by Katherine Boyle

The theoretical facet of “the abject” is, in many ways, a truly abstract concept, dealing with the epistemology of the object and the liminality of the human experience, all within a psychoanalytic framework. Folklore and ancient stories that tell tales of heroes and dragons seem more ornamental, but often reflect the basic ontologies of philosophies like abjection, often without always a self-awareness of their critical-psychological aim. In reading ancient, epic stories like that of the poem Beowulf, we practice that analysis of a notion like Kristeva’s abjection in its most essential, pure, and uncritical form, without the trappings of complex, un-traditional plot, or avant-garde narrative turns. The poem seems to ask: “What if the abject were a literary character? What if that which we would like to ignore was personified?” As we examine the first antagonist in the story, Grendel, it becomes clear that this monster is the abjected figure. In his reflection of the masculine warrior culture in which King Hrothgar and his retainers live and his violent resentment of a social hierarchy that is perpetuated by ring-giving and bonds of kinship, Grendel is an abjected and cast-out “other.” With this interpretation, the story might be understood anew as the struggle for the purification of a securely self-oriented humanity from the forces of repression and uncanny familiarity in the unfamiliar.

Julia Kristeva posits the notion of abjection as an intersection of psychoanalysis and social theories of the self in the first chapter of her book Powers of Horror. The abject is a part of the human experience or livelihood that is undesirable, perverse, criminal, or uncomfortable to the conscious self, and so it is thrown out into a realm of marginalization and non-assimilation. More than this, the abject is decidedly liminal and in-between defined states of being and understanding. Kristeva writes that “it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). More than simply being something that we, as humans, would reject or leave unclaimed, the abject encompasses the plethora of experiences that stem from a sense of ambiguous in-betweenness, things that are in themselves a contradiction, or things that might not always fit neatly into categories of human knowledge. This implicates modern forces that work outside of a binary system of hegemonic categorization and thus find themselves marginalized. Often, that which we abject, according to Kristeva, becomes resentful and rebellious against the very fact of its exclusion from dominant systems of knowledge, “mute protest of the symptom, shattering violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system” (3). There is an innate quality of protest built into the abject, which is prescribed and fulfilled by the nature of abjection.

Perhaps most importantly, the abject, by its nature, must force the human to question itself and its boundaries, limitations, and definitions. The abject would not be so if it simply strayed from humanity and lived apart, separate and having no effect on the epistemological experience of human life. Kristeva notes that “from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master” (2). In recognizing our instinct to abject that which we would rather not encounter, we question the security of our ontological status as a “self.” Most notably, this happens when we are forced to have an encounter with the abject. This confrontational experience of the abject is analyzed in Kristeva’s work, as well:

There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded… Abjection can constitute for someone who… turning away from perverse dodges, presents himself with his own body and ego as the most precious non-objects; they are no longer seen in their own right but forfeited, abject. (5)

Abjection works as a negative definitional force, allowing us to more fully understand the nature of our deepest human needs and wants. As mentioned, Kristeva works within the philosophical framework of psychoanalysis, and thus repeatedly asserts that the abject is in relation with the superego, contradicting this force of upright behavior and moral goodness with the quiet desires that we hold as humans for things that may not be entirely moral, productive, or definitive. The abject, because it reflects and plays within these desires, is cast off by us as we forever work towards a “higher” sense of self. This sense of reflection upon our own lives is the mechanism by which the abject acts: “I experience abjection only if an Other has settled in place and stead of what will be ‘me’” (Kristeva 10). When we create a system of laws, rules, and order in a society, the abject is what stands opposite us in the mirror and makes us question the inherent logic of the laws, the privilege that is given to some groups over others, and whispers about that which is corrupt, false, or left out, all on the basis of an innate desire for the examination of the unsavory and the questionable.

Kristeva details the experience of confronting or facing the abject in her explanation of the notion of jouissance, the climactic and sublime moment in which we turn to face what has been abjected, and it is at once wonderful and horrifying. There is always tension that is necessarily maintained between us and the abject, as if we might prop one another up. Jouissance is Kristeva’s term for that space and philosophical tension that is (and must always be) pushed between us and the abject – to encounter this is to become cataclysmically aware of the liminality and in-betweenness of that which we are too uncomfortable to acknowledge. It is at once a painful and ecstatic recognition, “It follows that jouissance alone causes the abject to exist as such. One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on enjouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion” (Kristeva 9). It is when we are, at last, taken in through confrontation by those parts of humanity that we have so carefully ignored. After a battle between self and self-other, it seems, there is a moment of painful peace and rejoicing that can only be described as joyful, cathartic. With this, it becomes imperative to move to examine the dynamics of self and abject that take place within Beowulf.

