What Rises from Hate
In the early 20th century two world wars, several lesser wars, and an onslaught of narrow-minded discrimination dominated how people lived, died, and thought which allowed the floodgates to open on how people communicated. More people were starting to open up and write their life stories in a fictional or poetic format, as they saw them unfolding. They were looking at life through the perspective of clearer vision seeing that perfection was not reality. The Victorian era was being reshaped by a whole new 20th-century attitude because people were coming to the realization that personal regiment could be traded for platoon regiment with the declaration of war. People needed a way to speak and political correctness in subject matter was no longer at the center of a writer's mind, instead of how the world was changing and the extreme reality of mortality was standing at the forefront. Therefore, it is my plan to explain why war is important to literature. Without the devastation, destruction, and discrimination that wars create we would not be able to compare and contrast our own inner feelings. I will show through various poetic verses, psychological input, and scholarly interpretations how without fears of our unknown differences in humanity we would never have been able to collectively find ways past our fears. Without the imbalanced balance that wrong actions bring us we are left not knowing what really is right.
Literature with war connotations is everywhere, and for every history buff describing the date by date blow by blows, there is someone writing about the feelings war has brought about due to those dates. âSince 1890, the literature of war has generated almost 23,000 books, essays, theses, dissertations, and other materialsâ (Calloway). Using the word war truly doesnât stop with the grenade or the canteen though, it extends to hate crimes that people commit out of discrimination and prejudice too. âA hate crime is an illegal act involving intentional selection of a victim based on a perpetratorâs bias or prejudice against the actual or perceived status of the victimâ (Craig 85). Hitler in WWII was synonymous with this, he was one of the leading most hate criminals known to man. How many stories (Number the Stars by Lois Lowry), poetry (âLady Lazarusâ by Sylvia Plath), and prose have been created as a byproduct of those tragedies? Peter Gay author of the book The Cultivation of Hatred summed up so well where aggression that causes tragedies stems from
âThe scars that aggression has left on the face of the past are indelible. Wars and rumors of wars, class struggles, clashes between religious denominations or racial and ethnic groups, rivalries for place and power in politics and business, the hatreds generated by nationalism and imperialism, the ravages of crimeâŠâ (Gay 3)
and that it âoffer[s] persuasive testimony that aggression has supplied most of the fuel for historical action and historical changeâ (Gay, 3).
All of these scars Gay talks about are plastered within the pages of such books as A Treasury of War Poetry British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 edited by George Herbert Clarke and Poets of World War II edited by Harvey Shapiro. In The Treasury of War Poetry⊠Clarke starts off by pointing out that âBecause man is both militant and pacific, he has expressed in literature, as indeed in other forms of art, his pacific and militant moodsâ (Kindle Location 149) giving clarity that man can have both kinds of moods within the literature. During WWI most poets of war broke down their feelings with regard to a patriotic obligation-al type feeling that rises from illusions of freedom, wants for justice and safety, and/or just animalistic territorial pride for one's place of residence. Nil Santianezâs article
âShowing What Cannot Be Saidâ said that âit was the Great War, not the wars fought in the nineteenth century, that truly demonstrated the poverty of language for conveying the experience of modern warfare. As is well known, the Great War affected in fundamental ways the human capacity for understandingâ. [So] â[a] crisis of meaning arose as an aftershock of the Great War. Profoundly baffled and traumatized by the magnitude of the tragedy, European and American artists and writers had to figure out⊠how to represent an experience lived and perceivedâ (Santianez 301).
Within this baffling tragedy, poets rose to the challenge and wrote as the Modernists of the early part of the century started to do, with more feelings to guide their sights. At this point in history, there was still a looming of Victorian proper protocol and procedure lingering in the air and because so few understood the depth of war the two extremes were getting mixed together in the minds of so many They were floating along in the thought processes of those in the war lending an unrealistic, idealistic romanticized dream quality to those lying on the ground staring up at the stars from battlegrounds. George Herbert Clarke provides such picturesque details of his love for England in his âLines Written In Surrey 1917â poetic explanation for why people would fight for England that displays the unrealistic idealists romanticized vision that even âDeathâs extremeâ cannot destroy.
