How great literature can change your life

Wednesday

Last week Radnor High School English teacher Carl Rosin reported on his students grappling with the use of Dylan Thomas by the Christchurch killer. The man also cited William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus, the subject of today’s essay. In addition to his use of another famous poem, what does it mean that this same poem inspired the great South African leader Nelson Mandela?

By Carl Rosin, English, Radnor High School

When an Australian man murdered fifty Muslim worshipers during their prayers, I interrupted my high school seniors’ British Literature curriculum to interpose a “Poetry Emergency”: a call to face and assess the terrorist’s use of Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus” in the rant he posted online. As Prof. Bates’s “better living” model might suggest, we dug deeper into the man’s grotesque application of literature. After last week’s post on the Thomas poem, which opens the Christchurch killer’s screed, today’s focuses on the Henley poem, which closes it.

When my student Megan McK. presented “Invictus,” she connected it to the Invictus Games. Here is her description of that “international sporting event for wounded, injured, and sick service personnel”:

The games began in the United Kingdom, started by Prince Harry after he visited the Warrior Games; a similar event was organized by the U.S. Department of Defense. The Invictus Games drew inspiration from the poem “Invictus” by W. H. Henley, who was an amputee himself. The Games most significantly represent the line “My head is bloody, but unbowed,” in that these men and women, who have sacrificed themselves for their country, came out wounded, but refuse to give up. Seeing the use of this poem, especially this line, in the terrorist’s rant saddens me deeply. It weighs heavily on my mind that the same poem that inspired a man to start an event to celebrate men and women who were injured serving their country also inspired another man’s means of killing multiple people in a racist and hateful act of violence.

The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber, in his article about the Christchurch murderer’s screed, summarized what is both widely known about Henley’s poem and not mentioned explicitly in it: that the poet, who had had one leg amputated when he was a boy, wrote the poem while recovering from a radical surgery to save the other leg. Kornhaber continued,

With its avowal that “my head is bloody, but unbowed,” it’s among the most commonly cited poems ever, with famous invocations including by [sic] Nelson Mandela while he was imprisoned for resisting South African apartheid and Timothy McVeigh before his execution for killing 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing.

It goes without saying that Nelson Mandela and Timothy McVeigh are already a bizarre pair of citers. Liam, one of my seniors, added a further reference, from Nobel Peace laureate and now Burmese leader (although her star has been badly tarnished by her complicity in the Rohingya crisis) Aung San Suu Kyi: “This poem had inspired my father, Aung San, and his contemporaries during the independence struggle, as it also seemed to have inspired freedom fighters in other places at other times.”

The term “freedom fighter” does hint at the problem we face when trying to get a handle on interpreting this poem and many others. The American revolutionaries of the 18^th century were freedom fighters…but not in the contemporary British accounts, in which they were terrorists. Mandela’s African National Congress were freedom fighters…but not to the apartheid government of South Africa, who imprisoned him for 27 years. On the flip side, the U.S. and its allies certainly do not agree with the freedom fighter self-designation that groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have adopted.

Conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg disparaged the common phrase “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” in his book The Tyranny of Cliches, calling it “simply absurd to contend that because people may argue over who is or is not a terrorist that it is therefore impossible to make meaningful distinctions between terrorists and freedom fighters.” This is a critic’s comment about literature: sure, there may be some legitimate difference in assessing the validity of a particular theme or thesis, but some things indeed have merit and some don’t. Perhaps it’s better to say, some things have an overwhelming amount more merit than others do.

I ask students of American literature, when they encounter Langston Hughes’s essential 1951 poem “Harlem,” about the images and actions Hughes catalogs. Is the poem all negative, all positive, or something in between? The key verbs include “defer” (technically, in participial form), “dry up,” “fester,” “run,” “stink,” “crust and sugar over,” “sag,” and then, finally, “explode.” Every year, without fail, more than one of these suburban high schoolers says that the last one gives a sense of hope. After all, who hasn’t heard of a new performer exploding onto the scene?

I can’t even imagine what Hughes would say if faced with this analysis. Sure, it’s possible – a word that memorably worked wonders for Henry Fonda as Juror #8 in Twelve Angry Men– but, as Goldberg might say, in context the assertion is absurd. Could the leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, who evoked hope in such classic poems as “Mother to Son” and “I, Too” back in the 1920s, have retained that level of hope through continued disappointments for three more decades? Possible, but unlikely.

Especially given the poem’s total lack of setup for such a “possible” reversal, especially given the decline of his tone through his many other writings over those decades, the much more reasonable answer is No. I understand that these teens, full of hope, who have not faced the degradations that decades of discrimination imposed on Langston Hughes, see “explode” in an affirmative sense – possibly because they very much want it to be so. Their perception does not make it valid.

The application of Henley’s and Hughes’s contexts butts up against what French critic Roland Barthes famously called “the death of the author.” He described how a multiplicity of interpretations “is collected, united,” but the location of this collection is in the reader, not the author:

[T]he reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.

