BOOKS
" Grendel , Grendel! You make the world by whispers , seco nd by second .
Are you blind
to
that? Whether you make it a grave or a garden of roses is
not the point . Feel the wall : is it not
hard~ "
295
Then, most miserable of tortures, he demands : "Sing! . . . Sing walls."
And Grendel sings. But faithful to his imagination of a world without
imagination , Grendel flees, one arm missing, into the woods . "Accident ,"
he shouts . "Accident ," he whispers .
The melange of fantasy, parody , philosophy, theories of imagination,
works beautifully, so beautifully that I suppose I care more for Grendel than
for any other Gardner character. Monstrously dying alone in the woods , he
cries for his " Mama. " And his last words form a curse to our very pleasures in
reading it : " Poor Grendel's had an accident, " he says , "So may you all . "
Having tried just about everything else in the way of story telling ,
Gardner gives us, in
The King 's Indian ,
a volume of short stories and a
novella . All of them are more or less overtly autobiographical, or are made to
seem that way ; and without really telling us much about him (except what I
guess his friends would pick up) they nevertheless ring true . They are full of
professorial fun, cloaked in science fiction or gothic horror or fairy tale . And
yet each of them has a central fig:.Ire who seems very Gardnerish. The first hero
is a man of words, a preacher in a Southern Illinois Church (near,
coincidentally , where Gardner teaches). He has evoked the distrust of his
parishioners because he insists on social responsibility, and he inadvertently
attracts a revolutionary youth to blow up his church. And what is the power of
language? The second hero is a Southern Illinois doctor, caught in a cyclone
during which he finds a mad and wicked genius who clones himself into
wicked young duplicates . The third is a medieval monk in a Browningesque
complication of envy and haunting who has given up his an of illuminating
manuscripts to work in the fields . And so on. In one story Gardner figures as
an acror himself, the narrator describing a wild artist who has come through a
period of darkness to see "the best in everything."
In their brevity and in their more or less obvious and deliberate
evocation of Poe, Kafka, Browning, medieval romance, and science fiction,
these stories are all fairly effective. But the book gets much better as Gardner's
manifestations become more and more wildly fanciful, less and less disguised
in the clothing of the real . The second set of three stories is pure fantasy,
playing with the narrative traditions of the fairy tale, transmogrifications and
heroic rescues , reminding us of the arbitrariness of sequence and characteriza–
tion, and , of course , of
Alice in Wonderland.
The insane and beautiful
Queen Louisa invents a family and a world, happy (except for occasional lapses
into a toad) in the midst of playful violence and horror which purports to be
sane and obeys quite arbitrary rules.
