweet showers into a descending
clutter of sterile rocks. The old ram, with
his instinctive
life force?"his
mindless
ache to mount whatever
happens
near" (6)?is
for Grendel
certain sign of another horrible
spring during
which he must
continue his twelfth year of meaningless
of
destruction
his own antithesis to the ram's mindless
humankind,
impregnation.
Gardner
young sun which moves vigorously
replaces Chaucer's
through
the sign of the Ram with one that "spins mindlessly
overhead"
(7). The
rather it turns to
only water which he provides does not engender flowers;
ice at Grendel 's feet as he emits an unspeakable
howl at the ram, who will
sun and ram are static, and both images thus
not budge. Both Gardner's
in time present. Grendel hibernates
freeze Grendel
so his life is a
in winter,
constant and conscious flow of spring-summer
is a creature
destruction?he
a
in
now.
and
eternal
horrible
existentially
trapped
seemingly
sweet melodies;
his "small birds, with a
Like
the
ram, these birds are yet
yelp," simply "lay eggs" (7).
high-pitched
another frustrating reminder to Grendel of his physical and spiritual impo
tence. Gardner's
"tender grasses peek up, innocent yellow,
through the
Nor
do Gardner's
birds make
COLLEGE LITERATURE
186
the children of the dead" (7), for Grendel
recalls that on the very
ground:
a
an
man
he
had
killed
and
old woman,
"Sweet mulch
for yellow
spot
blooms"
(7).
are painful
to
Other creatures,
the very universe?all
external nature,
Grendel. He makes an obscene gesture at the sky, thinking, "The sky ig
nores me, forever unimpressed.
Him too I hate, the same as I hate these
these
brainless, budding trees,
brattling birds" (6).
as
And
human
Chaucer's
just
pleasant,
life-giving
springtime moves
to
barren
Gardner's
their
horrible,
beings
pilgrimage,
springtime
begin
moves Grendel
to renewed carnage. In his cave it is Grendel who sleeps all
in the blacksweet
night with open eyes, aware in his chest "of tuberstirrings
and
His
duff of the forest overhead"
anger builds,
(9).
along with it his
once
he
his
hall.
lair
and
leaves
attacks
until
bloodlust,
Hrothgar's
again
In the remainder of Chapter
introduces the major characters
1, Gardner
introduces his pil
of his novel, just as in the rest of his Prologue Chaucer
as
are
he
sketches Gren
Gardner's
But
introductions
spare
briefly
grims.
and his queen, the dragon, and the Shaper. The
del's mother, Hrothgar
11
characters are fleshed out in time past in Chapters 2 through 10. Chapter
1 leaves off, during Grendel's
twelfth spring of man
begins where Chapter
12 the monster
killing, until in Chapter
finally finds release, not in the per
verse spring of Chapter
1, but in an equally grim, if longed for, symbolic
a "bottomless
cliff overlooking
final winter at the edge of a nightmare
death.
blackness"?and
NOTES
1 The
Works
of
Geoffrey
Chaucer.
2nd
edition.
Ed.
F. N.
Robinson.
Bos
ton: Houghton Mifflin,
1957: 651.
2 Collected Poems 1909-1962. NewYork: Harcourt Brace, 1936: lines 1-4.
3 John Gardner. Grendel. London: Andre Deutsch, 1971: 5. All subsequent page
references
are
to this edition.