Hero vs. Common Fate
In childhood, I coveted images of an intrepid figure rescuing people in distress. I admired the intensity of Superman’s focus as he shot through the air toward those in need; I spent hours thumbing through a sanitized history of the US civil rights movement, poring over images of Martin Luther King, Jr. as he shepherded a crowd through the streets of Montgomery; and I was convinced that there was no act greater than Moses’s parting of the Red Sea to usher the Israelites out of slavery. The hero, I understood, elevated the people’s possibilities—everyone was better off for his singular valiance.
Harryette Mullen’s “Hero vs. Common Fate” puts it differently. “The hero is the one / who runs to the fire,” the poem begins. But the familiar vision of spectacular bravery is swiftly upended by its proximity to another well-trod image: “Or the hero is / the one who avoids / the conflagration.” It is not the content of the hero’s act that characterizes him as a hero—he might court disaster or narrowly escape it—but the fact of his being set apart; as the first line break asserts, the hero is a hero because he is “the one.” While further images of the hero’s valor accrue, so too does a grammar of distinction from “the crowd,” whose “common fate” is rendered into an extractable resource to endow him with significance. In the end, Mullen’s poem makes clear that it is not the people who need a hero, but the hero who requires the people, orienting us toward the flourishing of “expendable extras” as the true measure of meaning.
– Claire Schwartz
Listen to Harryette Mullen read "Hero vs. Common Fate."
Hero vs. Common Fate
The hero is the one who runs to the fire. Or the hero is the one who avoids the conflagration. The hero can steer fast cars, pilot airplanes, boats, and helicopters. A resourceful improviser, the hero acts while others hesitate. This bold figure survives to rescue those who matter most in the story of the hero. When traffic stalls and passage is blocked with drivers fleeing the ravaged city, the hero gets out of the car and continues on foot. Indeed, the resourceful hero goes off-road. It is the hero’s instinct to move in a different direction, away from the crowd— those who share the common fate of expendable extras.
Harryette Mullen’s books include Her Silver-Tongued Companion, Open Leaves, Urban Tumbleweed, Recyclopedia, Sleeping with the Dictionary, and a collection of essays and interviews, The Cracks Between. A new poetry collection, Regaining Unconsciousness, is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2025.
