294
PARTISAN REVIEW
does all the telling , and he puts Gardner 's preoccupations immediately on the
surface of the fiction . The game-the parody of epic and, therefore , of epic
implications-is the heart of the narrative , in form and substance . Gardner 's
novels can be very talky, and if the dramatic context for the speculative talk is
not itself either funny or exciting , the speculation gets a little boring , no
matter how clever. Here the talk , unlike that of the Sunlight Man , is perfectly
right .
Gardner works very hard at context .
Grendel
uses the sophisticated
traditions of realistic narrative to spoof the heroic context of Grendel ' s world ;
at the same time , the context spoofs realistic narrative . And all that spoofing
finally cahcels itself out , in bewilderingly funny ways , until we are left only
with the wonderful imaginative energy of the invention itself-which is
precisel ywhere the book wants
to
take us. Who , after all , would have thought
to
see Beowulf's story from the perspective of his enemy , Grendel , but a
Lubbockian gone slightly mad? And who but Grendel (and a modern scholar
of Old English) could begin to see the nobly austere world of mead-halls and
spear-Danes as self-serving , petty , corrupt , and , worst of all , frightened . In
Nickel Mountain
Gardner plays with old-fashioned problems of point of view
for new purposes , but here the play seems almost for its own sake , and it
becomes delightfully generative . A backwards bildungs-roman (Gardner
always does force us
to
see the literary context) ,
Grendel
grows
to
a
self-destructive cynicism . And the guru of evil is an old fire- breathing dragon ,
thoroughly bored with his own wisdom , and quite a crotchety old
school-master. A fantasy himself, he speculates between hot burps about time
and space, determinism and free will, the emptiness of fantasy and
imagination. All the time Gardner pretends that the speculations aren't
serious . Yet the cynical old dragon , espousing a devilish materialism ("Get as
much gold as you can ," he tells Grendel , " but not
mine") ,
challenges the
very art that creates him , rejects art as mere illusion . Now that 's really
diabolical. Gardner would be the
seop
whose song Grendel hears , angrily ,
rising frdm Hrothgar's hall, if a
seop
properly scorched by the dragon 's
burning cynicism.
Even Grendel 's death is part of a happily gory set of metaphysical and
aesthetic speculations and jokes. To the end, Grendel stands up for
meaninglessness, matter , accident . Beowulf, bright invincible hero , torrures
him by insisting that " time is the mind. " There's something of a modern
novelist there . And ,
to
nobody 's surprise , Beowulf speaks for
art .
Holding
Grendel's painful and fated arm behind the monster 's back, Beowulf smashes
Grendel 's head against the wall :
,
'
.,
