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The Hollow Men. (Tenth Doctor Meta.)

The idea for this first came to me back in early March (the 3rd to be precise), after watching The Lazarus Experiment wherein the Doctor and Lazarus quote 'The Hollow Men' by T. S. Eliot. I sat down to read it, and was completely and utterly blown away. This was the result, because that poem is the Tenth Doctor. (To create this I ended up reading Heart of Darkness and Dante and sort-of learned how to use a proper graphics programme. Hence the long time coming.)

So without further ado I shall let you see for yourselves. Lengthy meta-heavy notes at the end explaining all my choices/thoughts. This is, I think, THE Tenth Doctor meta I always wanted to write and never knew how. (Should have suspected it'd all come down to Eliot...)

The Hollow Men

Notes

I'll start by quoting a little background:

"The Hollow Men" begins with a quote from Joseph Conrad's famous novella Heart of Darkness, the story of a colonial Englishman who goes power-hungry in Africa, and things only go downhill from there. Eliot's poem is about a group of scarecrow-like individuals who exist in a state between life and death and suffer from a serious case of moral paralysis. They are forever trapped on the banks of the River Styx, the ancient Greek symbol for the dividing line between life and death. Some critics consider "The Hollow Men" to be a companion piece for Eliot's most famous work, The Waste Land, another poem about moral paralysis.

Eliot's poems from the 1920s are often read in a political context as a reaction to the aftermath of World War I. Eliot was preoccupied with the idea of a European literary and ethical tradition, and he saw this tradition fragmenting everywhere around him. He turned, as he often did, to his favorite Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whose Inferno was inspiration for this poem. "The Hollow Men" was published in 1925, three years after The Waste Land. In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature

Text of the Poem

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

I know I wrote meta about Ten as Kurtz, but overall the Master is a better fit, especially as he was actually mad and set up a kingdom for himself. Which makes Ten Marlow, the one friend who mourns him. Visually it's a very striking image, especially as I love anything to do with Ten and fire-imagery. Also... the fire might consume the body, but the Master will be back. Given that what the whole poem centres around is people neither dead nor alive, this struck me as a very fitting beginning.

A penny for the Old Guy

My dear Nine. I hesitated over using Nine, but I wanted him in there somewhere and the Guy Fawkes associations have changed greatly over the years. He now - largely thanks to V for Vendetta - is now seen as a symbol of people-power, and I think Nine definitely fits as someone trying to change the system. And Nine - like Guy Fawkes - was ultimately unsuccessful in his plot. (OK, so it's a tenuous link. I just like the cap, especially as he's not really there: another character caught between life and death.)

I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

This is very obvious. The Family of Blood (scarecrows, literally), neither alive nor dead. And the Doctor... hollowed out by loss and war and infinite loneliness - the Doctor who had found fulfillment and meaning as the hollow and non-existent John Smith - now only has rage and vengeance left. The Family had each other, but the Doctor separates them so they become as lonely and empty as him. (It's also worth bearing in mind that when Eliot wrote this poem, World War I was simply The World War, just as for the Doctor there is The Time War. Unparalleled in destruction and reach, and world changing.)

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

This one took me forever to work out, but once I'd found this cap I realised it could never have been any different. (For long, in-depth exploration of that scene, see this post.) Also, you won't find a better expression of 'moral paralysis'. (Also it's of course a nice reference to the Shades from Dante's Inferno - but that is a different essay.)

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

This was always going to be River. (I am not going in to all the ways in which her name is fitting, because I'd have to go read up on Greek myths and beliefs and I do not have the time...) Mostly it's all very straightforward, but the interesting thing is the introduction of 'Death's other Kingdom' - because what struck me as I was working on this was the fact that Ten's era is steeped in death and yet... It's not literal death. Rose gets stuck in another world. The Master chooses to 'die'. Jenny dies, yet lives. Jack dies and dies, yet always comes back. Donna has her memory wiped. The Timelords are locked inside the Time War. Ten regenerates. And River lives on in the Library. They are dead, and yet they live... River is the odd one out, as she is the only one who is actually dead, and stays that way. It's also important to note that she 'crossed with direct eyes' [to Death's Other Kingdom] - eyes (and the lack thereof) are of huge importance in this poem, and River's clear-sightedness (and knowledge of the future) is one of her main features. (She is/will become his guide/story teller.) River may lie, but she does not lie to herself. But Ten does, and oh, there is one of the causes of that hollowness... Also the cap was a pure gift - River literally caught between. All I had to do was add Ten.

