■Washington Allston coined the phrase “■objective correlative” in his ■Lectures on Art. It must have been, he looked at a vegetable, judged on human emotion, and wrote,
Take an example from one of the lower forms of organic life,— a common vegetable. Will any one assert that the surrounding inorganic elements of air, earth, heat, and water produce its peculiar form? Though some, or all, of these may be essential to its development, they are so only as its predetermined correlatives, without which its existence could not be manifested; and in like manner must the peculiar form of the vegetable preexist in its life, — in its idea, — in order to evolve by these assimilants its own proper organism.
“No possible modification in the degrees or proportion of these elements can change the specific form of a plant, ― for instance, a cabbage into a cauliflower; it must ever remain a cabbage, small or large, good or bad. So, too, is the external world to the mind; which needs, also, as the condition of its manifestation, its objective correlative. Hence the presence of some outward object, predetermined to correspond to the preexisting idea in its living power, is essential to the evolution of its proper end, ― the pleasurable emotion.
In simple words, the world was palatable. Things it had yet either agreed with a prior idea for pleasure, or might not exist as well, failing to meet the condition for their manifestation to the mind.
The words, “cash on the table”, would tell more or less the same, if we look up the Greek where cauliflower is derived from cabbage, κραμβίδιον (krambídion) as diminutive of κραμβη (krambe).
Mr. Allston’s matter is not about biochemistry or farming, as long as lemon remains a component or ingredient of lemon cheesecake, rather than its “predetermined correlative”. For a lemon or two only to correlate with a cake, you put the fruit aside or maybe right next to plain cheesecake on the table, if you want the correlation to be close.
Arts or endeavors, intellectual too, bring novelty. They do not pre-exist. Paintings or poems, and other belles lettres too, all become when authors create them. If they “are predetermined”, they have been commissioned.
Pleasure as coming with evolution would make Mr. Allston suggestive of relevance for veg outside meal times, should contexts befall afar from finance. Plants are not irrelevant to human feelings. They can inspire aesthetic pleasure.
Impressionism was visibly the favor with Paul Cezanne. Wikimedia Commons have ■more examples of his “outward objects for pleasurable emotion”. Nothing here correlates objectively, however. Impressionism allowed multiple realizations for same objects.
■T.S. Eliot endeavored to make the jacket for the potato, so to speak. In ■Hamlet and His Problems he stated,
Hamlet is a stratification; (…) represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his Hamlet to be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final form.
In his critical endeavors, Eliot referred to the ■thing theory and the ■pathetic fallacy. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us, wrote ■Bill Brown.
It is a kind of personification that occurs in poetic descriptions, when, for example, clouds seem sullen, when leaves dance, or when rocks seem indifferent. The English cultural critic John Ruskin coined the term in the third volume of his work Modern Painters (1856)
— says ■Wikipedia.
In spring, tree leaves under a side breeze might shoot with reflexes of light and color — should dancing be pathetic.
Eliot yet would give in to antinomy. He placed dance with immobility in his ■Still Point of the Turning World. His Hamlet lays out,
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.
Elicited, instantaneous, and pleasurable — emotion — is a denial on a feeling. It is the true “emotional falseness”. Thus it might have been that clouds were smiling on Mr. Ruskin, only nobody told him.
Objectively, vegetables are no good parallel or comparison to human feelings, hence the title of this post.
Well, both Allston and Eliot had their emotionally difficult times. Allston’s wife died, “leaving him saddened, lonely, and homesick”, wrote ■Jay B. Hubell. Eliot reportedly suffered from ■abulia, otherwise termed a ■sickly weakening of the will.
Both were readers well practiced and men able to perceive the writing skill. I suspect they had an object of quiet envy, and she was Emily Dickinson, only not in those dash-loaded versions we see today.
If there is writing that has something objective and correlative, this would be her poetry. Feel welcome to compare ■a correlative for Emily Dickinson and Aristotle. Eliot’s stillness invokes misplaced localities, compare my ■Shapely and Handsome Fable.
An objective correlate avoids projection. It follows the matter of language. The roles of the agens and patiens are scarce, because the poetic thinking is not doing. Feel welcome to my notes.
Notes for Emily Dickinson’s poetry
Fascicles and print, the poetic correlative with Webster 1828, Latin and Greek inspiration, and an Aristotelian motif, Things perpetual — these are not in time, but in eternity. ■More
Post Scriptum. There has been rumor that Impressionist used suggestion about sexuality, to sell their paintings better. Well, the Cezanne Mons is of the shape geographically, and who knows, maybe villagers pruned the poplars to make them look a bit can-can for Gogh. Generally such stories are associated with commercialization of art. The belief is, “the simple people like such innuendoes”, and myths get to be propagated.