Pondering the Objective Correlative

[BlackShanglan]

Here's the theory, oversimplified. Certain images work together to produce a direct emotional response in the reader. They don't describe the feeling; they evoke it, and pretty consistantly across readers. The reader does not necessarily have to understand the images and their symbolic framework; the objective correlative speaks its own powerful langauge.

An example:

Car door closing.
Door locked.
Keys.
On seat.
*shuts*

The theory is that I don't have to describe that unique mixture of frustration, rage, annoyance, and whatever-it-is; the images evoke it.

The question: does porn have objective correlatives? Are there images that speak directly to the libido without the need for the intellect's moderating influence?

Examples?

Shanglan

 

[carsonshepherd]

Beer.
Lots.
Last night.
Headache.

 

[minsue]

Ooooh! Good question! (I have no answers. Just that observation.)

 

[BlackShanglan]

Ooooh! Good question! (I have no answers. Just that observation.)

It's all Dr. M's fault. Someone had to post something pseudo-writerly.

Shanglan

 

[Op_Cit]

OK, these are more narrow actions but perhaps they are in line with what you're talking about:

How about a woman bending over from the waist? Whether it's a scene in public or private it always seems to be sending a message.

And, while it still may be in a detailed sex scene, a woman taking the man in hand and guiding it home seems to (for me) convey more than the mere act.

 

[Lauren Hynde]

Here's the theory, oversimplified. Certain images work together to produce a direct emotional response in the reader. They don't describe the feeling; they evoke it, and pretty consistantly across readers. The reader does not necessarily have to understand the images and their symbolic framework; the objective correlative speaks its own powerful langauge.

I think that's a major problem with a lot of otherwise pretty well-written stories at Lit (and in general). Those objective correlatives should be transversal to all genres of literature (and story-telling), but especially in short-stories.

So, so many authors, here and elsewhere, tend to over-explain and justify and describe every bit of action, putting too little faith in the effectiveness of semiotics and the ability of the readers to understand those correlatives.

So few authors authors understand that the creation process of a short story has to be fundamentally different from that of a novel.

 

[gauchecritic]

I'm not actually sure that what you have there are objective correlatives (quite apart from the cultural aspect). It seems to me that you have 3 or 4 sentences with one or two words picked from each.

I'm not saying they don't create the feelings they are meant to engender only that (it seems to me) they are simply an example of extremely sparse writing. (Maybe that's the same thing, I don't know)

 

[CharleyH]

I'm not actually sure that what you have there are objective correlatives (quite apart from the cultural aspect). It seems to me that you have 3 or 4 sentences with one or two words picked from each.

I'm not saying they don't create the feelings they are meant to engender only that (it seems to me) they are simply an example of extremely sparse writing. (Maybe that's the same thing, I don't know)

Love the butt! (which one though, sans objective correlative)

Lauren has already posted in a similar way that I would. Like to add though to Op Cit: a woman bending over at the waist could be anything. It depends on who is infront or in back and what she is wearing (mini skirt, evening gown) to determine her intention in bending. Though one need not have to know why to get the sexual nature.

As for the question: are there images that speak directly to the libido without the need for the intellect's moderating influence?

Her pussy, as opposed to her cunt. They bring up very different feelings and images, no?

 

[TheEarl]

The catching of eyes.
The tilt of head.
The hesitation as you wait for the moment.
The slow, slow movement towards each other.
The brush of her lips on yours.

Everyone understands the thrill of the first kiss.

The Earl

 

[Guest]

I don't understand this thread.

Perdita

 

[TheEarl]

I don't understand this thread.

Perdita

I think Shang's going for universal feelings and emotions that can be described as a sequence of actions or events. Like mine - everyone knows the fluttering of the breath and the nervousness that she doesn't want to kiss you back and the tense hesitation all released in that equisite second where your lips touch and the crackling sensation rushes through you both. Yet it can be broken down to actions. Not an emotion mentioned, nor barely a thought, yet the feeling is felt by every reader.

