Eternity, since it avoids the pain of dying again, and, in its rejection of secular, scientific arguments, has probably the greatest appeal. And medical, scientific resources directed toward more life, and fitter life, remind us that the desire is for earthbound eternity, rather than eternal afterlife. The suggestion being this is all there is. Thus, paradise, as an earthly project, as opposed to a heavenly one, has serious intellectual and visual limitations. Aside from “Only me or us forever” it hardly bears describing anymore.
But that might be unfair. It is hard not to notice how much more attention has always been given to hell rather than heaven. Dante’s Inferno beats out Paradiso every time. Milton’s brilliantly rendered pre-paradise world, known as Chaos, is far more fully realized than his Paradise. The visionary language of antithesis reaches heights of linguistic ardor with which the thesis language seldom competes. There are many reasons why the images of the horrors of hell were meant to be virulently repulsive in the twelfth, fifteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The argument for avoiding it needed to be visceral, needed to reveal how much worse such an eternity was than the hell of everyday life. But the need has persisted, in our times, with a significant addition. There is an influx of books devoted to a consternation about the absence of a sense of evil—if not hell—of a loss of shame in contemporary life.
One wonders how to account for the melancholy that accompanies these exhortations about our inattention to, the mutedness, the numbness toward the decidedly anti-paradisiacal experience. Evil is understood, justifiably, to be pervasive, but it has somehow lost its awe-fullness. It does not frighten us. It is merely entertainment. Why are we not so frightened by its possibilities that we turn in panic toward good? Is afterlife of any sort too simple for our complex, sophisticated modern intelligence? Or is it that, more than paradise, evil needs costumes, constantly refurbished and replenished? Literary? Hell has always lent itself to glamour, headlines, a tuxedo, cunning, a gruesome mask or a seductive one. Maybe it needs blood, slime, roaring simply to get our attention, to tickle us, draw from us our wit, our imagination, our energy, our heights of performance. After which paradise is simply its absence, an edgeless and therefore unavailing lack full of an already perceived, already recognizable landscape: great trees for shade and fruit, lawns, palaces, precious metals, jewelry, animal husbandry. Outside fighting evil, waging war against the unworthy, there seems nothing for its inhabitants to do. A nonexclusionary, unbordered, come-one-come-all paradise, without dread, minus a nemesis, is no paradise at all.
Under these circumstances, then, the literary problem is harnessing contemporary language to reveal not only the intellectual complexity of paradise, but language that seizes the imagination not as an amicus brief to a naïve or psychotic life, but as sane, intelligent life itself. If I am to do justice to, bear witness to the deeply religious population of this project and render their profoundly held moral system affective in these alienated, uninspiring, and uninspired times—where religion is understood to run the gamut from scorned, unintelligible fundamentalism to literate, well-meaning liberalism, to televangelistic marketing to militaristic racism and phobophilia—I have serious problems.
Historically the language of religion (and I am speaking here of Christianity, but I am relatively certain this is true of all text-based religions) is dependent upon and gains its strength, beauty, and unassailability from biblical or holy texts. Contemporary religious language, that is the speech and the script that seeks to translate divine translations into “popular” or “everyday common” parlance, seems to work best in song, in anecdote, and in the apt rhetorical flourish. I understand that the reason for modernizing traditional language of the Bible is an effort to connect with and proselytize a population indifferent or unresponsive to the language that moved our ancestors. To compete for the attention of a constituency whose discourse has been shaped by the language of media and commerce and whose expectation of correlating images to accompany and clarify text is a difficult enterprise. And it appears reasonable to accommodate altering circumstances with alternate modes of discourse. While I can’t testify to the success of such efforts, I suspect the “modernization” of God’s language has been rewarding—otherwise these attempts would not be so plentiful.
Marketing religion requires new strategies, new appeals, and a relevance that is immediate, not contemplative. Thus modern language, while successful in the acquisition of converts and the spiritual maintenance of the confirmed, is forced to kneel before the denominator that is most accessible, to bankrupt its subtlety, its mystery in order to bankroll its effect. Nevertheless it seems a poor substitute for the language it seeks to replace, not only because it sacrifices ambiguity, depth, and moral authority, but also because its techniques are reinforcement rather than liberation.
