The Source of Self-Regard

by Toni Morrison

  Yes, mother. I suggested earlier that evil has no father, but it should not come as a surprise that Grendel has a mother. In true folkloric, epic fashion, the bearer of evil, of destruction is female. Monsters, it seems, are born after all, and like her sisters—Eve, Pandora, Lot’s wife, Helen of Troy, and the female that sits at the gate of Milton’s hell, birthing vicious dogs who eat one another and are replaced by more and more litters from their mother’s womb—it turns out that Grendel’s mother is more repulsive, more “responsible” for evil than her son is. Interestingly enough, she has no name and cannot speak (I would like to follow these images, but at some other time). In any case, this silent, repulsive female is a mother, and unlike her child, does have a motive for murder—therefore she sets out immediately to avenge her son. She advances to the mead hall, interrupts the warriors reveling at their victory, and fills the pouch she carries with their mangled bodies. Her vengeance instigates a second, even more determined foray by Beowulf, this time on the monster’s territory and in his home. Beowulf swims through demon-laden waters, is captured, and, entering the mother’s lair, weaponless, is forced to use his bare hands. He fights mightily but unsuccessfully. Suddenly and fortunately, he grabs a sword that belongs to the mother. With her own weapon he cuts off her head, and then the head of Grendel’s corpse. A curious thing happens then: the victim’s blood melts the sword. The conventional reading is that the fiends’ blood is so foul it melts steel, but the image of Beowulf standing there with a mother’s head in one hand and a useless hilt in the other encourages more layered interpretations. One being that perhaps violence against violence—regardless of good and evil, right and wrong—is itself so foul the sword of vengeance collapses in exhaustion or shame.

  Beowulf is a classic epic of good vanquishing evil; of unimaginable brutality being overcome by physical force. Bravery, sacrifice, honor, pride, rewards both in reputations and wealth—all come full circle in this rousing medieval tale. In such heroic narratives, glory is not in the details; the forces of good and evil are obvious, blatant, the triumph of the former over the latter is earned, justified, and delicious. As Beowulf says, “It is always better / to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. /…So arise, my lord, and let us immediately / set forth on the trail of this troll-dam. / I guarantee you she will not get away, / not to dens under ground nor upland groves / nor the ocean floor. She’ll have nowhere to flee to.”

  Contemporary society, however, is made uneasy by the concept of pure, unmotivated evil, by pious, unsullied virtue, and contemporary writers and scholars search for more.

  One challenge to the necessary but narrow expectations of this heroic narrative comes from a contemporary writer, the late John Gardner, in his novel, titled Grendel. Told from the monster’s point of view, it is a tour de force and an intellectual and aesthetic enterprise that comes very close to being the sotto-voiced subject of much of today’s efforts to come to grips with the kind of permanent global war we now find ourselves engaged in. The novel poses the question that the epic does not: Who is Grendel? The author asks us to enter his mind and test the assumption that evil is flagrantly unintelligible, wanton, and undecipherable. By assuming Grendel’s voice, his point of view, Gardner establishes at once that unlike the character in the poem, Grendel is not without thought, and is not a beast. In fact he is reflecting precisely on real true beasts the moment the reader is introduced to him. When the novel opens he is watching a ram, musing, “Do not think my brains are squeezed shut, like the ram’s, by the roots of horns.” And “Why can’t these creatures discover a little dignity?”

