T.S. Eliot And The Objective Correlative - Essay Example

T.S. Eliot and the Objective Correlative Thomas Stearns Eliot (T.S. for short), was one of the most influential poets of the 20th century. Having been born in America, he eventually made his home in London, but took with him many of his early influences and ideas, which included a heavy use of symbolism to create a sense of universality in his work. “Eliot is known for his critical and theoretical writing, particularly for his advocacy of the ‘objective correlative’, the notion that art should not be a personal expression, but should work through objective universal symbols” (“T.S. Eliot”, 2006). The objective correlative is defined by Eliot as being a set of objects, a specific situation or chain of events that can then be used as a formula to recall a particular emotion; “such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (Eliot, cited in Pateman, 2005). In other words, ‘show, don’t tell’ through the use of symbolism. Thus, Eliot deems it important to establish a connection with his readers through a relatively universal set of symbols and images as a means of communicating the emotion and depth of meaning required for the full experience of the work. Eliot, as the seventh child of a large prominent family in St. Louis with close connections to Boston, had ample opportunity to live on the edge of the modern movement. He was “born when his parents were prosperous and secure in their mid-forties … and his siblings were half grown. Afflicted with a congenital double hernia, he was in the constant eye of his mother and five older sisters” (Bush, 1999). His early years provided him with an extensive education in the academic realm as well as a comfort level among both the high and low-born members of his community. Religious teachings from the family were strongly Unitarian as his grandfather had helped found the church in St. Louis, but his full-time nanny introduced him to Catholicism when she took him to mass on occasion (Bush, 1999). He eventually made it to Harvard, where his older brother had attended and his cousin remained President, obtaining a B.A. in a rather creative elective program focused around various types of literature and an M.A. in English literature, all within four years. “In December 1908 a book Eliot found in the Harvard Union library changed his life: Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1895) introduced him to the poetry of Jules Laforgue, and Laforgue’s combination of ironic elegance and psychological nuance gave his juvenile literary efforts a voice. By 1909-1910 his poetic vocation had been confirmed” (Bush, 1999). Constantly divided between hometowns (St. Louis and Boston), religions and able to see people at all levels of society suffering through the same sorts of issues led Eliot to his strong ideas regarding the existence of universal symbols. Following his graduation, Eliot took a postgraduate year in Paris and, except for a few brief periods, remained in Europe for the rest of his life. Although he had written poetry prior to his leaving Harvard, the poems that gained him recognition were written during this period. These were published in 1917 in Eliot’s first book, Prufrock and Other Observations. The poems in this book contained many of the characteristics of Modernist literature. There is a certain degree of pessimism in stark contrast to the optimism of previous literary movements. In Eliot’s verse, there is also a sense of disconnection and isolation, the idea that the individual is hopelessly and eternally singular in an increasingly mechanical, urbanized world. To help illustrate these disconnections, Eliot makes use of symbolic language, allowing thoughts to flow unconnected, characters to talk out of turn, time to occur in haphazard fashion and presenting only fragments of information that the reader must then interpolate. Perhaps to battle against this feeling of isolation, though, Eliot fills his verses with symbolisms that strive to reach an appropriate responsive chord in the reader through the identification of universal or majority human experience, what he terms an ‘objective correlative’. As was revealed in his non-fiction essays published in 1919, for Eliot, “fashioning feeling in words requires not that one looks inside oneself, examining the phenomenology of subjective experience, but rather that outside oneself one is able to locate an ‘objective correlative’ for an emotion. … For purposes of art, the important thing is to be able to find such representations which evoke in others feelings appropriate to them. This is rather different from being oneself filled with emotions” (Pateman, 1991). This was the quality that was recognized even in his early verse that gained him such recognition and which had a lasting impact upon the way in which literature progressed from this time forward. