The startling contemporary resonance of T.S. Eliot and ‘The Hollow Men’
Since its publication in 1925, much debate has surrounded T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem, The Hollow Men. It’s a complex 98-line work with profound substance. Drawing upon the state of Europe after the disastrous First World War, the Treaty of Versailles, religion, and even the writer’s failing marriage, its fragmented structure has long divided readers about what it all actually means. However, it is certain that he was describing humanity withering into a hollow inertia of our own making, which will ultimately be our demise.
The extensive work ends: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper”. While Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism only two years after writing and changing outlook could have influenced the selfish portrayal of humanity he presents, with lines such as the closing ones and “For Thine is / Life is” and “Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow”, we can extrapolate a further meaning given our modern experience of late-stage capitalism. The global economic order, as we know it, was only in its infancy at the poem’s inception, but Eliot was bang on the money.
Eliot is portraying humanity as spiritually dead; we are broken, lost souls, he writes. Trapped in a state of inertia where we cannot translate words into actions or dreams into reality, we are nothing more than dead-eyed phantoms. For Eliot, this state was likely due to forgoing spirituality for economic want – swapping god for the green idol – and the nightmarish mechanical all-out war the world had just witnessed. Regardless of the motivation, though, we cannot doubt that he depicts a sclerotic civilisation that has absolved itself of its human characteristics. We’re trapped in limbo, he states, and bolsters this with reference to Dante’s Inferno in describing the nether zone between life and the “dead land”.
Eliot specifically evokes Dante’s first circle of hell, Limbo. He writes that the hollow society: “Grope together / And avoid speech / Gathered on this beach of the tumid river”. In the 14th-century work, Dante notes that people who didn’t commit to good or evil have gathered quietly by a river where the boatsman Charon cannot ferry them across to the underworld. The Italian writes that this is punishment for living “without infamy or praise” as they watch others go to the afterlife for eternity.
Living without infamy or praise and the world going out with a whimper are two points that certainly resonate with the contemporary reader. In a world that is largely too wrapped up in the trappings of consumerism and rapidly advancing technology to take any action of worth, much preferring to do nothing in light of the many different conflicts, humanitarian crises and a looming environmental collapse, Eliot’s words take on a startling new dimension.
We have become the hollow men, willingly entangled in a stasis where streaming and internet shopping keep us in our bedroom-sized boxes. We’re so comfortable in this soulless limbo of endless content, Netflix, Spotify and Deliveroo, that we happily let the genocide in Gaza, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and many domestic political injustices occur in front of our eyes in real time on TV, while a minority of us shoulder the burden. Most people are all too happy to let the rug be pulled from under them as the general grip on reality and truth slips, and they can turn off bad news at the press of a button and swap it out for Selling Sunset.
Just ask the influential American band DIIV. Their new album Frog in Boiling Water delves heavily into this late-stage capitalistic condition, with the title referencing Daniel Quinn’s 1996 novel, The Story of B, where we are the titular amphibian being slowly boiled to a blissful death in a pot of water. A metaphor for the slow and “banal collapse of society under end-stage capitalism”, it speaks volumes. Not only have we lost any self-determination, but the ability to critically analyse the information in front of us, they argue.
Punk poet John Cooper Clarke seemed to evoke this idea years before DIIV in 1977 when Britain was mired in a dire economic and socio-political state. Paraphrasing The Hollow Men in ‘Psycle Sluts’, he closes with the line: “For you that’s how the world could end / Not with a bang but a Wimpy”. While the fast-food chain is a rare sight these days, the point is incisive. Today, we might say the world might end with a Wingstop.
During an interview with Far Out about his political dark comedy A Kind of Kidnapping, comedian Dan Clark offered another perspective on the spiritually bankrupt, hollow contemporary condition Eliot outlined nearly a century ago.
“Everyone wants the same thing now,” he said. “Regardless of their profession, even multi-billionaires are not happy. They now want to be celebrities and fly to the moon. So, it’s basically that the left-wing actress and the right-wing politician are actually much more similar than you would think.” Money and fame are the name of the game today. It’s a rat race lacking any decency.
Zack de la Rocha, frontman of Rage Against the Machine, also brought Eliot’s point to the fore at the end of ‘Wake Up’ from the band’s 1992 debut. He furiously yells the closing lines: “How long, not long / because what you reap is what you sow!” The lyrics refer to Martin Luther King Jr’s speech at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march, where he paraphrased the well-known Bible verse: “Whatever a man sows, this he will also reap” (Galatians 6:7).
Regardless of its political significance to the time it was written, de la Rocha’s command is naturally imbued with a religious aspect due to King’s reference to the Bible, which in itself echoed the point that Eliot made in The Hollow Men, even if circumstantially. Both had clear spiritual meanings, but despite this, they have had a wider significance throughout history and today.
It is up to us to maintain self-determination and ensure we do not forgo any of it in light of political and commercial compromises. “Wake up!” are two words that have never been so significant.
