Stiffening in Conclusion: ‘Gerontion’ and the ‘Objective Correlative’

Abstract

Though written immediately after the quatrain poems, ‘Gerontion’ breaks loose from the formal constraints of its predecessors to explore what Empson has termed the ‘echoes and recesses of words’.¹ But if in this sense the text is courageously open to experience, the self-dramatisation it effects by its Jacobean rhetoric insulates it at the same time. Gerontion may be at the mercy of his own connotations, but he is also covertly ‘cheering himself up’ in ways that were familiar to Eliot as a critic of Othello: ‘Othello succeeds in turning himself into a pathetic figure, by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude, dramatising himself against his environment’ (SE, pp. 130–1). This is not quite Eliot’s own way of consoling himself: more ambitious than Othello, he will settle for nothing less than the wholescale incorporation of his environment. This desire to ‘see one’s wish outside one’ involves submitting the map of contemporary Europe to the contours of one’s own psyche, but this is not, needless to say, the way Eliot himself sees the process. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ he argues that, if the poet has acquired enough erudition, has extinguished self before the austere monuments of the Tradition, then what he will dredge up will no longer be the Kleinian octopuses and angels, but rather the ‘mind of Europe’ (SE, p. 16).