  Gardner’s version has the same plot, characters, etc., as the original, and relies on similar descriptions and conventions: referring to women, for example, only queens have names. If Grendel’s mother has a name it is as unspeakable as she is unspeaking. Seamus Heaney’s introduction to his translation of Beowulf emphasizes the movement of evil from out there to in here, from the margins of the world to inside the castle, and focuses on the artistic brilliance of the poem, the “beautiful contrivances of its language”; Gardner, however, tries to penetrate the interior life—emotional, cognizant—of incarnate evil and prioritizes the poet as one who organizes the world’s disorder, who pulls together disparate histories into meaning. We learn in Gardner’s novel that Grendel distinguishes himself from the ram that does not know or remember his past. We learn that Grendel, in the beginning, is consumed by hatred and is neither proud nor ashamed of it. That he is full of contempt for the survivors of his rampages. Watching the thanes bury their dead, he describes the scene as follows: “On the side of the hill the dirge-slow shoveling begins. They throw up a mound for the funeral pyre, for whatever arms or legs or heads my haste has left behind. Meanwhile, up in the shattered hall, the builders are hammering, replacing the door…industrious and witless as worker ants—except that they make small, foolish changes, adding a few more iron pegs, more iron bands, with tireless dogmatism.” This contempt extends to the world in general. “I understood that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. I understood that, finally and absolutely, I alone exist. All the rest, I saw, is merely what pushes me, or what I push against, blindly—as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. I create the whole universe, blink by blink.”

  But the fundamental theme of the novel lies in Grendel’s possibilities—first, his encounter with shaped, studied, artistic language (as opposed to noise, groans, shouts, boasts) and, second, his dialogue with the dragon who sits atop the mountain of gold he has been guarding for centuries. Regarding the first, his encounter with the poet, who is called the Shaper, offers him the only possibility of transformation. Grendel knows the Shaper’s song is full of lies, illusion. He has watched carefully the battles of men and knows they are not the glory the Shaper turns them into. But he succumbs to the Shaper’s language nevertheless because of its power to transform, its power to elevate, to discourage base action. He defines the poet’s potency this way: “He reshapes the world….So his name implies. He stares strange-eyed at the mindless world and turns dry sticks to gold.” It is because of this shaped, elevated, patterned language that Grendel is able to contemplate beauty, recognize love, feel pity, crave mercy, and experience shame. It is because of the Shaper’s imagination that he considers the equation of quality with meaning. In short he develops a desperate hunger for the life of a completely human being. “My heart,” he says, “was light with Hrothgar’s goodness, and leaden with grief at my own bloodthirsty ways.” Overwhelmed with these reflections on goodness and light, he goes to the mead hall weeping for mercy, aching for community to assuage his utter loneliness. “I staggered out into the open and up toward the hall with my burden, groaning out, ‘Mercy! Peace!’ The harper broke off, the people screamed….Drunken men rushed me with battle-axes. I sank to my knees, crying, ‘Friend! Friend!’ They hacked at me, yipping like dogs.” So he reverts to the deep wilderness of his hatred. Yet he is still in turmoil, torn between “tears and a bellow of scorn.” He travels to the dragon for answers to his own cosmic questions: Why am I here? What is God? What is the world?

  At the end of a long and fascinating argument, loaded with the dragon’s cynicism, bitterness, and indifference, Grendel receives one word of advice from the dragon: “Get a pile of gold, and sit on it.” Between Grendel’s suspicion that noble language produces noble behavior (just as puny, empty language produces puny, empty behavior) and the dragon’s view of man’s stupidity, banality, and irrelevance, his own denial of “free will and intercession,” right there, exactly there, lies the plane on which civic and intellectual life rests, rocks, and rolls. Grendel’s dilemma is also ours. It is the nexus between the Shaper and the dragon; between Saint Augustine and Nietzsche, between art and science; between the Old Testament and the New, between swords and ploughshares. It is the space for as well as the act of thought; it is a magnetic space, pull
ing us away from reaction to thinking. Denying easy answers, and violence committed because, in crisis, it is the only thing one knows how to do.

  Absolute answers, like those Grendel wanted, cynically poised questions, like those the dragon offered, can dilute and misdirect the educational project. In this country, where competition is worshipped and crisis is the driving force of media-salted information, and where homogeneity and difference, diversity and conformity are understood to be the national ideal, we are being asked to both recoil from violence and to embrace it; to waver between winning at all costs and caring for our neighbor; between the fear of the strange and the comfort of the familiar; between the blood feud of the Scandinavians and the monster’s yearning for nurture and community. It was the pull of those opposites that trounced Grendel and that trouble and disable national, educational, and personal discourse.

