“Dark chasms!” I scream from the cliff-edge, “seize me! Seize me to your foul black bowels and crush my bones!” I am terrified at the sound of my own huge voice in the darkness. I stand there shaking iron head to foot, moved to the deep-sea depth of my being, like a creature thrown into audience with thunder.” — from Grendel by John Gardner
“In place of the insensate, man-eating Yeti of 12th-century myth, Gardner gives us a literate monster who narrates his own tale with heavy irony and an almost paralyzing sense of his destiny. This Grendel is well aware that Unferth and Beowulf need him as inspiration for bravery and that the Shaper — part poet, part PR man — could not spin their exploits into myth without a truly loathsome foe. In very human fashion, Gardner’s beast is torn between belief in the power of faith and the cynical pleasure of acting out his whims, which, in Grendel’s case, tend to have gruesome consequences.
Gardner — who died nearly 25 years ago– shared much with his most famous creation. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, in his public assessments of some of his most esteemed fiction-writing peers, Gardner was as brutal and reckless as Grendel. In his scathing 1978 polemic On Moral Fiction , he calls Philip Roth “creepy” and dismisses Saul Bellow as “an essayist disguised as a writer of fiction”; Mailer, Albee, Vonnegut and many others come in for similar drubbings. Their work was not just bad, in Gardner’s view, but dangerous.” Source: David Stanton’s BETWEEN THE LINES:John Gardner Raided the castle of American fiction, a bit like Grendel.
“Even monsters have mothers. That message is at the heart of John Gardner’s 1971 novel “Grendel,” a reshaping of the 10th-century Danish tale, “Beowulf.” While that epic is named for the warrior-hero who slays a murderous beast, Mr. Gardner’s story is told from the point of view of the beast, Grendel. And in his novel, the repulsive, Dane-eating monster appears more recognizably human than any of the stiff-necked, blinkered men who seek his demise…
Composer Elliot Goldenthal faced challenges of his own in supplying the musical foundation of “Grendel.” There was, for example, the knotty problem of maintaining interest during the first half of the opera, when the action is minimal, and the audience is learning who Grendel is. “Of course, ‘Tristan and Isolde’ has very little action, and Wagner sustained it for four hours,” Mr. Goldenthal said by way of comparison.
Yet, an aspect of the compositional craft underlying “Grendel” involved coming up with devices to keep the dramatic tension from collapsing. One technique he used was to have several singers express aspects of a single character. “Grendel talks to himself,” Mr. Goldenthal said. “So I broke the dialogue up and shared it among the beast’s shadows, or alter egos. That allows him to have duets, trios, even quartets.”- review from “THE BEAST WHO BECAME AN OPERA, Lincoln Center Festival 2006”, Stuart Isacoff.
Listen to the npr interview about the making of the Grendel opera at : “Grendel: An Operatic Monster’s Tale”
“Bringing Grendel to life has been an epic story in itself. Getting the physical production to work has been tricky. The set broke down in rehearsal, forcing a postponement of the Los Angeles premiere at a $300,000 loss to the L.A. Opera.
Another setback occurred when composer Elliot Goldenthal fell asleep at his kitchen table while working last December. His chair tipped over, sending him crashing to the floor.
Goldenthal suffered a serious brain injury that wiped out his ability to speak. He says he regained his power of speech by singing every note of Grendel. Amazingly, despite the injury, he pressed on to meet his deadline for composing the opera.
All Things Considered, July 11, 2006 · Monsters and humans share the stage in Grendel, a new opera that opens in New York Tuesday night. Based on the novel by John Gardner, the show tells the classic medieval tale of Beowulf, but from the monster’s perspective.
npr interview with John Gardner, biographer Barry Silesky,and others: JOHN GARDNER: LITERARY OUTLAW
During the 1970s best-selling author John Gardner was at the center of American literature, and his sometimes controversial writings created debate on what fiction is and what it ought to be.
Gardner was the best selling author of a half-dozen novels including Nickel Mountain, Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues and October Light — as well as a scholar of Medieval literature, and a teacher and critic of contemporary fiction. He died in 1982 in a motorcycle accident.