Eileen A. Joy

Dept. Of English Language & Literature

Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville

Reading Beowulf in an Age of Terrorism

“He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance has separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate. Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.”

                                                                                                —Simone Weil[1]

“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught.”

                                                                                                —Emmanuel Levinas[2]

“I’ll have you know, I’m not afraid of witches, spirits, phantoms, boastful giants, rogues, knaves, etc., nor do I fear any kind of beings except human ones.”

                                                                                                —Francisco Goya[3]

Prolegomenon: What I offer here is a rumination that is related to a larger project having to do with the relationship between monstrosity and terrorism, and between violence and justice, in both Beowulf and contemporary life; relevant to a recent SIUE colloquium’s subject, “Thinking About Empire,” I have been thinking a lot lately about asymmetry as one of the defining features of empire, and terrorism as one of the natural (even, inevitable) outcomes of empire’s asymmetrical relationship to those who have, in Jean Baudrillard’s words, “ended up on the wrong side of the global order.”[4] In an essay on the events of September 11^th, Baudrillard wrote that, “by seizing all the cards for itself,” Western global power “forced the Other to change the rules. And the new rules are fierce ones, because the stakes are fierce. To a system whose very excess of power poses an insoluble challenge, the terrorists respond with a definitive act which is also not susceptible of exchange.”[5] But even more troubling, perhaps, is that while many in the West would like to blame a singular entity or philosophy for terrorism—say, Islam, or organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah—as Baudrillard also writes, these entities are just “moving fronts” for terrorism. Ultimately, “The antagonism is everywhere, and in every one of us,” and further, because we in the West have all dreamed, even before it happened, of an ultimate terrorist event, terrorism is also our “obscure object of desire.”[6] What is needed then, is a psychological excursion into the deep heart of this obscure object, as well as an ethics for our finding our way back out again.

I               It captivates by its grace[7]

                For a while now, I have been worrying the beads of the twins strands of two obsessions: the ethical philosophy of Emamnuel Levinas and suicide bombers. I have been thinking a lot about Levinas’s statement in Time and the Other, that “the encroachment of the present on the future is not the feat of the subject alone, but the intersubjective relationship,” and also, “[t]he condition of time lies in the relationship between humans, or in history.”[8] Levinas’s philosophy is deeply concerned with the metaphysical excellency of the moral subject who understands that ethics comes before ontology, or being—“Morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy,”[9] and is rooted in a fierce attention and subjection to the command of the Other [l’autre], who is both the proximate neighbor and the unknown stranger. For Levinas, morality posits a face-to-face relationship with the Other—what he termed le face-à-face sans intermediaire—in which the Other is not so much an actual face as “pure expression, an extradition without defense or cover, precisely the extreme rectitude of a facing, which in this nudity is an exposure unto death.”[10] Moreover, this “pure expression” always exceeds any limits we might put on it—“Expression, or the face, overflows images.”[11] Further, as Levinas writes,

There is in the Other a meaning and an obligation that oblige me beyond my death! . . . Responsibility for the Other, responding to the Other’s death, vows itself to an alterity that is no longer within the province of re-presentation. This way of being avowed—or this devotion—is time. It remains a relationship to the other as other, and not a reduction of the other to the same. It is transcendence.[12]

But we mustn’t assume, either, that the I, or ego, is left aside in this encounter, for as Levinas reminds us, “Only an I can respond to the injunction of a face.”[13]

                Even though I know that, in Levinas’s scheme of things, the face is not really a face, per se, but rather, an expression—and even, the overflowing of expression—I find myself thinking, obsessively, about faces, and more specifically, about the face of Zalikhan Yelikhadzhiyeva, the twenty-year-old Chechen woman who approached the admissions booth of an outdoor rock festival in Moscow on July 5, 2003 and detonated the explosives strapped to her belt, killing only herself (apparently, the explosives in her “martyr’s belt” were faulty somehow, and did not detonate properly). Another female suicide bomber accompanying her was more successful—if that is the right word—and managed to kill sixteen people, along with herself, and wounded over fifty others.[14] Browsing the Internet one day searching for pictures of this event, I came across a photograph of Yelikhadzhiyeva lying on her back between police barricades, one first clenched on her chest, an empty beer can on the ground beside her head, her eyes closed, and her mouth half-open—the scene is almost peaceful, and the face, serene, if also vulnerable; after all, she was only twenty years old, the same age as many of my students. I have never considered a twenty-year-old as someone who could be capable of such a fierce will and desire to kill herself and others, out of vengeance, or perhaps, a desperate powerlessness (which could also be a desperate facelessness). While many were transfixed by the gruesome images of the shredded bodies of bombing victims under white sheets, I couldn’t get this face out of my mind, nor can I, even now. Yelikhadzhieyeva’s face haunts me precisely because it is what Levinas would have said is not really a face, but a façade, in which “the thing which keeps its secret is exposed and enclosed in its monumental essence and in its myth, in which it gleams like a splendor but does not deliver itself. It captivates by its grace as by magic, but does not reveal itself.”[15]