  Crisis is a heightened, sometimes bloody, obviously dangerous, always tense confluence of events and views about those events. Volatility, theatricality, and threat swirl about in crisis. Crisis, like war, demands “final answers,” quick and definitive action—to douse flames, draw blood, soothe consciences.

  Sometimes the demand for quick and definitive action is so keen all energy is gathered to avoid the crisis of impending crisis. The effect of militarizing virtually every fluid situation and social problem has been encroaching inertia, if not established paralysis. It has also produced an increased appetite for ever more thrilling, intense presentations of crisis. (Note the plethora of televised entertainment devoted to ersatz, fake crises—survival in third-world countries among people for whom survival is an unremarkable condition of life.) This hunger is not different from numb insensitivity, is, in fact, a vivid expression of it. Once the taste for the blood images of conquest is introduced, it may not be easily slaked.

  I have elaborated upon this media version of crisis in order to distinguish it from conflict. Conflict is the clash of incompatible forces, the Shaper versus the dragon; a disharmony calling for adjustment, change, or compromise. Conflict recognizes legitimate oppositions, honest but different interpretations of data, contesting theories. These oppositions may be militarized, may have to be, but in the academy they should, must not be. In fact, they must be embraced if education is to occur. Conflict in the halls of the academy is unlike conflict in the malls, arcades, or on a battlefield. In academic halls versus arcade malls, conflict is not a screen game to play for its own sake, nor a social gaffe to avoid at all costs. It has a bad reputation only because we have been taught to associate it with winning and losing, with the desperate need to be right, to be alpha. With violence. Conflict is not another word for crisis or for war or for competition. Conflict is a condition of intellectual life, and, I believe, its pleasure. Firing up the mind to engage itself is precisely what the mind is for—it has no other purpose. Just as the body is always struggling to repair itself from its own abuse, to stay alive, so is the mind craving knowledge. When it is not busy trying to know, it is in disrepair.

  The mind really is a palace. Not only for its perception of symmetry and the outrageously beautiful, but also because it can invent, imagine, and, most important, it can delve.

  I like to think that John Gardner’s view will hold: that language—informed, shaped, reasoned—will become the hand that stays crisis and gives creative, constructive conflict air to breathe, startling our lives and rippling our intellect. I know that democracy is worth fighting for. I know that fascism is not. To win the former intelligent struggle is needed. To win the latter nothing is required. You only have to cooperate, be silent, agree, and obey until the blood of Grendel’s mother annihilates her own weapon and the victor’s as well.

  The Writer Before the Page

  I ONCE KNEW a woman named Hannah Peace. I say “knew,” but nothing could be less accurate. I was perhaps four years old when she was in the town where I lived. I don’t know where (or even if) she is now or to whom she was related then. She was not even a visiting friend. And I couldn’t to this day describe her in a way that would make her known in a photograph, nor would I recognize her if she walked into this room. But I have a memory of her and it’s like this: the color of her skin—the matte quality of it. Something purple around her. Also eyes not completely open. There emanated from her an aloofness that seemed to me kindly disposed. But most of all I remember her name—or the way people pronounced it. Never Hannah or Miss Peace. Always Hannah Peace—and more. Something hidden—some awe perhaps, but certainly some forgiveness. When they pronounced her name, they (the women and the men) forgave her something.

  That’s not much, I know: half-closed eyes, an absence of hostility, skin powdered in lilac dust. But it was more than enough to evoke a character—in fact any more detail would have prevented (for me) the emergence of a fictional character at all. What is useful—definitive—is the galaxy of emotion that accompanied the woman as I pursued my memory of her, not the woman herself.

