Beowulf: the monsters and the cynics

It is the final day of the year’s shortest month, and having achieved my writing goal for the month I am on the verge of throwing out yet another unfinished work of fiction. “Biding and boding like a masterwork” is my own internal sense of potentiality, yet I only seem to come close to the elegant expression of that inchoate desire in non-fiction. Fiction for me is a dark forest, and I have been lost too long. I despair of the way out. If this were the trade-off—the confines of conventional truth in return for expression of what I am convinced only I can say—then I would accept my lot gladly and you’d not find yourself reading this essay. But the confines of conventional truth chafe at the wrists. Trying to express the monsters and the dread in elegant and elegiac prose defies me, and so in desperation I simply write this: a footling cry as I am torn between the monsters of the forest I love and my own iron desire for clearly structured prose.

Somewhere, I remain convinced, there is indeed a masterwork. I have not found it yet. I’m not sure I hold any sure faith in its eventual discovery, either, because I am firmly of the belief that some writers never realize their potential. Many, perhaps, and I might be one of them. Aside from the tedious grieving, this essay attempts to evoke the monster’s blood-stained claw at the lintel, the cold iron driven clean through, a Grendel caught and captured in waterproof prose that can survive the whale-roads, the deep dive to the hag’s icy underground lair. I am interested in constructing monster prose that can sustain rough combat, and all my non-fiction is built on the tame suburban clay of the front brain. Monsters are back-brain beings, and I have not yet accessed the chill in the spine evoked by the immortal hwaet (“So,” in Heaney, a master’s decision proved upon my spine in ice water).

Martin Shaw speaks of the old myths having an essential resonance that is lost through hasty modification to conform to the demands of the modern. The world has not looked kindly on Jolie as Grendel’s mother (when it has looked at all). A swords-and-sandals epic trades the foreign grandeur of tragedy for domestic Hollywood spectacle.

In the same vein, Gladiator is an essentially modern tale, arguably a heavily conservative and thinly-disguised Christian hagiography that tugs at the emotions without pulling the invisible halter that holds each of us fast to the deep stories and their lands. We see Maximus’ hands in the wheat and the music swells and we feel we are in the right. We do not think of the sweat of the slaves that cultivated that soil, nor the screams of the children Rome displaced to make way for her fields. We do not think of our own blood-stained past.

This is what I mean by the demands of the modern: as Americans we required a hero digestible in terms of our narrative of individual exceptionalism, and so Russel Crowe (an exceptional actor himself) delivered. We left theaters that summer of 2000 feeling confirmed in ourselves, not challenged, nor awakened. And indeed that was not the purpose of the film, or of most stories told today. This is what I mean by cynicism: we believe stories are made to confirm us in who we are, and most of us believe the age of the great old stories is done.

If we don’t wish to be cynics, where are the deep waters? What if deep stories were there to be told, new myths to be captured, and few of us were listening? What if myth was not essentially past? I am always, eternally hearing that resonance inchoate within, but nothing I’ve written comes close to evoking it upon the page. I am a poor Homer. My Odysseus is stuck grinding coffee and looking to the sea, dreaming of a way home that grows more treacherous with each passing year, each gray hair.

I am not convinced the old days are gone, or the like of Homer or Vyasa may not walk among us still, but I am reasonably convinced very very few of us are interested in the work needed to attempt to reconstruct the secrets of inter-generational resonance that these composers mastered and that lie at the heart of myth. Mr. Shaw suggests this resonance is the end result of generations of careful polishing of the essential wood of the story, and he suggests the communal polishing itself is responsible for the remarkable hum these stories produce in the soul. Perhaps he is right. The biggest, the oldest stories are indeed living beings, but I do not think that means they were not composed. Mr. Gaiman has pointed out that stories composed by our forebears have out-lived every building ever built, and if that is so why should we not hope to compose so solidly again?

I am not interested in retelling the lost myths of Freja. Or in discovering Beo’s brother adrift and bringing him home through thick and thin to feasting. Mr. Gaiman, from whom I borrow the Freja example, suggests this kind of photocopy myth creation produces a bad story, since the result is neither yours nor the creation of the original author. To reframe more positively, perhaps a Stradivarius cannot be replicated, but a new master may so study the art of violin-making that his own violins resonate long after he has passed into dust.

There are no guidebooks here. Novels are written yearly in their murders and flocks and herds. Myth that has resonance, stories that will outlast us in our time, are much much rarer. Pooh Bear comes to mind. Frodo, perhaps. Luke & Leia Skywalker, or Morpheus, maybe.

I am a man in search of myth like a great boar, and whatever he is, he has not revealed himself to me yet.

I am a fool. I shall probably fail. And yet I quest.