Ork versus Orc

                In Gardner’s Grendel, Gardner adopts William Blake’s mythological figure “Orc” by taking Orc’s symbolic meanings and using it as a medium to explain the concept of destruction in his novel. Orc is, basically, a positive figure that technically symbolizes destruction, but yet in terms of revolution and freedom. Orc is greatly known as a figure that goes against Urizen (the angel that represents tradition). In many of Blake’s stories, Orc is used as a force that influenced the French Revolution and brings a sense of ambition and freedom to people with lost hope. The most interesting trait of Orc is that William Blake refuses to make him a hero, but yet a mere spirit that inhabits people to fight for revolution and freedom.

                In Gardner’s novel, Gardner uses Ork (Orc with a  “k”) as a priest that finally sees God as a limitation rather than a figure of hope and safety. The priest says on page 131 when Grendel appears to be a God and asks what Ork believes of the King of the Gods, “The King of Gods is the ultimate limitation and His existence is the ultimate irrationality.” Ork has a release of hope when he says this, tearing up and seeing the Destroyer as his savior rather than the devil. In this way, Gardner also adopts the “Milton concept” on how God is bad, and Satan is good, because Satan is freedom and God is holding people back. Ork, realizing this, takes on the mythological Orc’s traits by accepting his idea of freedom and that revolution needs to be taken place before any true hope can happen because right now the only hope they have is an artificial disguise that the Shaper takes and now the Shaper is dying.

                Destruction is one of the main themes in the novel and is still an interesting concept in literature because a lot of times destruction does not just have the connotation of evil and darkness, but of revolution and the idea of starting over. Gardner points out when he brings Ork into the story, that the kingdom is corrupt. The kingdom is being ruled by a dying figure that holds the power of God in the Kingdom, which is slowly killing all of the civilians because they have relied on this figure so deeply that they do not know how to survive without him. When Ork tries bringing this back to the other priests and liberates on his findings, they use religion against him and claim that he is nuts and that he has lost his mind, when really he just holds the fate of seeing the destroyer as a savior and finally understands that he was right about the kingdom. Sadly when he confronts the other priests, they dismiss him and say that God would never appear in front of him. 

Robert Creely

“OhNo”

If you wander far enough

You will come to it

And when you get here

They will give you a place to sit

For yourself, in a nice chair,

And all your friends will be there

With smiles on their faces

And they will likewise all have places.

                In Robert Creely’s poem “Ohno” he explores the fundamental concepts of life after death. Though he never says the word “death” literally, the speaker implies that your soul is wandering away from life, meeting the people you had lost during life. To create this idea, the speaker first gives it a grave (no pun intended) tone, that illustrates the idea of walking away from your usual so-called “bubble”. Wander, in connotation, means to walk away aimlessly without any true guide. If the speaker was implying life, the speaker would have used a different word like “follow” or “steer” because life is practically set up for an individual, making them, if only staying the process of life, not confused or aimless. The speaker tries to use this in the first stanza to bring upon the idea that death is isolation, but when the speaker hits the last line of the first stanza the speaker brings in the word “They”. They, a word for camaraderie, implies that the end of the journey there are new set of beings ready to accept the individual, placing the speaker in an unusual atmosphere that is different than before. These people could be angels, dead relatives, or merely people who have died in general.  

                In the second stanza, Creely develops a positive yet cryptic tone that implies that the place the individual landed is not a regular place. The speaker brings affectionate words like “friends” and “smiles”. But when read the whole stanza together, it brings upon a creepy feeling that these smiling friends are not smiling to be friendly but because they were waiting for him. The speaker says, as if getting for the speaker’s entrance toward this new world, “for yourself, in a nice chair”, implying that the friends had made a permanent place for him there. The point of view also develops a creepy feeling toward the piece. The point of view is second person, but it also acts as if the speaker is still talking about himself retelling a story. The speaker is retelling it so to the point and descriptive to the scene it makes it seem like a trap, rather than a welcoming. The speaker uses lines in the poem like, “they will likewise all have places” and “And when you get there/they will give you a place to sit”. The control that this character does not have shows a sign that the speaker will be there permanently, rather than a nice visit. The speaker obviously knows this as it is happening by the other characters awkward and feels a lack of control. The speaker, knowing there is no going back, takes the seat and joins the camaraderie. 