  In the example I have given of Hannah Peace it was the having-been-easily-forgiven that caught my attention, and that quality, that “easily forgivenness” that I believe I remembered in connection with a shadow of a woman my mother knew, is the theme of Sula. The women forgive each other—or learn to. Once that piece of the constellation became apparent, it dominated the other pieces. The next step was to discover what there is to be forgiven among women. Such things must now be raised and invented because I am going to tell about feminine forgiveness in story form. The things to be forgiven are grave errors and violent misdemeanors, but the point was less the thing to be forgiven than the nature and quality of forgiveness among women—which is to say friendship among women. What one puts up with in a friendship is determined by the emotional value of the relationship. But Sula is not (simply) about friendship between women but between black women, a qualifying term the artistic responsibilities of which are what goes on before I ever approach the page. Before the act of writing, before the clean yellow legal pad or the white bond are the principles that inform the idea of writing. I will touch upon them in a moment.

  What I want my fiction to do is to urge the reader into active participation in the nonnarrative, nonliterary experience of the text. And to refuse him makes it difficult for him (the reader) to confine himself to a cool and distant acceptance of data. When one looks at a very good painting, the experience of looking is deeper than the data accumulated in viewing it. The same, I think, is true in listening to good music. Just as the literary value of a painting or a musical composition is limited, so too is the literary value of literature limited. I sometimes think how glorious it must have been to have written drama in sixteenth-century England, or poetry in Greece before Christ, or religious narrative in 1000 AD, when literature was need and did not have a critical history to constrain or diminish the writer’s imagination. How magnificent not to have to depend on the reader’s literary associations—his literary experience—which can be as much an impoverishment of the reader’s imagination as it is of a writer’s. It is important that what I write not be merely literary. I am most self-conscious about in my work being overcareful in making sure that I don’t strike literary postures. I avoid, too studiously perhaps, name-dropping, lists, literary references, unless oblique and based on written folklore. The choice of a tale or of folklore in my work is tailored to the character’s thoughts or actions in a way that flags him or her and provides irony, sometimes humor.

  Milkman, about to meet the oldest black woman in the world, the mother of mothers who has spent her life caring for helpless others, enters her house thinking of a European tale, “Hansel and Gretel,” a story about parents who abandoned their own children to a forest and a witch who made a diet of them. His confusion at that point, his racial and cultural ignorance and confusion, is flagged. Equally marked is Hagar’s bed being described as Goldilocks’s choice. Partly because of Hagar’s preoccupation with hair, and partly because, like Goldilocks, a housebreaker i
f ever there was one, she is greedy for things, unmindful of property rights or other people’s space, and Hagar is emotionally selfish as well as confused.

  This deliberate avoidance of literary references has become a firm if boring habit with me, not only because it leads to poses, not only because I refuse the credentials it bestows, but also because it is inappropriate to the kind of literature I wish to write, the aims of that literature, and the discipline of the specific culture that interests me. (Emphasis on me.) Literary references in the hands of writers I love can be extremely revealing, but they can also supply a comfort I don’t want the reader to have because I want him to respond on the same plane an illiterate or preliterature reader would have to. I want to subvert his traditional comfort so that he may experience an unorthodox one: that of being in the company of his own solitary imagination.

  My beginnings as a novelist were very much focused on creating this discomfort and unease in order to insist that the reader rely on another body of knowledge. However weak those beginnings were in 1965, they nevertheless pointed me toward the process that engages me in 1982: trusting memory and culling from it theme and structure. In The Bluest Eye the recollection of what I felt and saw upon hearing a child my own age say she prayed for blue eyes provided the first piece. I then tried to distinguish between a piece and a part (in the way that a piece of a human body is different from a part of a human body).

  As I began developing parts out of pieces, I found that I preferred them unconnected—to be related but not to touch—to circle, not line up, because the story of this prayer was the story of a shattered, fractured perception resulting from a shattered, splintered life. The novel turned out to be a composition of parts circling one another, like the galaxy accompanying memory. I fret the pieces and fragment aspect of memory because too often we want the whole thing. When we wake from a dream we want to remember all of it, although the fragment we are remembering may be—very probably is—the most important piece in the dream. Chapter and part designations, as conventionally used in novels, were never very much help to me in writing. Nor are outlines. (I permit their use for the sake of the designer and for ease in talking about the book. They are usually identified at the last minute.)