II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

And Gallifrey. (Couldn't be anything else what with the 'fading star'.) I am almost at a loss to say anything because it's so stark and beautiful. 'Eyes I dare not meet in dreams' is possibly the most lyrical description of Ten's feelings re. his people ever, and even more fitting is 'There, the eyes are/Sunlight on a broken column'. Again with the sun/fire imagery, but I feel that the 'broken column' is almost more important - I've used this metaphor of Timelords/Gallifrey as being [broken] stone throughout. Once mighty, but now fallen... [Insert Ozymandias quote]

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

This took a while to work out, but in the end I went with Ten's goodbyes... He is, then, himself in that other kingdom, caught between life and death, and very much fits this description. Always distant, and moving further away.

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

I was told this was a reference to Dante meeting Beatrice... Which is why I embarked upon The Divine Comedy. I am very happy I did. (I've still got to read Paradiso, but that's irrelevant as concerns this - Ten would never get to heaven.) Dante is guided all the way down through Hell and all the way up Mount Purgatory by Virgil (a poet and a doctor), before he finally meets Beatrice, the woman he has always loved, ever since he first saw her, age 9. The thing is, Dante only ever met Beatrice on a handful of occasions, they both got married to other people, and she died age 24. I'm going to quote wikipedia, because it gets it spot-on:

Dante saw Beatrice as a saviour, one who removed all evil intentions from him. It is perhaps this idea of her being a force for good that he fell in love with, a force which he believed made him a better person.

When - in his poem - they finally meet, he cannot meet her eyes, as he is still tainted with sin, and feels utterly unworthy of her. Beatrice is also (there are layers and layers to the Comedy) an expression of the Divine, and is the one who is trying to save him. Which is where it all becomes too beautifully painful for Ten... Rose is very much his Beatrice, yet the whole Divine Comedy collapses around his ears and turns to Tragedy, because he doesn't believe in any kind of God. So how can Rose be an instrument of the Saviour, when salvation is impossible? It's a perfect catch-22.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time/.../But that the dread of something after death/.../And thus the native hue of resolution/Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. He loses his Rose, his perfect Beatrice (= his projection, I'm not talking about the actual, real Rose), and from then on keeps falling - it's almost like The Divine Comedy in reverse. So no, our Ten does not believe he can be saved and will not meet her eyes (metaphorically speaking, obviously).

III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Gallifrey again. Of course there is the 'fading star' tying it in with the earlier stanza, but the cap itself was always going to be this one. And 'supplication of a dead man's hand' - particularly the subversion of 'supplication' - yeah, I am very pleased with it. (Plus 'twinkle of a fading star' could also refer to the White Point Star diamond!)

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

The Companions. That they all fitted in here was almost more luck than design, but I am very happy with the end result. 'Death's other kingdom' is so very obviously poor Donna. 'Walking alone' is Rose - or the lack of - she is there mostly by her absence. But it's the last two lines that sprung out at me right from the start: 'Lips that would kiss/Form prayers to broken stone' could only ever be Martha. Again with the stone imagery (particularly as something to be worshipped; yet broken, fallen, unworthy) - especially apt as she became his apostle. But it was not what she wanted... I guess this could also be seen as a vague reference to the hollowness of John Smith. Ten on the screen doesn't exist then, as he is locked away - an abstract, unattainable. And that is how he stays, for Martha.

IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

I'm just going to let the caps speak for themselves, because I don't think there's anything I could add. Two dying men, and their lost Kingdom.

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Same again. The Doctor and the Master. I have nothing to add.

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

This was only ever going to be Rose, but oh, it's fits so perfectly it hurts. (I love how beautifully it sets it all up, just to brutally undercut it with those last two lines.)

V
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.

I found this cap (they're holding hands!) and never looked back...

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Waters of Mars. (Has there ever been a better description? 'Between the idea and the reality/Falls the Shadow'. Makes me shiver. For Thine is the Kingdom. Oh Ten.)

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

I wanted something to tie in with The Lazarus Experiment, and this rather sprung out at me - especially 'Life is very long', as it ties in with the discussion in the church. (The Doctor: "I’m old enough to know that a longer life isn’t always a better one. In the end, you just get tired. Tired of the struggle. Tired of losing everyone that matters to you. Tried of watching everything turn to dust. If you live long enough, Lazarus, the only certainty left is that you end up alone." Bleakest Doctor ever.)

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

This kinda broke my heart. ('For Thine is the Kingdom.' And the crown is hollow...)

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

And of course the future belongs to Eleven. You cannot be caught indefinitely between life and death. The Doctor needs to live. (Also Eleven and Nine serve as bookends, which is neat.)

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 a whimper.

This might be my favourite image of all. I chose the cap very deliberately - Ten is not the focus, just a figure in the shadows, almost lost in the wide shot - and all around there are festive lights: Pretty; indifferent. The world keeps turning, oblivious to the ending of this particular story.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

I am going to come back and read this when I can really devote the time. I think, from what I've read it will be amazing. Hats off!