I do not mean to suggest that there are no brilliant sermons, powerfully intelligent essays, revelatory poems, moving encomiums, or elegant arguments. Of course there are. Nor do I mean to suggest that there is no personal language, no prayer that is not stunning in its creativity, its healing properties, its sheer intellectual power. But these rhetorical forms are not suitable for sustained prose fiction. Modern narrative is devoid of religious language that does not glean most of its nourishment from allusions to or quotations from the King James Version of the Holy Bible. Two examples of fiction that deliberately and successfully merge modern and biblical language are Leon Forrest’s novels and Reynolds Price’s short narratives.
The questions I put to myself are: Is it possible to write religion-inflected prose narrative that does not rest its case entirely or mainly on biblical language? Is it possible to make the experience and journey of faith fresh, as new and as linguistically unencumbered as it was to early believers, who themselves had no collection of books to rely on?
I have chosen this task, this obligation partly because I am alarmed at the debasement of religious language in literature; its cliché-ridden expression, its apathy, its refusal to refuel itself with nonmarket vocabulary (or its insistence on refueling itself with marketing vocabulary), its substitution of the terminology of popular psychology for philosophical clarity; its patriarchal triumphalism, its morally opinionated dictatorial praxis, the unearned pleasure it takes in performability for its miracle rather than content; its low opinion of itself.
How can a novelist represent bliss in nonsexual, nonorgiastic terms? How can a novelist, in a land of plenty, render undeserved, limitless love, the one “that passeth all understanding,” without summoning the consumer pleasure of a lotto win? How to invoke paradise in an age of theme parks?
The answer, unfortunately, is that, so far, I cannot.
I have chosen in the meantime something else, some other strategy to concretize these informing, old-fashioned passions and conflicts. Not to use paeanistic, rapturous, large words, etc., but to reveal their consequences.
Here I would like to do what I have always done when the questions becomes answerable only in the act of storytelling. Begin the story.
“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.”
Grendel and His Mother
I am hoping that you will agree that the piece of literature I want to draw from is, as one of its translators says, “equal to our knowledge of reality in the present time.” And discover in the lines of association I am making with a medieval sensibility and a modern one a fertile ground on which we can appraise our contemporary world.
I am going to tell you a story. First because narrative is probably the most effective way knowledge is structured and second because I am a storyteller. The practice of writing makes demands on me that nothing else does. The search for language, whether among other writers or in originating it, constitutes a mission. Delving into literature is neither escape nor a surefire route to comfort. It has been a constant, sometimes violent, always provocative engagement with the contemporary world, the issues of the society we live in. So you won’t be surprised that I take m
y text from ancient but by no means remote sources. The story is this. As I tell it you may be reminded of the events and rhetoric and actions of many current militarized struggles and violent upheavals.
Once upon a time there lived a man-eating monster of unprecedented cruelty and unparalleled appetite, who ravaged generally at night and focused primarily on the people of one particular kingdom, but it was only because he chose to. Clearly he could slaughter whomever and wherever he decided to. His name was Grendel and he spent a dozen years dismembering, chewing, and swallowing the livestock, the thanes, the citizens of Scandinavia.
The leader of the besieged country lived in a great mead hall with his queen, his family, friends, guards, counsels, and a grand army of heroes. Each night when the leader retired, guards and warriors were stationed to protect the hall and its inhabitants from destruction and to try, if at all possible, to slay their nighttime enemy. And each night Grendel picked them off as though they were ripe cherries on an eternally fruited tree. The kingdom was sunk in mourning and helplessness; riven with sorrow for the dead, with regret for the past, and in fear of the future. They were in the same situation as the Finns of one of their sagas: “hooped within the great wheel of necessity, in thrall to a code of loyalty and bravery, bound to seek glory in the eye of the warrior world. The little nations are grouped around their lord, the greater nations spoil for war and menace the little ones, a lord dies, defenselessness ensues, the enemy strikes, vengeance for the dead becomes an ethic for the living, bloodshed begets further bloodshed, the wheel turns, the generations tread and tread and tread.”