                In Grendel  by John Gardner, Gardner creates the world-wide philosophical question, “What’s is more monstrous: man or beast?”. In hope to answer this, he takes the antagonist Grendel from Beowulf and twists Grendel into a cynical, yet emotional, character that hosts two different monsters inside of him: a beast and a man. In this first chapter Grendel is introduced as a being that lives in the deepest of the forest and lives like an animal but has the sophistication of a man, with complex thoughts and a range of emotion. Though most people blame his anger on his animalistic side, he craves the ability to communicate, and in some ways to be a part of the community. For example he, like the rest of human society, is manipulated by the shaper, but yet still has the survival instincts of a beast. Though Gardner approaches this as a unique and different idea, there have been countless characters just like Grendel, except they were introduced as werewolves, or wolves that can appear as men.

                Remus and Romulus were, in a nutshell, two demigod brothers in Roman Mythology that were meant to be strong, fearless men but instead got thrown into the river to drown. Their father, a Roman God named Ares, forced a she-wolf to save them before they could drown. The she-wolf granted them her milk, feeding them and sheltering them in the only way she could because she could not communicate and continued to mother them until they could return to society. Though they were obviously more sophisticated then her, for a moment in time they were nothing more than humanistic wolves themselves because they held an emotional attachment to the she-wolf and they saw her, despite being intellectually different, as their mother and lived like her. While they were not actually the physically form of werewolves, they still held the issues of a werewolf.

                Though Grendel is on the opposite of Remus & Romulus because he is actually born a beast, they share the same story line. Grendel and the brothers are both in the same archetypal situation; they live between two worlds because they are born as one type of species but are unconsciously living like the other. Remus & Romulus for instance, should have stayed in the wolf pack, as Grendel should have been accepted and granted into society. This could be a cause of their irrational decisions when they fully step foot into their worlds. When Grendel lets the beast take him over because of his anger toward his humanistic side, he turns into a mass murderer and kills half the town. When Remus & Romulus step foot in society and take hold of the throne of Rome, they both commit terrible acts because they are incapable of reentering society in a normal manner. Romulus for example, broke human ethics and raped a large amount of women, then started a war.

                Personally, I do not think there is only one answer to Gardener’s question. I think there are a thousand answers that can go along with this question, but if seen compared to Remus & Romulus’ tale, it is easy to say that his monstrous acts are because he is a mix between two worlds.  

                T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” the speaker questions the overall question of what a love song is. Though the poem does not speak about love directly, it casts out the feelings of isolation and the effects it can have on someone’s well being. The speaker states on lines 80-81, “Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed”  illustrates the pain and misery, and what it can turn an individual into, alike to Sherwood Anderson. In Sherwood Anderson’s novel Winesburg, Ohio Sherwood takes individuals just like the speaker of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and shapes them into grotesques, because of how their heartburning truth had taken over their life and brought them, emotionally, away from society.

                According to Anderson’s requirements of what a grotesque is, the main speaker of Eliot’s poem is defined as one as well. The speaker says on line 15, “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes”, in which begins his imagery with the color yellow, symbolizing cowardice and deceit. Most of the characters in Anderson’s novel have cowardice tendencies, like Elizabeth Williard in “Mother”.  George Williard’s mother, Elizabeth Williard, had always been too scared to leave her husband, though she despises him and is deeply unhappy in her current situation. Anderson says on page 14, after watching a terrible situation between a helpless cat and a violent baker, “After that she did not look along the alleyway any more, but tried to forget the contest between the bearded man and the cat.” In Elizabeth’s situation, she would rather be blind to the ugly truth than see it, deceiving herself, and being a coward.

                Also, in that same line, Anderson and Eliot hold parallels. “Window panes” was a large symbol in Anderson’s novel, often times symbolizing a threshold or a barrier. In most of the situations, a character was looking out the window from inside somewhere, aching to leave, but for whatever reason, could not. For instance, in “Mother”, Elizabeth hopes to see guidance and hope when she looks out the window, but only finds a cold fight.

                Also, the speaker also personifies this yellow smoke, hinting that it could possibly be a person. On line 24, the speaker in Eliot’s poem says, “For the yellow smoke that slides up the street”. Smoke, a visible but at the same time invisible substance, is seen as a living thing in the poem. Many characters in Anderson’s novel holds the same form, like Wing Biddlebaum, who insists on being around people but at the same time draws back and is afraid to be fully seen. For instance, whenever Wing Biddlebaum would get in a rant, George would hope for him to continue but when Wing realizes he was going too far and almost opens up too much, he puts his hands in his pockets and returns to being invisible.