T.S. Eliot’s Objective correlative, by P.B.:
Eliot used the term objective correlative exclusively to
refer to his claimed artistic mechanism where emotion is evoked in the
audience. The only way of experiencing emotion in the form of art is an
objective
correlative.
Eliot described Hamlet as ‘Most certainly an artistic
failure’- because its central character is dominated by an emotion which is
inexpressible because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. The only way
of expressing emotion in 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. When the external facts which must terminate
in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. He acknowledged
that such a circumstance is something which every person of sensibility has
known, but felt that in trying to represent it dramatically.
Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Shakespeare
has failed to provide Hamlet with such objective
correlative. According to Eliot, the feelings of Hamlet are not
sufficiently supported by the story and the other characters surrounding him.
The purpose of objective correlative is to express the character’s emotion by
showing them rather than describing the feelings as pictured earlier by Plato,
Peter Barry.
1.The term ‘objective correlative’ was popularized by to T.
S. Eliot in his essay, ‘Hamlet and His Problem’.
2.The term ‘objective correlative’ first used by Washington
Allston around 1840 in the ‘Introductory Discourse’.
3.Eliot said (Hamlet) as ‘most certainly an artistic
failure’.
4.Eliot’s impersonal conception gets expression in his ‘Tradition
and individual Talent’(1917).