T.S.

Eliot’s Theory of Objective

Correlative
Dr Farida Yasmin Panhwar
Assistant professor
Institute of English language & Literature,
University of Sindh, Jamshoro, Pakistan
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• In the essay Hamlet and His Problems, Eliot was
ostensibly reviewing two recent books on William
Shakespeare’s play, one by an American scholar,
Elmer Edgar Stoll, the other by an English scholar, J.
M. Robertson.
• He singled both of them out for praise because, in
their treatment of Hamlet, he felt that they had shifted
their critical attention away from the more typical
focus on Hamlet’s character and instead toward the
play itself.
• Maintaining that same shift in focus in his own
commentary, Eliot, in the course of his review,
deliberates on what he sees to be Hamlet’s failure as
drama.
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• In this essay, Eliot stated first some poets like Goethe and
Coleridge have given "interpretation" of Hamlet, and had
created a Hamlet of his own in the process, as critics tried
to understand issues in Hamlet`s character which wasn`t
understood by Shakespeare himself, as he believe.
• “The work of art cannot be interpreted….there is nothing
to interpret; we can only criticize it according to
standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for
"interpretation" the chief task is the presentation of
relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to
know.”
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• Eliot states that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the ‘Mona
Lisa of Literature’, because people find it a great
work of art, interesting, mysterious like smile of
Mona Lisa.
• For Eliot, works of art need to be evaluated primarily
as works of art; and judging Hamlet purely as a work
of art—irrespective of whether we find it.
• In the course of that part of his discussion he coins the
term objective correlative, one of the two critical
phrases for which he became perhaps as much
renowned as he did for his poetry.
• Eliot states that Shakespeare rewrote it and refined for
theatre audience – but failed to notify the character of
Hamlet odd feelings towards his own mother.
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• Eliot suggests, is filled with “stuff” that
Shakespeare as both playwright and poet was
unable to “drag to light, contemplate, or
manipulate into art.”
• T.S Eliot’s states that Shakespeare Hamlet His
Problem is too ‘big’ for the plot of the play and
the ‘intractable material’ Shakespeare is being
forced to work with.
• This, according to Eliot, is a failing not
necessarily in the material itself but in
Shakespeare’s handling of it.
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• According to Eliot, the poet cannot communicate his
emotions directly to the readers, he has to find some
object suggestive of it and only then he can evoke the
same emotion in his readers.
• Eliot justifies his analysis of Hamlet and says that the
play’s problems is the failure of objective correlative’.
Which is
– “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”.
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• It is through the objective correlative that the transaction
between author and reader necessarily takes place.
• For this object is the primary source of, and warrant for,
the reader's response whatever that may be; and it is also
the primary basis for whatever inferences we may draw
about what it is that the "author wanted to say."
• Briefly speaking, what Eliot means by his doctrine of the
objective correlative is that a great work of art is nothing
but a set of conceptual symbols or correlatives which
endeavor to express the emotions of the poet, and these
symbols constitute the total vision of the creative artist.
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• He believed that Shakespeare did this correlation well
in some of his “successful” plays, but not in Hamlet,
as in making a correlation in Hamlet Shakespeare
didn`t do that.
• Shakespeare drew the material for his Hamlet from
the plays of Thomas Kyd, but failed to make his play
correspond to the original material.
• It means the writer is unable to objectify the
emotions.
• There are two reasons for it.
• First a work of art should be read in the context of the
literary tradition on which an individual work is built
and of which it is a part.
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• For an emotion to be “immediately evoked” in a
work of literature, Eliot contends, there must be “a
set of objects, a situation, a chain of events” that
constitute “that particular emotion,” such that when
that formulation is presented, it will result for the
reader or viewer in a sensory experience evoking the
desired emotion.
• “The artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in this complete
adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is
precisely what is deficient in Hamlet.”
• Hamlet’s emotions in the play seem unclear and there
is a gulf between the emotion felt by the character
and the way this is worked up into drama in the play.
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• The second reason for calling Hamlet an artistic
failure has to do with the lack of objective
correlative.
• Shakespeare creates the character possessing emotion
in excess because the emotion has no equivalence to
the action of the character and the other facts and
details in the play.
• In other words, there needs to be something concrete
that leads a character to a specific emotion, contrary,
Hamlet is "dominated by an emotion which is
inexpressible, because it is inexcess of the facts as
they appear".
• In other words, Hamlet's emotions are too much
given the actual events that occur in the play.
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• Finally, he state that the job of an artist is to keep the
emotions alive
– “the intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an
object or exceeding its object, is something which
every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a
study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence:
the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or
trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the
artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world
to his emotions.”
• Due to this lose of objective correlative Eliot feels that
Hamlet of Shakespeare is puzzling and deficient .
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• For example, Hamlet’s preexisting hatred of Claudius
is justified by the Ghost’s revelation that Claudius is
a murderer and putative adulterer, but so does the fact
that Hamlet despises Claudius to begin with cloud the
single-minded motivation required of Hamlet to seek
the vengeance to which the Ghost exhorts him.
• The “madness” of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare’s hand
is less than madness and more than feigned.
• The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his
puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of
dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the
character Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion
which can find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it
is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot
express in art.
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an
object or exceeding its object, is something which
every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless
a study to pathologists.
• It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person
puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling
to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by
his ability to intensify the world to his emotions.
• The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet
of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and
excuse. We must simply admit that here Shakespeare
tackled a problem which proved too much for him.
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• Theory of the objective correlative reminds us of
Aristotle as well as the French symbolists.
• Like Aristotle, Eliot is of the opinion that it is not the
business of the poet to 'say' but to 'show', not to present
but to represent.
• In other words, Eliot's concept of the objective
correlative is based on the notion that it is not the
business of the poet to present his emotions directly but
rather to represent them indirectly through the 'objective
correlative' which become the formula for the poet's
original emotions.
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• Eliot's theory of the objective correlative has been
criticized by Eliseo Vivas on two grounds.
• First, Eliot's view implies that the artist knows in
advance the particular emotion for which he makes
object, a situation or an event, the correlative.
• Eliseo Vivas advances the hypothesis that it is only
through the act of composition, through his efforts
to formulate it in words that the poet discovers his
emotion.
• As such he cannot have advance knowledge of the
particular emotion for which an object is made the
co-relative.
 Theory of Objective Correlative
• Secondly, the emotion expressed in a poem can
neither be of exclusive interest to the reader, nor
can he feel exactly the same emotion as the poet
did.
• Furthermore, Eliot's criticism of Hamlet as 'an
artistic failure' has been refuted by a great
majority of scholars.
• However, the objective correlative theory is
applied well to many works of writers around the
world as well as the works of T.S. Eliot’s own
poetic and dramatic work to prove the validity and
application this theory.