Side Note

I'm on my way to bed and now I'm really wishing that I hadn't made writing about a psycho that kills you in your dreams the last thing I did tonight. Oh well. Happy Halloween.

In Honor of Halloween

Because it is Halloween, I felt it necessary to post one entry to acknowledge it. Just one. And I’m probably going to have nightmares after this, just for irony’s sake.

The story I’m talking about is one that started off scary, and then gradually became the joke of horror movies, being far funnier than they are scary. Admittedly the movies are not scary at all (unless you are under the age of 11 or have a very weak stomach).  But the story itself is horrifying, and still manages to terrify me simply because of the concept.

The story I’m talking about is the classic story of Freddie Krueger, the nightmare of Elm Street.

Before you lose all interest, allow me to explain why this is scary.

A Nightmare on Elm Street manages to focus on the most basic fears of people. One is the loss of identity. Another is the loss of control. And the third is a child or innocent coming into harm’s way.

Allow me to explain further. Freddie Krueger is the son of a nun who became trapped in a mental asylum overnight and was raped repeatedly by the inmates. It is for this reason that he is known as “the bastard son of one hundred maniacs.” If the subject of rape was disturbing enough, then the product of those rapes definitely is. It left Freddie not knowing his true parentage. Nobody was able to determine who his father really was, which left him with no true sense of identity apart from being a bastard child and the product of rape. He was born without an identity, and had to carry that burden with him the rest of his life.

Freddie attacks people when they are asleep. Disregard how he got the power to enter people’s dreams, because that’s not what matters here. The part of this power that creates fear is that these people are attacked at their most vulnerable moments. They are in a dream that they have absolutely no control over. Not only are they unable to fight back, but they are also alone in their own minds and are essentially destroyed from the inside out in a way that they have no control over. They have lost all control, and are destroyed in their weakest moments.

Freddie typically preys on children, specifically the children of the people who killed him (so you’re safe. Congratulations!) The fear of children being hurt is an easy enough fear to comprehend: people feel obligated to protect those who are innocent and helpless, and don’t like seeing them come into harm’s way. That’s why Slenderman and the Toothfairy from that horror movie are so freaky. Like Freddie, they find joy in destroying young and innocent lives.

 These fears are the core of the story, and they are what make it scary without the ridiculous special effects and weird methods of deaths. They target the most common fears of people and illustrate them. That is why they are still very relevant and still very scary. 

A Comparison of a Not-So-Good King and A Serpent

Something that disturbs me about John Gardner’s Grendel is that it makes the concepts of good and evil so indistinguishable from each other that, in the long run, everything seems very similar.  What I mean is that the main character, Grendel, is partially human and partially beastly. Therefore, he is a sort of link between what is referred to as the civilized world and the primal world. He is a character that would usually be labeled as evil, but because he is so human, it is difficult to just say flat out “Yep. Grendel is the bad guy.” Furthermore, because he has traits that make him so human but also so beastly at the same time, it by comparison makes the humans seem beastly and the beasts seem human.

Foil after foil is created: Grendel to the dragon, the dragon to the shaper, Grendel to the shaper, the shaper to Wealtheow, Hrothgar to the shaper, Grendel to Unferth, this one to that one and those guys and the list could keep going. However, there is one foil that, even though I was able to recognize it, I’m still not exactly sure how I feel about it.

The dragon and Hrothgar are very similar. At first it struck me as odd that they should be. After all, Hrothgar is supposedly a “good king” according to Beowulf. He is the ring-giving, the symbol of order and unity, the very heart of the Danes.  He is the person who originally brought the Danes together as a brotherhood. The dragon is the complete opposite, being a nihilist and a loner and probably a little crazy (although that’s arguable). In black and white terms, the dragon is the evil one and Hrothgar is good, and that’s all there is too it. However, they are too similar to let their likenesses go ignored. Both the dragon and the king seek gold and guard it. The king gathers it in his mead hall and distributes it to his thanes, and the dragon collects it and counts it. Additionally, both of them have an affinity for virgins. Hrothgar collects Wealtheow as a sort of war agreement and makes her the queen, and dragons typically just take them and guard them for no apparent reason. I don’t really understand the purpose of that, but to each his own.

Basically, both parties seek to acquire things that really serve them no purpose. They hoard virtually useless things, and their greed creates stagnation. The dragon’s greed and lust for virgins and gold is predominantly why he is associated with evil. Yet Hrothgar is doing the exact same thing.

This is where I am ambivalent. Is the foil of the dragon and the king to display Hrothgar as evil and beastly, or to display the dragon as human and good? Or even more likely, it is present to display both as neither good nor evil? Personally, I think that the foil is to demonstrate that all men, no matter how “good” they seem, are inherently evil and self-serving, but even now I can’t be sure that that was the intention. That’s the reason why this is both my favorite and most hated foil. It compares the king, someone who supposedly epitomizes good, to the dragon, a creature so indifferent to creation and destruction that he has to be evil. 

Link to "Plato's Allegory of the Cave"

http://www.greenvalleyhs.org/library/Documents/PlatoAllegoryCave.pdf

A Personal Response to "Plato's Allegory of the Cave"

As another companion piece for my current read (John Gardner’s Grendel) I read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.  In summary, the allegory serves as an explanation of enlightenment: it opens in a cave where many prisoners are chained to a rock facing a wall, where they can observe nothing but their shadows. When one of the prisoners is freed and is able to escape to the outside world, he is opened up to knowledge that he never had in his days in the cave. When he returns to the cave, he tries to share his knowledge with the other prisoners, but is ridiculed and is considered stupid for understanding things differently from the rest of the prisoners.

