He glanced at me, suspicious. "You're not paying attention."
"I am!" I said, joining my hands to show my seriousness.
But he shook his head slowly. "Nothing interests you but excitement, violence."
"That's not true!" I said.
His eye opened wider, his body brightened from end to end. "You tell me what's true?" he said.
"I'm trying to follow you. I do my best," I said. "You should be reasonable. What do you expect?"
The dragon thought about it, breathing slowly, full of wrath. At last he closed his eyes: "Let us try starting somewhere else," he said. "It's damned hard, you understand, confining myself to concepts familiar to a creature of the Dark Ages. Not that one age is darker than another. Technical jargon from another dark age." He scowled as if hardly capable of forcing himself on. Then, after a long moment: "The essence of life is to be found in the frustrations of established order. The universe refuses the deadening influence of complete conformity. And yet in its refusal, it passes toward novel order as a primary requisite for important experience. We have to explain the aim at forms of order, and the aim at novelty of order, and the measure of success, and the measure of failure. Apart from some understanding, however dim-witted, of these characteristics of historic process..." His voice trailed off.
How does a dragon talk? Such is the problem John Gardner had to solve when he undertook to reinvent the epic poem Beowulf, a poem that, as every English-speaking student has learned, is the oldest European literary work written in a vernacular tongue to have come down to us. In the original work, slow and somber, Beowulf is the hero who fights against the forces of evil : the monster Grendel, whom he kills in the first part of the poem, and the dragon whom he will likewise kill in the second part, but who will mortally wound him. In Gardner's fiction, however, it is Grendel who tells his story, for the question of knowing how one gets to be a monster produces a more interesting viewpoint than the one defined by the good. One thus discovers that if Grendel kills men, it is because he is simultaneously the witness, judge, and impotent voyeur of the strange power fiction has over them, and confers upon them. He has seen them build themselves a destiny, a heroic past, a glorious future, with the words invented for them by the Shaper, or the Poet i n the strong sense of giver of form. Grendel is aware of the lies in these words, but this knowledge excludes him from what is taking shape before his eyes: his lucidity brings him nothing but hatred and despair. Thus, he chooses, forever solitary, to be the Great Destroyer for human beings, or more precisely the Great Deconstructor. He will derive a bitter, monotonous pleasure from the proof he never ceases inflicting on humans of the impotence of their Gods, the senseless character of their lives, and the vanity of their heroes.
Hatred is a choice, not a consequence. Before becoming the scourge of humankind, Grendel met a being much older than himself, the dragon that Beowulf was to fight one day. This dragon is "beyond good and evil," beyond both the passion for constructing and for destroying illusory constructions. For him, nihilistic rage is just as absurd as belief, for everything is tied together, everything goes hand in hand, creation and destruction, lies and authenticity. And he knows that Grendel will choose excitement and violence, despite his advice, the only one he can give: seek out gold and sit on it...
The homage of fiction to philosophy. It is fairly easy to give voice to a denouncer, an idol-smasher, a denier of all belief. Yet it is much harder to give voice to a nonhuman knowledge, more ancient than humankind, able to see farther than the insignificant ripple they create in the river of time. To escape the human point of view, and to do so with the calm self-evidence that is appropriate, as if the workings of the universe belonged to what is given, beyond all conquest and hypothesis, Gardner turned to the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, copying out entire passages from Whitehead's last book, Modes of Thought.
In what follows, Grendel was to encounter Whitehead a second time. It happened in the course of an incursion that took him toward the circle of the Gods, those statues that terrorized men ask in vain for protection against him. Grendel meets the blind Ork, the eldest and wisest of the priests. He decides to have some fun and, before killing Ork, he asks him to confess his faith, and say who is the King of the Gods. This time, in breathless succession, it is the God of Science and the Modern World, the principle of limitation, ultimate irrationality, then that of Process of Reality, with his infinite patience, his tender concern that nothing may be lost, that come from the blind man's lips. Grendel, bewildered, lets his prey get away.
The words of a dragon, surging forth from the depths of the ages, associated with the neutrality of one for whom epochs, importances, and arrogances succeed one another, but also words of trance, come from nowhere, able to rout Grendel, who has declared war on the poet's tale-spinning: the reader has now been warned. It is a strange tongue that will gradually be elaborated here, a language that challenges all clear distinctions between description a nd tale-spinning, and induces a singular experience of disorientation in the heart of the most familiar experiences. It is a language that can scandalize, or else madden, all those who think they know what they know, but also all those for whom to approach the non-knowing at the heart of all knowledge is an undertaking that is meticulous, grave, and always to be taken up again.
~~Thinking With Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts -by- Isabelle Stengers
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