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948 in recognition of the part he played in the development of the Modernist literature movement. This type of symbolic use of language to evoke an emotion in a reader through personal identification with the experience can be traced through most of Eliot’s poems, such as “Portrait of a Lady” (Eliot, 1917). A dreadful sense of anticipation is invoked from the very first stanza, in which Eliot allows, out of the “smoke and fog of a December afternoon” (1), the “scene to arrange itself – as it will seem to do” (2). From the first of these lines, one can feel the cold clamminess of a grave with the twilight gray of a nondescript environment, placing the reader in an amorphous space with little to no reference. A scene begins to take shape in front of our mental eye as Eliot begins to paint a new universe for us, allowing us to experience another perspective constructed entirely by himself. With “four wax candles in the darkened room, / Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead, / An atmosphere of Juliet’s tomb / Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid” (4-7), the dread deepens. The repetition of the four wax candles and the four rings of light bring to mind fuzzy allusions to religious ceremonies, carried on in secret places and leaving plenty of shadow around in which unknown things might hide. No longer is this a neutral space of nothingness in which it is difficult to be other than merely curious, the reader is placed in a darkened room that is likened to a tomb. Despite creating an almost palpable responsive emotion in the reader, Eliot has not once mentioned the name of a feeling in the creation of this effect. The tomb he invokes in this first stanza also illustrates his complicated use of symbols and universal knowledge to gain an emotional response from his reader. The tomb he compares his room to is not just any tomb, but that of Juliet – the most famous Juliet being the one created by Shakespeare in one of his most popular tragedies. Anyone familiar with Shakespeare’s story knows that when Juliet appears in her tomb alone, she is merely giving the semblance of death so that she might wake up and reunite with her lover, Romeo. This person is also aware that she doesn’t wake before Romeo arrives and determines to kill himself rather than lead a life without her. When she awakes to find Romeo’s lifeless body lying on the floor next to her, the fair Juliet plunges a dagger into her heart. Thus, the image of Juliet’s tomb is one of horrible tragedy, the terrible loss of youth, the unfathomable idea of a life without love and the hopelessly defiant anticipation of a last, desperate effort. It is with this type of imagery that Eliot establishes the scene as one that will necessarily end in failure because of the sheer terror felt at the deepest layers of the individual describing the scene, yet still manages to provide a sense of pessimistic half-hearted hope that something good might arise, despite the unlikelihood of it within the first 8 lines of the poem. However, the scene is not complete until he populates it with the characters that will provide the reader with a more accurate sense of the hopelessness and disconnectedness of the modern world. These arrive in the form of a young man and woman as they appreciate together a performance by a musician. The characters are not described by physical or other attributes, but are instead allowed to speak for themselves through the words they share with each other. The young man is shown to be quite cynical and detached with comments such as commenting that the musician should stick with an audience of just his friends as the only way of protecting “the bloom / That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room” (12-13). The woman can be quickly observed to be an inane talker, filling the silences in conversation with useless commentary such as “In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends, / [For indeed I do not love it … you knew? you are not blind! / How keen you are!] / To find a friend” (21-24). While this seems a reasonable approximation of a disjointed conversation, it also reveals an inability on the part of the speaker to remain on a single topic. The impression presented becomes one of it being a topic not worth dwelling upon for either party and causes the reader to wonder what the rest of the poem could possible be about. As the woman presumably continues to prattle on about her friends, the narrator describes “the windings of the violins / And the ariettes / Of cracked cornets / Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins” (29-32), quickly re-capturing the reader with the notion that what follows will be an intimate glimpse of the man’s impressions without actually saying something outright. The woman becomes as unpleasant sounding to us as the screeching of violins and the blat of a broken horn, something a great deal of readers had probably experienced at least once in their lifetime sufficiently enough to suppress a responsive shudder. The “Capricious monotone” (34), the “one definite ‘false note’” (35) that exists as a tom-tom playing its own tune in his head provides us with the necessary detachment from the woman, realizing that the mind of the narrator has gone on a similar vacation from the scene in front of him. He has stepped into his own world, existing to its own music, with a focus on the effects of tobacco in his system and the monuments around them as they whittle away another