Heavily influenced by the works of Ezra Pound Thomas Stearns Eliot, begins to increasingly develop a poetic voice that is rooted in the question of ‘what went wrong’ in the modern society. It was the time when Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic model dictated everything. Sex and gender and the roles they played were at the forefront of the themes of the poets in the so-called modernist movement. The movement was marked by opposition to the traditional ways of viewing the world. It encouraged experimentation and individualism. In contrast to Romanticism, the modernists cared little for nature. People did not believe the world was growing and aiding but rather destroying the individual. The irony is that while T.S. Eliot was one of the most influential poets of his time in terms of pushing boundaries, his life at home was very traditional. Most of his poems regard to rejecting Romantic ideals and addressing the damage of society on humanity. One of these poems that questions the human condition in modern society is “The Hollow Men”, written in 1925. This poem is the account of what awaits us in death and about how humanity ignores the conflict while being on earth between good and evil and instead fills their lives with shallow meaning. This paper will argue how T.S. Eliot utilises intertextual references to James Frazer’ The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and allusions to outside events such as the English Gunpowder Plot of 1605 in order to establish the main themes of emptiness and failure in modern society in his poem “The Hollow Men” with a focus on the two epigraphs and the fifth section of the poem.
T.S. Eliot, as a modernist poet, will ‘plunder’ the modern Western culture, such as the myth culture, to achieve the symbolism he wanted to create. He will establish a form a poetry derived from fragments that were put together. Eliot constructed this kind of poetry in order to conceive a temporary safe haven from the modern society, even though he knew modern society will destroy it again. In doing so, Eliot made great use of intertextuality or allusion. In her literary study Desire In Language: a Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Julia Kristeva defined the term intertextuality as “ a tangible relationship between two or more texts” (Nasi 4). Kristeva pointed out that: “Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double” (66). According to Manjola Nasi:
the added function of quotation is that it plays a role on the structural level of the poem, emphasizing fragmentation and at the same time estranging each instance of quoted lines from the present context and narrowing the distance between the text […] and other previous texts. (5-6)
T.S. Eliot will use intertextuality or more specifically allusions on past events or literature to create a certain type of order in the chaos that came after the modern life of the Lost Generation after the First World War. He will utilise mythology, such as the Greek mythology, and references to great established literary works from Dante or Shakespeare for example as the basis for his poetry and other work.
Eliot did not only made allusions on literary works or myths as mentioned before but he also derived his views on the modern society and the literary field from study analyses. One of these analyses is Sir James George Frazer’s work The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Eliot will spend quite a bit of time combing through this book by Frazer before he started to write his own literary works. Frazer was an early anthropologist who did a lot of comparative study analyses of mythic ceremonial rites. In his book The Golden Bough, he pointed out that a great amount of pre-modern primitive cultures would do peculiar things in Spring or around April. Frazer starts to point out that in almost all pre-modern primitive tribal societies, there is some kind of ritual that include a death, followed by a burial and a resurrection. This idea of resurrection means that someone of the society has to die so that others can live. Frazer points out that this is a very ancient motif and it is a necessary one in social development. The notion that there is this tie between burying someone and the fact that crops start to grow means that there is a tie between a certain religion and their agriculture. By reading this comparative analysis, Eliot became very interested in these stories which would later be the basis of his poetry, and more specifically it would be the key to “The Hollow Men”. In his essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923) theorises T.S. Eliot the ‘mythic method’ of James Joyce (Nasi 1):
In using myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. […] It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. […] Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythic method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art. (Eliot, People.Virginia.EDU)
Eliot argues here that using the mythic method is the only way to create order in the chaos that was created by modernity. The Golden Bough was not only a great influence for “The Hollow Men” but also for The Waste Land, Eliot’s great poem from 1922. This poem is of importance for “The Hollow Men” as “The Hollow Men” is often referred to as the short version or the sequel of The Waste Land. In The Waste Land draws Eliot on the fertility symbolism from The Golden Bough. Magic and fertility have disappeared from the modern world, which has become a ‘waste land’ on a spiritual level. Eliot utilises a combination of fragments from daily lives of the modern society, which can be regarded as futile, with fragments from ancient mythical symbols and great stories such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Christianity, Greek mythology, etcetera as mentioned before.