âDoves droop or amble; the agile waterfly/ Wrinkles the pool; and flowers, gay and dun,/ Rose, bluebell, rhododendron, one by one,/ The buccaneering bees prove busily./ Ah, who may trace this tranquil loveliness/ In verse felicitous? - no measure tells;/ But gazing on her bosom we can guess/ Why men strike hard for England in red hells,/ Falling on dreams, âmid Deathâs extreme caress,â (5-13)
Though there were also questions that followed when death was staring at them from every shadow changing their thought processes to why would a God so mighty allow man to endure such pain. Which is a point that is illustrated in the words of Henry van Dykeâs poem âLiberty Enlightening The Worldâ where he proclaimed
âO dearest country of my heart, home of the high desire,/ Make clean thy soul for sacrifice on Freedomâs altar-fire:/ For thou must suffer, thou must fight, until the warlords cease,/ And all the peoples lift their heads in liberty and peace.â (17-20)
These were true men who were not used to hand grenades and scarce rations because before the war they ran the local grocer or counted out money at the bank, or just walked out of high schoolâs doors. So when Wilfred Wilson Gibson said in âBetween The Linesâ that they would ââŠlain/In muddy trenches, napping like a beast/ With one eye open, under sun and rain/ And that unceasing hell-fireâŠ/ It was strangeâ (30-34) and to them, it was just that âstrangeâ. Most of the poets of this war seemed to keep a hope about them that resonated through their words such as in A. Victor Ratcliffâs âOptimismâ where he states âO day, belong and heavy if you will,/ But on our hopes set not a bitter heel./ For tiny hopes like tiny flowers of Spring/Will comeâ (11-14). The war was hard on these boys and men but they fought with the, some would say, optimism that comes with thinking they are fighting an ending battle. They didnât think another war was right around the corner. These guys were some of the first to open the flood gates to a literary road full of various stages and forms of fighters that contributed raw emotion and questionable understanding of life into our blossoming literary world.
As time progressed on people wrote more and more with the intention of gaining some sort of understanding. At this same time that authors in literature were blooming like wildflowers, authors in psychology were blooming as well. So when the Psychological masterpiece Brave New World by Aldous Huxley was written in 1932, right after the First World War and right before the second, boasting what human Utopia would be like in a fictitious way we were not only shown that Utopia but we were cleverly shown that it wouldnât work. Not everyone can be brought up naĂŻve and happy, we are humans, with tendencies to see things through animalistic lenses. We must have conflict to some degree in an effort to grow. It is through our growing process that psychologists have found we need to communicate our findings and our interpretations of these findings to grow successfully. Laurel Richardson points out that
âAll knowledge is socially constructed. Writing is not simply a âtrueâ representation of an objective ârealityâ, instead, language creates a particular view of reality. All language has grammatical, narrative, and rhetorical structures which create value, bestow meaning and constitute⊠the subjects and objects that emerge in the processâ (Richardson, 116).
Writing all of how they felt and what was going on was extremely hard for the soldiers as Marian Eide states in her article Witnessing and Trophy Hunting: Writing Violence from the Great War Trenches because âjournals or diaries [were] expressly forbidden⊠and letters home were carefully censoredâ (Eide 86). So it seems that they had to decide what it was they were going to accept and what they werenât. Though we all interpret these situations in life differently we all ultimately make collective decisions as to whether or not to accept what a leader may order or we choose to counter that order in protest or defiance and while it was hard those soldiers wrote whatever they could and they wrote it with as much detail and feeling as they were allowed. They choose not to conform completely but fight for their right to express what they were going through because they were constantly internalizing what was going on. As through language they were âcreat[ing] [their] own particular view of realityâ as Richardson said.
The same was true about WWII and now as Lucinda Dyer states in her piece âThe Lives of Warsâ âshelves [were] continuing to groan under the weight of titles about WWII, [so] publishers [were] constantly looking for stories that [could] offer readers a new perspective on the now seven-decade-old conflictâ (Dyer 23) So we see in Poets of World War II edited by Harvey Shapiro stating in his introduction that âPoems about any war share a subject that Simone Weil identified, in an essay about the Iliad that she wrote during World War II, as âforceâ: âthat x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of himâ (Shapiro, xix). Shapiro decided to collect and present his readers with poetry from old and new soldiers. New soldiers that had not seen war but heard all about it from their parents and/or siblings mixing with returning older soldiers who fought not too long ago. Essentially veterans who collectively already knew of the travesties that test a manâs will to live out on the front lines who were now returning as ranked officers. These were men who at first saw the fight as nobility and honor for one's country but were now looking at new recruits as an encroachment of one's personal space in uncomfortably close quarters because they no longer felt they understood what they were fighting for exactly. The whole of war became so large that they could not wrap their minds around what was going on. What made it worse was that during the military downtime the roaring twenties kicked it heals up in victory and people got lost in the huge party of indecision about what was better security and money or expatriate uncertainty and lavishly lush extremes. So when WWII reared its face at these industrial revolutionaries, existential thinkers, and philosophical literary minds it was like a bucket of ice water thrown in everyoneâs face. Making Robinson Jeffers cynicism seems truthful in his assessment of the situation in his poem titled âPearl Harborâ where he states âThe war that we have carefully for years provoked/ Catches us unprepared, amazed and indignant. OurâŠ/âŠleaders make orations. This is the people/ That hopes to impose on the whole planetary world/ An American peaceâ (24-31) âBut now I am oldâŠâ (17).
