The Logic of Awareness in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollowmen”

THE LOGIC OF AWARENESS

 

In T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollowmen”

It has been sufficiently recognized by critics and students of T. S. Eliot’s poems that the force of his writing lies mostly in the suggestive power of his striking images which evoke a whole state of being a mood at once intensely personal and objective, the one as an instance of the other, the common fund of mankind’s experience as shared by the individual awareness. But it has not been sufficiently considered whether the poems contain a logical meaning, hidden beneath a deliberately reordered, seemingly reversed, pattern of logic. The logical meaning underlying his poems, say “The Hollowmen” is not the logic of the intellect, it is the logic of human awareness, with all its emotional implications. It is the logic or order in which human psyche cognizes the stream of introspections, coming as they do, in their own peculiar order. Yet these introspections, on second thought or analysis are such as can be reordered in a logical sequence for a fuller, intellectual comprehension. And such a comprehension is essential to appreciate the significance of the reversals of order that sweep across the inward-looking mind of the poet. It is this logical reconstruction of the meaning of the poem ‘The Hollowmen’ that I attempt in this essay. This is thus, an attempt first to show that the sections of the poem express a meaning which is capable of being put in the sequence of logical prosaic thinking. By implication, it attempts to throw into relief the significance of the seemingly desultory sequence of meaning that we find in the poem. The rhythms, images and the strange punctuation lend life to the meaning.

The first four sections of the poem describe the human situation at once contemporary and perennial. It presents the basic problem or riddle of life, a cross-section of the perennial human failure to face up to the riddle of being. The fifth section explains why it is so and rounds off by tracing through implication, the cause to its manifestation in the effect. The second stanza of section five is the key to the ‘meaning’ of this poem and it explains the rest of the stanzas.

The men are hollow, stuffed; the headpiece filled with straw, i.e., it fails to fulfil its essential function of perceiving the reality, of having a conception, and ‘idea’ of it. Between the ‘reality’ and ‘idea’ ‘falls the shadow’. What is the ‘shadow’? The incomprehension of the headpieces that renders them incapable of contacting the reality.

‘The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here.”

Their visual perception is thus, figuratively dim and they do not see things as they are, as in broad daylight, but as ‘under the light of a twinkling star.’ They ‘grope together’ in their incomprehension. Their world is thus ‘death’s dream kingdom’. It is a dream of living dreamt by spiritual death.

Their sense of touch is no better; theirs is a dead man’s hand”; it can just serve for groping; unable to touch, see or speak, they feel they are “waking alone.” Even when they are ‘trembling with tenderness’ of love, they cannot kiss though they wish to; and kiss is a form of touch which can communicate a feeling. No wonder that the prayers they form are the broken tags appended to the ‘stanzas’ in the last section. Unable to ‘kiss’ or touch, they go in ritual rounds around ‘the stone images’. They dare not touch the ‘images’ as though they who a sort of prickly pear and yet, in the emptiness of their heads they do not realize their plight. Like school urchins who do not realize their childish incomprehension, the hollowmen are merry and they sing. They feel merry over what, in fact, they should feel mortified.

The consequence of their inability to articulate (which is a product of their incomprehension) are not broken prayers alone. Theirs is not only the inability to commune with God, who is Spirit. They cannot communicate with one another. For to communicate there must be some realization to be communicated. What realization can one have when eyes do not see, skin cannot feel the touch and when the brain does not comprehend anything? They do not have any conception of any thing–not even of one another. To communicate is to re-create that which has to be communicated. They cannot create anything.

“Between conception
And creation
… … … …
Falls the shadow.”

When they cannot create, their heads are indeed headpieces filled with straw. What they have in it is not something pulsating with life; it is dead, like straw; it is stuffed–stuffed chaotically with dead concepts taken in mechanically without choice or understanding. So, when they speak they do not really mean anything. Their speech is thus a meaningless rustle:

“Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rat’s feet over broken glass.”

