Super-Fun Existentialism Time with Grendel! Yah!

As a person with a lasting interest in philosophy, I have an intense interest in the concepts espoused by both the dragon and Grendel, especially as they contrast with the beliefs of the men in the novel. 

            Grendel begins as a classic existentialist, and as an existentialist, he is a clear proponent of Absurdism, that is, the core concept that life has no inherent meaning outside of that which we as sentient beings prescribe to it.  He sees little or nothing of value in life, and yet continues to live.  He even specifically says that the only way he could die would be in a lunatic fit and jump to his death however I think it would not be so lunatic from his perspective.  In a life that his entirely meaningless and devoid of happiness, especially one consumed by depression, why not jump?  I would almost think that to him it would be preferable to jump, to end his misery that engulfs him so entirely.  But that fact that he chooses to continue his existence gives credence to the idea that Grendel, at least before his meeting with the dragon, is not entirely nihilistic.

            And here we see a key tenet of existentialism that Grendel is ignoring:  Authenticity.  Existentialists believe that people must find oneself and then live by that self.  They believe that the only actions that matter are those that are born of the free will of individuals, and that these actions can cause one to believe in some sort of meaning, and rightfully so.  Grendel has displayed no willingness to seek out a meaning to his life, he simply wallows in his trivial existence.  That is not to say that Grendel has no desire to have meaning, he clearly expresses that he wanted to believe in the Shaper and his words of God and glory.  Grendel is bound by the belief that, and it is this which takes him to nihilism, it is impossible to have any meaning, whether preordained or temporally created.

                Grendel could, for all intents and purposes be the poster child for existentialist despair, the supposed void that those who take similar views fall into.  And, as this relates to the existentialist tenet of despair, the collapse of hope following the destruction of one’s worldview and sense of meaning.  This is said to happen when one’s life takes a drastic turn, say you’re a janitor who closely identifies him/herself with their position, and are fired.  Such a situation leads to despair, depression, etc.  However Grendel does not experience this, he never identifies a role for himself and loses it, he begins by believing that he is meaningless rather than having meaning ripped away from him. 

                I believe in an existentialist existence can be a positive one, because meaning inherited from a divine or natural force is not as powerful as a meaning that comes from within, one that is inherently individual and free.  Without such a meaning, or even a quest to obtain one, Grendel is doomed to suffer his fate, which we all know is to die at the hands of Beowulf, and worse, not just to die, but to die after accomplishing nothing.

A Response to the Poems of Chino and Jane

First up, we have a response to Chino's poem:

Chino's Blog:  http://totheenderstronghold.blogspot.com/

First of all, I really enjoyed your use of a modernist poem, it is from a period I am rather fond of, and because I don’t believe I have the same knack for analyzing them that you seem to possess, I found your analysis very interesting.  The really amazing thing, for me at least, with modernist poems, is that you can be absolutely sure that every single word means something, and that something is debatable, which can lead to several different meanings for different people.

The people in the crowds of the metro have indeed lost the life in themselves, because life isn't supposed to be a set routine, it needs to be changing and always varied, such repetition is suited only for machines at best, and that is what these people are becoming.  No, wait, they’re becoming less than that, they are the shades of the people that once were, and that must mean that they were once alive.  And the only thing that’s sadder than not having something as valuable as life is having that life and then losing it.  And yes, while I believe that the water is this poem serves more to enhance the melancholy of the scene, I still find it refreshing because it is nature, even if it is a dismal presentation of one.  Though the bough too has lost its life, much like the people in the station once had and lost their own.  It contrasts the philosophical loss of life that the people experience with the near actual loss of life of the branch itself.

Overall, I found the poem and your analysis of it fascinating, and moreover, it reminded me of why I like modernist works so much, because of the value of every word and the variable presentations they can make to different individuals.

And now to Jane:

http://clippyscorner.blogspot.com/

I think you sell yourself a bit short when you say that you have found no deeper meaning of the poem, sure, there’s no great metaphysical ideology, but I think that’s the point of the work.  The words tell of the cat’s actions, but it is really the cadence of the poem that fully envelopes you into the situation. 

Through the cadence and the rhythm of the of the poem you get a sense of not just the bland actions of the cat, but a feel for the actual movements in a way that is often understood only by those who have been around cats for a great while.  While I can say that I share no great love for cats (I fear that they and I are doomed forever at an impasse resulting in mutual respect at best), I feel that this, and not prose, best captures the actual movements of a cat, though your description of the grandiosity of their movements comes close.

And I, too, found it interesting that the cat would step into a flowerpot on its way to the pantry.  I am just wondering, why, when there is perfectly good found just round the corner, but an empty flower pot becomes more interesting to the cat   And by the way, a jamcloset is a cellar used in Victorian times to store foodstuffs such as jam that needed the cool and couldn’t be kept in the main kitchen area, not necessarily a pantry, and I think it makes it more interesting visualizing the cat sneaking into the cellar, rather than a door in the kitchen, even if it doesn’t change the meaning of the poem.

Virtue by George Herbert

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
    The bridal of the earth and sky;
The dew shall weep thy fall to night,
    For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave,
    Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;
Thy root is ever in its grave,
    And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
    A box where sweets compacted lie;
My music shows ye have your closes,
    And all must die

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
    Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
    Then chiefly lives.
-George Herbert

I chose this poem because I found the dichotomy between the world and the virtuous very interesting. The most basic definition of the poem is that everything in the world is doomed to end, even the most beautiful, and only the most virtuous amongst us has the chance to live on. Plus, I thought the wording sounded really pretty :).

The poem obviously has some religion connotations. The only thing that has the ability to survive the ravager that is time is a virtuous soul, and the only way for one to live throughout eternity would be in the afterlife, meaning that you must get to heaven to survive. This makes quite a bit of sense that Herbert these things, as, in addition to being a poet, he was also an Anglican priest.
The poem is composed in four stanzas of four lines each, and in the first three stanzas, he makes a metaphor for the inevitability of death. In each stanza he presents an element of the world in a beautiful way, and then crushes it by explaining its mortality.

The first stanza speaks of the day; it is “so cool, so calm, so bright” words that are certainly positive, it makes the day a good thing, and even the dew weeps at the days lost to night. The day is an element of beauty so wonderous that even inanimate objects weep for the loss of it. And that is the key point, that the day is lost to night. Even the most beautiful is equally susceptible to being quelled by time, and it is this first example of death that sets the theme of the poem.
The second stanza is much the same as the first, it describes something that is both beautiful and fleeting, in this case a rose. And a rose is indeed beautiful, it has a vibrant and daring color, so much so that those who look upon it rashly are apt to weep tears and need to wipe their faces. But then Herbert must mention that the rose is already halfway in its grave, as its roots are in the ground. Yes, the rose is beautiful like the day, but similarly so, it is doomed to die, and it is even closer to its grave than the day is.

The third stanza is a again a repetition of Herbert's formula. He presents the spring as beautiful, even more so than a rose or the day, because it contains both in abundance. Herbert presents the spring as the time of year when everything sweet in the year is compacted into one season, and uses this to say that not just certain things, but everything will die.


 And then the fourth stanza arrives, and joyous day! Something lives! And this something is the virtuous soul, because, unlike the world stuck in its mortal coils, the virtuous soul is immortal, and though all the four things in the poem are described as sweet, it is the virtue that separates the soul from those things that die, from the whole world that must by necessity turn to coal.

Wing Biddlebaum

In class we went over some questions about Wing Biddlebaum that I was meaning to bring up during our Socratic Seminar, however I never had the chance (admittedly partially because of my fear to speak in public), and so I would like to discuss my thoughts on Wing here.

First of all, do I believe that Wing was a homosexual?  Well, I'm somewhat conflicted as far as that goes.  I found it extremely interesting that Wing had tried through his gestures to impart the dream into his students (and George Willard) and that the child that accused Wing of molesting him came upon this idea at night in a dream.  The result of his teaching was that, "Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream."  A chance occurrence?  I think not.  While I certainly do not believe that Biddlebaum actually molested that young boy, or had any intention of doing so, I believe that something of himself was imparted with his touch along with what he was trying to teach his students.  However inadvertent in may have been, I believe that Wing's touch revealed his homosexuality to his students in such a subtle way that it would only manifest in their dreams.

I am reasonably sure that Wing, or Adolph Myers as he was known is not a molester, as the book rather explicitly says that the boy made it up:  "A half-witted boy of the school became enamored of the young master. In his bed at night he imagined unspeakable things and in the morning went forth to tell his dreams as facts."  He made up his story, and the only relevant things from his fiction are the time and place of his imaginings.  

Wing is also out first look into grotesques, and he embodies many of the traits that we have come to expect in the others of the novel. He is an outcast from the rest of the town, and is very isolated/lonely, with George Willard being the only character that speaks to him on a regular basis.  Additionally, Anderson often has his grotesques lack a fundamental ability to communicate and interact with others, which is obviously one of the factors in their loneliness.  But ironically, Wing once had the ability to interact with others and express ideas well, but he voluntarily gave that up along with the use of his hands because he believed that it led to the accusations of molestation against him.  Wing's truth is a rather obvious one, his obsession with his hands, and it is by his fervent belief that his expressive hands are the cause of all his suffering, and as a result he hides their use, and when he does use them, refrains from using them expressively and to communicate, as he had, but instead he "closed his fists and beat with them upon a table or on the walls of his house."  It is also this "truth" that sets the stage for the rest of the grotesques presented in the novel, and it is against Wing that we are initially forced to make comparisons.

Grotesque-ness

First of all, in a somewhat unrelated note, I have yet to be entirely convinced that "grotesqueness" is indeed a word, it just sounds awkward to me.  But, the truth will not be denied, it is actually a word, coming from "grotesque," which comes form the same Latin word that led us to grotto, and all of which come indirectly from the Greek krypte, which means a crypt or vault, or, more interestingly from the Latin crypta, a verb meaning to encrypt.  Of course a more modern dictionary would tell us that grotesque means "odd or unnatural in shape, appearance, or character; fantastically ugly or absurd; bizarre." (dictionary.com).

     Why would this be relevant? one may ask, and I believe that it is because, whether or not Sherwood Anderson was actually aware of the Greek roots of the the word he so vividly epitomized, the characters represent this meaning. Given that the word means to encrypt, or to hide or deceive, I believe it is even more applicable to Sherwood Anderson's characters than one would initially believe, based on the more modern definition. Anderson's characters are not overtly grotesque or bizarre, but their identity is often based on some type of shady past, which they attempt to hide or obfuscate (such as Wing running away from his past as a schoolteacher, or Dr Parcival who tells vague stories about his past that are likely lies). But even more they attempt to hide their grotesqueness, which often contributes to it even more. All people would like to hide that which they are ashamed of, and often rightfully so, but the grotesques of Sherwood's novel often do so in a way that leads to their further descent into grotesqueness through their attempts to hide both what they are ashamed of about themselves, and to hide from what they are afraid of. In “Tandy,” the main character tries to hide her true self behind the fictitious persona of Tandy, a person who is entirely based off of the ramblings of a drunk as the ideal woman, and by attempting to replicate this raving ideal, she becomes a grotesque. And so Tandy hides her true self in addition to creating a new identity. Enoch Robinson, creates a group of imaginary friends because he is unable to tolerate the young artist friends he had begun to pick up and go out with in New York because of a childlike ego and self-centeredness. His imaginary friends always agree with him and never threaten his image of himself, and, again going back to the roots of the word grotesque, he hides himself away. Enoch Robinson does not try to change or mold others to a standard more acceptable to himself, but hides himself away from the world completely, by isolating himself in his apartment, and isolating oneself from the world is a trait that can be seen in almost all of the characters, including Wing Biddlebaum, who lived on the outskirts of town as a berry picker, and Elizabeth Willard, who remains inside all of the time she was not with Doctor Reefy.

Pathedy of Manners

      “Pathedy of Manners” by Ellen Kay attempts to represent the life of a woman who was privileged, intelligent and well-educated as inherently worthless after she accumulates some age. The woman spoken of was known for her beauty and was very popular with the opposite sex. The woman traveled extensively and new much about art; she scorned Richard Wagner, likely because many considered his antisemitism to be detrimental to his reputation, even though he was a notable composer of operas. She also praises the dancing girls of Degas, who was known for being one of the founders of Impressionism, a man whose work can be considered to be supportive of womens' rights in a time where such thinking was frowned upon. Because Degas painted working women (even his dancers were portrayed as either in rehearsal or backstage, making it seem like they were working professionals), it can be inferred that the woman spoken of is supportive of womens' rights, making her more of a radical intellectual, especially considering the time period (the poem was published in 1931), where few women received college degrees at all. The mystique of the woman is increased by the third stanza, she is said to have gone to Europe and done interesting and high-society things, she rejects the advances of a marquis, and by having her learn to distinguish real Wedgwood (a luxury pottery manufacturer based in England, a company that is now known as Waterford Wedgwood, the well-known crystal maker) from fake reveals the high class lifestyle she must have been living. The woman then goes on to make an ideal marriage with an intelligent young man who is equal in status to herself, which is shown by the authenticity of his pearl cufflinks. They then go on to purchase an ideal house, however they have lonely children. One must wonder, if the marriage and the house are ideal, then for what reason would the child be lonely, and the only reason would be that the children are not ideal.

Hi there

     

      Then the fifth stanza comes around, and this is where the poem makes a major turn. The narrator injects herself into the story, saying, “I saw her yesterday at forty-three.” Suddenly the whole meaning of the poem is flipped on its head, the narrator, who the reader initially assumes is omniscient, has in fact only seen the woman in question twice, once, when she was twenty, and then again twenty-three later, only learning as an outsider the details of her life. When the narrator sees the woman again, she has lost her husband and attempts to present the woman as pathetic and broken, with a wasted life and no friends (the woman has one hundred callers, but apparently none of them are friends. But because this is a textbook unreliable narrator, a narrator whose entire perspective is based upon two very separate incidents, it seems that the narrator is merely seeming to slight the woman because of, what I'm assuming is class bias and jealousy towards the woman because of her privileged backgrounds.   

George Willard

     George Willard is a very fascinating character in Winesburg, Ohio.  Anderson uses George to do a large number of things in this story, first, in a sense; George's involvement makes the story into a Bildungsroman, a story about the development/maturation of a character.  George seems to defy what many of the themes that the rest of the novel attempts to portray, in a novel about the creation and existence of grotesques, he remains unharmed.  Also, Anderson introduces speculation that George is the writer at the beginning of the novel.

     George develops a burgeoning ability to dream, an ability that he apparently lacks in the beginning of the novel, according to Wing.  Wing tells George that he must learn to dream, a skill, which, by the end of the novel he appears to have gained.  At the end of "Departure" he is thinking not of serious things that relate to his future, but of little things, dreams.  George also experiences the typical adolescent feelings.  He is eager for sex, but, after actually experiencing it with Louise Trunnion, George feels both pride and guilt, separating the act from the person he did it with.  But as time goes on and his mother dies, George matures, which can be seen especially in "Sophistication."  In "Sophistication" George finally makes it into adulthood, not through any particular action or rite of passage, but through the realization that he is isolated and he "sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village."  He comes to adulthood by realizing certain things about society that everyone must at some point come to understand, and come to reflect on their life. 

     George is not only surrounded by grotesques in Winesburg, he is often their sole connection to other people, and is one of the few things outside of common themes and location that link the separate stories in the novel together, and actually make it, well, a novel.  He appears in almost every story, “Tandy” being an obvious exception, among others.  Oftentimes, George is the only character that others will speak to.  Wing Biddlebaum, for example refrains from speaking to most anyone, but feels a sense of release when he speaks to George.  George causes other characters to reveal what it is exactly that makes them grotesque, whereas without his involvement they would have remained hidden, or at least not explicitly shown. 