It is perhaps the simplest and most direct route to begin by analyzing Grendel in terms of his status as an outcast from good, honorable Anglo-Saxon society. This point of characterization begins when the monster is first introduced to the story, and continues even after he has been killed by Beowulf. He is characterized as terrible and bloodthirsty, but simultaneously resentful and envious of the events that take place in the mead hall: “a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark, / nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him / to hear the din of the loud banquet” (Beowulf 86-88). We understand that the basis for the epic poem is the relationship between lords and their retainers, or between two men who fight for the same leader: a bond of kinship, of two dwellers in the same mead-hall, is the strongest of all interpersonal relationships during the time of Beowulf. Our first introduction to Grendel is not his bloody desires or his great strength; he is instead characterized as “a prowler through the dark,” demonstrating that he is fundamentally alone in the world of the fiction: without kin and a lord to serve, he wanders, lost, and is envious of those who have that privilege of loyalty and love. In this way, Grendel is immediately abjected. Because of his unmediated jealousy and desire for revenge against those bodies which cast him out, he cannot be integrated into a clan, and is subsequently left behind.

Here, Grendel’s actions in the poem might begin to be analyzed as a byproduct of the act of abjection itself, and we might codify the effective resistance of the monster in terms of the nature of the “casting-off” that created him. Imogen Tyler writes that “to understand how abjection gives rise to resistance, we need to consider the material effects of of being made abject within specific historical, social, and political locales” (38). Grendel’s resistance to his abjection, his bloodthirstiness and violence towards Hrothgar and his clan, consitute this resistance to his exclusion that is so notably defined by the nature of the dominant culture that has cast him off. Grendel is made particularly complex by his seeming emotional transparency, his clear desire to cause harm that has a motivation, to commit violence that is not mindless, but targeted. In many ways, the admission of this emotion surrounding the act of pillaging and savaging through the warriors in a mead-hall constitutes a revolt against, or at least a questioning of, the Anglo-Saxon warrior ethos that dominates the poem. As I will elaborate upon momentarily, Grendel is reflective of the society that has cast him out, and as a literary figure, he allows the reader to explore those areas of Anglo-Saxon sociocultural values that are unpleasant, or not stated with the most accurate tone in epic poems. The bloodiness and disturbing brutality of battle when two clans fight against one another are not clearly explained with proper relation to their psychological context in the texts, and the emotional reaction of those that kill to the fact that they are killing is not amplified. Considered in the social and political locale, as Tyler writes, in which the story would have taken place, Grendel’s abjection and subsequent resistance to society expands our understanding of the sub-textual, or pre-textual experiences in the poetry.

To elaborate on the emotional weight of abjection and violence within this Germanic culture, it is imperative to understand a the social hierarchy that was upheld, in many ways, by the action of abjection. Kristeva describes a reaction to confronting the abject as follows: “the spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery” (2). There is a profoundly human reaction, then, to rid oneself of what is unlikeable or abject about the human experience, or what seems to be dangerous or disgusting to a healthy and enjoyable life. Even if Grendel had not committed the atrocities at Heorot, it seems likely that he would still be rejected (abjected) from the common Anglo-Saxon world, simply due to the general dislike, and distrust, that was had for those who were free agents, without a lord or clan. During the time of the writing of the Germanic epic (Beowulf and others), it was generally accepted that clans operated under a code of loyalty and honor. This code expected that retainers, in exchange for gifts (“ring-giving”) would fight for their leaders. It was honorable to die on the battlefield in violent love for one’s lord, and it was dishonorable to run away from a fight, or save one’s own life, particularly if it might have been at the expense of one’s lord or kinsmen. There is, arguably, a sense of abjection for any retainer that violated this strict code of honor, and those around them likely experienced that “repugnance… of being in the middle of treachery” (Kristeva 2). Those who did not sufficiently conform to the honor code (which was based in that long tradition of masculine “warrior” ethos), were understandably abjected from the court, forced to wander without a home.

