Objective Correlative

     Objective Correlative is one of the most important critical concepts of T.S.Eliot. Eliot’s idea of poetic impersonality finds its formulation in this concept. Eliot described this concept in his famous essay “Hamlet and his Problems”. He believed that the poet is unable to transfer his/her emotions and ideas directly to the reader. Thus there must be some sort of mediation. Eliot says “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.”

     

     Through this objective correlative the transaction between the author and the reader takes place. Thus what the author has to say is objectified. These objects can be a situation, certain inanimate objects, and characters etc. The external actions or objects are representing the internal emotions of the characters. The sleep waking scene, candle, comments relating to the perfumes of Arabia, smell of blood etc. in Macbeth gives us the picture of Lady Macbeth’s emotional and mental state.

     Shakespeare has failed to find suitable objective correlative in his drama Hamlet. Hamlet’s suffering is not conveyed properly by any character or any action in the play. Thus for Eliot Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an artistic failure. Eliot admired Dante’s poetry and its visual imagination because Dante did not lose his grasp over the objective correlative.

     The worldwide loss of vision in José Saramago’s Blindness, the car in Stephen King’s Christine, Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird etc. are examples of objective correlatives.