Objective Correlative’
T S Eliot (1888-1965) is important
literary figure of 20 the century criticism, he was great poet, dramatist,
essayist and critic; he was man of action always in search of some concrete
truth. He was intellectual and academic personality of the modern criticism. He
has contributed valuable things that are still in consideration in literary
domain 21st literary criticism.
The theory of the ‘objective
correlative’ is undoubtedly one of the most important critical concepts of
T.S. Eliot. It exerted a tremendous influence of the critical temper of
twentieth century. In the concept of the ‘objective correlative’, Eliot’s
doctrine of poetic impersonality finds its most classic formulation. Eliot
formulated his doctrine of the ‘objective correlative’ in his essay on “Hamlet
and his Problems”.
According to Eliot, the poet cannot communicate his emotions directly to
the readers, he has to find some object suggestive of it and only then he can
evoke the same emotion in his readers. So this ‘objective correlative’ is “a
set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of
that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which
must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately
evoked.” It is through the objective correlative that the transaction between
author and reader necessarily takes place. For this object is the primary
source of, and warrant for, the reader’s response whatever that may be; and it
is also the primary basis for whatever inferences we may draw about what it is
that the “author wanted to say.” Briefly speaking, what Eliot means by his
doctrine of the objective correlative is that a great work of art is nothing
but a set of conceptual symbols or correlatives which endeavour to express the
emotions of the poet, and these symbols constitute the total vision of the
creative artist.
Eliot himself
defines ‘objective correlative’ as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of
events, which shall be the formula” for the poet’s emotion so that “when the
external facts are given the emotion is at once evoked.” For example, in Macbeth the
dramatist has to convey the mental agony of Lady Macbeth and he does so in “the
sleep-walking scene”, not through description, but through an unconscious
repetition of her past actions. Her mental agony has been made objective, so
that it can as well be seen by the eyes as felt by the heart. The external
situation is adequate to convey the emotions, the agony of Lady Macbeth.
Instead of communicating the emotions directly to the reader, the dramatist has
embodied them in a situation or a chain of events, which suitably communicate
the emotion to the reader. Similarly, the dramatist could devise in Othello a
situation which is a suitable objective correlative, for the emotion of the
hero. Hamlet is an artistic failure for here the external
situation does not suitably embody the effect of a mother’s guilt on her son.
The disgust of Hamlet is in excess of the facts as presented in the drama.
It becomes apparent
that it is neither the intensity of the emotion nor the greatness of its components
that determines the poetic quality of a poem but what matters is the intensity
of the fusion, nor one of the ways in which the poet achieves this intensity is
through the embodiment of an emotion in a concrete object. That is why
Matthiessen interprets the term ‘objective correlative’ to mean a situation or
image which represents the poet’s emotion. Furthermore, the theory of the
‘objective correlative’s is thus based on the assumption that every poem cannot
only be broken into its correlatives but the correlatives can be pieced
together to form a larger whole.
What Eliot may have
had in mind was that the emotions of poetry should be provided with motives, or
that the responses of the poets should be responses to a defined situation. The
actions, gestures and words of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep arouse the
same sense of anguish in the readers as they do in Macbeth himself, and hence
his words on hearing of his wife’s death seem quite inevitable and natural
under the circumstances. This is also the case with the anguish of Othello.
This is so because the external action and situation are quite adequate for the
internal emotion. But this is not so in Hamlet. There is no
object, character, situation or incident which adequately expresses the inner
anguish of the Prince of Denmark. His suffering is terrible, but the full
intensity of at his mother’s guilt is
not conveyed by any character or action in the play. He suffers terribly, but
his suffering is far in excess to the character and situation as presented in
the play. A similar situation in real life would not arouse equally intense
emotion in normally constituted people. Shakespeare wanted to convey something
unexpressibly horrible but the character of Gertrude and the whole plot of the
play is inadequate for the purpose. In other words, Shakespeare has failed to
find a suitable ‘Objective Co-relative’ for the emotion he wanted to convey.
Here in lies the real source of the artistic failure of Hamlet.
Different critics
have explained the phrase ‘objective correlative’ in different ways. For Cleanth
Brooks, ‘objective correlative’ means “organic metaphor”, for Sister
Mary Cleophas Costello “the intensity of meaning-structure”. Eliseo
Vivas takes it as a vehicle of expression for the poet’s emotion; Allan
Austin treats it as the poetic content to be conveyed by verbal expression.