half an hour. This presentation of a specific scene, precise imagery and sensory experience make it impossible for us to interpret this poem in any other way than to understand we are glimpsing a bored man struggling to maintain his manners through a terribly dull afternoon in the company of a young woman who is desperately trying to win him over with the inane social babble that passes for conversation among her set. The passage of time is not mentioned specifically, but is rather introduced with yet more symbolism and imagery in the first line of the second verse, “Now that the lilacs are in bloom” (41). The woman remains the subject of the story, but is now presented in a more reflective light that reveals more of the man at her side than the woman herself. That she is very ill is made obvious as “She has a bowl of lilacs in her room” (42) which has now become the meeting place. She mentions “Youth is cruel, and has no remorse / And smiles at situations which it cannot see” (48-49) to which he pays only scant attention as he smiles “of course, / And go on drinking tea” (50-51). This almost condescending wisdom delivered from her is taken with the same grain of salt with which he received her in the first part of the poem. He still regards her as a voice that returns “like the insistent out-of-tune / Of a broken violin on an August afternoon” (56-57). Her comments regarding his own character – “You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’ heel / You will go on, and when you have prevailed / You can say: at this point many a one has failed” (61-63) – end up having a profound impact on the way in which he views his life, another vignette painted in the following stanza as he illustrates how he lives his life completely alone, remarking almost casually about the major events he reads about in the newspaper, and questions whether his way of life is better than the ideas held by his female friend. The poem ends with a picture of their unhappiness together as he relates the difficult trip he makes home: “Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease / I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door / And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees” (85-87). The scene described indicates the narrator is leaving to travel abroad and the woman is unhappy about the separation. Like the rest of the poem, the words spoken by the woman are quite revealing regarding the nature of their relationship, one that has existed on a shaky foundation of expected behaviors while the imagery presented in the thoughts of the man reveal his own state of being. “I must borrow every changing shape / To find expression … dance, dance / Like a dancing bear, / Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape, / Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance” (109-113). The reader, placing themselves in this frame of mind, can easily understand the dual nature of the man, the outward-acting person that goes through the mundane activities of his life upholding the polite necessities expected of him and the inner response to the tom-tom drum that works to acknowledge the realities of the soul within, who is not so detached from the outer world after all. Thus, through fragmented bits of conversation and the expression of individual thoughts that are only loosely connected to the action of the scene, Eliot is able to present a complete picture of a man existing on planes of being at once and struggling to find a balance. This is the quintessential idea behind the Modernist movement, that of a society fragmented by urbanization and the isolation and fragmentation of the individual within this world. Through his writings, Eliot introduced the world to the idea of the ‘show, don’t tell’ dictum that influences most writers today, illustrating with his carefully selected words and strategically described scenarios the everyday emotions and feelings experienced by individuals regardless of social class or economic position. His choice of everyday subjects, such as the acrimonious relationship between a man and a woman, and his willingness to explore the more negative aspects of such relationships as opposed to the flowery aggrandizement of romantic love as it was presented in the Victorian poetry of his immediate predecessors led the way to the more realistic and all-encompassing literary works of the 20th century. Works Cited Bush, Ronald. “T.S. Eliot’s Life and Career.” American National Biography. John A. Garraty & Mark C. Carnes (Eds.). New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. American Council of Learned Societies. July 25, 2006 Modern American Poetry < http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/life.htm> Eliot, T.S. “Portrait of a Lady.” Prufrock and Other Observations. London: The Egoist, 1917. Pateman, Trevor. “Tradition and Creativity: T.S. Eliot ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’” Key Concepts: A Guide to Aesthetics, Criticism and the Arts in Education. London: Falmer Press, 1991. July 25, 2006 “T. S. Eliot.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. (July 25, 2006.) Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. July 25, 2006 . Read More