Enough of politics for the moment. There are a lot of things happening that way, but there are also a lot of people talking about them, so let’s leave off with that bundle of subjects and turn to something even more frustrating.
The frequency with which I get “But why did you write that?” from a reader is truly staggering. (Yes, yes, I get “How much money can you make at that?” about as frequently, but I’ve been braced for that one from the start.) Considering how slender my sales are, and the relation of that paucity to the subjects I choose to address, it’s a reasonable question to ask.
In part, the answer is that I believe those subjects to be important ones, and potentially beneficial to my reader. The prevalent anomie of our time cries out for a restoration of older standards and values. Included therein are the eternal verities that have been so roundly pooh-poohed by the glitterati who’ve dominated fiction for the century past.
But that’s only half of the reason. The other is a search for something that no one has ever found… and that I know I won’t find either. It’s the Holy Grail of the fiction writer, and at least as elusive as the Grail pursued by Arthur and his knights: the objective correlative:
objective correlative, literary theory first set forth by T.S. Eliot in the essay “Hamlet and His Problems” and published in The Sacred Wood (1920).
According to the theory,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.
If you’ve ever encountered the term objective correlative before this, you’re probably around my age, if not older. It was once something high-school students were exposed to in tenth or eleventh grade, depending upon the school and its English teachers. Every fiction writer strains after it, whether he’s aware of it or not: “What words and actions will get my reader to experience the emotion I want him to?”
And as the title of this piece suggests rather heavy-handedly, the quest is doomed from the first.
Evoking particular emotions from a reader requires that that reader have a great deal in common with the writer. Obviously, the two must have a language in common, at least. Moreover, the reader must interpret the events of the story or poem, and the language in which they’re expressed, to have the meanings the writer gives them. Beyond that, they must have a fair commonality of cultural and historical background. And even with all of that, the writer aims his words at the reader in a very dim light.
This difficulty goes a long way to explaining why younger people are often indifferent to tales that moved their parents and grandparents to tears. Our cultural matrices don’t match. We see the story of Romeo and Juliet against a historical backdrop of clan warfare and “forbidden” romance; they’re apt to look at it as a tempest in a teapot, if they’re familiar with that idiom. We read Wuthering Heights in awareness of the mores and standards of Emily Bronte’s milieu; they shrug and say “Why don’t they just have sex and get over themselves?”
The elusiveness of the objective correlative is just as trying for contemporary tale-spinners writing for a contemporary reader. Human culture has experienced a kind of diaspora. Many people have claimed that “there is no ‘American culture.’” In point of fact, there are many American cultures – and no two of them have much in common. How does a writer like me, with my seven decades of experience, my classical, religiously informed education, and my life history evoke the emotions of a young man of twenty-five with whom I share virtually no formative experiences and very little cultural foundation?
Yet I labor at it. Every writer does, unless he’s content to write for himself alone. If the writer is determined to tell tales that center on subjects to which his readers are numb, or to which they’ve never been exposed even peripherally, his challenge is monumental.
But that’s the game. If we omit the dream of becoming the next Tom Clancy or Stephen King, the prize is mostly disappointment. Even so, if the stories and their messages about Mankind, how we should live, and the regrettable way we do live are important enough to us, we keep on.
So I write about freedom and justice. I write about love and the prices it can exact. I write about the heroic choice. I write about Christianity and the greatest of all human institutions, the Catholic Church. For these things matter to me very much. I hope to make them matter just as much to whatever deluded fool might choose to expend a little of his valuta on one of my books. And I grope for the objective correlatives that will make the decisions, actions, and reactions of my characters resonate emotionally with that unknown soul, just as they do with me.
I fail. I fail knowing that I’ll fail. But I have the pleasure of the effort, and the hope that someone will brush against the things that matter so much to me and will perhaps be moved. And every now and then I get a little fan mail. You can’t have everything.
[With gratitude for the encouragement and friendship of Margaret Ball.]