As for the first intertextual reference in the poem “The Hollow Men”, it begins with two epigraphs which are references to a literary work from the past and an event from the past. The first epigraph, “Mistah Kurtz – he dead” (Eliot 2543), is in reference to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the servant tells Marlow, the narrator of the story, that Colonel Kurtz is dead. Heart of Darkness tells the story of a wild and violent man named Kurtz who goes into the inner continent of Africa and dies at the end of the story as a lost man. The significance of this epigraph to the poem is that Marlow refers to Kurtz as being hollow, despite his few good qualities. Colonel Kurtz is a fascinating character because he is a man of vicious action, he is a man who represents his life through action. The second reference, “A penny for the Old Guy” (Eliot 2543), is an English saying for Guy Fawkes Day on the fifth of November. In 1605 Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up the British Parliament. Fawkes was captured and tortured before he could succeed however. Guy Fawkes can be regarded as the voice of anarchy, the voice of war against the norm. To celebrate the foiled plan, children still explode straw effigies. To buy them, they ask for money by saying “penny for the guy”, ‘the guy’ being Guy Fawkes. Specifying ‘the old guy’, however, refers to Greek mythology and the River Stix. It is said that people who died are required to pay a penny to the ferryman before gaining access to the other side of the river. Those who could not afford it were left between life and death in purgatory. These people can be seen as ‘hollow men’. These two epigraphs are both representatives of individuals, Kurtz and Guy Fawkes, who are violent and yet men of action. In opposition to that, you will have the modern human of the Lost Generation. “We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men / […] / Headpiece filed with straw. Alas!” (2543, ll. 1-4), according to Eliot is this generation hollow and stuffed. However, being hollow and stuffed at the same time is an oxymoron, it does not fit together. And to that degree it is a paradox. This modern generation is just like a scarecrow or like the effigies of Guy Fawkes, hollow and stuffed at the same time. They seem to be of some importance but they are filled with nothing. This symbol of the hollow but stuffed men is a metaphor for the primary modern condition which is a paradox according to T.S. Eliot.
The fifth and final section of the poem is perhaps the most important section to understand the general meaning of “The Hollow Men”. The first and final stanzas of this section are in tune to the children song “Here we go round the mulberry bush / On a cold and frosty morning” (Ramazani and Stallworthy 2545, note 1).
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning. (2545, ll. 68-71)
The significance of the first stanza is the time, five o’clock, because this time is said to be the time of Christ’s resurrection. It is of significance here because Christ resurrection ties in with the symbolism that is explained in Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the symbolism of ‘dying and rising’-gods. The fragmented line further on in the stanza, “For Thine is the Kingdom” (2545, l. 77) is only a section of the Lord’s prayer which is an allusion on Christianity. But a few lines further, “Life is very long” (2545, l. 83) shows the reader that the men cannot even finish a simple prayer, the men are too hollow for even that. It shows that not only are the men beginning to wear down but it also shows that this is their life, the eternity is the real life. The second, third and fourth stanzas in section five are examples in reference to the “Shape without form, shade without colour” (2544, l. 11) from the second stanza of the first section of the poem. This stanza is isolated in the first section because the narrator is showing the audience things in comparison to the men through oxymorons. These examples show us again that the men are missing something essential, just like shape would be without form. Because the men are missing this essential ‘thing’, they are hollow. The difference between the examples of section five and the examples of section one is the including of the falling of the shadow between those examples. All of these examples , all of these concepts go unfinished because the shadow makes itself. The shadow blocks these things from gaining their essentials from becoming whole. The shadow does the same for the men, they remain hollow because the shadow is in their way. For instance, emotion and response to that certain emotion are separated by this shadow. And most importantly, the existence of man is separated from the essence which is the point Eliot is truly trying to make. Something blocks man from becoming all it could be, it is not enough to exist and be hollow but rather man must finally make something of himself to be whole. Finally the final stanza, again to the tune of “Here we go round the mulberry bush” as mentioned before , is once again a reference to Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper. (2546, ll. 95-98)
His plan ended with nothing, compared to the big boom he had wanted and that is the way life is according to Eliot. Yet they, the hollow men, are left here in nothingness.
In conclusion, we can say that T.S. Eliot and his poetry tell us many things. However, it tells us more about humanity than anything else. Throughout his poems, Eliot shows the readers that it is the society that is blocking us from being whole. We as a lost generation remain hollow unless we can find this one essential thing that makes us whole again and we need to destroy this kind of society or a least remove it from our path. T.S. Eliot shows us, the audience, his views through the use of intertextual references that will provide a broader meaning to the lines of his poem. This poem can be regarded as Eliot’s darkest statement of the modern individual. It is Eliot’s critique of modernity. According to him everybody is a victim of this modern society, we all have something in our brain but there actually is nothing in our heart. Eliot believes that this is the human condition, we speak so much but we say absolutely nothing. Eliot tries to tell us something with this poem, that it is time to wake up and do something about this condition of the modern society. Through the use of allusions, he made it clear that we are all hollow and that this society is bound to fail. However, there is a possibility of change. Eliot argues that reading a poem like “The Hollow Men” can remind us, the readers, to try and be a little less empty in the modern society.