They ‘whisper’ because they were taught that speaking in a low voice is ‘respectable’ and they accept it mechanically. They accept the standard of decency complacently and thus their eyes are further closed to any possibility of realizing the spiritual barrenness of their existence.

The reference to the ‘rat’ suggests the timorousness, a shrinking away from contact with light and with other creatures, a certain aimlessness, a pettiness; their lives are isolated by their pettiness and are dark like rat-holes. To the hollowmen who are without any real understanding of world and of men there cannot be any values that can give meaning to life. World is, thus, to them, ‘a dry cellar’; because their vision is narrow and trivial. As they cannot truly communicate they cannot have a true communal life. Their’s is just a “Leaning together.” Now we can see that every one of the hollowmen is, to everyone else, a “shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.” I suggest that we should read these lines in continuation of ‘we are’ with which the ‘stanza’ begins.

They are a paralysed force because,

“Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow”

and so on.

In the last section the hollowman, the voice in the poem, illustrates, with the help of broken tags of the Lord’s prayer, what sort of prayer, the hollowmen make. Between the reality of God and their hollow notion of Him, between the motion or impulse to pray and the act of prayer, between the emotion with which “we are”

Trembling with tenderness
… … … …
And the response
Falls the shadow.

And ‘response’ suggests the use of the word in the Church service. Between the desire to speak and the spasmodic attempt to communicate with the fellowmen’ falls the shadow’; so it is in the utterance of Lord’s prayer: Thus,

“In this hollow valley

… … … …
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech.”

Thus their life is not a realization of the potencies of life any meaningful existence. The essence in them never descends into active living, into real, meaningful action, worship of mutual communication,

“Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the shadow.”

Their life in this state of spiritual hollowness is nothing but a tumid river. They do not live in the midst of its ‘living waters’ but they are:

“Gathered on this breach of the tumid river”

‘The beach’ is ‘this valley of dying stars’. And this spiritual bankruptcy is not a matter of today. It was so in the past and many were the kingdoms of yore that were so lost in it. This earth, which has been the scene of this immemorial horror of hollow existence is:

‘This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms’, is a monument to man’s failure. It is a broken jaw bone in which an archaeological geologist or anthropologist might see the spiritual failure of bygone races. And it is precisely in this manner that mankind is doomed to exist in future and for all time, even till the very end–

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

The spiritual hollowness, incomprehension, and the host of such qualities are the doom of mankind not the ‘bang’ of any war or bombing.

Is there no hope? There does not seem to be. For those with ‘direct eyes’ i. e., with eyes, that could look at the truth of human existence in this death’s dream kingdom have to exclaim , like Mistah Kurtz, “The horror! The horror!” Once they have seen bitter truth, they have crossed over to “Death’s other kingdom.” They are no longer amidst the hollowmen for to realize one’s hollowmen fearlessly is to emerge from it. The eyes of such call the attention of the rest to their spiritual hollowness. They are like ‘sunlight’ on ‘the broken column’ of the spiritual emptiness of the hollowmen. Human civilization, human achievement, is a column but alas, it is a broken column, not worthy to be called a column. It is a monument to human failure not to human achievement–like the legs of the broken statue in Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” The historical failure of mankind in the past and the present failure are exposed in the sight of those who have realized it. Even if a Christ, with his twelve apposses and the myriad saints appears amidst us like a multifoliate rose we dare not meet their gaze. If they try to preach us, their voice is “the voice of one who cried in the wilderness.” We, who have ears but do not hear, have to say of their voices –

“And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and solemn.”

They are spiritually as far away from us as the heavenly hosts of singing angels. They are ‘with us, not of us.’

When their eyes stare us in our face, and call on us to join them, we are timid like rats and we say,

“Let me be no nearer
in death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crow skin, crossed staves
… … … … …
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom.

