PARTISAN REVIEW
51
political activism of youth, but finds he cannot wholly understand
it or participate in it. Why? Because, he says, youthful dissent is
dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible; because it is in
excess of the facts as they appear. This is not, as you might think,
a quote from George Kennan. It is from T. S. Eliot in his formula–
tion of the term "objective correlative." He is talking about what
might be called by certain critics, equally satisfied with pacification,
the
topoi
of SDS, namely Hamlet. It matters, but not much, that
the idea of objective correlative is as old as Poe and probably de–
rivative of Washington Allston's 1850 "Lectures on Art." Given what
Eliot himself called in 1966, not many years ago, its "truly embar–
rassing success in the world," what matters most about the term is
its effect on us and its effect, still, in helping promote simplistic and
repressive notions of depersonalization, unified sensibility and organ–
icism.
(If
any political equivalences are thought out of order here,
consider the night in 1969 at the Village Gate when Norman Mailer,
later to propose that New York City be broken up into organically
functioning sections, opened his campaign with a staccatoed charge
that New York City lacked "an objective correlative." Though Mail–
er felt it necessary to identify the author of the phrase, Jimmy
Breslin was perhaps on that occasion more accurate in complaining,
privately, that he hadn't known he was running on a ticket with Ezra
Pound.)
In any case, the effect of Eliot's too easily appropriated crit–
ical
terminology, as distinct always from the marvelously
unstabi–
lizing
intelligence at work in his critical writing and in his poetry,
is
to insist that feelings be grounded, secured, made explicable within
structures of "unified sensibility." Such terminologies are what the
academy has chosen to extract from Eliot and to mold into a critical
system designed to take care of what might be called discordant or
dissident elements. The effort in classroom criticism has been to make
the student find a design by which these elements, including his own
offbeat reactions, can be accommodated. Otherwise forget them, at
least in cI.ass. "At every stage," Allen Tate cozily suggests, "we may
pause to state the meanings so far apprehended, and at every stage
the meanings will be coherent." Of course they
will,
if
the critic has
decided beforehand that it is right and good that they should be.
Coherence, as I've suggested, is a virtue, a comfort we hope for,
look for, but why need it have become the primary criterion in