II                Exteriority is not a negation, but a marvel[16]

                Between August of 2002 and just this past February when a bomb explosion on a crowded Moscow subway train killed over forty people, Russia and Chechnya have witnessed the emergence of what many consider to be a shocking phenomenon—female suicide bombers. Because many Chechens reject the idea that these women have embraced a radical Islamic fundamentalism, and many Russians, conversely, have assumed that these women embody what they see as the “Palestinianization” of the Chechen rebellion,[17] a certain tension, confusion, and even hysteria, attaches to the ways in which ordinary Russians and Chechens, government officials, and the international press have attempted to describe these women. It has been said about the female Chechen suicide bombers, alternatively, that they have been kidnapped by Islamic extremists, given psychotropic drugs, and then raped as part of their coercion into doing what no woman would supposedly do of her own accord;[18] that they are emotionless “brick walls,” “pre-programmed,” “brainwashed,” and “de-humanised”;[19] that they are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder;[20] that they are blackmailed “zombies”;[21] and that they are the harbingers of the fact that “something has come unglued at the heart of Chechen society.”[22] But even more central to the issue of what might be called the troubling, yet intimate alterity of these women, is the name given to them, as a collectivity, by the Russian government and happily picked up by the international press: they are the “black widows” of Chechnya–that is to say, they are the actual widows, mothers, sisters, and daughters of men killed in two wars with Russia that have claimed over 100,000 lives, but they are also venomous black widow spiders, who kill with one bite.[23] They are therefore both intimately familiar, yet also monstrously Other, and as such, they embody the phenomenon labeled by Jacques Lacan as “extimité,” explained by Jacques Alain Miller as designating “in a problematic manner the real in the symbolic.”[24] More simply put, this is the state of affairs where the exterior is always present in the interior, and further, “Extimacy is not the contrary of intimacy [but rather] . . . the intimate is Other—like a foreign body.”[25] In this sense, those whom we perceive to be Others, and whom we assume are distantly foreign and opaque, are really our intimates—our excluded interior—and it is precisely because of their intimacy, that they frighten us. Terrorists, especially, frighten us, because we believe, naively, that they cross over from somewhere out there to here (the home), and threaten our fragile bodies, which we believe are bounded and inviolable territories of identity unto themselves. And this is why terrorists are often referred to as being inhuman, and even, monstrous, and their acts, evil and unspeakable. Terrorists are ultimately the figures of what Freud termed the Uncanny (or, unheimlich, both “not like home” and “like home” simultaneously)—they are the shadow-stalking phantasms of the Unconscious who have been repressed but never stop returning to view in various distorted shapes;[26] further, terrorists frighten because they represent the excess, or exorbitance, of our nightmares. Their acts, as Baudrillard writes, represent “an excess of reality,” for terrorist violence is both the “exorbitant mirror” of the West’s own violence as well as “the model of a symbolic violence forbidden to it, the only violence it cannot exert—that of its own death.”[27]

                We must never forget that terrorists are real persons with real lives grounded in all the material and psychic particularities of the local—Zalikhan Yelikhadzhiyeva, for instance, lived with her sister in a brick house in a small Chechen village and studied at the medical vocational school there[28]—and furthermore, that the terrorist’s acts are both real and immoral. But our understanding of the terrorist, if we are willing to embark on such a project, will have to begin with an understanding of our perception of them as monsters. As Jeffrey Cohen reminds us, the monster’s body is always a cultural body:

The monster is born . . . as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture.[29]

