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Gunnar Arrias. Vai Tomasa Stçrna Eljota mçría korelatîvs ir obligâti vîrieðu korelatîvs?
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on Jacqueline Rose’s question, in an essay entitled “Hamlet, the Mona Lisa of Literature?”,
5 whether Eliot’s objective correlative is a male correlative (perhaps the term
corrective would be more appropriate in the case Rose is arguing).
The idea of an objective correlative was presented in a review article, “Hamlet
and his Problems” (1919), which came to be included in The Sacred Wood (1920),
where Eliot advocates the idiosyncratic view that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an artistic
failure. Here I’m going to offer a rough interpretation of the concept of an objective
correlative and then confront it with a feminist assault.
Louis Menand doesn’t find the concept of an objective correlative a particularly
original one, adding that it immediately collapses under analysis. Nonetheless everybody
“almost intuitively” seemed to understand what Eliot meant. 6 Hugh Kenner pertinently
points out that Eliot had a dangerous gift of phrase. 7
This is how Eliot defines the objective correlative:
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. 8
In a fairly representative survey, Literary theory: From Plato to Barthes (1999),
Richard Harland sees the objective correlative as an extension of the symbol lining
up with the more “technical” attitude of the new criticism with its stress on imagery,
aesthetic autonomy and impersonality (anti–intentionalism). 9 In opposition to
Harland–type interpretation of the objective correlative (a dominant internal aesthetic
point of view) I believe that the notion of an objective correlative is best understood
from the point of view of semantic–epistemological considerations and also from the
point of view of the problem of expression within philosophical aesthetics. (I’m not
going to deal with the latter question in this paper.) “Hamlet and his problems” can
be illuminated by Eliot’s occupation during his Harvard years with questions of epistemology
and hermeneutics. With Eliot problems of interpretation, understanding and
explanation were deeply embedded in religious and existential meditations.
The locus classicus concerning Eliot’s ideal of impersonality is of course “Tradition
and Individual Talent” (1919), 10 but as will subsequently become clear there is a
charge in the Hamlet–essay against Shakespeare’s being unable to objectify his emotions;
hence becoming too personal. Ronald Bush, in T.S. Eliot. A Study in Character
and Style (1984), manages to strike a delicate balance in his assessment of impersonality
in Eliot: “In the time of ‘Gerontion’ and The Waste Land, Eliot’s poetry is ‘obsessed
with disclosing [...] ‘the self that wills’ [...] his prose of the same period is
devoted to establishing a theoretical basis for discriminating between the two selves.”
Bush argues that Eliot found this theoretical basis in the philosophy of the idealist
philosopher G.H. Bradley, whose philosophy was subjected a doctoral dissertation by
Eliot, Knowledge and Experience (1916). Through notions like “locus of experience”
or “point of view” or “finite center” Bradley offered a way “to discount the naive
view that the poet’s work is continuous with his breakfast conversation. A problem
arises, however, when critics superimpose the terms of Eliot´s dissertation on a few