Book Journeys: Grendel

Beowulf is a famous Anglo-Saxon poem from around the 9th century about a warrior (Beowulf) who slays three monsters - Grendel, Grendel's Mother, and a Dragon. This book by John Gardner is a postmodern retelling of the first part of the story from Grendel's point of view. 

It's said that you need to have read Beowulf, or be familiar with it, to be able to follow Gardner's narrative. The writer certainly intends this, but I think only a passing familiarity is really necessary. The above paragraph of this very blog would probably be all the prior information you would need, I never really knew all that much about the poem/myth ahead of the first time I read this book and I don't think it hindered my enjoyment whatsoever - especially considering that Grendel is one of my all-time favourite novels. 

It's a fairly slight book, more of a novella than a novel, but it's by no means a simple work - it has a certain density and complexity. Gardner uses the basics of medieval myth to deconstruct humanity and some of the philosophies that power the very essence of our civilisation. He does this with a sort of academic wryness that often comes across as blackly humourous. 

Grendel is a brutish and crude figure. He is cruel and ugly and every bit the monster he is portrayed to be in other versions of the tale Beowulf. Gardner has gone to great lengths to keep his protagonist monstrous in both appearance and personality. Grendel is by no means stupid though, he is confused by his own existence and angered by the differences between himself and everyone around him. His own mother is a depraved and loathsome creature that he is unable to communicate with, the local Dragon is all-knowing but nihilistic and does little to help reconcile his point of view with the world, and the village of humans that Grendel spends twelve years of his life observing, molesting, taunting, and waging war on, are so far removed from his own understanding of life that they only fuel his confusion to the point of outright fury.

The 'hero' Beowulf himself doesn't turn up until the last sequences of the novel and remains unnamed, which is fitting considering this narrative has been re-centred from the monster's perspective. Grendel's confrontation with the village's saviour is resoundingly ambivalent and provocative. Grendel is a miserable and bored creature, neither superior or inferior to the little people he torments... he's like an ur-anti-hero, and this book really pulls apart the foundations of concepts like 'heroes' and 'villains' in a big way. 

There's something highly engaging and amusing about Grendel's detached interpretation of the village's growth. His view of its advancement characterises humans as a parasitic and stupid species. The monster's prime motivation for wreaking so much havoc among them is boredom and curiosity, which is perhaps more relatable than most readers would care to admit. 

In terms of style, Gardner uses a lot of stream-of-consciousness to explore Grendel's thoughts and the novel is written mostly in present tense. When I first read Grendel I was quite impressed by the way it sustained a present tense narrative - I'd never much liked present tense before but Gardner converted me into seeing how it can work and I've used it more often in my own writing since.

Anyway, I highly recommend Grendel. If there is such a thing as a canon then I would put this book in it as it has so much that going for it - it's entertaining, intellectually stimulating, intertextual, amusing, tragic, and subversive. I'm yet to find another book even remotely like it.

Narrative Voice and Jasper Jones

Most of my Year 10 class from 2015 loved Jasper Jones, and were excited when the film recently came out.

I've mentioned it before but it never hurts to mention it again: if you live in the Sydney area and have a chance to undertake Jo Rossbridge and Kathy Rushton's Conversations About Texts modules then you really, really should. I got so much out of this course in regards to teaching and grammar that I have considered doing the whole thing a second time just so I can keep learning about it. 

I was lucky in that I had the opportunity to do this course around the same time that the English Textual Concepts framework first started becoming available. At the time I was teaching Jasper Jones to my Year 10 class - a wonderful Year 10 class who were open to a range of ideas and modes of learning - and I was fortunate in that all these things came together to allow for a marriage of grammar analysis and the English Textual Concept of Narrative Voice. 

At this point in time I will not say that my marriage of these is completely harmonious, however, what the analysis of grammar has enabled is a greater variety of students engaging with analysis of writing style. As English teachers we often teach the subject in a fluid and holistic way that will appeal to those who are 'English-minded'. However, by incorporating more rigid modes of analysis in support to this approach we can also engage students with diverse learning styles - IE. Those who are not 'English-minded'. This means using analytical criteria where possible, calculating lexical density, utilising a range of numeracy-based approaches, and looking at grammatical intricacy - methods that can assist the more naturally mathematically or scientifically-minded in finding access points to English. 

