Criticism as Countertransference: Eliot on Hamlet
As a bookend to go with D.H. Lawrence's muscular take-down of Hamlet, read T.S. Eliot's supercilious "Hamlet and His Problems." Eliot is amusing for what he got wrong ("...the play is most certainly an artistic failure") and quite smart in what he got right.
Eliot, like Lawrence, projects his own limitations onto Shakespeare and disdains what he can't explain. He knocks Goethe for finding Werther in Hamlet and Coleridge for finding Coleridge in Hamlet -- clever and to a certain extent true, but not the whole story. Eliot -- a lesser poet than either Goethe or Coleridge -- accuses them of frustrated creativity "which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead." And where he understands least, there is Mr. Eliot most certain: "The only way ... unmistakable ... unmistakably .... We know that .... We are surely justified in .... undoubtedly correct .... and this is precisely what ...."
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. ... [T]he state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife's death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic "inevitability" lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion ....
Provocative: in order to evoke a particular emotion the artist constructs a chain of events which elicit a sequence of imagined sensory impressions. This chain of events obeys a particular formula corresponding to the emotion to be evoked. The formula consists of an accumulation of facts which trigger a series of imagined sensations. These events and their associated sensations lead to the last event in the series, and that event triggers the particular emotion the artist is evoking.
Intriguing, but whether it is the only way of an artist's expressing an emotion needs a great deal more evidence than Mr. Eliot gives us -- it would be nice to have another example or two. And whether it accurately and exhaustively deconstructs the process of an artist evoking a particular emotion is even more dubious. But his problem with Hamlet hinges on this 'objective correlative.'
[T]his is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. ... Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand... and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it.
Eliot can't find the "objective correlative" to Hamlet's emotions. And because Eliot doesn't feel aroused to those emotions, the play is by his litmus a literary failure. He simply cannot explain how so many inconsistencies and problems could exist in a Shakespeare play, errors which "even hasty revision should have noticed." He concludes
... that Shakespeare's Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare's, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the "intractable" material of the old play. [Thomas Kyd's ur-Hamlet] Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure.
| But he doesn't stop there.
[P]robably more people have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the "Mona Lisa" of literature. The grounds of Hamlet's failure are not immediately obvious. ... We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know.
You have to grant him this, Eliot has nerve, to dis Shakespeare and Leonardo in the same breath. But Eliot's disdain is often a compliment: He admits Shakespeare tackled the inexpressibly horrible, what he doesn't say is that, more than any other artist, Shakespeare succeeded.
For some reason, in this essay Eliot's usual skill as a critic is spotty, maybe because he is deaf to dramatic necessity in actual stage performance. He notices that while "immature"
Lines like Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Nice analysis, spot-on about the poetry. But what if Horatio is supposed to have a voice different from Hamlet's? Perhaps as a dramatic character, Horatio's diction is supposed to be less mature than Hamlet's. Eliot's plays, ("The Cocktail Party," "Murder in the Cathedral," etc) are intellectually brilliant but not really dramas in the usual sense. His characters declaim their lines at one another in verse, and they all sound pretty much the same. Here is more inadvertent praise:
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. The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known.... 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....
Wrong. Hamlet is an adolescent -- and a wise old man. In him, myriad-minded Shakespeare created a character so complex that Hamlet would forever be identified as his creator's Doppelganger.
groves.james@mgh.harvard.edu
*T.S. Eliot. The sacred wood: essays on poetry and criticism. London, Methune 1920, republished July 1996 © Bartleby.com |
