| Chapter 1: | What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage |
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Examples abound in Eliot’s work, but the fifth section of “The Dry Salvages” in Four Quartets offers one of the clearest. In this section, understood in terms of Eliot’s theory, the unseen wild thyme, the winter lightning, the waterfall, the sense of hearing inwardly music remembered, are expected to trigger immediately the sense of timelessness which is evoked when these items are experienced in the precise order Eliot finds for them when these items are received in that order.
A sequence in language has the power to re-instate both the emotion and the experience suggested by that emotion. Nothing more needs to be said about it or done with it. Source-hunting is redundant, as is descent into the netherworld of connotation to heighten the effect of a given reality. Eliot’s objective correlative is, then, an example of the third category of reading proposed, the “associational”. It is a syntagm which divests itself of ‘vertical’—symbolic and allegoric—resonance to produce the effect already inscribed in its given terms.
Michael Polanyi’s division of knowledge similarly conceives of a veiled prior significance which informs directly experienced phenomena. In his schema, it is the proximal or subsidiary level of awareness, as he calls it, which shapes our reception of things present to consciousness. These items to hand, which Polanyi calls distal (or focal), though they seem transparently and completely manifest, are tacitly known only by the projection onto them from this subsidiary or proximal level. In this significational universe, what is obvious is inherently illusory, insofar as the ‘stand-alone’ quality of its obviousness is borrowed from another, hidden, source. Polanyi at various times draws upon experiments to help his explanation of this process: