How John Gardner Turns Ideas into Action

Part of: The Deep Reader

This article discusses chapters 5–6 of Grendel and the opening of October Light, including consequential events and family history in those passages.

The apple receives an extraordinary amount of attention before Grendel throws it. He picks it up, polishes it on the hair of his arm, smiles, and talks. Across the hall, Unferth is trying to speak as a hero should. A trestle table's harvest has given the monster another way to conduct the encounter, and he takes his time discovering its possibilities.

The delay is part of the cruelty. We can see an ordinary object becoming an instrument for destroying the scene Unferth believes he has entered. A sword raised against a monster promises one sort of story; an apple polished while the monster mocks the swordsman's language prepares another. Gardner lets the argument about heroism catch a physical form.

His teaching becomes especially useful beside such a passage. In The Art of Fiction, a writer's choices are answerable to the experience they produce. Reading his novels closely adds a further complication: a character can borrow a way of seeing that makes an experience compelling and makes his conduct worse. We need to follow both what the fiction enables us to inhabit and what it gives us grounds to judge.

How near is the voice?

Gardner's psychic-distance examples in The Art of Fiction proceed from an external account of a man in winter toward the man's vocabulary and bodily discomfort. “Henry hated snowstorms” still reports a feeling from a little way off. With “Snow,” followed by its intrusion into clothing and sensation, the language puts the reader inside an irritated response.

The movement changes who appears to select the words, how much explanation intervenes, and what the sentence assumes we already share. Grammatical person supplies no fixed setting: a first-person narrator can report himself from a considerable distance, or revise the impression his earlier self has just made.

Grendel's arrival before the dragon offers that double access. “My heart shook” gives us the frightened creature's immediate condition. The surrounding description keeps bringing the dragon toward familiar human behavior: his elderly voice, his proprietorial concern for the treasure, his enjoyment of frightening a visitor. Vastness and humiliation coexist. We inhabit Grendel's terror while hearing him find embarrassing, sometimes comic comparisons for its source.

Gardner explicitly permits departures from conventional distance: “Variations of all kinds are possible.” His demand is that the choice be controlled. The qualification prevents us from turning the examples into a ladder that every scene ought to descend. In Grendel, the changing mixture of sensation and commentary is part of the narrator's character. Flatten it into sustained immediacy and we would lose some of his talent for watching, explaining, and deceiving himself.

The dragon leaves more than an argument

The dragon's lesson arrives through an unequal encounter. He can terrify Grendel, make him look foolish, and withdraw his amusement the moment the visitor touches a jewel. His authority has a bodily enforcement mechanism before his account of the world has persuaded anyone.

For a moment, Grendel's fear even opens a possibility the dragon opposes. Thinking about how human beings must feel when they see him, Grendel decides that frightening them for sport is different from killing to eat. The distinction is compromised by his self-serving account of predation, but it is still a limit he has begun to imagine. The dragon ridicules it.

Later in the encounter, the dragon tells him that terror stimulates human achievement and that another threat would replace him if he withdrew. Grendel suspects that the apparent explanation is flattering his cruelty. He says, “I refuse.” The scene has supplied resistance as well as instruction.

Chapter 6 makes a simple story of conversion untenable. Grendel reports a pervasive change in how the world feels, then identifies a separate discovery: the dragon has made him invulnerable to weapons. Soon afterward, approaching Hrothgar's hall, he still says he does not intend to frighten the men for nothing. His hostility, his attraction to the hall, and his occasional killing all have histories; the visit has not created them from empty space.

The charm alters what an encounter can cost him. When a guard strikes and the sword fails to wound him, surprise precedes comprehension. The narration slows around the two bodies and the useless weapon. Only as other attacks fail does his laughter gather, and his fear gives way to the pleasure of demonstrating what he can do. The first systematic raid follows later.

This sequence separates a proposition, a changed capacity, and an action. The dragon's account can help Grendel interpret the humans as ridiculous; invulnerability lets him act on contempt under radically altered conditions. The book also preserves habitual fear after the danger has changed. Ideas, power, and learned responses move at different speeds.

For a writer revising a philosophical scene, that unevenness is worth more than an eloquent speech followed by convenient obedience. Keep the character's resistance. Identify what practical circumstance changes, what the character has wanted already, and what new explanation becomes available afterward. If the behavior would follow from the changed circumstance alone, the speech may be claiming more causal power than the story has given it.

Unferth cannot choose the terms

Unferth initially has a script for the confrontation: a warrior announces himself, defeats the monster or dies in the attempt, and earns remembrance. Grendel's discovery that he can humiliate him supplies a more absorbing activity than another uncontested killing.

The apple's preparation stretches the interval in which the two characters expect different things. Unferth keeps reaching for elevated forms of address. Grendel talks about the inconvenience of maintaining heroic dignity and continues polishing. As the fruit starts flying, the warrior's speech breaks into an outraged response to what is happening to his body. The action has made his preferred register increasingly hard to sustain.

Gardner connects the mockery to the earlier encounter through a sensory recurrence. Grendel notices the dragon's smell strengthening, “as if my teasing were bringing the old beast near.” The qualification preserves the narrator's perception. We need not turn it into a literal reappearance, or a proof that he now agrees with every proposition the dragon has uttered. The association makes a manner of treating someone recur in another relationship.

Unferth then does something Grendel didn't predict: he follows him to the cave. That action gives the hero's position resistance to the monster's account. His aspiration cannot be dismissed solely as something performed for spectators, since he has entered a place where the spectators are absent. Yet he also imagines the song his death will earn. Gardner leaves the competing motives together, and lets Grendel exploit their inconsistency.

The decisive act is withholding a killing. Grendel blocks his mother from approaching, waits through Unferth's exhausted declarations, and promises to carry him home. “So much for poetry” is the monster's claim about the result. A creature strong enough to determine whether the encounter ends in death can deny his opponent the conclusion that would vindicate him.

The subsequent handling doesn't let gentleness settle the moral judgment. Grendel carries the sleeping man back and kills the two guards at the hall. The preserved hero's life becomes a continuing humiliation. Kindness of movement, isolation from an audience, and survival all change their meaning within the larger action.

Sally reads herself into a different mood

October Light places the problem of influence inside reading itself. In chapter 1, Sally Abbott begins a battered paperback after her brother James's violence has driven her into her room. Gardner credits the embedded smugglers' story to a collaboration with his wife, Joan. Its position within Sally's experience is what gives the first crossing its force.

The outer narration follows her reluctance, her physical handling of the book, and her gradual surrender of attention. Then the paperback begins. Its central figure, Peter Wagner, finds life and even the prospect of death boring. Almost immediately, Sally interrupts: “Isn't it the truth!”

The return to her room revises what agreement sounded like. Her response partly repeats a phrase she used when her late husband read aloud. Fury at James, habit, loneliness, and a slight release from the room have entered her assent. We have heard a judgment being made before we are given its full occasion.

The next interruption is more painful. A joke about the would-be suicide's good sense briefly amuses her, then recalls the death of her nephew Richard. The memory brings James back as a bereaved father whose cold, rough hand she once held. It supplies a relationship that her present anger would prefer to suppress. The narrator even calls the memory an “enemy to her perfectly reasonable anger,” letting the approving phrase expose how strenuously she is defending that anger.

She resumes reading. The outer voice describes the paperback's rhythm entering her mood and enlarging the scale of her disgust. The effect includes both absorption and distance: Sally is carried along, while we can compare what the book gives her with what her memory has briefly restored.

At these crossings, the two narrative levels exchange information. Staying wholly inside the paperback would lose Sally's reception of it; staying wholly in her room would lose the actual language that attracts and offends her. The alternating passages let us experience persuasion and examine it, including its competition with a more intimate knowledge of another person.

Gardner's teaching can help us notice whether a sentence sustains an experience, and his fiction asks us to follow what happens when an experience becomes persuasive. Sally can put the paperback down and pick it up again; these early returns find her with a changing relation to the brother downstairs. The writer kept those changes available to us, even when she would rather read past them.

Sources

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, Alfred A. Knopf, 1984, chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5; psychic distance, pp. 111–112.

John Gardner, Grendel, chapters 5–6, in the primary-text selections in Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel, eds., Primary Sources on Monsters, Arc Humanities Press, 2018, pp. 310–316. The reprint abridges portions of the dragon's philosophical exposition; the analysis above concerns the reproduced encounters and their actions.

John Gardner, October Light, Open Road Media, 2010, chapter 1, “The Patriot's Rage, and the Old Woman's Finding of the Trashy Book by the Bedside”; first entry into the embedded novel, “The Drowned Man,” and the ensuing returns to Sally. The acknowledgments credit Joan Gardner's collaboration on the smugglers' story.