In his “seven theses toward understanding cultures through the monsters they bear,” Cohen argues that the monster is always a “harbinger of a category crisis.”[30] In other words, monsters are “disturbing hybrids” who resist easy categorization and, in fact, threaten to smash the distinctions in any system we might devise to describe their freakishness: “In the face of the monster, scientific inquiry and its ordered rationality crumble,” and further, “the geography of the monster is an imperiling expanse.”[31] Because the monster also always embodies difference writ large (usually along lines that are sexual, racial, and cultural), “the boundaries between personal and national bodies blur” in the body of the monster which always threatens “to fragment the delicate matrix of relational systems that unite every private body to the public world.”[32] The Chechen suicide bombers are especially troubling in this scenario because they bring together in their cultural bodies two “signs” that have traditionally terrified through their Otherness: “woman” and “nonwhite” (what Cohen terms She and Them!).[33]

                And where is it, exactly, that the monster make its home? According to Cohen, the monster resides “in that marginal geography of the Exterior, beyond the limits of the Thinkable, a place that is doubly dangerous: simultaneously ‘exorbitant’ and ‘quite close’.”[34] The female Chechen terrorists are strange to many Russians, yet also lie very close to the heart of what Russia is, as a state, and therefore, it will never be a matter of simply driving them back to the wilderness from which they supposedly came, nor of just destroying them (Russia’s “official policy”), for as Cohen also reminds us, “No monster tastes of death but once.”[35] There is always a revenant.

III            The Other is the prime intelligible[36]

                Perhaps the most well-known monsters of Old English literature, Grendel, a “grim ghost” (grimma gæst; l. 102), and his mother, a “mighty mere-wife” and “sea-wolf” (merewif mihtig and brimwylf; l l. 1519 and 1599),[37] live in the landscape which is wild and supposedly unlivable, yet is also situated at the very margin, or border, of the so-called “civilized” world—specifically, Daneland, whose chief symbol, King Hrothgar’s hall (Heorot), is upheld by the poet as the “best of all houses” (husa selest; l. 146a).[38] But there is something peculiar, too, about this glittering and golden world whose light shines over many lands (l. 311): the only things that really constitute Daneland are the shore that separates it from the rest of the world, the horn-gabled hall, two paths (the paved stone road leading to the hall and the blood and flesh-splattered trail that leads to the monsters’ mere), and the territories of the monsters who are “out there” somewhere.[39] This spatial construction, and its implications, is reminiscent of the world in King Lear, in which there are really only two places—the inside of the houses of power and the outside of the heath with its raging storms. Ultimately, the world, in both Beowulf and King Lear, is divided into Here and Out There, and it is always dangerous to be on the outside, although that is precisely the place where most people actually live, and where the hero has to go if he wants to find his most intimate (hence, secret and abjected) self.

                If Hrothgar and his Danes have an obscure object of desire, it is Grendel, a “fiend from hell” (feond on helle; l. 101) who, in twelve winters of crafting crimes (fyrene fremman; l. 101) and making nightly murderous incursions into Heorot, has become not only Daneland’s chief terror, but also its chief terrorist. Similar to the “ungraspability” of the female Chechen suicide bombers, whose descriptions reveal the hysterical confusion that results when Otherness breaks into the house and starts throwing dynamite, the descriptions of Grendel within the poem reveal both his inherent unknowability as well as his intimate familiarity, which both fascinates and frightens. He is a “powerful spirit” (ellengæst; l. 86), a “giant” (eoten; l. 761), a “dark death-shadow” (deorc deaþscua; l. 160), a “soul killer” (gastbona, l. 177), a “secret hatemonger” (deogol dædhata; l. 275), a “hell-secret” (helrunan; l. 164), and perhaps most importantly, because it is repeated so often, a “terror” (aglæca; ll. 159, 425, 433, 592, 646, 732, 739, 816, 989, 1000, and 1269).[40] Although Grendel is definitively strange and monstrous and evil, the poet also tells us that he and his mother are descended from Cain (ll. 104-14, 1260-68), and therefore they share a human kinship with the other characters in the poem.[41] Further, as Ruth Melinkoff has reminded us,

Grendel and his mother not only are plainly fleshly creatures but also clearly are more human than beast. Although the poet was sparing with physical descriptions, he provides some vividly revealing details: arms and shoulders (835a, 972a and 1537a), claw-like hands (746-8a and 983b-90), a light shining from Grendel’s eyes (726b-7) and his head dragged by the hair (1647-8a). We are explicitly told that one of the pair had the likeness of a woman and the other a form of a man (1349b-52). Evil monsters, yes, but with human forms, flesh and minds.[42]