Most of the resources below cover things like tense and perspective. Nonetheless, there are also questions about the aforementioned lexical density and grammatical intricacy - skills that my students had been taught just prior to analysing these texts. The Conversations About Texts course covers lexical analysis in great detail.

Highly recommended!

Here is a brief rundown of how it works:

Lexical Density

This refers to the amount of lexical items in a piece of writing. For the sake of not confusing the students too much, it's best to get them to think of lexical items as any word or phrase that has a single meaning. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs... these are lexical items. The other non-lexical words in the piece of writing will be prepositions, connectives, etc. The easiest way to get students to tell the difference is by getting them to ask the question: could I explain the meaning of this word? If they can't, then it's not a lexical item. 

Lexical density is calculated as a percentage. Students underline all the lexical items and count them,  and this number is then divided by the total number of words in the text to arrive at said percentage.

EG. 70 lexical items divided by 110 words = 64% lexical density.

I tell students that a good piece of writing should have a relatively high lexical density (of course, this isn't exclusively the only thing that makes a good piece of writing - make sure you tell them that too!) The lexical density shouldn't be too high though - too high and it becomes incredibly jargonistic and hard to follow. Hopefully your best writers will fall between 60% and 80%.

I regularly get students to test the lexical density of their own paragraphs. It's a nice, concrete way for students to measure their progress if they're aiming to increase their use of extended vocabulary. A variation of the calculation to this end could be that they are only allowed to count each lexical item once. So if they write 'increasingly' then they can't count it again if they've used it later in the same paragraph. Also, for the calculation to work the paragraph needs to be more than just two or three sentences.

Grammatical Intricacy

This will require students to have an understanding of clauses, something that they may or may not remember from their literacy-intensive days of primary school. Students count the number of clauses in the paragraph and then divide these by sentences to work out the average amount of clauses per sentence in the piece of writing.

EG. 10 clauses divided by 4 sentences = 2.5.

The higher the resulting number the more grammatically intricate the sentences are. Ensure that the students don't equate this with any kind of judgment on the text - single clause sentences can be just as effective as complex sentences with multiple clauses. The point is that students have solid evidence to support judgements about the piece as a whole, especially if they are looking at the way sentence structure can be a reflection of style and genre.

The Drowned World was Ballard's second novel, a memorably dystopian vision of tropical London after the ice caps have melted.

Narrative Voice

This brings us to the lesson. In studying Jasper Jones with Year 10 I wanted to engage the students with the narrative voice that Craig Silvey employed in writing his novel. This, firstly, requires for students to have an overview of the choices that authors make when creating a narrative voice.

1. This PPT breaks narrative voice down into three key starting points - tense, perspective, and language. Work through the PowerPoint by talking students through the activities and their understanding of them. You will need to help them unpack the difference between 'limited' and 'omniscient' when discussing Third Person. (If you want to extend students who are really interested in this stuff you could probably mention that there are, in reality, 12 different kinds of tense, and at least 6 different perspectives. Save this for the go-getters though, it will just confuse the majority!)
2. Students then engage with a text extract from The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard. This text has little to no connection to Jasper Jones, which makes it a perfect comparative point in terms of looking at the breadth of narrative voice. The extract is a small piece that introduces the setting for Ballard's post-apocalyptic novel. I ask students to work in pairs on this so they can evaluate and make educated guesses at what genre it might be (they aren't made aware that it's a post-apocalyptic novel). The information they collect using the accompanying questions should assist them in helping build a picture of how the choice of narrative voice supports the kind of text Ballard has constructed.
3. Then, to bring it full circle, students undertake a similar activity in analysing an extract from Jasper Jones. Of particular use is the final question in which they are ask to draw comparisons between Silvey's novel and The Drowned World, based on their understanding of narrative voice.

Resources
Resource 1 - Narrative Voice
Resource 2 - Extract 1: The Drowned World
Resource 3 - Extract 2: Jasper Jones