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Friday
Last week, I wrote about Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature opening my eyes on how Hamlet provides us with a powerful means to grieve. It also has helped me understand how I myself used Beowulf to grieve following the death of my oldest son.
Beowulf is as much a poem about grieving as it is about fighting, which makes sense when you think about violence in the culture. Grendel’s Mother grieves over the death of her son (she’s the archetype of vengeful grief), and after she gets her revenge, we see Hrothgar grieving for the man she kills. (“Rest, what is rest, sorrow has returned,” he tells Beowulf.) In the tale of Finn, Hengest grieves the death of his fallen lord Hnaef. Hrethel, who loses his son in a hunting accident, climbs into bed and never gets out again. The “last veteran” retreats into his treasure hoard after everyone around him has died, becoming (as I read the scene) a human dragon. And my reading of the poem’s ending is that Beowulf, upon looking back over his life and seeing a long string of deaths, is himself in danger of scaly and hard.
In this reading of the poem, two of the three monsters are connected with grieving, with Grendel’s Mother being a hot anger response and the Dragon being a sullen withdrawal response. But as I have noted, Grendel’s Mother and the Dragon are coin sides of the same emotion: after killing Hrothgar’s companion, she becomes a dragon, retreating to her underwater lair, and the dragon, when triggered, comes charging out his cave to burn down everything around him.
When Hrothgar sinks into grief, Beowulf’s first recommendation is revenge therapy. “”Wise sir, do not grieve. It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning,” he says before concluding his speech by describing such mourning as unmanly: “Endure your troubles today. Bear up and be the man I expect you to be” (trans. Seamus Heaney).
But as Fletcher points out in Wonderworks, Hamlet reveals the emptiness of revenge therapy. The problem with typical revenge stories, he points out, is that they suggest that the solution to grief is doing something. In Beowulf, he might point out, Beowulf is telling Hrothgar that the revenge plot just needs more plot.
Shakespeare, however, understands this is not enough and gives us a play where, for large stretches, there doesn’t seem to be any plot. Discussing the “strange plotlessness” of the play, Fletcher points out that Hamlet doesn’t behave like a character in a traditional revenge tragedy. Instead, he wanders around the castle with a book while delivering long soliloquies, raving about his inner doubts, and venting his disgust at life. In fact, he wanders so far from the typical revenge plot that the ghost of his father returns to get him back on track. “This visitation is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose,” he tells his son.
Grieving, in other words, requires more than revenge—or, from another perspective, it requires less.
As I look back at the weeks following Justin’s death, I realize I picked up this lesson from Beowulf. For all of Beowulf’s can-do spirit, when he leaps into the mere (lake) to confront Grendel’s mother, for the first time we see him passive. Because the monster has him in her grip, he can do nothing. Sea monsters strike against his chest armor and he is helpless against them. The lesson I took from this when I reread the poem two weeks after the drowning—I had returned to a book I was writing on various classics as my therapy—was that I just needed to let the monster take me wherever she would and not fight back. As I write in that book (which will come out in the fall),
“I don’t know where this grieving is going to take me,” I remember saying to myself, “but I will follow her wherever she leads me…” Following grief’s lead, I was to discover, meant accepting whatever she dished out to me each day. Sometimes I was furious, sometimes I was sad, and often I was unimaginably tired, experiencing a bone fatigue that nothing could assuage. In each case I didn’t fight it. I just figured that anger or depression or fatigue were on the menu for that day.
I picked up the same lesson from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I was also writing about in the summer following Justin’s death. Early in the poem, in what I tell my students is comparable to a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Gawain knows he only has a year left to live. After all, he can’t survive the return axe blow from the Green Knight, with whom he is having a beheading contest. At first Gawain tries to fill up the intervening time with action—which is to say, with plot. And while it first appears that (unlike in Hamlet), we get lots of plot, that plot is presented in such a way as to be virtually meaningless. Basically Gawain is presented with one damn adventure after another as he rides to keep his rendezvous with death:
Many a cliff must he climb in country wild;
Far off from all his friends, forlorn must he ride;
At each strand or stream where the stalwart passed
T’were a marvel if he met not some monstrous foe,
And that so fierce and forbidding that fight he must.
So many were the wonders he wandered among
That to tell but the tenth part would tax my wits.
Now with serpents he wars, now with savage wolves,
Now with wild men of the woods, that watched from the rocks,
Both with bulls and with bears, and with boars besides,
And giants that came gibbering from the jagged steeps.
Had he not borne himself bravely, and been on God’s side,
He had met with many mishaps and mortal harms.
(trans. Marie Borroff)
The actions that make a knight a knight no longer have significance in the face of death. It’s like someone continuing to do his or her job—let’s say, writing up reports—after the cancer diagnosis. The poet says that his wits are being taxed but it’s more like he has lost all interest. After all, other things are more important.
Beowulf’s descent into the depths of the mere has its equivalent in Gawain being lost in a dark wood (to use Dante’s phrasing):
…By a mountain next morning he makes his way
Into a forest fastness, fearsome and wild;
High hills on either hand, with hoar woods below,
Oaks old and huge by the hundred together.