Such diversity of opinion does not necessarily reflect confusion on the part of
Eliot. Instead, it testifies most eloquently to the varied interests and
concerns of his commentators and the variety of principles which they had
introduced for the purposes of interpretation, refutation, or approval.
Eliot’s theory of
the objective correlative reminds us of Aristotle as well as the French
symbolists. Like Aristotle, Eliot is of the opinion that it is not the business
of the poet to ‘say’ but to ‘show’, not to present but to represent. In other
words, Eliot’s concept of the objective correlative is based on the notion that
it is not the business of the poet to present his emotions directly but rather
to represent them indirectly through the ‘objective correlative’ which become
the formula for the poet’s original emotions. One of the reasons why Eliot
admires Dante’s poetry is that Dante’s was ‘a visual imagination,’ because
he attempted ‘to make us see what he saw,’ because he did not lose his grasp
over ‘the objective correlative.’
Eliot had learnt
from the French symbolists that emotion can only be evoked; it cannot be
expressed directly. Mallarme contended
that poetry is not made of ideas but of words, and explored the potentialities
of words as modes of evocative suggestion. Eliot’s theory was also anticipated
by Ezra Pound in “The Spirit of Romance.” Pound admitted that in the
ideographic process of using material images to suggest immaterial relations,
the poet has to be as impersonal, as the scientist: “Poetry is a sort of
inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures,
triangles, spheres and the like, but equations for the human emotion.” In
Pound’s phrase “equations for the human emotion,” we find Eliot’s objective or
relative foreshadowed.
The theory of the
‘objective correlative’ is also a continuation of the views of the Imagists. As
Eliot himself explains in his Introduction to the Selected Poems by
Marianne Moore, ‘the aim of imagism….was to induce i peculiar concentration
upon something visual, and to set in motion an expanding succession of
concentric feelings.’ Thus the ideas of the Imagists are similar to those of
Eliot contained in his theory of the ‘objective correlative'; it is not the
poet’s aim to set in motion his original emotion but ‘to induce a peculiar
concentration upon something visual’.
The basic idea in
Eliot’s theory of the ‘objective correlative’, that the emotions in poetry are
embodied in an object, owes much to the romantics. For example, Coleridge points
out ‘that images however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature…do not
of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only
as far as they are modified by predominant passion, or by associated thoughts
or images awakened by that passion.” Wordsworth also says much the same thing
when he says ‘that poetry proceeds from the soul of man, communicating its
creative energies to the images of the external world’. In the Victorian Age,
Ruskin elaborated the idea further when he pointed out that great poets
represent the object as it is, the same time conveying their emotion. In the
twentieth century both Hulme and Pound expounded the theory that the poet
should choose something external to represent his emotions, and they stressed
the need for accuracy and concreteness of the object that would be symbolic
expression of the emotions of the poet.
It is generally
agreed that the term ‘objective correlative’ was probably borrowed from
Washington Allston’s Lectures on Art. It is also probable that
in using the term ‘objective correlative’, Eliot had in mind the following
passage of Whitman : The prudence of the
greatest poet….. matches every thought or act by its correlative.
Although the idea
contained in the doctrine of the objective correlative is traceable to a number
of critics, there is no doubt that Eliot gave to the phrase its unique currency
and elaborate interpretation. The phrase ‘objective correlative’ has become the
recognised term to signify the way emotion is expressed through a work of art.
Eliot’s theory of
the objective correlative has been criticized by Eliseo Vivas
on two grounds. First, Eliot’s view implies that the artist knows in
advance the particular emotion for which he makes object, a situation or an
event, the correlative. Eliseo Vivas advances the hypothesis that it is only
through the act of composition, through his efforts to formulate it in words
that the poet discovers his emotion. As such he cannot have an advance
knowledge of the particular emotion for which an object is made the
co-relative. Secondly, the emotion expressed in a poem can neither be of
exclusive interest to the reader, nor can he feel exactly the same emotion as
the poet did. Furthermore, Eliot’s criticism of Hamlet as ‘an
artistic failure’ has been refuted by a great majority of scholars. However,
his theory of objective correlative applies well to his own poetry.
