Objective correlative

‘Fancies that are curled about these images’:

Like the 'dissociation of sensibility' the 'objective correlative' is another of T S Eliot's obiter dicta that was made much of in the modernist era that he helped to usher in, but fell into neglect in the post-modern era dominated by the science of linguistics. As in the case of the former, it would seem appropriate to re-examine the concept and consider its current relevance in the critical evaluation and appreciation of literature.

Eliot threw out the principle in his 1919 essay on Shakespeare's 'Hamlet', which he considered to be an artistic failure. The reason he offers for this judgment is that Shakespeare has failed to objectify or justify the emotional intensity of the play through the actual situations and events furnished by its plot. He then pronounces his theory:

Chain of events

“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, 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.”

T S Eliot

Eliot's contention is that the the revenge plot and the Hamlet story taken over by Shakespeare from earlier sources was inadequately adapted by him to support the complex of attitudes and feelings embodied in the character of Hamlet. Accordingly these remained largely inexplicable and therefore artistically unjustifiable.

Although we are no longer under the spell of Eliot's magisterial style, we are still impressed by the plausibility of his maxim. But for the same reason it now appears to us to be somewhat too plausible. In the first place, it seems to reduce the artistic or creative process to the application of a formula, just as a scientist may expect a certain chemical reaction following the combination of certain substances in his test tube. In the second, it seems to reduce art to the level of advertising whose modus operandi could well be expressed in similar terms. Advertisers, after all, are in the business of manipulating images of various objects and situations for the purpose of inducing an irrational craving for their products and services.

Literary theories

And it is precisely because of the negative perspective occasioned by the passage of time that we should be fair and view the theory in the literary context in which it was first expressed. For Eliot did not propound the idea of the objective correlative out of thin air. As we noted at the beginning of this article it was really uttered as something of an obiter dictum. Others, however, took it up eagerly and accorded it the status of a dogma. This presupposes that there was a general recognition at the time of the relevance and the logicality of his idea.

Eliot was writing under the influence of the Imagist movement in poetry of which he himself had been a part. For the Imagists objectivity was the key requirement. They were concerned primarily with the actual objects or situations out of real life that they chose to represent, without considering themselves to be under any necessity to explicate these as their Romantic and Victorian predecessors were in the habit of doing. Neither did they use their images to point a moral or adorn a tale, nor did they attempt to adorn these images with moralising or interpretation. This is how their chief spokesman, Ezra Pound, put it:

“The natural object is always the adequate symbol......I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a man uses 'symbols' he must use them so that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.”

Thus for the true Imagist objective reality was all that mattered. It was enough to present an image simply for the impression it made qua image on the poet. Nor was this a case of reducing art to the level of photography. The perception of the image as it actually was had a particular mystique attaching to it. This was eloquently described by the hero of James Joyce's 'Portrait if the Artist as a Young Man', Stephen Daedalus, as he sought to interpret Thomas Aquinas' theory of beauty. Having described the initial phases of artistic apprehension as being the perception of the uniqueness and the harmonious cohesion of an aesthetic image, he explains the third phase as a sense of radiant illumination:

Mysterious instant

“This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in the imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley compared to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind, which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony, is the luminous silent stasis (suspended state) of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.”

The emotional impact that his imaginative contemplation of the image makes on the artist enables him to represent it in such a way that the same impact is, at least theoretically, realizable for his audience. Here is a famous example of an Imagist poem by another of the school's prime movers, TE Hulme: it is entitled 'Autumn': “A touch of cold in the Autumn night---I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer. I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children.”

We can ourselves feel the effect that catching sight of the moon had on Hulme. He was struck by how its ruddy immediacy contrasted with the pale remoteness of the stars framing it. It affected him with the conflicting impressions of identification and alienation. He is able to convey this through the descriptive power that his imagination bestows under the pressure of the impact. The moon leans towards him like a farmer in the pink of health familiarly hailing him. But the stars are forlorn in their exclusion from such camaraderie, like town children who are pale from their lack of exposure to the countryside sunlight. This is all that Hulme means to convey and he does so successfully.

Eliot the poet was much influenced by Imagism. In fact he regarded Pound, who edited 'The Waste Land' for him and to whom he dedicated it, as 'the better craftsman'. When we look at an early poem of his like 'Preludes', we see that it abounds in images that are typical of urban living and convey the sense of desolation and meaninglessness. But Eliot goes on to betray a concern which transcends the purely aesthetic concern of the Imagist. Towards the end of the poem he comments: “I am moved by fancies that are curled About these images and cling; The notion of some infinitely gentle, Infinitely suffering thing.”

What Eliot seems to be implying is that he cannot restrict himself to aesthetically successful representations of these images of squalor and vacuity. They arouse feelings in him not only of repulsion but of compassion and tenderness. In other words they awake his moral awareness of the implications of post-war coarseness and purposelessness. And it was this residual emotion, further 'recollected in tranquility' that propelled him to produce the 'set of objects, the situations and the chain of events' that comprise the Waste Land. Eliot began with the emotions engendered by his moral awareness and found the appropriate artistic formula or vehicle for it. In fact, the theory of the objective correlative seems perfectly to fit the artistic process at work in 'The Waste Land'. It is this sense of social and moral responsibility that the poem embodies and conveys to the reader that makes it a great poem and that makes Eliot a great poet.

Having tried to set Eliot's theory in its context, we can understand why it was acclaimed as much as it was all the way into the early seventies. And now we are now able to put it even deeper into context. For what Eliot has done is to explain in his own way how the imagination should operate in a work of art. The best elucidation of this is the oldest, namely that of Shakespeare in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream': “And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”

The creative imagination of the artist enables him to translate his insights into life, the 'things unknown', into 'forms' – whether dramatically, poetically or fictionally - that are recognizable by his audience. If he fails to give his ideas 'a local habitation and a name' they would remain as 'airy nothings' to his audience. This is what Eliot is suggesting is the problem with Hamlet. What we now need to do is to test Eliot's theory out further in its application to works of art ancient and modern, before going on to examine his contention that 'Hamlet' is an artistic failure.