The Problem and the Art of Impersonality

T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men is an emphatic demonstration of meaninglessly ritualistic human activity. All the people are impersonal. The primary image, the “hollow men” are called “quiet and meaningless” and conduct their “prayers to broken stone.” The poem employs childish rhymes that suggest monitonous ritual: “Here we go round the prickly pear / at five o’clock in the morning.” By the end of the poem, every kind of idea, act, and response is said to deviate from its intent by resulting in shadow. This poem could be called a demonstration of the problem of impersonality, since there is impersonality as its subject and as its method.

Impersonal distance is an approach commonly taken by Eliot, as explained in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” William Skaff, in his book “The Philosophy of T.S. Eliot” mentions this notion of “impersonality,”: “Eliot’s idea of ‘impersonality’ in artistic creation also derives from the collective-historical unconscious” This idea and its derivation can be traced through both Eliot’s poem and his essay (143).

It is interesting to observe the things that are noted as certain in the poem. As a prominent indication of the modern problem, and as one that is nearly a century old now, we might find signs in it of the continued existence of the reasons for its laments. Certainly, “The Hollow Men” are somehow devoid of something, like the rhyme without reason, they are empty people.

The notion of eye contact, given here as a now familiar aspect of the modern condition, is treated as a certain problem: “The eyes are not here / There are no eyes here.” It may well seem that way, as anyone who has ever sat on a New York subway car may well have felt. It is simply not possible, polite, or safe to make constant eye contact. More than a loss of eye contact, it is human contact that Eliot is missing here:

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

The speaker in “The Hollow Men” commits two crimes of judgment or interpretation. They are crimes by the standard of the poem itself, because they contribute to the very problem of hollowness being condemned. Both of these are crimes of distance, if you will. The first is committed frequently by Eliot, and it is the assumption of a certain distance between the great and less-hollow people of the past, and the people of the present. The second crime of distance is the speaker’s “deliberate disguises” which appear to promote anonymity.

The people of the past are made out to be slightly more appealing than “The Hollow Men.” The eye imagery is employed here again to show that the people of the past, by contrast, have eyes that “are sunlight on a broken column” and singing voices as opposed to “quiet and meaningless” ones. Perhaps we could read the sunlight on a broken column as their gaze upon us in the present. By way of further contrast, perhaps, the speaker works to establish a distance “more distant and more solemn / than a fading star” – a distance in the voices of the dead, which have meaning, and between the voices of the living, which have none. By way of contrast alone, perhaps this is effective.

The speaker then wishes to own some of that distance: “Let me be no nearer / In death’s dream kingdom.” This can be interpreted several ways. Perhaps the speaker wishes to die having said things with a voice that carries meaning. Still, the distance between the value of the dead and that of the living appears to be a solid part of the problem presented in the poem. To crave some of that distance for one’s own appears to be claiming the problem as well.

At the very least, the desire to rise posthumously above the unenlightened masses does nothing to address the problem of the unenlightened masses. Who will be left to appreciate the posthumous merits? The way to bridge a distance is not to cross it, to join the distant, but eliminate the distance itself.

The speaker in “The Hollow Men” appears powerless to the distance here, continuing:

“Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-”

Eliot has spilled more ink over similar matters, regarding the distinction between meaning in the past and in the present. In his aforementioned essay Eliot argues that “To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim.” He starts with the plausible assertion that:

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism.”

Along the way though, he makes some statements which may help explain how he can also be the author of such a distant speaker. He says, “very few know when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal.” Perhaps, Eliot’s speaker is justly (or merely self-righteously) doomed to live through a hell of impersonal, insignificantly emotional eyes. It makes sense that this essay and the poem would have come from the same author, but the poem does something to disarm the essay.

Is this poem the “laudable” impersonally emotional art we are supposed to content ourselves with, an art which looks upon any one of us, who could just as easily have been one of the passersby, as someone the speaker should fail to make eye contact with, preferring anonymity? Then again, the emotion carried by the speaker along with its confessed bias toward distance and anonymity is the very emotion at the heart of the problem of our “hollowness.”

Eliot is no hypocrite here. His speaker is voicing something so common that it cannot possibly be attributed to the poet alone. Otherwise, no one would be able to relate to it, and the poem would fail.

It is all the problem of impersonality. The problem is lamented and demonstrated by the poem. Perhaps it is impossible to demonstrate the problem so well and to address it within the same poem. It doesn’t seem likely that an art of impersonality will solve the problem of it.