For the ‘meeting’, if it comes about, will be ‘final’ and there the principle is ‘he who loses his life shall save it and he who saves his life shall lose it.’ He who is prepared to lose it shall go to the ‘tree swinging,’ i.e., with life and rich foliage which contrasts with the other “the dead land, the cactus land.” Our world is ‘death’s dream kingdom’ and here we live ‘under the twinkle of a fading star.’ The world of those who saved their souls by dying to their former hollow existence is a bright, sunny world; their eyes are like ‘sunlight.’ The Christ has assured us that when ‘Thine eye is made single, the whole being shall be filled with light’, i.e., of spiritual illumination. The zone where we meet these when they appear is the ‘twilight kingdom’ where the question of accomplishing ‘the final meeting’ or otherwise will have to be decided. And we, the common run of mortals, dare not meet them. They are a hope only which none dares to reach for in practice:

“The hope only
Of empty men.”

From our understanding of our present state of being and from what has happened in mankind’s past we can say:

“This is the way the world ends.”

The extent of our hollowness makes us sing the Lord’s prayer like an anthem or a merry nursery rhyme, without the devout feeling. We are too hollow even to feel the horror of it all. Mistah Kurtz at least acknowledged the horror and thus crossed over to ‘death’s other kingdom’ with ‘direct eyes’ a thuswe can say:

Those who have eyes that can see, do not stay with us. The eyes of such are thus ‘dying stars’ and our world is thus ‘the valley of dying stars’ while we, the hollowmen are ‘gathered on this beach of the tumid river.’ We continue our existence in this world even as the effigy of the old guy Fawks continues to be paraded long after he is dead. Those who cross over to ‘death’s other kingdom’, leaving our ‘hollow valley’– 

Remember us, if at all, not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollowmen;
The stuffed men.

Let us now consider whether the arrangement of the stanzas in the particular order bears out any such meaning as we have got from it. Firstly, it fits in with Eliot’s views on tradition and the relation of the present to the past in literature as expressed in his “Tradition and Individual Talent.” We have noted above that the failure of the hollowmen to see, contact, conceive and articulate with one another regarding the reality is not the besetting horror of the present generation only. Mankind was such in the past and will be so till the end of the world; and if there appears to be a hope in the appearance of the ‘multipliate rose’ it is ‘hope only’ from which the hollowmen are sure to seek escape into deliberate disguises. Now I quote at length the corresponding passages in the said essay of Eliot:

“Tradition...involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone, who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastnessof the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes one traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity. He further says, “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”

The meaning we have got from the poem has illustrated the latter statement in that the awareness of the present state of spiritual hollowness of mankind has altered the pastness of the past and discovered its contemporaneity with the present and the contemporaneity of these two – past and present–with the future, till the time of end of the world. It brings before us not only ‘the pastness of the past, but of its presence’, ‘a sense of the timeless as of the temporal together.’

My exposition of the meaning of the poem has, I feel, indicated the sense of the timeless and we need to underline the other, i. e., the sense of ‘the temporal’ by referring to another statement of Eliot: “The difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.” We are aware, in a way, that the European civilization of the past was not aware of the extent of its hollowness which was no less than that of the hollowmen of the poem, the present generation.

After noting such a close correspondence, between Eliot’s ideas on ‘the historical sense’ and his poetic work, it would be a gross misunderstanding of the poem to say that it is a satirical testament of the sordidness of twentieth century European civilization and culture. And it would amount to denying to Eliot what he strove for and achieved, i.e., ‘tradition’ which, he said, “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” As Leonard Unger has noted, Eliot himself testified to ‘the ultimate relationship between his prose, and his own poetry’. He said that his prose was an attempt “to formulate the kind (of poetry) he wants to write.”

Such an exposition of the meaning of the poem as we have attempted is quite in accordance with Eliot’s statements in his essay “Tradition and Individual Talent.” Into the mind of the poet, “the elements which enter are of two kinds: emotions and feelings.” He proceeds to say, “The effect of a work of art upon a person who enjoys it is an experience. It may be formed out of one emotion, and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result.”

