Annotation: Arthur G. Brodeur - "The Structure and Unity of Beowulf"

A confession. I am no theory head. The finer details of what makes structuralism structuralism, or how phenomenology works, or what have you are often lost on me. I don't operate within the bounds of a single coherent theoretical paradigm because I don't think like that. My stuff tends to be wide-reaching and pulls in ideas as needed. If I need to attend to gender or sexuality, I'll pull in some ideas from feminist and queer theories. If I'm dealing with language, I get really deep into the finer details of how the language is functioning and that might be interpreted as some type of formalism or New Criticism. Honestly, though, I don't set out to do any of my scholarship with that kind of "I'm doing X theory" approach, and when I had to do that for my dissertation abstract and introduction it was a bit of a fib. It's just not how I conceive of what I'm doing.

What I am doing, or at least what I think I'm doing, is just reading things in ways that seem intuitive to me. I'm not exercising some esoteric skill, not beating the text with a theoretical cudgel in order to bash an interpretation off it. I don't think what I'm doing is complicated, though I have found that trying to engage students to try it out can lead to frustration on their part as I learn that things I have never had to consciously think about are utterly alien to them. That's part of the learning process of teaching, though. One of the goals behind this blog is thus to unfold my way of thinking about literature so I can more easily examine what it is I do, so I can better translate that into the classroom. I believe I will return to the classroom someday.

Anyway, Arthur Brodeur's article seemed a fitting place to say the above because it's one of the few times I feel like I can properly identify a structuralist analysis as a structuralist analysis and understand what that means. Brodeur is concerned with how the poem coheres between its (traditional) two parts. What makes this an easier analysis for me to understand is he brings it back to themes and what he feels the poem is trying to say, at least in part. So there's something there, but not a lot about Grendel's Mother. Whenever I describe Beowulf's structure in my head, I always think of the poem as having three main action points (Grendel, Grendel's Mother, the dragon) separated by interludes. The idea of conceiving of Beowulf has having a neat division into two parts (the Grendel feud and the dragon) never even occurred to me until the first time I read an old article about Beowulf when I was an undergraduate. I'm not sure anyone still subscribes to that model for understanding the structure of the poem, but I'm hoping to see if anyone does as I read further.

That said, I will not ramble further and will instead get on with the annotation.

Brodeur, Arthur G. “The Structure and Unity of Beowulf,” PMLA 68.5 (Dec. 1953): 1183-95.

One of the key interests I have in structuralist analyses of Beowulf such as this one is in seeing how they handle the fight with Grendel’s Mother in assessing the structure. Brodeur is writing post-Tolkien’s “Monsters and the Critics”, but still quite early in that period, and Brodeur begins with a brief overview of the two competing views of his time. The first, that of Klaeber, is that Beowulf consists of two distinct narratives about Beowulf. The second, Tolkien’s rejoinder, argues that it is a mistake to consider Beowulf as a unified narrative at all in the way we conceive of narrative poems in the modern age. Tolkien still falls in the camp of two parts, only he argues that they possess thematic linkage (whereas Klaeber argues the only link is the person of Beowulf) (1183). Both of these traditional views roll Grendel’s Mother (here called his “dam”) as a subordinate part of the larger Grendel episode (1184). There is very little here for me to use, as Brodeur offers basically nothing else in terms of consideration for Grendel’s Mother, but the article will serve as a quality example of mid-century approaches to Beowulf’s structure. Regarding the thrust of the argument itself, Brodeur finds further unity between the two parts (as accepted in his time) of the poem through the figure of Hygelac, who features in many of Beowulf’s speeches and whose actions and death make up a fair portion of the poem’s second part. The time spent on Hygelac in Beowulf’s speech, the “envelopment” of the narrative within Beowulf’s love for Hygelac “binds the two parts of the poem into an inseparable whole” (1195).