                Grendel directly parallels the allegory: similar to the prisoner, Grendel makes an ascent to the surface world, an ascension that brings him out of the reality that has been created for him since his birth and up to the surface world where he finds himself in a world much bigger than he ever knew. They, alone, are the ones who are able to escape to the outside world and “contemplate the sun” as Plato calls it. This is what sets them apart; they are the enlightened, the sole possessors of knowledge that nobody else of their company can comprehend without experiencing it for themselves.

                As Plato says “It is the task of the enlightened not only to ascend to learning and to see the good but to be willing to descend again to those prisoners and to share their troubles and their honors, whether they are worth having or not. And this they must do, even with the prospect of death.”

                This statement brings me to the ultimate question: is it better to be enlightened, or is it safer to stay in the cave and never leave it?

                As the freed prisoner from the allegory found, once you leave the cave there is no way to return to it. Similarly, after Grendel was “charmed” by the dragon and given knowledge, he found it to be a burden, and wished that he was “curled up, asleep like a bear, in [his] cave” (pg. 137). This statement carries the full weight of Grendel’s burden. He is carrying the weight of knowledge, weight that he is finding himself having difficulty lugging around with him. Though it can be argued that Grendel (and the prisoner, for that matter) are better off knowing what the world has to offer, the burden they have to carry outweighs the benefit of the knowledge.

                This theme is seen over and over again: it is in Frankenstein, where Dr. Frankenstein pursues knowledge only to have it destroy him after his newly gained knowledge allows him to create a monster. It is in Winesburg, Ohio, when George Willard takes a “backward view of life” and is open to insecurity, pain, and struggle for the first time in his 18 years of life. It is seen in The Catcher in the Rye, when Holden Caulfield is able to see through the “phoniness” of others, and basically becomes an existentialist because of it. Over and over again, in novel after novel and page after page, the cycle is repeated: a hero is given knowledge, and it destroys him. So why seek it in the first place?

                Personally, I think it is better not to know. That is my personal opinion and I’m stating it expecting some criticism, but I would prefer not to know. A downfall is inevitable, so why speed it up by seeking knowledge that is not necessary to achieve happiness? Much like Grendel, I would rather be asleep in my cave. 

A Link to "The Mental Traveller"

http://www.bartleby.com/235/134.html

An Attempt at William Blake's "The Mental Traveller"

  Upon reading “The Mental Traveller” by William Blake, D.G. Rossetti  who initially published the manuscript declared it a “hopeless riddle.” It is with that knowledge that I very happily decided to take a crack at interpreting it to accompany my current read, John Gardner’s Grendel. Gardner opens the book with an except from the poem: “and if the babe is born a boy/ he’s given to a woman old/ who nails him down upon a rock/ catches his shrieks in cups of gold” (lines 9-12)

                The poem is rich with imagery, specifically biblical imagery. The aforementioned child seems like a model of Christ, as he is pierced on “both his hands and feet” and crowned with “iron thorns around his head.” Additionally, the “woman old” who initially nails him to the rock and feeds off of shrieks closely resembles the Whore of Babylon from the book of Revelation, a lady who was “adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations” (Revelation 17:4).

                Additionally, mythological references are present, particularly a reference to Prometheus. Similar to the infant boy, Prometheus is chained to a rock as an eternal punishment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to man. His liver is pecked out daily by an eagle. The liver was believed to be the organ associated with life and emotion in the same way that the heart is the organ that is more modernly associated with emotion.

                However, the biblical imagery and mythological references seem very ironic when juxtaposed with the author of the poem himself: William Blake is probably best known for developing his own mythology based on religion in which God is a tyrannical figure, while the Luciferian  figure Ork is regarded as a hero for rebelling against the tyrant god. The majority of the belief system was based on the concept of contrast, the idea that with light there must be dark, and with creation there must be destruction to create balance.

                In my personal interpretation of “The Mental Traveller,” the idea of this balance was what I found to be one of the most prevalent themes. The poem is structured in a cyclical pattern, in which the old woman feeds on the energies of the infant to prosper and regain her youth, and then the infant, now a youth, must deprive the woman of her energy. The cycle repeats itself as the female character and male character struggle against one another. However, the struggle is necessary for the survival of both parties: one cannot exist without the other. They feed off of each other and one can’t live without the other.

                I think that this is predominately why Gardner chose to open Grendel with an excerpt from this poem: to introduce the idea of interdependence. Similar to the man and woman in the poem, Grendel and the Danes need each other. Grendel fuels their religious and societal beliefs: without being able to identify him as evil, the Danes would not be able to identify of appreciate goodness. As the dragon says, Grendel “improves” the Danes by giving them something to believe in. The Danes reciprocate this by giving Grendel something to believe in: The Danes give Grendel something to despise through their wastefulness and hatefulness.  

                “The Mental Traveller” was a mystery when I started reading it. It still is, for the most part. But overall, my take away from it was the motif of interdependence, how two halves are necessary for the creation of a whole, and that one half causes the other half to thrive.