The Hollow Men

Critics have left the influence of old nihilism on T. S. Eliot’s poetry largely unexplored, an idea that necessitates further inspection because it provides a consistent pre-and-post-conversion current that accounts for his propensity to see empty spaces as fruitful. Dispensing with a framework that silos Christian conversion from philosophy, I interrogate images of empty space in Eliot’s poetry and show that he views nothingness as generative in The Hollow Men and extending to the Four Quartets, effectively spanning most of his literary career. To do this, I draw upon my archival research to reconstruct his reading of nihilism before Nietzsche—an “old” nihilism which views nothingness as generative instead of destructive—and argue that engagement with philosophy in this tradition shapes his empty spaces. This view of emptiness aligns with Eliot’s search for metaphysical answers in a broken world, a process that ultimately saw him simultaneously profess his faith passionately in front of the Pietà yet continue to exercise the values of old nihilism in his poetry.

Now-a-days we are passing through an era of moral and ethical anemia. The wheel of progress has unveiled the mysteries of the universe beyond Milky Way or the mysteries of God Particle. But the wheel may be clogged up with the deterioration and corrosion of human values. The outward glittering cannot hide the hollowness of our inner beings. It is true that different aspects of moral and ethical deterioration were rampant in human society since the dawn of civilization. In modern society, the

T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” shares this impersonal tone of accepted and rushed knowledge and interconnection with images of belief and action that reaches its own objective purpose from its subjective practices. Researchers agree that these hollow men are in a transcendent development, in between states of being and nonbeing. It is easy to pigeonhole this poem as a post-war poem, as well as a pre-war poem, since its publication came after World War I and before World War II in 1925. Interesting enough, “The Hollow Men” is a mid-war poem, filled with the disillusionment after a war and the obligation before the war. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” holds this transitory pivot for agnostic reverence and religious urgency that sarcastically accepts and seriously questions the temperament of existentialism.

The current paper provides an analytical study of Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men.” The methods that have been employed in this research are textual and reader-response analyses. The poem has been explored from both approaches in order to know the first impression of the researcher of the poem and backed by critics’ notions of the poem. The study thus intends to shed light on two main themes including religion, spirituality, meaninglessness and nothingness. It also tends to demonstrate how Eliot portrays his own view on the modern men and the modern life through this poem. Eliot believes that modern men are hollow from their insides, and they are empty yet filled with straw just like a scarecrow. The paper tackles the critics’ views on Eliot, Eliot’s view on modernity, and the role of tradition and intertextuality in Eliot’s poetry. The paper finally depicts major themes in the poem. Eliot, in his quest for finding a satisfying religion, penned “The Hollow Men” as a mirror to the conditions of the society after the World War I which caused suffering from lack of faith, religion and morality.

My partner and I were undertaking some research on AGARTHA 1 in preparation for a couple of publications (one for CultureMachine and another for FibreCulture, as well as for a keynote at the second 'Tuning Speculation' conference which took place many months before those publications) 2 when a colleague from the Riven-World 3 sent us-riverrun, past Eve and Adam's 4 -a Linking-Book to the works not of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (born in 1842, deceased in 1909) 5 but of another, younger, Frenchman (born in 1992, not yet deceased), who is about to release his very first album in the wake of several mix-tapes, EPs and uploaded singles: a man whose first-name echoes the surname of Basilius Valentinus (the famous alchemist)…namely Valentin Le Du, better-known by his Sheridan-Le-Fanu cognomen (beamed down to him from VALIS, 6 of all places/spaces) Vald ' VALIS' Sullyvan. 7 The album about to be released by Vald will have as its title the Alveydrian 'AGARTHA': 8 that world hidden from human-all-too-human detection, realm of ( )hole-earth/( )hole-world orchestration. 9

T.S. Eliot will be considered in his play “Murder in the Cathedral” and how in the second half of the 30s he represented a religious or more generally spiritual approach of what was happening in Europe at the time: fascism and nazism, communism and western cowardice (the famous “hollow men”). This play is centered on four temptations that I will study in detail in order to show how the situation Thomas Becket is in can only lead to martyrdom but the vanity of looking for that martyrdom has to be avoided. How can it be avoided and why? Can this martyrdom save the day?

H.G. Wells in the second half of the 30s with a film like “Things To Come” defends his well asserted idea that the association of Darwinism and Marxism leads humanity to a total catastrophe as depicted in “The Time Machine” with a longer vision of geological or cosmic time leading to a complete rebooting and reformatting of the universe, and the earth. This vision led him to defending a total eugenic policy to save humanity from this doom. At the end of his life, shortly after WW2, he expressed full discontent and fear that his prediction was unavoidable or inescapable.

Between these two extreme apocalyptic visions, martyrdom to bring the future out and eugenics to prevent the future from being born C.S. Lewis defended a Catholic approach of life. I will study the seven novels of “The Chronicles of Narnia” to find out how C.S. Lewis captured and expressed this dilemma and what vision of the future he had and how he thought that future could come. This approach will be limited to “Narnia” in order to remain within the particular period of the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s, in fact after the beginning of the Cold War and before the death of Stalin, and what’s more in his literature targeting young people, a literature which generally brings more spirituality and naivety. Even if we should read Narnia three times in a life time.

The conclusion will be more a question than a real final opinion. How can we transfer this approach from that context to our context? Has science fiction changed its meaning because of the different world we are living in today, sixty years after the writing of “Narnia” and seventy years after the writing of “Murder in the Cathedral” and the shooting of “Things To Come”?

Tre sono le questioni. Non fatico a ritrovarle in cima alle preoccupazioni della tradizione del pensiero filosofico e della produzione artistica occidentale, almeno a partire dalla modernità in poi. Tre questioni che si possono esprimere chiaramente attraverso tre semplici domande:

Chris Marker’s video installation The Hollow Men, presented on a series of eight plasma screen monitors mounted in a row, captures a haunting vision of the death and destruction of World War I, an event that functions as a prelude to the dawn of a new era.