Objective Correlative

As far as we know the term “objective correlative” was first coined by the American painter and poet Washington Allston and only later introduced by T.S.Eliot into his essay “Hamlet and His Problems”.   Eliot regarded “Hamlet ” as a sort of “artistic failure”, because Shakespeare, according to him, had not succeeded in making the audience feel properly Hamlet’s overwhelming emotions. The bard had not gone beyond describing the Prince of Denmark’s emotional state through the play’s dialogue, rather than stirring minds and souls to feel as he did, and this could have happened only through a skilful use of images, actions and characters:

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.

In short, poetry must not express emotions but rather find objects, situations and facts capable of evoking them in a definite and ordinary reality.  Hence, the objective correlative correlates the state of mind of the poet to a series of tangible and well-defined objects, thus giving a strong semantic significance to the poet’s feelings. Pain, restlessness, bitterness are no longer expressed through the description virtual or abstract elements, but rather concrete and real, like a landscape, a house, a wall, a lemon tree, but also the sea, a stormy boat, a marina and so on, in this way to poets succeeds in conferring those images a universal meaning.

In the Waste Land, for example, the fragility, the sense of loss and depression of the post-war generation is reproduced powerfully by the following set of words “a heap of broken images“. The war had destroyed from the foundations the world as it was and only the ruins and the bits and pieces of that past had remained. Those fragments are piled up untidily and there is no way to reconstruct the former unity. It is gone, what remains is only “stony rubbish“, that is: useless. The men who inhabit this Waste Land are stunned and devoid of any certainty and perspective, they have been “dried” of their values and once stripped of every superstructure, they have turned themselves into basic elements like “tubers” and prefer to rest safely protected by the “forgetful” winter snow rather than to put their heads out of the ground and act. Men are like “dull roots“, but roots must clutch at something in order to survive, something that might give them the impression of meaning to the days yet to come, but in a sterile lands what seems to nourish and comfort you for the present may become poisonous and turn into a tragedy in a close future. We all know that those “dried tubers” found relief drinking at the fountain which gave life to those populisms which grew in those fatal twenty years between the two wars.

All this in just few simple words, which thus combined give the formula to any reader to feel the state of mind of those who lived one the most tragic periods of our history.

 

 

 

 

Myths, heroes and………..Totti.

I’ve always enjoyed reading stories about myths, legends, courageous men ready to sacrifice their lives for the sake of their country or even only for the beauty of a woman. The main actors of these stories where the heroes, who actually embodied the highest expression of  the values of their society: loyalty, honour, love for the country, sacrifice. With their deeds, which were narrated in long epic poems, they were the symbols of the power, pride but also ethics of their people, thus contributing, through a natural process of identification, in the making of what could be called national awareness.

Heroes could not be commoners, for sure, because the greatness of the values they embodied had a divine nature that could be found either in their breed, for example Achilles, whose mother was the nymph Thetis or in their name, as for  Beowulf. Beowulf, in fact,  means “bee wolf” (which was supposed to be a metaphor for a bear): “the wolf that eats honey“, from which it was extracted ambrosia, the food of gods. He was, therefore, one of them. The values heroes embodied were universal and worked as glue of past more primitive societies, thus creating the basis of modern ones. At this point, I always ask my students a question: are there any such heroes nowadays? Men or women that could be the expression of universal values? They usually ponder for a while, then they come up with the usual defiant answer: Totti.

Totti, who? I guess you would ask. Well, Totti happens to be an Italian footballer, particularly popular here in Rome as he is the captain of A.S.Roma. The answer is quite provocative, as they know well that I am a great fan of the other team here in Rome S.S.Lazio. On Sundays , but often for the whole week, the atmosphere here is always something like, Capulets vs Montague,Guelphs vs Ghibellines,Trois vs Sparta and Lazio vs Roma. Thus, you may understand how that name can be particularly odious to me. However, despite the choice of the man, is it such a wrong answer? Can an action of a  footballer or a team have the same function of glorious heroic deeds? Yes.

Nick Hornby in his autobiographical book  Fever Pitch: A Fan’s life , well describes how football works in the mind of supporters. It is glue. Football is the common ground that allows the protagonist Paul Ashworth, an English teacher, to re-create a relationship with his father after the divorce and at the same time he finds in the other supporters of Arsenal that family he needs, with whom sharing the deeds of the present, the hopes for a better future and the stories of a glorious past. Time is felt as seasonal, therefore reassuring, cyclical, never-ending. We may discuss upon the values football expresses, however, people gather around those values and find motivations, passion, frustration but also happiness. For ninety minutes they/we feel alive in a never-ending dream.

It is sad, however, that they couldn’t spot anybody else. How could I blame them? After all the society they had been brought up fabricates powerful models, who invite to a process of identification in order to make profit (football included). The beautiful “lightness” of values is thus replaced by the “heaviness” due to the craving of things. Therefore, once men are emptied of their values, they cannot but  become just like those “dried tubers” of T.S.Eliot ‘s Waste Land, who don’t seem to find any good reason to live and just like “broken images” wander pointlessly in this world, unless……………Totti comes 😦

 

 

The dried tuber syndrome

The symptoms of  the dried tuber syndrome are easily recognizable: melancholy, indolence, fear of the future, sense of loss; as far as T.S.Eliot is concerned a whole generation between the two great wars suffered from the consequences of its contamination. The causes? The sense of uncertainty produced by the loss of past values and the impossibility of replacing them with new ones. If the present is not fertile enough to offer new perspectives and hopes and at the same time slowly dries whatever we used to believe in, we just become like emptied tubers that would rather stay hidden in the darkness of the earth than grow and face the oppressive light of the day. Hamlet, for example, clearly suffered of that disease. He had seen his world gradually falling apart: the death of his father, the hasty marriage of his mother with his uncle who had become in the meanwhile King of Denmark too. When the play starts Hamlet has already been deprived of many certainties: his family, the mother figure, maybe even his succession to the throne of Denmark. The first time we meet him in the play he already displays the early symptoms of the syndrome: bitterness, melancholy, dullness. So when his father’s ghost informs him that his brother, the King, had shamefully murdered him while he was sleeping in his orchard, he actually deals the final blow to Hamlet’s psyche, At first he seems to be willing to react, to revenge immediately his father and kill the infamous murderer, but when the adrenaline is off, he realizes that he just can’t do it: “Oh cursed spite/that I was ever born to set it right“, he ponders. His father’s revelation should require a prompt reaction but Hamlet delays it – in fact the ghost will have to reappear a second time to incite his son to act –  showing signs of confusion and psychological stress. The frustration deriving from his inability to accomplish what he feels a moral duty towards the memory of his father leads him also to consider suicide. He will eventually react only when he realizes he has fallen in his uncle’s trap, before dying.