The hazel and the hawthorn were all intertwined
With rough raveled moss, that raggedly hung,
With many birds unblithe upon bare twigs
That peeped most piteously for pain of the cold.
The good knight on Gringolet glides thereunder
Through many a marsh and mire, a man all alone…
Think of Gawain–or anyone grieving for either a loved one or for him/herself–as those unblithe (sorrowful) birds peeping most piteously.
My next project, The Green Knight’s Guide to Grieving, will take up this work so I’ll put it aside for now. Returning to Beowulf, I get a better sense from Fletcher’s Hamlet discussion how Beowulf helped me grieve. In addition to guiding me into a plotless space, it also let me know that there’s no magic bullet to ending grieving.
I thought at one point that the manner in which Beowulf kills Grendel’s Mother might provide an answer. The sword, which was forged by giants in the golden age before the flood, was (as I interpreted it) a cause greater than oneself. For Beowulf, the sword represents the warrior ethos while for me it meant my family, my students, my college, and my community. If I gave myself over to them, I hoped I would find peace.
It took a student undergoing her own grieving to point out what I was getting wrong. I quote from Erica, whose mother was dying and who took up my suggestion that Beowulf might speak to her emotional turbulence. She wrote that the author of Beowulf, having “no real solution for the problem of grief, simply created the sword as a way to escape a real answer, a real struggle.” Because “neither the poet nor the society understood or felt comfortable enough to really feel grief,” she said, “Beowulf hid behind his armor and his weapons, under the pretext that he was on the good side and grief was on the bad side.”
Only at the end of the poem, Erica continued, do we see an end to grieving. From this she took away the lesson that “grief will get you. If not now, it will come later, and denying yourself the emotional freedom to be honest with your own heart will only work against you in the end.” And she added, “Grief is not always a bad thing to feel; it allows you to come to terms with, and reconcile with, things in your life that cause you pain. In this way you grow and mature with greater wisdom, and even [develop] coping skills.”
Thanks to Erica and to Fletcher’s book, I now see that Beowulf is more of a unified whole when it comes to grieving. Fletcher says that Hamlet is finally able to move past grieving when, seeing Laertes mourning Polonius and Ophelia, he “acknowledges that someone can feel like him.” When we see, in this other mourner, that “we’re not alone in our sorrow” and that a wider public “understands what it is to lose someone who can never be replaced,” we experience relief. “With their understanding,” Fletcher writes, the public “helps not only to support us through our bereavement, but also to relieve our anxiety that we haven’t done enough to commemorate our dead.”
Fletcher adds that
the relief deepens when the public then carries our intended meaning beyond us into future days and places. As that shared remembrance spreads forth, the deep centers of our guilt network gently relax. We come to see that we don’t need to devote our every waking hour to mourning remembrance. We can return to the rhythms of our daily lives, secure in the emotional discovery that a memorial exists in a human community far vaster than ourselves.
So sorrowful warriors could have used Beowulf to work through their own grief issues. First they would have seen Beowulf open himself to Wiglaf, accepting his help in fighting the dragon—which is to say bitterness and withdrawal. Then they would have seen a woman keening for the fallen king:
A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
A Geat woman’s with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany of nightmare and lament…
Finally, they would have seen the Geats constructing a marker, one that will guide sailors through dark seas:
Then the Geat people began to construct
Beowulf’s barrow a mound on a headland, high and imposing,
a marker that sailors could see from far away…
Before dying, Hamlet asks Horatio for a different kind a monument, a sharing of his story. Fletcher points out that “once again, a public memorial is required”:
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.
In Beowulf, we see the hero’s story being told:
Then twelve warriors rode around the tomb,
chieftain’s sons, champions in battle,
all of them distraught, chanting in dirges,
mourning his loss as a man and a king.
They extolled his heroic nature and exploits
and gave thanks for his greatness; which was the proper thing,
for a man should praise a prince whom he holds dear
and cherish his memory when that moment comes
when he has to be convoyed from his bodily home.
So the Geat people, his hearth companions,
sorrowed for the lord who had been laid low.
They said that of all the kings upon the earth
he was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.
There are different kinds of memorials. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, I determined that I would reach out to suffering students since I now knew what it was to have suffered. Indeed, I might not have guided Erica to Beowulf to explore her own grieving had I not gone through my own experience.
But there was another kind of public memorial as well. Julia and I set up an international exchange scholarship in Justin’s name. 23 students from Slovenia, where I had a pair of Fulbright fellowships, have attended St. Mary’s College of Maryland for a semester, living with us as they did so, and a like number of American students have studied in Ljubljana. When we visited Slovenia last year, we joined up with many of these former students and learned about their lives, which have included careers, partners, sometimes children. Many told us that their semester at St. Mary’s was a high point in their lives.
In seeing them, we were able to see the future that we were denied with Justin. And were comforted.
Previous post on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks
Hamlet Taught Us a New Way to Grieve
George Eliot’s Humanism
My Brilliant Friend, a Cure for Loneliness
Stream of Consciousness’ Healing Powers
Self-Satire’s Medicinal Powers
How Lit Inspires Courage and Love
Got a Problem? Call a Poet
Lit’s Neurological Benefits