More to the point of Grendel’s extimacy, Grendel is simultaneously the “elsewhere ghost” (ellorgæst; l. 807), “fierce house-guard” (reþe renweardas; l. 770),  and the “hateful hall-thane” (healðegnes hete; l. 142) who Hrothgar calls “my invader” (ingenga min; l. 1776), pointing to his complicit status with those who lie sleeping in the hall at night, and whom he kills and ingests (literally, eats) during his nightly depredations. It would appear that somehow, if even on an unconscious level, Hrothgar recognizes that Grendel is somehow his and the Danes’ personal nightmare, and even the poet mentions, at line 152, that Grendel “had fought for a long time against Hrothgar.” Further supporting the notion that Grendel’s feud with Hrothgar’s court is somehow personal, and that its original cause might somehow be rooted in Daneland’s ostentatious display of its wealth and power in its most visible articulation—the golden keep of Heorot itself—are the lines, early in the poem, that Grendel “sorrowfully endured his time in the darkness, [and] suffered distress, when he heard each day the loud rejoicing in the hall, the music of the harp, and the clear song of the poet” (earfoðlice/ þrage geþolode, se þe in þystrum bad,/ þæt he dogora gewham dream gehyrde/ hludne in healle; þær wæs hearpan sweg,/ swutol sand scopes; ll. 86-90). One of the reasons Grendel may be particularly angry about this music is the subject matter of the song itself—God’s creation of the world (ll. 91-98)—for Grendel, as one of the “giants” spawned by Cain, likely has a special grievance with God, and also with any men, like Hrothgar and his Danes, who appear to have been blessed by God (one visible sign of this blessing, aside from the Danes’ material wealth, is the fact, relayed to us by the poet tells us in lines 168-69, that because of God, Grendel can not approach or touch Hrothgar’s gift-seat). Although the poet does not say so directly, we can assume that Grendel assumes that he is not, never was, and never will be welcome in the hall and the field of un-welcoming that the hall radiates might be part of what undergirds his rage against the Danes.

                Due to the language both the poet and the characters often use to describe him, it seems plausible that Grendel comes from that place where ghosts and demons and shadows dwell—either an “Other world” that cannot be seen or traveled to by humans, or Hell itself—and therefore he is a kind of terror from nowhere that always strikes at nightmare-time, when everyone is sleeping with one eye open. In fact, when Beowulf first arrives in Daneland and is explaining to the coast-guard why he is there, he reveals that he and his men have heard of this “unknown malevolence” (uncuðne nið; l. 276) that threatens the country of the Scyldings, and he wishes to offer Hrothgar counsel as to how he might vanquish this “I don’t know what kind of ravager” (sceaðona ic nat hwylc; l. 274). Therefore, it could be argued that it is not fair to say that the Danes have not properly welcomed Grendel, whom they can not recognize, in any way, shape, or form, as belonging to their world. In this scenario, Grendel is worse than any identifiable human enemy—he is worse than the Frisian or Heathobard who has been invited to dinner and is quietly seething over old grudges, and whose killing sword is always close at hand. Interestingly, it is precisely this more familiar enemy that Beowulf seems so worried about when he returns to Geatland and explains his adventures in Daneland to his chief and liege-lord, Hygelac. Either through an amazing prescience or a smart reading of cues he witnessed while at Hrothgar’s court, Beowulf explains to Hygelac (ll. 2000-2162) that Heorot will eventually be destroyed by a failed alliance with an old enemy, the Heathobards, through an arranged marriage between Hrothgar’s daughter, Freawaru, and the son of Froda, chief of the Heathobards. Indicating to Hygelac that these kinds of alliances rarely hold, Beowulf states, “Often, after the fall of a prince, in a short while the deadly spear flies, even if the bride is good” (Oft seldan hwær/ æfter leodhryre lytle hwile/ bongar bugeð, þeah seo bryd duge!; ll. 2029-31). In a strikingly creative moment, Beowulf then imagines the marriage dinner itself, still in the future, when the Heathobards will welcome the Danes into their hall to celebrate the wedding and, for all their good intentions, will eventually be galled at the sight of all the Danes in their glittering ring-mail, which they wrested from the dead bodies of Heathobards on the battlefield (ll. 2032-40). Because the desire for vengeance always wins out over the desire for love (and even, sex), naturally, violence erupts.[43] It should be noted, too, that Beowulf’s prognostication here, in a neat little piece of prolepsis and analepsis combined, has already been affirmed by the poet in lines 81-85. As violence comes full circle, so does the poem, but at least the characters possess some prescience about this cycle, and they even have social codes to contain it somewhat. Some critics might argue, then, that Grendel is somehow worse than these familiar enemies because he represents a kind of sublime rage whose cause is unknown;[44] furthermore, his preemptive attacks could not initially be anticipated, he does not recognize the jural conventions of feud, and he cannot be fought with conventional weapons.[45] But I would argue that this reading of Grendel belies what Hrothgar himself tells Beowulf about who Grendel is and where he comes from.