But what seemed never to trouble or worry them was who was Grendel and why had he placed them on his menu? Nowhere in the story is that question put. The question does not surface for a simple reason: evil has no father. It is preternatural and exists without explanation. Grendel’s actions are dictated by his nature; the nature of an alien mind—an inhuman drift. He is the essence of the one who loathes you, wants you not just dead, but nourishingly so, so that your death provides gain to the slayer: food, land, wealth, water—whatever. Like genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass murder, or individual assault for profit. But Grendel escapes these reasons: no one had attacked or offended him; no one had tried to invade his home or displace him from his territory; no one had stolen from him or visited any wrath upon him. Obviously he was neither defending himself nor seeking vengeance. In fact no one knew who he was. He was not angry with the Danes; he didn’t want to rule their land or plunder their resources or rape their women, so there could be no reasoning with him. No bribery, no negotiations, no begging, no trading could stop him. Humans, even at their most corrupt, selfish, and ignorant can be made available to reason, are educable, retrainable, and, most important, fathomable. Humans have words for madness, explanations for evil, and a system of payback for those who trespass or are judged outlaws. But Grendel was beyond comprehension, unfathomable. The ultimate monster: mindless without intelligible speech. In the illustrations that imagine him and the language that described him, Grendel is ugly: hairy, his body is folded in on itself, reeking, easy and most comfortable on all fours. But even without claws or rows of sharklike teeth, even if he had been beautiful, it would not have lessened the horror; his mere presence in the world was an affront to it.
Eventually, of course, a brave and fit hero named Beowulf volunteers to rid the kingdom of this pestilence. He and his task force of warriors enter the land, announce their purpose, and are welcomed with enthusiasm. On the first night, following a celebration to rally the forces and draw their courage, the war is won—or so it seemed. When the monster appears, they suffer only one casualty before Beowulf rips off Grendel’s arm, sending him fatally bleeding, limping and moaning, slouching back home to his mother, where he dies.
Yes, mother. I suggested earlier that evil has no father, but it should not come as a surprise that Grendel has a mother. In true folkloric, epic fashion, the bearer of evil, of destruction is female. Monsters, it seems, are born after all, and like her sisters—Eve, Pandora, Lot’s wife, Helen of Troy, and the female that sits at the gate of Milton’s hell, birthing vicious dogs who eat one another and are replaced by more and more litters from their mother’s womb—it turns out that Grendel’s mother is more repulsive, more “responsible” for evil than her son is. Interestingly enough, she has no name and cannot speak (I would like to follow these images, but at some other time). In any case, this silent, repulsive female is a mother, and unlike her child, does have a motive for murder—therefore she sets out immediately to avenge her son. She advances to the mead hall, interrupts the warriors reveling at their victory, and fills the pouch she carries with their mangled bodies. Her vengeance instigates a second, even more determined foray by Beowulf, this time on the monster’s territory and in his home. Beowulf swims through demon-laden waters, is captured, and, entering the mother’s lair, weaponless, is forced to use his bare hands. He fights mightily but unsuccessfully. Suddenly and fortunately, he grabs a sword that belongs to the mother. With her own weapon he cuts off her head, and then the head of Grendel’s corpse. A curious thing happens then: the victim’s blood melts the sword. The conventional reading is that the fiends’ blood is so foul it melts steel, but the image of Beowulf standing there with a mother’s head in one hand and a useless hilt in the other encourages more layered interpretations. One being that perhaps violence against violence—regardless of good and evil, right and wrong—is itself so foul the sword of vengeance collapses in exhaustion or shame.
Beowulf is a classic epic of good vanquishing evil; of unimaginable brutality being overcome by physical force. Bravery, sacrifice, honor, pride, rewards both in reputations and wealth—all come full circle in this rousing medieval tale. In such heroic narratives, glory is not in the details; the forces of good and evil are obvious, blatant, the triumph of the former over the latter is earned, justified, and delicious. As Beowulf says, “It is always better / to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. / … So arise, my lord, and let us immediately / set forth on the trail of this troll-dam. / I guarantee you she will not get away, / not to dens under ground nor upland groves / nor the ocean floor. She’ll have nowhere to flee to.”
