Word: grendels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Grendel...
...possibly penetrate all of the levels of this great metaphysical mess. Surely, traditional critical approaches are useless. Gardner has demonstrated in his novels his disapproval of rendering the world as it is. Grendel set about to reshape the Beowulf epic into the same philosophical query, using the skeptical monster as its prime agent. The small scale of that work, and its ingenius conception made it much more approachable. The came the Sunlight Dialogues, a very lengthy piece of prose with over 100 characters. Here, a great conglomeration of metaphysics is structured along the lines of a modern Grail Quest...
...most sincere and heart of heart having it outs. Everybody eavesdrops, it is licensed voyeurism. The Window Shop (56 Brattle St.) is an outdoor cafe that provides a front row bleacher seat as to who's who at the Casablanca (where the preppies hang out for their booze). Grendel's Den (on Boylston St. across from the Hungry Persian) is a basement coffee house with great spicy shiskebab, an endless selection of the most select folk rock albums, and some of the most carelessly elegant counterculture waiters around...
...dominating theme in both Grendel and The Wreckage of Agathon is individual freedom within a mass consciousness. Agathon chose total individual freedom, rebelling against the Spartans' strict sense of uniformity. And although he died, his ideals achieve a harmonious serenity with the hopes of his more worldly-wise student, Demodokos. Grendel, too, embodies a kind of selfhood, which is more barbaric and cynical: he believes completely in himself only because there is no hope of being accepted within a greater whole. It's hard to suppress sympathy for this Cain-like character, but in the end the victory of mankind...
Here lies the problem. The Sunlight Man also offers a singular viewpoint, based like Agathon and Grendel on a belief in a "cosmic order...indifferent to man." But where Agathon, Grendel, and their stories become complete in themselves, exclusive of and only supplemented by other devices, the Sunlight Man is lost in the shuffle of overburdening plot and structure complexities that never really hold their...