Grendel’s Crisis: Aesthetic Nihilism
Billboards, magazines, and social media always promote the smartest, richest, and most beautiful people in the world. People that live the dream of the commoners. But can it be useful to create unrealistic standards— or beautiful illusions— for humans? In his novel Grendel, John Gardner explores the idea of illusion in society through Grendel’s questioning of human society. Modern society is formed on illusion, and the ones to best protect or destroy society are the ones who best understand the nature of illusion, especially when it comes to beauty.
Grendel is the clear enemy of society, the monotony of his lonely days broken up only by the drama of faux-heroes such as Unferth or war between nation-states. …show more content…
While Grendel and the dragon believe that nihilism enables them to terrorize society, as every life and death is inconsequential, Beowulf rejects this outcome. He instead focuses on a different theory known as “optimistic nihilism”— that people should always take the opportunity to make constructive choices and eliminate evil whenever possible. Beowulf clearly juxtaposes the two philosophies with his diction— he tells Grendel’s world of “murder,” “burn,” “dark nightmare-history, time-as-coffin,” but also of an alternative nihilism, where “time is the mind, the hand that makes (fingers on harpstrings, hero-swords, the acts, the eyes of queens)” (170). In his eye, in the human eye, meaning is something to be constructed like poetry. Monsters will destroy, but good— the beautiful poetry and the innocent youth— will always …show more content…
Humans “gave the clock a face, \ the chair a back, \ the table four stout legs” (Mueller 3-5) to feel safer in a world of personified entities. Humans group “inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile” (Collins 13) together in thesauruses in order to make composing literature easier. The reason why the Shaper’s words and Wealtheow’s beauty is so influential on the people is that people are conditioned to mistaken objects for the ideas the represent and forgetting how they actually exist. The mainstream education of poetic nursery rhymes and an implementation of a large, occasionally-redundant vocabulary causes these two misleading systems of
Billboards, magazines, and social media always promote the smartest, richest, and most beautiful people in the world. People that live the dream of the commoners. But can it be useful to create unrealistic standards— or beautiful illusions— for humans? In his novel Grendel, John Gardner explores the idea of illusion in society through Grendel’s questioning of human society. Modern society is formed on illusion, and the ones to best protect or destroy society are the ones who best understand the nature of illusion, especially when it comes to beauty.
Grendel is the clear enemy of society, the monotony of his lonely days broken up only by the drama of faux-heroes such as Unferth or war between nation-states. …show more content…
While Grendel and the dragon believe that nihilism enables them to terrorize society, as every life and death is inconsequential, Beowulf rejects this outcome. He instead focuses on a different theory known as “optimistic nihilism”— that people should always take the opportunity to make constructive choices and eliminate evil whenever possible. Beowulf clearly juxtaposes the two philosophies with his diction— he tells Grendel’s world of “murder,” “burn,” “dark nightmare-history, time-as-coffin,” but also of an alternative nihilism, where “time is the mind, the hand that makes (fingers on harpstrings, hero-swords, the acts, the eyes of queens)” (170). In his eye, in the human eye, meaning is something to be constructed like poetry. Monsters will destroy, but good— the beautiful poetry and the innocent youth— will always …show more content…
Humans “gave the clock a face, \ the chair a back, \ the table four stout legs” (Mueller 3-5) to feel safer in a world of personified entities. Humans group “inert, static, motionless, fixed and immobile” (Collins 13) together in thesauruses in order to make composing literature easier. The reason why the Shaper’s words and Wealtheow’s beauty is so influential on the people is that people are conditioned to mistaken objects for the ideas the represent and forgetting how they actually exist. The mainstream education of poetic nursery rhymes and an implementation of a large, occasionally-redundant vocabulary causes these two misleading systems of