             Because it is only the poet who tells us that Grendel and his mother are descended from Cain (and this happens in two definitive instances at lines 102-14 and 1260-68), it is important, I think, to look closely at how Grendel’s chief enemy, Hrothgar, describes and perceives him. A key passage for understanding this—perhaps the key passage—is the somewhat lengthy speech Hrothgar makes to Beowulf (lines 1322-82) after Grendel’s mother has burst into Heorot and killed Hrothgar’s most beloved warrior, advisor, and rune-counselor, Æschere. First and foremost, it is clear that Hrothgar understands that the “hand-slayer” (handbanan; l. 1330) had a comprehensible motivation for her murder: “She revenged that feud when you [Beowulf], last night, killed Grendel” (Heo þa fæðe wræc,/ þe þu gystran niht Grendel cwealdest; ll. 1333-34), and further, she “would avenge her kinsman” (wolde hyre mæg wrecan; l. 1339). At the same time, Hrothgar describes Grendel’s “kin” in somewhat oblique terms as a “wandering slaughter-host” (wælgæst wæfre; l. 1331) who goes “I know not where” (ic ne wat hwæder; l. 1331) with her plundered body. But then, in a striking reversal, Hrothgar shares with Beowulf some very specific details (albeit, borrowed from the hearsay of “land-holders among my people,” but also from counselors; ll. 1345-46) about who, exactly, Grendel and his “kin” are, and where they live. In what could even be called slightly excitable tones, Hrothgar explains that some people have seen “two similarly huge borderers, holding the moors, elsewhere ghosts” (swylce twegen/ micle mearcstapan moras healdan,/ ellorgæstas; ll. 1347-49), one of whom could clearly (gewislicost; l. 1350) be seen “shaped as a woman” (idese onlicnæs; l. 1351), and the other, “harm-shaped, tread the exile-path in the form of a man, although he was much bigger than any man” (oðer earmsceapen/ on weres wæstmum wræc-lastas træd,/ næfne he wæs mara þonne ænig man oðer; ll. 1351-53). Most important, I think, is that Hrothgar knows this “ghost” has a name, Grendel (ll. 1354-55), and that he has no father—given that this is a world in which patrilineal succession is so important, one could argue that Grendel’s “fatherlessness” adds one more layer to his dimension of frightening uncanniness. Finally, in this same speech, even though Hrothgar claims that Grendel and his kinswoman “guard a secret land” (Hie dygel lond/ warigeað; ll. 1357-58), he then goes on, in shades on increasing hysteria, to describe in very precise detail this “wolf country”: there are fens, windy cliffs, mountain streams under dark bluffs, a flood under the earth, a lake with overhanging branches and frost-covered trees, and at night, strange fires on the water (ll. 1357-76). In Hrothgar’s emotional speech to Beowulf, we see that the margins of the world in which monsters live are both sublimely “secret” and treacherous, yet also geographically recognizable (and therefore, navigable). Likewise, the monsters themselves, Grendel and his kinswoman, are both dark shadows, but also corporeally material and humanlike, and therefore, as Cohen would phrase it, they “resist capture in the epistemological nets of the erudite,” and from their “position at the limits of knowing, [they] . . . stand as a warning against exploration of [their] . . . uncertain demesnes.”[46] It’s obvious, I think, that Hrothgar is afraid of the secret, yet familiar country in which Grendel and his kinswoman live (otherwise, why hasn’t he already launched some kind of counter-offensive there, or traveled there himself to survey the obstacles?), perhaps because he realizes that the “difference” of this landscape is, as Cohen writes, “arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential,”[47] just like the bodies of the monsters, or the bodies of the men who sleep within Heorot’s high walls. And, as René Girard has written, “Difference that exists outside the system is terrifying because it reveals the truth of the system, its relativity, its fragility, its mortality.”[48] Grendel’s and his mother’s cannibalism is very apt in this scenario because it both absorbs the warrior’s body “into that big Other seemingly beyond (but actually wholly within, because wholly created by) the symbolic order that it menaces,”[49] and also disperses the warrior’s being, like so many pieces of flesh, into the wilderness. In fact, one of the most terrifying sights for Beowulf and his men when they seek out Grendel's kinswoman in her underwater den, is the spectacle of Æschere's head sitting on a cliff beside the burning and blood-swelled waters of the mere (ll. 1417-21), and later, when he returns home, Beowulf tells Hygelac how distressed the Danes were that they could not properly burn Æschere's body on a funeral pyre (ll. 2124-6).