In “The Hollowmen” the one ‘emotion’ is repeatedly stressed in each fragment the awareness that we are hollow, stuffed men, ‘shape without form,’ etc., that therefore we dare not meet the eyes of those who have crossed to death’s other kingdom which are like sunlight, that we cannot face up to that final meeting in the ‘twilight kingdom’. Thus we persist in supplicating to images of ‘broken stone’ ‘under the twinkle of a fading star’ which is in contrast to the ‘sunlight on a broken column’ mentioned in section II. Section IV expresses our awareness that mankind was not spiritually better in the past and that the appearance of a ‘multifoliate rose’ has been ‘the hope only of empty men.’ The last section states and illustrates how the shadow falls between idea and reality, motion and act, conception and creation, emotion and response, etc. And the broken tags from the Lord’s prayer illustrate it. The concluding lines assure us cynically, that mankind will remain such till the end of the world. This is the string of the dominant emotion which, if we are not willing to accept it to be a single emotion, can be divided into a few emotions like disillusionment with human condition in sections I and III, fear of the eyes, i.e., of redemption, in section II, reflection on the helplessness of man in the past and the present in section III, and helplessness at the present moment in the last section. The feelings are suggested by the individual sections, their words and phrases, images, the nursery rhyme and the broken tags of the word’s prayer. Then how does Eliot manage to achieve unity of artistic effect?

Another statement of Eliot lends strong support to the exposition we have given above. It speaks of the great achievement of Dante: “Canto XV the ‘Inferno’ (Brunetto Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by, considerable complexity of detail. The last quartrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which ‘came’, which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet’s mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”

What Eliot said in his remark on Canto XV of the ‘Inferno’ quoted above and, especially, of the last quartrain applies equally to the last section of “The Hollowmen.” It does not develop simply out of what precedes, but...”was in suspension in the poets mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to.” The first three sections are the receptacles for “storing up numberless feelings,” etc., which “remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together” as in the last section. This, I believe, is ample indication that we have to get at the dominant argument of the poet, the seed, in the last section of the poem. We can thus apply to’ ‘The Hollowmen’ the statement of Leohard Unger regarding ‘The Wasteland.’ “The series of fragments at the end compresses and intensifies the technique, the mode of expression, which has operated throughout the poem. In this respect, the very technique of the poem, especially as symbolized by the conclusion, is significant of the poet’s meaning.”

Our contention that the last section of the poem is the well spring of the earlier sections is borne out by another testimony furnished by Leonard Unger. To the question whether ‘Ash Wednesday’ had begun as separate poems, he answered: “Yes, like ‘The Hollowmen’,” it originated out of separate poems. Then gradually I came to see a sequence. That’s one way in which my mind does seem to have worked throughout the years poetically–doing things separately and then seeing the possibility of fusing them together, altering them, and making a kind of whole of them.”

Thus viewed, the opening section of ‘The Hollowmen’ is logically the conclusion, a sort of summing up. What, then, could be the logic of opening a poem with the conclusion and closing it with the logical beginning or the fountain-head of the main argument? It is easy to see it. After long, observant, reflection on life, we intuit the truth about life. When we begin to verbalize it to ourselves at last, we begin our ‘interior monologue’ with the conclusion. Then we elaborate it with instances from life and end up by logically tracing the underlying, factual, basis of the conclusion. Thus, structurally, the poem is an exact representation of the natural sequence of the workings of a reflective, intuitive, perceptive mind. It has long been recognized by Eliot’s critics that he deliberately chose the rhythms of everyday speech. Now we see it is not mere everyday speech. It is more than that. It is a speech which one makes to oneself internally or to another, even in the sequence of verbal representation of the perceptions. This fact adds a further dimension to the perception, by most critics, in the poem of the technique of ‘interior monologue.’

The logical sequence of statements in the various sections of the poem can be briefly put thus: Section I is the statement of general condition of the hollowmen as revealed in common human communication and association; Sections II and III illustrate it in specific fields of human activity–in religious life, for instance; Section IV provides a view of man’s history in retrospect, as a record of man’s continual spiritual failure. All these aspects are summed up and unified in section V and its content is reflected by the rhythm and structure of its verse.