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Monday
Reader and friend Katherine Zammitt alerted me to a New York Times column by Maureen Dowd in which she sees the Republicans’ New Hampshire primary through the lens of Beowulf. This particularly caught my eye because, when I published my book How Beowulf Can Save America, I sent a copy to Dowd because I had quoted her. While she never replied, I like to think that it contributed to her column.
In any event, she contends that, while Trump may be a Grendel, Nikki Haley—his one remaining Republican opponent—falls short of heroic status.
Dowd’s point can be summed up by a riff on Lloyd Bensen’s famous putdown of Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate: “I knew Beowulf. Beowulf was a friend of mind. Governor, you’re no Beowulf.”
Let’s look first at how Dowd compares Trump with the troll or ogre who attacks the Heorot mead hall every night. As she notes, Trump played the role of the monster “who keeps coming back to terrorize us” and who “was stomping around that lovely little snow-covered state, devouring his foes”:
In his lyrical translation of “Beowulf,” [Seamus] Heaney described Grendel as “the terror-monger,” the “captain of evil” and “the dread of the land.”
He wrote that the fiend “ruled in defiance of right” and was “malignant by nature, he never showed remorse.”
The “powerful demon, a prowler through the dark, nursed a hard grievance,” he said, adding: “Grendel waged his lonely war, inflicting constant cruelties on the people, atrocious hurt,” pursuing “vicious raids and ravages.”
In my book, I don’t compare any individual to Grendel but rather see him as the archetype of resentment that can take over an individual or group of individuals. Trump both embodies such resentment and feeds upon it in others.
Beowulf defeats Grendel, not by wildly slashing at him with a sword (his men do this and it doesn’t work), but firmly and deliberately grasping him with an iron handgrip and refusing to let go. One stands up to bullies, I argued in my book, by refusing to be cowed by their manic energy. Instead, one takes a strong stand. It’s how Beowulf initially faces down the king’s jealous henchman Unferth upon first entering Heorot and then how he defeats Grendel. Here’s the description of that approach in the Seamus Heaney translation:
Venturing closer,
his talon was raised to attack Beowulf
where he lay on the bed; he was bearing in
with open claw when the alert hero’s
comeback and armlock forestalled him utterly.
The captain of evil discovered himself
in a handgrip harder than anything
he had ever encountered in any man
on the face of the earth. Every bone in his body
quailed and recoiled, but he could not escape.
He was desperate to flee to his den and hide
with the devil’s litter, for in all his days
he had never been clamped or cornered like this.
Then Hygelac’s trusty retainer recalled
his bedtime speech, sprang to his feet
and got a firm hold. Fingers were bursting,
the monster back-tracking, the man overpowering.
The dread of the land was desperate to escape,
to take a roundabout road and flee
to his lair in the fens. The latching power
in his fingers weakened; it was the worst trip
the terror-monger had taken to Heorot.
And now the timbers trembled and sang,
a hall-session that harrowed every Dane
inside the stockade: stumbling in fury,
the two contenders crashed through the building.
In the end, Grendel can only escape by tearing himself free of his arm, sustaining a mortal wound. In other words, he falls apart. Or to use a bad pun I used to use in class, Beowulf disarms him.
Unlike some of Trump’s opponents—say Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi–Nikki Haley has not engaged with Trump in this way. As Dowd observes,
Unfortunately, Nikki Haley was no Beowulf. She was not mighty and canny enough to rescue us from the brute. Not a single mead bench was broken in the battle. Her blade made slight cuts, but she was tentative, hoping not to drive away Trump supporters. She was on defense, not offense. She needed more of that adamantine quality that Nancy Pelosi showed against Trump.
And:
Haley did not say what needed to be said: Donald Trump should not be president because he tried to overthrow the government. We can’t have someone guiding our democracy who is undemocratic, claiming that every contest he loses is rigged. We can’t have a president who encourages violence, vomits misinformation, campaigns by humiliation and smears and, lately, portrays himself as divine.
The final result, then, was that the “Mara-a-Lago Monster,” “engorged by his victories over Haley and Ron DeSanctimonious,” just grew stronger.
Later in her column, Dowd compares Trump to Captain Queeg in Herman Wouk’s Caine Mutiny. But that’s a post for another day.