Thus, there is a sense that Beowulf’s great fight with Grendel is an effort to purge what is undesirable from the world of familiar things, to remove the abject from a society of comfortable humanity. Grendel is repeatedly described as somewhat amorphous, a dark “shadow” or “demon” moving across the plains without cause or desire, a “force” that is outside of the system of knowledge of the narrator. Grendel notably fights without weapons, which is reiterated multiple times in the text, a detail that removes him even further from a corporeal humanity. It is not a groundbreaking project to analyze Grendel as an abstraction of unwanted, non-human forces, and this could be done without the context of Kristeva’s philosophy, but to fully understand this antagonist, I would argue that the abject is imperative. Beowulf’s request to fight against Grendel, who has now been established as an almost completely abstract moral force of evil, is:

And so, my request, O king of Bright-Danes,

…

is that you won’t refuse me, who have come this far,

the privilege of purifying Heorot,

with my own men to help me, and nobody else. (Beowulf 427-432)

Beowulf’s request is worded very specifically: he desires the “privilege of purifying” the mead-hall. He does not state that he would like to defeat the monster or keep safe Lord Hrothgar’s retainers, nor is he outwardly concerned about the safety of the larger nation in these lines. His concern lies with purification, with weeding out something bad from a common human space. This is the hallmark language of a philosophy of abjection, that seeks to cast out anything that is uncanny, liminal, or reminiscent of an unpleasant repression. Abjection, in the most basic sense, is the philosophical mission to achieve the myth of a whole, pure, unadulterated human form. Beowulf’s mission seems to be to abject, most fundamentally, something that is disagreeable, even if the disagreement reflects something important about Anglo-Saxon society and reflects upon the culture that it attempts to eradicate.

It is also critical to consider the framing of this villain, Grendel, as it is maintained throughout the epic poem. Naturally, the tone of the narrator when Grendel is described undergoes a major shift each time the villain appears in the text. There is the sense that things are going well, that there are riches abounding and the culture of the Danes is intact, until something unimaginably evil appears to ruin it all. Grendels transgressions are described with an equally sinister and mournful tone: “Grendel came greedily loping… hunting for a prey in the high hall” (Beowulf 711-713), “Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open / the mouth of the building, maddening for blood,” (723-724), “he who had harrowed the hearts of men / with pain and affliction in former times” (808-809). Grendel, undoubtedly, does awful things to the men that are in the mead-hall: he tears them apart, steals them away, and cannibalizes them – these are terribly bloody consequences for a battle. It is important to note; however, that his essential actions are reflective of what Germanic lords, like King Hrothgar and King Hygelac, do on a regular basis to other villages: they invade without permission, if there is resistance, they cut countless men down in bloody battle, they look to take the central meeting place, the mead-hall, as their own, and they capture, torture, and rape those townspeople who resist. The only difference here is that Grendel is cannibalizing people, but this is easily understood as an act of metaphorical consumption, potentially interpreted to reflect the consumption of human flesh through acts of sexual assault and torturous, unnecessary violence. I will elaborate on the action of cannibalism later in my analysis. Ultimately, Grendel seems to reflect those disturbing, and often glossed-over realities of Germanic warrior culture.

Because of the framing of the poem, we are primed to see Grendel in a negative light, but his character reflects far more about the Germanic culture than might be expected upon an initial read of the text. In considering the monster through the lens of Kristeva’s philosophy, it is given a less primitively bloodthirsty purpose than one would expect, given the description that is provided in Beowulf. Kristeva asserts that “abjection… is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles” (4). In reflecting the actions of the Anglo-Saxon kings (that, presumably, are the forces that kept him prowling the earth, unaccepted and unassimilated), Grendel is the abject. Whether intentional by the author or not, he becomes a force of hatred that provides a great moral lesson to the audience, that strict social stratification and the creation of “in” and “out” groups may not always be the wisest or most humane hierarchical option. The jouissance that Beowulf experiences when he encounters this foe in their fight, simultaneously joyous and awful, is this essential element of reflection, in which he suffers from the uncanny experience of facing the abject head-on: “it is a brutish suffering that, ‘I’ puts up with, sublime and devastated” (Kristeva 2). Interpreted this way, the reader might be brought to question the stability of the masculine-warrior culture that was so imperative to the genre of Germanic epic, particularly when just one force that functions in opposition to this system is able to shut down a mead-hall for years. This seems to be the true power of the abject.