It was the old and the young, toe to toe and back to back swapping un-relatable stories âbecause we all live out narratives in our lives and because we all understand our own lives in terms of the narratives that we live outâ that is what we feel is âappropriate for understanding the actions of others.â as quoted by M. Hyvarinen of Jerome Brunerâs words from his piece Life as Narrative. This quote essentially puts into words the personal measuring stick we use for others in an unfair bias but one that we have a hard time controlling. These become the differences by which we measure ourselves creating the gaps in society that feed warring attitudes. Lincoln Kirstein put this bluntly in his poem titled âRankâ where he said
âDifferences between rich and poor, king and queen,/ Cat and dog, hot and cold, day and night, now and then,/ Are less clearly distinct than all those between/ Officers and us: enlisted men.â (1-4)
Where he not only defined the difference but defined the mood with his use of capital letters and profanity in his poem titled âP.O.Eâ where he clearly packs up the hope WWI poets tried to maintain as he states
âWe strive to fake a grateful note/ But goddamn duffle bag and pack,/ Gas mask, rifle, helmet, coat/ Too heavy are, so each sad sack, Must flop and gripe: This is some shit./ Up On Your Feet, our orders crack./ Itâs All Aboard for THIS IS IT.â (18-24)
Which it seemed to be in metaphorical terms even if it wasnât an âitâ in literal terms, in the sense that when WWII was over the nightmares of the battle lingered long after everyone stepped foot in their home. During WWII most poets of the war broke down their feeling as well but what we saw was less of the leftover Victorian facade and more of the nightmare reality. So floating now in the thought processes of those in the war were realistic non-idealistic warped beauty elements that were told in a dream quality from those lying on the ground staring up at the stars from battlegrounds. Yvor Winters in his poem âMoonlight Alertâ captures the realism of the non-ideal nightmare with such poetic rhythmic flow that it softens the unbelievable of death with mother natureâs beauty.
âThe sirens, rising, woke me; and the night/ Lay cold and windless; and the moon was bright,/ Moonlight from sky to earth, untaught, unclaimed,/ An icy nightmare of the brute unnamed./ This was hallucination. Scarlet flower/ And yellow fruit hung colorless. That hour/ No scent lay on the air. The siren scream/ Took on the fixity of shallow dream./ In the dread sweetness I could see the fall/ Like petals sifting from a quiet wall,/ Of yellow soldiers through indifferent air,/ Falling to die in solitude. With careâ (1-12)
Our bookshelves were now filling up with works that talked about feelings and works that talked about experiences, ones that gave detailed accounts and ones that fantasized about how things in the future could go due to the outcomes of these first two wars, books that talked about the parties in between the wars, the victories and the loves, books that explained it all and also invented it all. New worlds were opening up and new fears were now arising that previously were not known let alone dwelled upon. PTSD was beginning to form with each passing governmental, social and economic conflict and psychology was gearing itself up to deal with this new onslaught of mental instabilities that were coming home along with the soldiers with their own set of books. Each passing and developing conflict created more and more opposing sides for people to feel akin to based on how they were raised and what they were exposed to. Psychologists needed to map out the person sitting in front of them so that they could gather more data to better help the individual but always keeping in the back of their mind also society as a whole. So they would gather...
