Edward: I doubt if you
ever had a case like mine:
I have ceased to believe in my own
personality.
Reilly: Oh, dear yes; this is serious. A very common
malady
Very
prevalent indeed.
(The
Cocktail Party)
We
live in the Age of Emptiness, the Era of Anxiety. T. S. Eliot,
one of the major prophets of the age, has exposed it inside out in lurid light,
Modern life is one Waste Land, vast, oppressive and forbidding; a Waste Land
rimmed by a bleak horizon. The people who inhabit this Waste Land are portrayed
“not
as lost”
violent
souls, but only
As
the hollow men
The
stuffed man.”
Hollow
men and stuffed men of Eliot, Alphas and Gamas of Huxley,–these are the chief
characters of the mid-twentieth century drama. Ennui and Emptiness, Futility
and Frustration, all of the same kidney, make up the dramatis personae, They
may provide a veritable paradise for the incisive analysis of a seasoned
psychopathologist, but the prospects for a civilisation of which they are
pillars are all but promising.
At
the outset two possible objections might be met. Are not the feelings of
emptiness and anxiety, it may be asked, generated by the times of uncertainty
and insecurity we are passing through? That is a superficial diagnosis, for a
deeper analysis but reveals that the ‘Time of Troubles’, to use a telling
phrase of Dr. Toynbee, is as much the symptom of a deeper ferment as the
psychological manifestations are of emptiness and anxiety. Secondly, are not
the hollow men and the stuffed men, the neurotic children of the age, patently
abnormal and as such do not represent a cross-section of the people? In one
sense they are not the average, but no less important and typical. They are the
more sensitive and gifted members of society for whom the conventional
pretences and defences no longer work, who are less successful at rationalizing
than the ‘well-adjusted’ citizen who is able for the time being to cover
up his underlying conflicts. Hence the topical importance of hollow men.
‘An
awareness of solitude’ is the pathetic complaint of Celia in T. S. Eliot’s ‘The
Cocktail Party’. It is something “that is always happening to all sorts of
people...I have always been alone...one always is alone”. So morbidly alone, so
deeply bitten by loneliness that “It no longer seems worth while to speak to
anyone.” A symptom of the age,
“that
sense of separation,
Of
isolation unredeemable, irrevocable–
It’s
eternal or gives a knowledge of eternity
Because
it feels eternal while it lasts. That is one hell”
(The
Family Reunion)
it is a feeling of
alienation, of being left out in the cold. There is yet the paradox of modern
loneliness, the loneliness in a crowd. Says Harry in ‘The Family Reunion’:
“The
sudden solitude in a crowded desert
In
a thick smoke, many creatures moving
Without
direction, for no direction
Leads
anywhere but round and round in that vapour–
Without
purpose, and without principle of conduct
In
flickering intervals of light and darkness.”
Such
loneliness is a corollary of emptiness, both being phases of the same Basic
experience of anxiety. “Without direction, without purpose, and without
principle of conduct”–how true of the age! When a person lacks the conviction
of what he wants, when he is at best certain of what others expect of him
rather than what he himself as an agent wants, when he is but ‘the shadow of
desires of desires’, when the conventional goals he is taught to follow land
him in a cul de sac, when he lacks the conviction of the reality of his
own goals,–the result is an inner void. Haunted by this inner void he looks
around for a haven, and that anywhere but within himself. Where he is thrown
back upon his own resources and inner strength, he finds no anchorage, for he
has all along neglected to develop them. Left thus to himself he is like one
who feels that the walls of the room he is inhabiting are closing in upon,
himself. He is afraid that he would be at loose ends, would lose the boundaries
for himself until he bumps against something other than himself, until he
hobnobs with others only to orient himself. “No...it isn”t that I want to
be alone,” says Celia. Solitude for the sake of solitude, the desire to be left
alone, to get away from it all, not for a rest or an
escape but for its own sake, for the sake of communion with one’s self as a
means of rediscovering one’s self,–all this is looked upon
with suspicion. He must be a social failure and a crank to desire solitude. And
thus “many people suffer from the fear of finding themselves alone and so they
do not find themselves at all”!
Many
are the defence mechanisms to keep at bay the gnawing loneliness and the
yawning emptiness. We are frightened at the prospect of being left alone, for
it implies, so we suspect, that we are socially unwanted, unliked and
unaccepted. Nothing is more terrifying than the prospect of being treated as a
social anathema or pariah. What, for instance, is the importance of being
invited to a party, and why are invitations sometimes shamefacedly wangled? Not
always because you are dying to go and get bored, not always because you are
sure you will enjoy the drivel of small talk, the tittle-tattle in an age when
the art of conversation is well-nigh dead, not merely because you are
gregarious by instinct, but, more often than not, because an invitation is a
proof that you are not being left out.