Contemporary society, however, is made uneasy by the concept of pure, unmotivated evil, by pious, unsullied virtue, and contemporary writers and scholars search for more.
One challenge to the necessary but narrow expectations of this heroic narrative comes from a contemporary writer, the late John Gardner, in his novel, titled Grendel. Told from the monster’s point of view, it is a tour de force and an intellectual and aesthetic enterprise that comes very close to being the sotto-voiced subject of much of today’s efforts to come to grips with the kind of permanent global war we now find ourselves engaged in. The novel poses the question that the epic does not: Who is Grendel? The author asks us to enter his mind and test the assumption that evil is flagrantly unintelligible, wanton, and undecipherable. By assuming Grendel’s voice, his point of view, Gardner establishes at once that unlike the character in the poem, Grendel is not without thought, and is not a beast. In fact he is reflecting precisely on real true beasts the moment the reader is introduced to him. When the novel opens he is watching a ram, musing, “Do not think my brains are squeezed shut, like the ram’s, by the roots of horns.” And “Why can’t these creatures discover a little dignity?”
Gardner’s version has the same plot, characters, etc., as the original, and relies on similar descriptions and conventions: referring to women, for example, only queens have names. If Grendel’s mother has a name it is as unspeakable as she is unspeaking. Seamus Heaney’s introduction to his translation of Beowulf emphasizes the movement of evil from out there to in here, from the margins of the world to inside the castle, and focuses on the artistic brilliance of the poem, the “beautiful contrivances of its language”; Gardner, however, tries to penetrate the interior life—emotional, cognizant—of incarnate evil and prioritizes the poet as one who or
ganizes the world’s disorder, who pulls together disparate histories into meaning. We learn in Gardner’s novel that Grendel distinguishes himself from the ram that does not know or remember his past. We learn that Grendel, in the beginning, is consumed by hatred and is neither proud nor ashamed of it. That he is full of contempt for the survivors of his rampages. Watching the thanes bury their dead, he describes the scene as follows: “On the side of the hill the dirge-slow shoveling begins. They throw up a mound for the funeral pyre, for whatever arms or legs or heads my haste has left behind. Meanwhile, up in the shattered hall, the builders are hammering, replacing the door … industrious and witless as worker ants—except that they make small, foolish changes, adding a few more iron pegs, more iron bands, with tireless dogmatism.” This contempt extends to the world in general. “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.”
But the fundamental theme of the novel lies in Grendel’s possibilities—first, his encounter with shaped, studied, artistic language (as opposed to noise, groans, shouts, boasts) and, second, his dialogue with the dragon who sits atop the mountain of gold he has been guarding for centuries. Regarding the first, his encounter with the poet, who is called the Shaper, offers him the only possibility of transformation. Grendel knows the Shaper’s song is full of lies, illusion. He has watched carefully the battles of men and knows they are not the glory the Shaper turns them into. But he succumbs to the Shaper’s language nevertheless because of its power to transform, its power to elevate, to discourage base action. He defines the poet’s potency this way: “He reshapes the world …. So his name implies. He stares strange-eyed at the mindless world and turns dry sticks to gold.” It is because of this shaped, elevated, patterned language that Grendel is able to contemplate beauty, recognize love, feel pity, crave mercy, and experience shame. It is because of the Shaper’s imagination that he considers the equation of quality with meaning. In short he develops a desperate hunger for the life of a completely human being. “My heart,” he says, “was light with Hrothgar’s goodness, and leaden with grief at my own bloodthirsty ways.” Overwhelmed with these reflections on goodness and light, he goes to the mead hall weeping for mercy, aching for community to assuage his utter loneliness. “I staggered out into the open and up toward the hall with my burden, groaning out, ‘Mercy! Peace!’ The harper broke off, the people screamed …. Drunken men rushed me with battle-axes. I sank to my knees, crying, ‘Friend! Friend!’ They hacked at me, yipping like dogs.” So he reverts to the deep wilderness of his hatred. Yet he is still in turmoil, torn between “tears and a bellow of scorn.” He travels to the dragon for answers to his own cosmic questions: Why am I here? What is God? What is the world?
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