VLVL (13) p 274 - "...Hooking a U" [Hidden SS's]

[Joseph Tracy]

That's how Gardner's  Grendel begins, with a sympathetic take on the  
abused monster. Later the POV shifts to the  hero Beowulf and the  
necessity of ridding the world of Grendel  transformed by his  
"inability to adjust socially " into this unfortunate and now   
bloodthirsty killer.   But what is Beowulf about? It is about might  
(along with  beauty, Christianity, athletic prowess and lordship)  
makes right. (I don't know where I picked up triumphalism as my  
shorthand word for the might makes right  philosophy, perhaps  
colonialism is more apt) Who was the real ungainly monster that the  
Saxons ( the Geats, the invading Germanic peoples) "had" to kill ?  
Were there really slimy sociopathic mothers living in lakes in  
Britain ? If this story is just early scifi why is it such a primal  
pattern of Germanic and English literature? The dominant people of  
the the British Isles were the various Celtic peoples, who among  
other things had much better stories than fucking Beowulf. Beowulf   
is the mythic foundation of a war culture/cop culture, 3/4 of  
Hollywood movies are Beowulf, there  are bad guys and good guys and  
the good guys have to kill the bad guys to make the world safe for  
fair damsels and mass consumption.  In Beowulf Grendel is a primitive  
creature of the wild earth who gets his "culture from  his Mother"   
whom Beowulf finds in a lake( ooh that scary realm of the unconcious,  
where the nice clear delineation of lord and lady,  king and servant  
disappears, and is also the mysterious source of useless things like  
art and music and stories that aren't fucking Beowulf).  I'm getting  
a wee bit worked up here but I'm Irish and this story is the bloody  
history of my family on both sides.   I feel identified with the Jews  
of Roman or Greek .... occupation, the Caananites and Philistines who  
were living where Abraham once walked around,  the Africans, the  
native North  and South Americans. To me Beowulf is a religion and a  
culture that has taken over most of the planet and I, for one, think  
it is a crock of shit.

You may not have thought the Geats were cool but , but Gardner has  
them doing the "necessary " thing and I could not read that as in any  
way satiric.  He makes them the not altogether but mostly heroic  
figures of the story. Neither his literary stance nor the text   
supports a satiric  reading or a serious critique of Beowulf  IMO.   
So Gardner wants to help renew a moral vision for English literature,  
but he fails to get even as far as Shakespeare ( how much further  
there is to get is open to debate) in terms of moral complexity and  
reading him once was enough for me. Gardner's critique of Pynchon is  
ambiguous and smacks of jealousy. Gardner writes lovely engaging  
prose, but Grendel was a blip and GR was an earthquake.

  Another thing bothers me about Garder's article. I never read  
Pynchon in College. I am mostly a visual artist who likes to read and  
sometimes write rather than a a bona fide  member of the Professional  
Organization of English Majors. ( I did teach HS English for 3 years,  
always feeing puntuationally inadequate).  A friend loaned me  
Vineland after hearing I had lived in Arcata  and I read it all the  
way through  in a few days with immense pleasure and amusement and  
head spinning wonder. I didn't get V because I wanted to study it. I  
got it because I wanted to read it. But I did study it because I saw  
an intriguing structural model I had never encountered in literature.  
It seemed to me to mimic the double helical strands of DNA including  
the anti-parrallel opposition which Pynchon does with time. V was  
darker material but wow what a vision of the complex interactions of  
History,  myth, comedy and human desire . I was hooked.

Maybe I should re-read the last chapter of Grendel to see if I missed  
something , but  I felt like I was looking pretty hard the first time.

Anyway, some interesting and intense conversations on the list right  
now. So I close with my anti-Beowulf passions exposed but not the  
slightest animosity and much respect for all my fellow p-listers. Joseph

If anyone is interested in VL and picking up with CH 14 , including  
scathing comments on my introduction have at it .  Penultimate  
chapter so not a bad time to start running with some riffs.



On Mar 22, 2009, at 4:53 PM, Richard Ryan wrote:

>
> "Grendel's had an accident. So may you all." (I quote from memory -  
> but this I remember thinking when I read it a zillion years ago was  
> one of the great last lines in post-war American literature - NEW  
> THREAD).
>
>
>
> --- On Sat, 3/21/09, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>
>> From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: VLVL (13) p 274 - "...Hooking a U" [Hidden SS's]
>> To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Date: Saturday, March 21, 2009, 11:23 PM
>> wow, that's not how I saw it.
>> but I guess it could be read that way.
>> I wouldn't like it either if that was what it's about.
>>
>> For me, it was like, the outsider (though he is actually
>> related to
>> them somehow)
>> striving for acceptance
>> and his mother bringing him up to think he's special and so
>> forth,
>> whereas when he goes to Hrothgar he's met with horror, is
>> kind of like
>> the disjunct between a happy kid home life and the
>> indignities of
>> school...
>>
>> there was also some symbolic stuff that I dont remember and
>> then
>> "Grendel's had an accident" - I dinna ken how that disses
>> earth
>> religion, but if it does, well I'm agin it (the book that
>> is) I didn't
>> close the book thinking Geats were cool, that's for sure.
>> Triumphalism?!
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -- 
>>  - "Be groovy or B movie" - the old 24fps signoff
>>
>
>
>