412. THE PRISON KEY: Eliot*: “Cf. Inferno, XXXIII, 46: ‘ed io sentii chiavar l'uscio di sotto all'orribile torre.’ Also F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346. ‘My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it... In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.’”
See Dante*, Inferno 33.46-47:
“And I heard locking up the under door
Of the horrible tower.”
SOLIPSISM: F. H. Bradley was Eliot’s professor at Oxford, and his book, Appearance and Reality (1893) was the basis of Eliot’s doctoral thesis in 1916. Bradley advanced the philosophy of solipsism, suggesting that only one’s mind exists with certainty and everything outside the mind is questionable. Eliot, and modernist literature in general, refuted this, arguing instead that the world, like thunder, speaks to us all.
THUNDER’S SECOND DISCIPLINE: The concepts of “datta” and “dayadhvam” go even further, telling the poet to give back and sympathize with the world. See note 400: Dayadhvam means “Sympathize,” what the demons understood in hearing “Da.”
417. A BROKEN CORIOLANUS: See Shakespeare*, Coriolanus 3.3.125-126, where Coriolanus speaks after being banished from Rome:
“And here remain with your uncertainty.
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!”
THE OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE theory of modernist literature, which Eliot advanced on his own terms just prior to publishing The Waste Land, is broached here. The concept was introduced by Washington Allston, Lectures on Art and Poems, 1850:
“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.”
See Eliot, The Sacred Wood; Essays on Poetry and Criticism: Hamlet and His Problems (1920), in which Eliot developed this theory further, arguing that a literary work needed explicit, relatable elements to express itself and evoke emotions in its audience. In other words, the reader or audience needs to be able to sympathize. By this theory, Eliot proclaimed Coriolanus a better tragedy than the more solipsistic Hamlet. But see note 432 for Eliot’s awareness of emotions beyond explanation.
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* see note 0.1