     Anderson allows for speculation in who exactly the old writer at the beginning of the novel really is by leaving him nameless.  While reading the book, I went back and forth, but my opinion at the end is that George really is the writer.  Like the writer, George is not a grotesque, one of the extremely few examples of such in the book, and while the young George does this through childhood and learning to dream, the old man does so through a young thing inside of him, both doing so through youth.  Also, George is the connection between all the characters, and he seems well poised to be able to write about them convincingly.  George is repeatedly shown to get information from people that they wouldn’t normally give out, and to talk to people that don’t normally talk.  He becomes capable of dreaming.  By “Sophistication,” George begins “to think of people in the town where he had lived with something like reverence.”  He starts to appreciate their grotesqueness.  

When my love swears she is made of truth

Shakespeare here does not just address his lover’s lies to him, and I’m getting the feeling that she’s probably cheating on him, but that sometimes in life it’s easier to believe in a fantasy than in real life.  Shakespeare believes in his lover’s words, even though he knows them to be false.  Intellectually, he knows that it can’t be true, but emotionally, he it’s just easier to pretend that they are.

And it’s not just his lover that is having some problems with telling the truth, but so too does the speaker.  He knows that he is getting older, and that his best days are behind him.  He has hit and gone past his prime, but he not only refuses to acknowledge that fact, but lies about it to himself as well as to his loved one.  And it brings to mind the question, why is it exactly that he must lie about that, and why is it that his lover lies about being faithful?  His answer is that love itself is inherently deceitful.  That love disguises itself as trustworthy, but in reality it is often by necessity inherently false. 

Both the speaker and his lover are aware of the fact that they are lying to each other, but neither cares very much, partially because old people don’t like to be informed of their ever-increasing age, but mostly because, by lying to each other, it allows them to ignore their respective weaknesses, for one, the guilt of cheating on the other, for the other, his age.

Age seems to be the biggest factor to the speaker, almost as if he is simply glad to have love despite his age.  But, though he has love, he seems very detached from her, given that he shows little concern for her lying and cheating.  At its most base, the poem is concerned with the speaker’s insecurities about his own advancing age, and his need to not only lie to himself about its existence and the complications and weaknesses it brings, but his need to lie to others in order to decrease his own ability to acknowledge it.  By lying to each other, they in fact relieve their own burdens by pretending that the burdens don’t exist.  Sometimes it’s just easier to believe in the dream.

In fact, in line thirteen, the speaker goes so far as to say that the reason that he is together with his lover is because they are lying, their very relationship is the vehicle through which he tries to purge his insecurities.  He does this through what I think is a rather clever double meaning with “lie.”  Additionally, part of the reason that he seems to agree with her lies is that he wants to seem inexperienced to her, like a younger man would be.  He doesn’t just lie to her directly about his best days being behind him, but he lies to her through his pretended belief in her own falsities.  This, of course, doesn’t really work, but she too, suppresses the truth in order for them to continue their rather stupid repartee. 

Is the Monster the Monster?

I feel for the monster.  Which, to those who have read the novel, is not an unusual feeling, which is part of the reason that I am upset that the general population has an image in their minds of the monster being a dumb, unthinking fiend that should be eternally hated.  This, I feel I can contribute to the film industry.  Especially since the 1931 edition, where the monster was portrayed as both mute and beast-like, has the character been constantly abused by Hollywood and the public.  In response to such general lack of knowledge of the monster’s tragic and enlightened life, I write this.

Initially, the only fault of the monster is his own hideousness, he has yet to commit the horrible deeds he would later in the novel, and has yet to garner the animosity towards his creator that loneliness and rejection would later give him.  He is a fresh creature born into a world that hates him, he is implied to be kind and gentle by nature, and only society twists him.  The monster, and I almost hesitate to call him that, as Frankenstein seems the true monster in the book, is innately good.