With this, we might turn to a critical context for all of this action: the element of Christianity that permeates the action throughout Beowulf, and by which Grendel is continually defined. The reader is, by reiteration, forced to understand the relationship between God and Grendel as a negative and estranged one. He is “god-cursed Grendel” (Beowulf 711), “the God-cursed brute” (121) who “had given offence also to God” (810). If we are to understand Germanic warrior-culture as based upon honor, the text also hints that this honor is tied to the notion of approval from God. (Whether this is what the culture within the story valued or a Christian interpretation by the poet is unclear, but for the purposes of the fiction as separate from authorial context, God seems to be quite important to the approval and success of Beowulf). In this Christian culture, Grendel is cast out on the basis of being “Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlawed / and condemned as outcasts” (Beowulf 106-107). From his birth, he is cast from honorable, God-fearing society, and sent to wander, due to his heritage. The mention of Cain is important here, as it specifically indicates an action of abjection: because his ancestor was the first human to commit fratricide (a particularly heinous crime in a culture that sees their kinsmen as brothers in blood), Grendel is represents something about humanity that they would like to quickly forget or cast off. Turning on one’s own kin is, naturally, to go against the urges and loyalty that hold together Germanic clans. Thus, Grendel is made an even more unimaginably displeasing figure by his very birth, abhorrent to good, honorable society and representing something disgusting, complicated, and difficult to stomach.

This abjective force that seems to push Grendel further and further out of regular humanity, is then, predictably, a religious one. There are countless rituals and tenets of religious sects that value purity and the casting-off of the undesirable: Christian purity culture and the sacrament of confession, keeping kosher in Judaism, and the notion in Islam that some animals are haram (unclean), such as pigs. This early Christian, or somewhat pagan-hybridized culture of Beowulf is no different, which is why Grendel is established as being the opposite of God, and forcibly so. Kristeva discusses religious abjection in pagan rituals, arguing that “abjection appears as a rite of defilement and pollution in the paganism… It takes on the form of the exclusion of a substance… the execution of which coincides with the sacred” (17). Here, the exclusion of something, and the act of excluding that thing from daily life or in certain specific areas of life or society, indicates a sense of the sacred that comes about because of this abjection. Grendel’s evil quality lies in his heritage and damnation far more than it does in his actual actions (before the poem starts, we don’t really know whether he has attacked and tormented humans in the past or not). His villainous nature is created because of his abjection, his opposition to God, and so he is condemned as “a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing” (Kristeva 8). If the Geats and Danes are parties that are loved and accepted (and thus supported) by God, Grendel is of some other race, one that is not preceded by a divine presence, such as the Christian god.

In relation to this sense of religion, we can understand abjection as a theory of the non-human, and thus Grendel as being ontologically separate from humanity as a species. In Christianity, animals are not considered to have souls, and do not go to heaven/hell as humans would. While Grendel’s form is ambiguous as stated in the poem, he is decidedly not a regular man, but seems to have animal qualities that are many and various. I have already asserted that Grendel’s terrorizing of the mead-hall is based in his reflective qualities (reflecting man’s violence back upon himself). Yet another aspect of Grendel’s abjection is his status as non-human, or somewhat animal. Kristeva explains:

The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder. (13)

The fundamental tenets of humanism (and many different religious orders) rely on a distinction between man and animal. Much of the basis for the ideal of human uniqueness and superiority relies on the belief that humans contain some thing that makes us better, more complete, or more whole than animals are. In this way, Grendel is animalized in the text as the abject, perpetuating “un-human” actions and systems such as murder, because of his descendancy from Cain. Early in the narrative of Beowulf, Grendel prowls around Heorot and the village, terrorizing the clan and murdering people, but “the throne itself, the treasure-seat, / he was kept from approaching; he was the Lord’s outcast” (168-169). If the throne of Heorot, created for King Hrothgar, can be read as a symbol of the seat of heavenly power or divine right, Grendel is pictured here as the ultimate religious exile, unable to come anywhere near the seat of divinity. Like an animal, he is not considered to be at the same level as man, and seems to represent the animality that humans recognize inside themselves but refuse to acknowledge. Wandering around aimlessly, murdering and eating people, conquering and invading, Grendel is the abjected non-human that exists entirely without, away from kin, clan, and God.