“It
is getting late
Shall
we ever be asked for? Are we simply
Not
wanted at all?”
An
invitation may serve as a talisman to combat your loneliness. But a temporary
one, for when you withdraw into your shell, the loneliness will have gained an
edge. And the price you have paid for all this! The price of giving up your
existence as an identity in your own right and getting swallowed in an ant
society. That, at any rate, is not a constructive reaction to loneliness.
Lone1iness can best be conquered by developing one’s own inner resources,
strength and sense of direction, and entering into meaningful relations with
others only on the basis of such inner development. “The stuffed men are bound
to become more lonely, no matter how much they lean together; for hollow people
do not have a basis from which to learn to live.”
What
then is the root cause of this modern malady? For a clue let us once again turn
to T. S. Eliot:
Unidentified Guest: ...There’s a loss of personality;
Or
rather, you’ve lost touch with the person
You
thought you were…
...
All
there is of you is your body
And
the ‘you’ is withdrawn...
(The
Cocktail Party)
The
modern is a stranger to and unaware of himself. He is like a house divided
against itself,–the contestants, the contest and the battle-ground all rolled
into one, a multi-multiple personality. He has lost his bearings, ceased to
believe in his selfhood. If consciousness of self, the capacity to see one’s
self as though from the outside, is the distinctive characteristic of man, he
has taken a holiday from it. Harry clinches the issue:
“A
minor trouble like a concussion
Cannot
make very much difference to John.
A
brief vacation from the kind of consciousness
That
John enjoys, can’t make very much difference
To
him or to anyone else. If he was ever really conscious,
I
should be glad for him to have a breathing spell:
But
John’s ordinary day isn’t much more than breathing”
(The
Family Reunion)
Having
lost the grip over himself, he has well-nigh lost the grip over the objective.
He is like a rudderless boat under a starless sky, drifting across the high
seas, sans goal, sans purpose, sans hope. Bereft of the sense of the worth and
dignity of the human being, the individual has lost his identity. He is
swallowed up in the herd, playing safe by living by herd morality. The modern
self is just a synonym of any random impulse: “You are nothing but a set of
obsolete responses.” And “to ‘be yourself’ is just an excuse to relax into the
lowest common denominator of inclination.” With its bottom thus knocked from
under it, the self exists, if at all it exists, in fragments.
Reilly: Indeed, it is often the case that my patients
Are
only pieces of a total situation
Which
I have to explore....
(The
Cocktail Party)
Thus
in a society which has lost its centre of values the individual is a displaced
person out of tune with reality, out of place everywhere and at home nowhere,
and he must needs be rehabilitated. A square peg in a round hole, he does not
know whether the hole is too round or the peg is too square. The past is
vanishing and the future is being born, and between them the present is
perilously poised. The old values have gone west and the new ones are not yet
discovered, perhaps not even conceived. Or perhaps the old goals, ideals,
criteria are still there in our minds, but they hardly work. You have the
paradox of unchanging criteria and changing circumstances. Most people are
frustrated by asking questions which do not lead to the right answer. They are
“lost in a potpourri of contradictory answers–‘reason’ operates while one goes
to a class, ‘emotion’ when one visits one’s lover, ‘will power’ when one
studies for an examination, and religious duty at funerals and on Easter
Sunday”. The values and goals, such as they are, are so compartmentalized that
it is done at the expense of the unity and the integrity of personality. The
person is consequently in pieces both within and without.
The
hollow man should knit the derelict pieces together if he wants to be back on
his feet. He should find a new unity for his life, a thinking, feeling, willing
unity. He should rediscover the sources of strength and integrity within
himself, discover and affirm values in himself and in his society which serve as
the core of his unity, which will enable him to choose his goals
constructively, and thus to overcome the painful bewilderment and anxiety of
not knowing which way to go. “Revaluation of all values, transvaluation of all
values,” Nietzsche proclaims, “is my formula for an act of
ultimate self-examination by mankind.”
T.S. Eliot is agnostical about the process:
Julia: Oh yes, she will go far. And we know where
she is going.
But
what do we know of the terrors of the journey?
You
and I don’t know the process by which the human
(The
Cocktail Party)
But
one thing is certain beyond doubt–that human values in the vale of radio-active
tears are in bad repair and you neglect them at the cost of multiplying hollow
men who might hasten
“the
way the world ends
Not
with a bang but a whimper.”