As he was “born” to Frankenstein, it would make sense that as a result, Frankenstein would have a just responsibility to both the monster and society to educate the creature, and give it care.  Like Adam, the creature should have been nurtured by his creator, and given a companion.  But this was impeded by two things.  First, the monster was physically hideous, just absolutely repulsive, and flaws in not just Victor, but all of mankind led him to hate him because of his physical deformities.  Humanity’s inability to tolerate that which is different from us or our surroundings led to Victor’s rejection of the creature.   Secondly, Victor had no control over his creation, the monster was physically more powerful than he, and, as is evident from the monster’s eloquence and knowledge of Milton and French, the monster was equal or superior to Victor intellectually.  This problem in particular led Victor to deny the creature happiness by refusing to create him a mate.  Unlike God and Adam, Victor would have no control over his monster or its offspring with its mate, and thus considered it immoral to release a possible race of these creatures upon the Earth in opposition to nature and mankind. 

Given that it is clearly Victor’s fault that the monster felt rejection and despair at his situation, one must inevitably come to the atrocities that the monster committed.  Is he truly evil for having committed them?  I would argue he is not.  Society made him, not his own nature.  The monster was depressed by a life in which he was doomed to be alone forever, and as a result of his repeated disappointments in both Frankenstein and humanity, it is only to be expected that he would lash out.  Understandable that he would want to hurt his creator in the most intimate way possible, by killing his loved ones.  Perhaps his crimes need not have been so horrendous, but when considering the way in which he was doomed to live his life, and the way people treated the creature, it can almost be considered inevitable that he would act out in such a way. 

Myself as a Literary Scholar

As a literary scholar, I have had a rather narrow focus.  I have a preference for reading the classics, particularly non-fiction.  I’ve enjoyed philosophical texts, such as Plato’s Republic and the Symposium, as well as historical texts such the The History of the Peloponnesian War, or Livy’s monumental History of Rome, even going so far as to teach myself Latin to better understand Livy’s ideas, or those of Cicero in Rhetorica ad Herennium.    Don’t get me wrong, I’ve certainly read such more modern classics as Great Expectations, or Robinson Crusoe (of which there is also a Latin version…), but they have certainly been no particular emphasis or effort to read them.    

Classical texts hold a certain appeal to me, a rather romantic notion in fact.  They’re old, incredibly old, and yet, despite the time and language of their writing, they remain not only relevant to today’s society, but often, are still incredibly valued (Rhetorica ad Herennium for example, is still widely used as a rhetoric textbook two-thousand years after it was written), and the fact that something that displaced in time can still be relevant and interesting really appeals to me.  In addition, they don’t just give out information about their subject matter, but give additional details about the societies that they were created in, from the social jabs of Cicero to the admiration towards government from Vergil.

The problem is though, outside of school, I’ve only ever read books for pleasure.  I have rarely made notes in a book I have read for fun, and more rarely still do I attempt to analyze the book for theme, or the author’s underlying intent, or the reasons he or she used this or that word or metaphor.  I suppose this makes my prior reading rather shallow, though, in my humble opinion, rather broad. 

The vast majority of my in-depth reading has been the result of school and literature classes therein, and as a result, the number of individual books I’ve read deeply and with critical thought are relatively few, outside of a few favorites (The Great Gatsby being one of them).  Despite my shortcomings in terms of volume, I feel that my skills in being able to devise what it is exactly that an author is trying to say, and analyzing the ways in which they say it, are quite developed, not to the level I hope to achieve through school this year, but at least sufficiently enough to begin with. 

My particular shortcoming, however, comes from poetry.  I have had little experience reading poetry, nor any particular drive to do so.  This is a deficiency I hope to overcome during this year.  The causes for this are varied, but result mostly from a lack of interest and exposure.  I have rarely had to deal with poetry for any extended period in school as of yet, and there are very few poems that have really caught my attention, though I am rather fond of “Invictus” and “If-,” especially the prior.  Unfortunately, I feel that this might be an issue for me, given especially that the AP test contains a very large amount of poetry questions.