To name Grendel as this locus of abjection is a project that is critical in both directions of definition. We can identify Grendel as abject, as I have done, but it is also imperative to understand and define abjection through our understanding of Grendel, and of other characters like him. An analysis of Beowulf and abjection brings out the sociopolitical application of Kristeva’s theory, which interrogates what we cast off in (generally modern-day) societal law and politics. Georges Bataille, as summarized by Tyler, proposes that abjection creates whole demographics that are cast out, “an excess that threatens from within, but which the system cannot fully expel as it requires this surplus both to constitute the boundaries of the state and to legitimize the prevailing order of power” (Tyler 20). If we understand Grendel’s monstrosity as essential for Anglo-Saxon society in order to outline what is within their strict cultural hierarchy and what is not, we can observe, as Tyler writes, that this political order is one that relies on opposition in order to remain sovereign. When we consider the sheer disgust and disdain with which Grendel is treated by Hrothgar’s retainers and allies, the intense emotions that he evokes, it is clear to see that the excluding power that is represented by Heorot relies on Grendel for the establishment of abjected zones and reinforcement of the political, human hierarchy in the mead-hall. Tyler continues to explain that the feeling of disgust amongst members of the in-group creates distance between the included and excluded (22), which is a productive way of understanding and interpreting abjection as it has generated the figure of Grendel. This distance that is created by abjection, the uncanny, liminal space between Beowulf and Grendel, provides much of the subtextual context for the exploration that takes place in the poem of violence, fear, and killing.

At this point, it is imperative to return to abjection as it relates to the physical limits and definitional understanding of the human body, and the violent casting-off that happens during a battle. Grendel is not only abject himself, he is also an agent or operant of abjection, he “would rip life from limb and devour them, / feed on their flesh” (Beowulf 732-733), and “mauled a man on his bench, / bit into his bone-lappings, bolted down his blood” (740-741). When considering this aspect of Grendel’s activities, the abject is made far more complex in the poem. First, Grendel rips people apart and allows their blood to spill, tearing their bodies open to re-negotiate the outer limits of physical form. Jela Krečič and Slavoj Žižek work with the feeling of disgust caused by abjection, they write that it “arises when the border that separates the inside of our body from its outside is violated, when the inside penetrates out” (64), and it is predicated on the action of the “dead barrier being broken and the organic interiority penetra[ting] the surface” (66). In his ripping apart of Beowulf’s kinsmen and fellow warriors, Grendel breaks the barrier that separates the inside of the body from the outside world; to put it plainly, he spills blood and guts, which is disgusting to many humans. We abject this; as we abject him, we also abject his actions. Simultaneously, however, Grendel cannibalizes the the men that he kills. Again, in the most reductive sense, this is a horrible thing because it is “gross,” but more importantly, he commits that action that allows “organic interiority” to move outside of the body. In eating people, Grendel demonstrates the cyclical and universal abjection of his struggle against Beowulf and his kinsmen: he is the abject eating the more “pure” humans, he integrates their hidden, interior aspects (blood, organs, bare humanity) into his body, reflecting them back onto themselves by puncturing the distance between abject and familiar. As a monstrous cannibal, then, Grendel’s figure questions the purpose of the casting-off that has condemned him and his ancestors, and he explores the reflective universality of the human instinct to abject.

As established, the figure of Grendel in the poem is created in stark opposition to the existing culture of Germanic warriors during this time: he exists as entirely cast off from society. Textual evidence supports the conclusion that Grendel exists in opposition to all “good” things about, for example, King Hrothgar’s clan: a comfortable and familiar humanity, a sense of beauty and purity to life, commitment to God, loyalty to one’s clan and lord, and honor in all things, particularly on the battlefield. But, as we have observed thus far, Grendel’s true purpose is not this simple. As we read his acts of evil cannibalism and his ancestral separation from society in the poem, it is clear that he operates as a reflection of the human Anglo-Saxon warriors, as well as a manifestation of their complex situation of abjection. The experience of jouissance, the intense and awful confrontation with the abject, is felt even by the reader when this figure, in which the abject is contained, begins to rip humans apart and consume their bodies, and we encounter the bloody reality of Anglo-Saxon warfare with full transparency and appropriate culpability, perhaps for the first time in the poem. Representing an old biblical evil and the loneliness that all kinsmen loathe to feel, Grendel resists his exclusionary positioning by a dominant social force and stubbornly reflects the unending casting-off of violently undesirable emotional and vulnerable human experiences, which are unceasingly inherent to the warrior culture in which Beowulf takes place.

Works Cited

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Translated by Seamus Heaney, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2000.

Krečič, Jela and Slavoj Žižek. “Ugly, Creepy, Disgusting, and Other Modes of Abjection.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 43, no. 1, The University of Chicago Press, Autumn 2016, pp. 60-83. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26547671.

Kristeva, Julia. “Chapter 1. Approaching Abjection.” Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982, pp. 1-18.

Tyler, Imogen. “Chapter 1. Social Abjection.” Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain, Zed Books, 2021, doi.org/10.5040/9781350222359.