This may seem far-fetched or even idealistic, but I’m confident that Henley would not have assumed that his medical history would be known to a random reader. His narrator’s first-person recollection of being “bloodied” under the unspecified “bludgeonings of chance” is broad enough to be applicable to any set of oppressive circumstances. I’m not so confident saying the same about Hughes, whose oppression was not in the individual realm but in the world-historical.

Poet Reginald Shepard’s essay “On the Intentional Fallacy” takes a middle road. On the one side is our studied awareness of the poet’s life; on the other lies the theoretical denial we see in Barthes, which follows the earlier argument of William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley that considering intent leads to fallacy.

“The use of biographical evidence need not involve intentionalism,” Shepard writes, “because while it may be evidence of what the author intended, it may also be evidence of the meaning of his words and the dramatic character of his utterance.” He qualifies this by adding, “an author’s biography won’t explain his or her work. If it does, that indicates a failure in the work: it’s not fully realized if it needs to be completed by biography. In work that lasts, what lasts is what remains after things like the author’s intentions have faded away.”

After Henley’s biography faded away and he surrendered his work to history, the text that remains holds more and more room for interpretation. Enter Mandela, Suu Kyi, McVeigh, and others. This is why Jackson, another of my senior students, had a “nauseated feeling” about the Christchurch murderer. Jackson sensed that the murderer’s “actions are supported by the theme of the poem.” Henley’s narrator, “unbowed” in front of his opponents, describes proudly how “the menace of the years / Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.” Jackson continued,

He’s saying don’t be afraid, stand tall, and state your opinion confidently. All of these claims I made in my annotations, thinking this was a good way to think about life. Express yourself and don’t be afraid of what others think. But the terrorist took it the same way. He did express himself and claimed to be inspired to do so by this poem, and that leaves a really sour feeling in my mouth, despite the poem being so well-written.

Jackson is one of the few who admitted what none of us, because if feels so wrong, wants to admit: that the poem’s theme is not easily separable from the shooter’s motivations.

Sarah was one of several students who pushed back on that idea, arguing that “the shooter was the one who caused the ‘bludgeonings of chance’ and the ‘wrath and tears’ described in the poem. He was not the resilient victim but the perpetrator.” Josh H. cited the same lines, noting that the terrorist “believes he has been hurt by others who actually have not done anything wrong to him.”

Decrying the pain of “‘this place of wrath and tears’ does not feel like an endorsement of pushing either these conditions or ‘the Horror of the shade’ onto others,” wrote Hannah. She also quoted line 5, “In the fell clutch of circumstance,” which “implies that the issues the speaker is having are not being purposefully caused by any entity, and yet the shooter seemed to feel he had found someone to blame.” Words like “passionate” (Jade) and “resilient” (Melissa) appeared in other students’ arguments against the killer’s screed, demonstrating what Liam referred to as a poem that “promotes positive self-empowerment.”

Bauti reinforced the anti-screed position with characterization provided by allusion:

The line “it matters not how strait the gate” is a reference to the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus says, “Strait is the gate and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.’” This goes directly contrary to the terrorist’s ideology, as the way through the narrow gate is to follow the Ten Commandments, which number 6 clearly states “you shall not kill.”

Giulia, who presented the poem in my second section, summed up the terrorist’s logical shortfall in a meditation upon the poem’s famous last two lines,

I am the master of my fate; 
I am the captain of my soul.

These, she wrote, are not suitable to be paired with the terrorist’s actions – “Taking one’s life into one’s own hands does not mean hurting a bunch of other people.” Adriana also argued that “becoming ‘the master of [his] fate’ does not justify his trying to become the master of other people’s fates.”

But we cannot deny what Jackson and his classmate Alana most directly conceded: that both this poem and “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” are undoubtedly inspirational, and that (as Alana wrote), “the idea that they might be used to inspire something grotesque is not completely insane.” The murderer’s direction and plan may have been insane, but the selection of these poems, disconcertingly, was not.

Does that make the poems complicit? How can it not?

And yet, after these 17- and 18-year-olds held “Invictus” and “Do Not Go Gentle” up to the light, the conclusions they reached – emotional, intelligent, empathetic, relying on critical thinking – exonerated the art by showing how evocative and vigorous poems can be. The murderer carried these works with him, sullying them by connecting them with his ineradicable crime. We cannot undo this. Fortunately, the poems still emit their own light and will continue to do so.

What happened in Christchurch, Pittsburgh, Poway, El Paso, Dayton, and dozens of other places is not okay, is never okay. But our art’s very vitality, its ability to slip beyond our grasp and into the hands of an evildoer, is okay. It’s uncomfortable, even infuriating, and even worse that we can’t keep beauty out of the hands of those who may distort and corrupt it. Were we to cower into demanding disambiguation and explicit specificity, the power of language and imagination would suffer. Censorship would be an even greater victory for the barbarians.

This is what it feels like to care about the world as deeply as artists do.