"Grendel", Chapter 1: John Gardner's Perverse Prologue

Author(s): Joseph F. Tuso

Source: College Literature , Spring, 1985, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring, 1985), pp. 184-186
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25111661

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NOTES & DISCUSSION
GRENDEL, CHAPTER 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
tainly one of those significant influences. Chapter 1 of Gardner's novel
Grendel provides an especially clear example of Gardner's ability to inter
weave and transform elements of medieval literature?in this case
Chaucer's General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales?to suit his artistic
purposes.
One of the most famous openings in all literature, the first twelve lines of
Chaucer's General Prologue hearken back to Petrarch, Boethius, and
Virgil, and verbally probably most closely to Guido d?lie Colonne and
Boccaccio.1 The salute to spring is a conventional medieval theme which
typically features sweetly singing birds and all the other common, external
signs of a revivified world, but Chaucer's description transcends the com
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 tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye

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NOTES & DISCUSSION 185

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages (17)
Chaucer's April brings life-giving rain to engender flowers; his west wind
("Zephirus") both causes and encourages the growth of new crops by dis
seminating seed; his sun is new and vigorous; his small birds sing lovely
songs. This rebirth in external nature parallels a rebirth in internal human
nature, for spring is the ideal time for the pilgrimage. Chaucer's opening is
smooth, his meter mirroring the mood of a world gradually awakening, his
long vowels in the first line approximating the spoken "ah!" sound of in
tense human pleasure.
In The Wasteland, some five hundred years after Chaucer, T. S. Eliot
provides a less enthusiastic view of spring:
April is the crudest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.2
John Gardner, in Chapter 1 of Grendel, while also parodying Chaucer's
opening in several significant ways, begins his novel by dealing with an
alienated anti-hero?the social antithesis to Chaucer's pilgrims?with a
tone even starker than Eliot's: "The old ram stands looking down over
rockslides, stupidly triumphant. I blink. I stare in horror."3 Here Gardner
transforms Chaucer's astrological sign of spring into a real ram and April's
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 destruction of
humankind, his own antithesis to the ram's mindless impregnation.
Gardner replaces Chaucer's young sun which moves vigorously through
the sign of the Ram with one that "spins mindlessly overhead" (7). The
only water which he provides does not engender flowers; rather it turns to
ice at Grendel 's feet as he emits an unspeakable howl at the ram, who will
not budge. Both Gardner's sun and ram are static, and both images thus
freeze Grendel in time present. Grendel hibernates in winter, so his life is a
constant and conscious flow of spring-summer destruction?he is a creature
existentially trapped in a seemingly eternal and horrible now.
Nor do Gardner's birds make sweet melodies; his "small birds, with a
high-pitched yelp," simply "lay eggs" (7). Like the ram, these birds are yet
another frustrating reminder to Grendel of his physical and spiritual impo
tence. Gardner's "tender grasses peek up, innocent yellow, through the

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186 COLLEGE LITERATURE

ground: the children of the dead" (7), for Grendel recalls that on the very
spot he had killed a man and an old woman, "Sweet mulch for yellow
blooms" (7).
Other creatures, external nature, the very universe?all are painful to
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
brainless, budding trees, these brattling birds" (6).
And just as Chaucer's pleasant, life-giving springtime moves human
beings to begin their pilgrimage, Gardner's horrible, barren springtime
moves Grendel to renewed carnage. In his cave it is Grendel who sleeps all
night with open eyes, aware in his chest "of tuberstirrings in the blacksweet
duff of the forest overhead" (9). His anger builds, and along with it his
bloodlust, until he leaves his lair and once again attacks Hrothgar's hall.
In the remainder of Chapter 1, Gardner introduces the major characters
of his novel, just as in the rest of his Prologue Chaucer introduces his pil
grims. But Gardner's introductions are spare as he briefly sketches Gren
del's mother, Hrothgar and his queen, the dragon, and the Shaper. The
characters are fleshed out in time past in Chapters 2 through 10. Chapter 11
begins where Chapter 1 leaves off, during Grendel's twelfth spring of man
killing, until in Chapter 12 the monster finally finds release, not in the per
verse spring of Chapter 1, but in an equally grim, if longed for, symbolic
final winter at the edge of a nightmare cliff overlooking a "bottomless
blackness"?and death.

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.

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