Show, Don't Tell

Post by Mel

*CONTAINS MAJOR GRENDEL (POSSIBLY BEOWULF?) SPOILERS, IF YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY BEEN SPOILED BY EVERYTHING IN POPCULTURE THAT HAS EVER REFERENCED BEOWULF OR GRENDEL EVER*

Illustration; woodcut by Emil Antonucci

“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.” 

Thus spits the protagonist of John Gardner's novel Grendel, in a fit of confused nihilism.  The world Gardner paints in this book through Grendel's lonely eye is difficult to describe:  So much of it exists entirely in Grendel's mind, but so much of it is painfully real, such that the reader can feel the same jagged edge that drives Grendel to his philosophy and his fate.  Through the Shaper, through Beowulf's "sing walls," the reader watches as mankind bleeds at the touch of this sharp reality, and heaves itself through the cosmos like a wounded beast -- clinging to each other and to their stories, particularly to the meaning that their stories give their lives, as if meaning and hope are equivocal and inseparable.  To Grendel, perhaps they are.

To me, my reading of this book wasn't complete without some knowledge of the philosophy and the reasoning behind it; I finished it deeply affected, but unsure as to why I'd been affected so, unsure as to the meaning my brain had soaked up like a sponge.  I remember that when I started it, it threw me into a terrible mood -- the universe seemed grey, time seemed to stretch as it always has in the most lethargic, meaningless points in my life, when I have nothing to occupy myself but the workings of my mind, chewing up the same fears and existential realizations over and over again.  In short, Grendel was bitter and alone and it hurt and I wasn't even sure if I liked the way it hurt -- I'm never sure, with this kind of literature -- but some part of me invested itself in him, in his familiar confusion, and I experienced his nihilism with him, and I understood it as one understands the look of an animal in pain.  Wordlessly and raw.  I had no names for these feelings, but I felt them with Grendel.

I have names for them now.  It took a little research, but perhaps the most helpful thing was this letter from Mr. Gardner to a group of high school kids that wrote about his book, in which I was reminded for the fifty-thousandth time that the protagonist's opinions do not represent the author's.  "[A good writer's] method," he addresses the students, "is not to argue for a single position--in the way Nietzche did, for instance--but rather to explore, with all the care and wisdom he's capable of mustering, the various implications, contributing factors, etc., that must be considered when any serious philosophical question is raised."  And with that statement, something clicked, and I started reading more -- about how he based Grendel off of Sartre, about his own relationship with Sartre's work, about how, to quote that very same letter, "[i]f the reader decides, as all three papers here decide, that I am advising people to live like Grendel and give up values, then the reader is wrong but I have done no harm, because the reader will see--in spite of his slight misreading--that somehow it's not good giving up values."

"Show, don't tell."  I understand what that means now.

Of course, I am reading Thus Spake Zarathustra for this very same project -- I'll get a taste of Nietzsche and decide then if I think he's preaching, as Gardner says he is.  From what I can tell, though, it's fairly obvious.  (Furthermore, it's interesting, but now that I've read Grendel and realize that it's not pro-destructive nihilism, I'm realizing that the lineup of books that I've picked out for myself are fairly anti-nihilism.  Camus' Caligula certainly is.)

 Nietzsche is certainly literature, but I feel like I'll still have gotten more out of Gardner's work than I will when I read Zarathustra; there's something wonderful about feeling the pain of a misguided protagonist, completely sympathizing with him, and then realizing that what he has become is evil and will bring him misery and that you don't have to be that way.  I struggle with this sort of internal conflict: I'm not sure what there is, if there is anything, and it pulls me into some terrifying places sometimes.  I don't like the idea that there isn't one great big cosmic standard telling us all what to do, that there might not be anything out there, there might not be any deities or anything more than the cold, barren, inexplicable earth and our inexplicable lives.  There's something heartening about the idea that Gardner isn't advocating losing yourself to it.  He isn't even advocating immediate pleasure, like the Dragon.  He's not advocating anything but looking at it, feeling it, and deciding what it is based on its nature.

He showed me a terrible thing and somehow I got something wonderful out of it, something I can't quite explain.  And I think that's what literary fiction should be about.  Not swamping the reader in heavy deeper meanings, not driving the reader to some true understanding of reality's fatalism and meaninglessness, but showing the reader a situation, explaining it to the reader in the best way those characters and those situations can, and letting the reader take from it what they should, logically.

Sometimes I get angry at literary fiction for being pretentious, and this is not one of those times.  I truly love this book:  It's given me hope, in a weird sort of way.