âLife histories, informantsâ oral accounts, in-depth interviews, case studies, historical documents, and participant observation[s] as these would help them âgain entre, ask questions, listenâ as they would then âfashion these accounts into a prose pieceâ which ârequires complex decision makingâ (Richardson, 116)
...all in an effort to help the individual and/or group of people better understand themselves. Psychologists even started telling their patients/participants to keep detailed journals, life accounts, and/or notebooks of whatever they thought of, whatever they saw, and most of all whatever they felt. Psychologistâs discovered that ânotions such as âstoryâ and ânarrativeâ to be especially useful in conveying the coherence and the meaning of livesâ (McAdams, 100). This seemed to resonate with so many as a coping mechanism for their PTSD, depression, anxiety, and generalized confusion about life now that so much tragedy was being brought to their attention more and more as society grew, time went on, and even as technology made it easier and easier to know what was going on outside of one's personal circles of friends and family.
During and after both World Wars people were literally swimming in thoughts about what they could not control leaving them more confused and powerless than ever before. The rising hate between what was unknown about each other had become magnified on global levels all the while populations were increasing and even though wars were fought to stabilize the prejudice, that prejudice was still remaining and spreading. People were now coming face to face with cultural and ethnic differences they had never known existed and fears rose to new heights. It seems to be our human instinct to fight what we do not know and try to make others conform to our own thought processes in order to create order, the fact is, what we actually create is discrimination through racism and sexism, miscommunication and ultimately wars. Though without war wrought hopefuls from WWI who started to lose their hope with the onset of WWII who came home questioning more than before we wouldnât have near as many books to read as we do today, or movies, or song lyrics and so on. Prior to WWI, we had far less written words in print with accounts of how it felt to be facing mortality while staring at the wide-open expanse of a common sky we all share. With all the words that have been written since WWI we have continued steadfast to evolve into a society of individuality within a multitude of expressive outlets; outlets that allow all of us to depict the wars of our own lives; allowing us to show the triumphant good that can come from our dyer conditions. We have found the written word as a suitable way to get our thoughts and emotions across to so many. Without those warring tortures that we experienced and still do set ourselves up to the experience, we would be far less attuned with what constitutes right since we wouldnât have experienced such wrongs to have for comparison. Consequently, we would have/ have had far less written words expressing our emotional experiences but instead would have/ have had more flat stories full of rainbows we have no idea how to enjoy because without horrible conditions how can we appreciate the blissful conditions. While we should ultimately learn as an evolved society to express our aggressive differences in more constructive non-violent ways let's face it, it is easier to place blame and war over reasons of shallow vanity of gods unknown then to accept we are all human, we all feel the same at some point in our lives, and we all live under the same domed sky.
Works Cited:
- vanDyke, Henry. "Liberty Enlightening The World." A Treasury of War Poetry British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917, The Riverside Literature Series, Kindle Location. 225.
- Gibson, Wilfred Wilson. âBetween The Lines.â A Treasury of War Poetry British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917, The Riverside Literature Series, Kindle Location. 1830.
- Ratcliff, A. Victor. âOptimism.â A Treasury of War Poetry British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917, The Riverside Literature Series, Kindle Location. 1618.
- Shapiro, Harvey. Poets of World War II. New York, Library of America, 2003. Pgs. 13, 52, 55-56.
- Gay, Peter. The Cultivation of Hatred. New York. W.W. Norton, 1993. Pgs. 3,4.
- Calloway, Catherine. War in Literature and Drama. Oxford Bibliographies, 2013. www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791279/obo 9780199791279-0004.xml. Accessed September 28, 2017.
- Craig, Kellina M. Examining Hate-Motivated Aggression: A Review of the Social Psychological Literature on Hate Crimes as a Distinct Form of Aggression. Aggression and Violent Behavior. Vol. 7. Issue 1. Jan-Feb 2002. Pg. 85.
- Richardson, Laurel. Narrative and Sociology. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Sage Publications. Vol. 19. No. 1. April 1990. Pg. 116.
- Hyvarinen, M. Life as Narrative Revisited. Partial Answers: Journal o Literature and the History of Ideas. Project Muse 2008. Vol. 6. No. 2. Pg. 261. Doi: 10.1353/pan.0.0020
- McAdams, Dan, P. The Psychology of Life Stories. Review of General Psychology. Educational Publishing Foundation, 2001. Vol. 5. No. 2. Pg. 100.
- Santianez, Nil. Showing What Cannot Be Said. The Manchester Review. Summer, 2016. Vol. 57. Issue 2. Pg. 301.
- Dyer, Lucinda. The Lives of War. Publishers Weekly. August 20, 2012. Vol. 259. Issue 34. Pg. 23.
- Eide, Marian. Witnessing and Trophy Hunting: Writing Violence from the /great War Trenches. Criticism. Winter, 2007. No. 1. Pg. 86.