I am going to come back and read this when I can really devote the time.
Yes, it does rather need time to take it in... (Hi there work that's been nearly 8 months in the making! *g*)

I think, from what I've read it will be amazing. Hats off!
Aw, thanks. I hope it lives up to expectations. <3

Whoa...

Now that my mind has been blown, I'm going too go sit in a corner, wibble, drool and hope that I can pull it back together enough to think. As it is, my mind is churning deeper possibilities and meanings and the underlying ideas that tie all this together and...

Brain blown.

*HUGS*

I almost feel like cackling? *g*

(I am STUPIDLY proud of this. And what with having pored over it for so long it feels impossibly good to finally share it!)

OMG. I could go over this all day. So much tasty, tasty meta. This is epic.

*BEAMS*

Thank you! <3

Oh my word, yes. Mind blown. The framing of the Time War as WWI...! The (Last) Great (Time) War that shattered an ancient ruling society and its traditions, leaving the survivors to grasp at the fragments in the twilight. The war that everybody lost. Why did I never see it before? And Ten is in the twilight, stuck in the borderland, grappling with Time Lord immortality and human mortality and unable to embrace either, meting out half-death to everyone around him. Unable to work out who he is with his entire frame of reference destroyed and unwilling to look himself in the eye to figure it out.

And Rose as Beatrice...! Leading him out of the dark, but she is human and fallible and there's only so much she can do, and once she's gone and there's nothing beyond her, even the improvement she wrought in him turns out to be hollow and riddled with flaws. He modeled himself on her humanity, but also inherited her thoughtlessness towards some of the people around her and her judgemental streak and her fear of mortality, and without her around to stabilize him with good old human common sense, it sends him off the deep end eventually. Without her, he flails around desperately for a savior figure and finds only himself--his godlike Time Lord self--but with the weight of that civilization and its traditions gone, there's no anchor there, just unimaginable power in the hands of a twilight man who's patently unfit to wield it.

But it's the last two lines that sprung out at me right from the start: 'Lips that would kiss/Form prayers to broken stone' could only ever be Martha. Again with the stone imagery (particularly as something to be worshipped; yet broken, fallen, unworthy) - especially apt as she became his apostle.

Oh yes, that's perfect. And it fits nicely with broken stone being Gallifrey, because that is the side of him that Martha gets to see.

And the Doctor and the Master--circling, always circling, utterly fixated on each other among the ruins but unable to stare each other straight in the eyes. During almost all their significant interaction in Utopia/Sound of Drums they literally aren't looking at each other--always through the medium of a phone, a one-way TV screen, a perception filter. Once they meet they just stop interacting and the back-and-forth, cat-and-mouse game passes to the Master and the distant Martha, who has stepped into the Doctor's role. She aspires to be him the way he aspires to be Rose, and ultimately it almost breaks her because he himself is so fucked-up, but she has the human stability that he lacks to correct his flaws and arguably makes a better Doctor than the Doctor himself.

(continued - whoops, I seem to have run afoul of LJ's character limit. I blame Ten.)

Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Ten, stop bottling up your feelings, it never ends well. *g*

Life is very long - also appears as a lyric in "The Queen is Dead," and since Morrissey is an allusive bastard and the song deals with similar disaffection with a hollow crown, I'm 98.5% sure it was deliberate. Except, as a cherry on top, he expands it to "Life is very long when you're lonely." (Ten listens to the Smiths on repeat and cries into a mug of tea when he's feeling mopey. Nothing will convince me otherwise. And one day I will make a Doctor/Rose vid to "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" because I can barely listen to it without going PFFAAAHAHA at how appropriate it is.)

And while I'm dragging song lyrics into it, the broken column as Gallifrey makes me think of Honour by VNV Nation, about a once-proud nation marching to the field of its final battle and annihilation. "Shall I call on you to guide me well / To see our hopes and dreams fulfilled? / On this day of our ascension." The whole thing is eerily appropriate to the Time War.

And on a final note, this makes me want to rewatch Family of Blood with the WWI parallel firm in my mind. Because wow--the Doctor's human doppelgänger doing his duty to his nation, unaware of the Time War's human doppelgänger lurking on the horizon. And the epilogue takes on a darker undertone in the presence of all that twilight and half-death in the aftermath: "Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn..." ("...At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them" and the stars that shall be bright when we are dust and OH.) Which Cornell probably intended to some extent, the clever bastard, what with the doling out of immortality as a punishment and... all of NuWho, really, and its ambivalence towards mortality.

Edited 2012-10-26 17:41 (UTC)

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"eyes I dare not meet in dreams"

Re: "eyes I dare not meet in dreams"

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