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odd_buttons) wrote2004-11-28 12:07 pm
odd_buttons) wrote2004-11-28 12:07 pm
Objective Correlative
The following is an excerpt from Part III of the book Making Shapely Fiction, by Jerome Stern. The first two parts are very much worth reading as well. The book is available in paperback.
Objective Correlative
T. S. Eliot defined this term as the specific and concrete to express abstract ideas in literature. As he put it, you need "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events" to create a "sensory experience" so that "the emotion is immediately invoked." The concept has always been controversial. First of all, Eliot summoned it to explain why Hamlet was an "artistic failure." Second, critics have been in constant disagreement as to its meaning.
Even with that confusion, the objective correlative can still be useful to writers of fiction. Ideas and feelings are more vivid if they are expressed by a powerful, palpable image. When we remember works of fiction, we recall objects and actions, not thoughts and abstractions. In Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest modern society is embodied by the insane asylum. The titles of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Kafka's The Trial, Katherine Ann Porter's Ship of Fools, Walker Percy's The Moviegover, or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man suggest the objective correlatives that unify each work.
See Imagry, Metaphor and Simile, Motif, Symbolism.
Objective Correlative
T. S. Eliot defined this term as the specific and concrete to express abstract ideas in literature. As he put it, you need "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events" to create a "sensory experience" so that "the emotion is immediately invoked." The concept has always been controversial. First of all, Eliot summoned it to explain why Hamlet was an "artistic failure." Second, critics have been in constant disagreement as to its meaning.
Even with that confusion, the objective correlative can still be useful to writers of fiction. Ideas and feelings are more vivid if they are expressed by a powerful, palpable image. When we remember works of fiction, we recall objects and actions, not thoughts and abstractions. In Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest modern society is embodied by the insane asylum. The titles of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Kafka's The Trial, Katherine Ann Porter's Ship of Fools, Walker Percy's The Moviegover, or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man suggest the objective correlatives that unify each work.
See Imagry, Metaphor and Simile, Motif, Symbolism.