A Psychological Commentary on John Gardner's Grendel

This paper examines two fictional works of author John Gardner, “Redemption” (1) and Grendel (2), in an effort to illustrate how art can be used to resolve and master guilt over an earlier trauma. Gardner had accidentally killed his younger brother when both were preadolescent boys, and he himself was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1982, as if the psychic trauma was being reenacted.

“Redemption” (included in The Art of Living, ) is a short story that recounts the unintentional death of his 7-year-old brother under the wheels of a tractor that the older brother, the author, was driving. It is a stark compendium of painfully remembered details and images that intrusively replay the trauma. It compares his heroic fantasies before the traumatic event with the turmoil of confession, self-hatred, and guilt that deform his daydreams after the death. Grendel concerns “the earliest monster in English literature” and retells the historical epic of Beowulf, full of killing, from the monster's point of view. It was the author's third novel, and the first to deal with a violent evil character.

In a psychotherapy study (3), I examined how a psychotic artist who had killed a family member used a composite symbol of a monster (a horned centaur) to project guilt and feelings of badness outside himself and how he sought out an audience to view his work. In this case the motive was simply for people (young women who symbolically represented the victim) to express liking for this artistic image (the bad murderous part of the self) and for the artist thus to feel forgiven for his action. This was only partially successful and much of the artist's guilt was expressed in a repetition of behaviors that symbolically repeated the traumatic crime.

Here the attempt to resolve guilt in a man who was a renowned creative writer and not psychotic takes on a more complex form. We might expect to see higher levels of psychic functioning as represented by remembering