Sárospataki Füzetek 17. (2013)
2013 / 1-2. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Sawyer, Frank: Krisztus, egyház és világ T. S. Eliot Kórusok "A sziklá"-ból, 1934 c. versében
Sawyer Frank. 1.3 ‘Objective correlative There are many aspects to Eliot’s poetic techniques, which aim at density of thought along with a great richness in emotional tones and impressions, juxtaposi- tioning ideas which are often paradoxical but are meant to wholistically include all our experiences in order to reach more awareness. We may draw attention here to Eliot’s idea of using ‘objective correlative’6 7 statements, by which is meant that he describes something (an object, a situation, event, relationship, etc.) in such a way that the concrete example immediately produces the correlative’ or analogical feeling in the reader. For example, when we hear the words, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”, we feel the boredom and the hesitancy of the overcautious person who remains on the sidelines of life, hardly entering the game as an actor. We feel the nausea of noncommitance. There are endless phrases and words in Eliot’s poetry which function as objects’ (given signs) which produce the (subjective) ‘correlative’ feeling in us. For example, the often repeated words ‘desert’ and ‘rocks’ in Ash-Wednesday. Or, here in Choruses from the Rock, we find words like ‘house’ and ‘light’. A typically objective correlative statement, would be: “The great snake lies ever half awake, at the bottom of/ the pit of the world, curled....” This produces the analogical feeling more directly than saying that evil is always there at the basis of our lives. The snake statement contains the horror of evil, while the second statement is abstractly true but impinges less upon us. We can say that the word ‘church’, ‘house of God , and ‘faith’ for Eliot are objective correlative symbols in these Choruses for all our best values and our cultural heritage. That is why he says, “To our Christian heritage we owe many things besides religious faith. Through it we trace the evolution of our arts, through it we have our conception of Roman Law which has done so much to shape the Western World, through it we have our conceptions of private and public morality. And through it we have our common standards of literature, in the literatures of Greece and Rome. The Western world has its unity in this heritage, in Christianity and in the ancient civilizations of Greece, Rome and Israel, from which, owing to two thousand years of Christianity, we trace our de>57 cent. On the same page he says: “If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes”. The reader can judge how true this may seem to be so many decades later (he wrote this in 1948). To feel what Eliot felt when he used words like ‘church’, we need to know this perspective which he held on ‘faith’ as the motor of culture. II. The Rock — structure & themes The Rock was commissioned in 1934 as a pageant play in order to raise funds for building churches in the new suburbs in the diocese of northern London. In the prefatory note Eliot says that he cannot be called the author of the play, since the historical scenes were planned by the committee and Eliot was asked to write a script 6 See F.O.Matthiessen, The Achievement of T.S. Eliot (Oxford University Press, 1959), 58. 7 From Eliots Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, cited in Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T.S.Eliot (New York: Plarcourt Brace, 1975), 304. 68 Sárospataki i zf.tek 201:1/1-2