                According to Levinas, “The privileged role of the dwelling does not consist in being the end of human activity but in being its condition, and in this sense its commencement.”[50] Because of what we can imagine to be Grendel’s belief that Heorot mocks him, and even denies him welcoming access, and because we can also imagine that the Danes would not ask him to share a meal with them, partly because he’s killing off their ranks (and therefore is a legitimate enemy), but also because they claim they don’t know “where the hell-secret glides in his motions” (l. 162-63), Grendel is never allowed the possibility of being able to actualize (or even, redeem) the very human-ness that the Danes themselves have detected in his features and that the poet has written across his large, menacing body. By “leasing” Beowulf, as it were, to destroy Grendel and his ilk, Hrothgar is admirably doing everything he can to stop “terror” from enveloping and decimating his culture, to be sure, but he is also attempting to wipe out the traces of what that culture has purposefully excluded from its interior spaces (but which, nevertheless, founds those interior spaces, and which might also be termed its obscene secret supplement).[51] Hrothgar and his Danes, and Beowulf and his Geats, see Grendel and his mother as thoroughly Other than themselves, yet, as Carol Braun Pasternack has pointed out, the language in the poem often belies the lines of difference that supposedly separate men from monsters, and thereby also reveals what might be called the poem’s “political unconscious”:

Aglæca characterizes Grendel and the dragon and aglæcwif Grendel’s mother, but aglæca also characterizes Sigemund (893a), both Beowulf and the dragon together (2592) and, in two instances, ambiguously either Beowulf or his monstrous opponent, in the first possibly Grendel (739a) and in the second possibly mere-monsters (1512a). Klaeber struggles in his glossary to keep a clear distinction between hero and opponent, identifying the same term as, on the one hand, ‘wretch, monster, demon, fiend’, and on the other, ‘warrior, hero’. But, as George Jack recognizes in his edition, ‘fierce assailant’ indicates the common ground for all the referents.[52]

Further, Pasternack explains that “The aglæcan are also wreccan, and this word and etymologically related terms point even more clearly to an oral-heroic paradigm in which hero and opponent fall within a single concept, the fierce outsider.”[53] Beowulf’s murder of Grendel then, ultimately represents a kind of double-dispossession, especially when we consider that he first drives Grendel out of the “high hall” that is the home of those who are supposedly blessed[54] and by whose architecture Grendel obviously feels mocked and excluded, and then later, to add insult to injury, Beowulf desecrates Grendel’s body by slicing off his head in the “roofed hall” (hrofsele; l. 1515) of his mother.[55] And this is a head that, tellingly, will take four men to haul it along the horse-path back to Heorot (ll. 1634-39), where, somewhat disturbingly, after being dragged across the floor to where the nobles are sitting on the benches, it becomes a spectacle for awe, as well as a trophy (ll. 1647-50). Perhaps this is finally fitting, for although Grendel can’t dine anymore on the beautiful, shining bodies of the Danes, cracking their bones and gulping them down in chunks, nor does the light any more shine through his eyes, he can keep watching them. He can keep warning.[57] And likewise, Æschere’s head, left along the cliff beside the burning mere where Grendel’s mother discarded it (l. 1421), is also watching and warning. These, finally, are the faces of Beowulf that overflow all images and call into question the nature of the proper relationship of violence to justice—this is a problem that, to paraphrase Levinas, exceeds the bounds of this essay.[58]

[58]In "The Infinity of Time," Levinas wrote that "Truth requires both an infinite time and a time it will be able to seal, a completed time. The completion of time is not death, but messianic time, where the perpetual is converted into eternal. Messianic triumph is the pure triumph; it is secured against the revenge of evil whose return the infinite time does not prohibit. Is this eternity a new structure of time, or an extreme vigilance of the messianic consciousness? The problem exceeds the bounds of this book" (Totality and Infinity, 284-85).