The Earl

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Well, that’s kind of the whole point of fiction, isn’t it? To pick and choose from all those everyday details just those things that give meaning and emotion to a story.

A hack writer tells you that Sheila was a bored housewife. A decent writer shows you Sheila standing at the sink on a Sunday evening staring blankly out at her snowy backyard. The sink, the snow, the backyard, all have emotional meaning. BS calls them objective correlations, I think of them as telling details. They mean much more than they say. They should be every writer’s stock in trade.

As far as this kind of thing in sex, it’s hard to say, because really, porn deals with very few emotions other than sexual excitement and maybe joy. I’ve written some stories involving melancholy or bitter sex, or sex that had meaning beyond the carnal, but they don’t do well, so the kind of objective correlations we do see are pretty blatant: the sound of a zipper opening, hands touching, junk like that. It always means the same thing, and that’s usually just lascivious glee.

In a recent story I had a girl having a kind of bittersweet affair with a man, and she would take off her top for him, but would turn away to take off her panties. I thought it showed that she was willing to show him her breasts, which he enjoyed, but when it came time to expose herself, she was still shy about it. I didn't plan it to be any sort of hidden symbol or anything. It just seemed to me that that's the way this particular girl would undress. Still, it made a subtle point about the realtionship.

In a larger sense, though, there’s all sorts of delicious details you can use to give emotion and mood to a sex scene. We were talking for a while about the weather, which is one detail. Others are the things people do that express emotion. You don’t tell the reader “it was the best thing she’d ever felt in her life”. Instead you show them her hands clawing at the sheets or her toes curled up against the soles of her feet. I think most of us use light and darkness in the same way, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

I heard once that Alfred Hitchock considered the image of a telehone ringing in an empty room to be one of the most portentous symbols he’d ever used. I agree, and I love details like that. Little images and descriptions that convey a mood without coming out and describing it. The sound of a woman’s heels clicking down a marble corridor, curtains blowing out of open windows, flowers beat down by the rain. They’re all great, and all very sexy in my opinion.

---dr.M.

 

[CharleyH]

I think Shang's going for universal feelings and emotions that can be described as a sequence of actions or events.
The Earl

Shang seems to be going for the minimal. CUNT? PUSSY? They elicit different emotional responses. If we say one over the other, there is a certain amout of respect vs. slut elicited between the two.

Y'all are describing. He is not asking for description, but minimalism. Can a reader elicit a response minimalistically? Or does authour, and reader need - NEED to describe every single minute, trivial detail?

 

[sweetnpetite]

Re: Re: Pondering the Objective Correlative

I think that's a major problem with a lot of otherwise pretty well-written stories at Lit (and in general). Those objective correlatives should be transversal to all genres of literature (and story-telling), but especially in short-stories.

So, so many authors, here and elsewhere, tend to over-explain and justify and describe every bit of action, putting too little faith in the effectiveness of semiotics and the ability of the readers to understand those correlatives.

that's why I started a thread a while ago that said- describe the events leading up to a kiss that shows that the kiss was passionate without saying it.

far too many stories rely on 'we kissed passionatly' and 'i was so wet/hard. I couldn't believe this was happening'

I may even have been guilty of it myself. But I am trying to improve.

 

[Guest]

Can a reader elicit a response minimalistically? Or does authour, and reader need - NEED to describe every single minute, trivial detail?

There many choices 'tween those two. We don't all want to write or read minimalist works. P.

 

[sweetnpetite]

Or does authour, and reader need - NEED to describe every single minute, trivial detail?

She came into the room, shutting the door behind her. She took two steps then paused and continued accross the room. She turned slightly and rounded her way into the kitchen. Her hands went up to the appliance on the countertop. She removed the pot from the coffee maker and turning around, walked to the sink. She turned on the water, letting it get cold. Filling the coffee pot with water from the tap, she then turned off the faucet and turned back to face the counter. Carefully, she walked back accross the kitchen and pured the water slowly into the top of the coffee maker. She measured out a full scoop of ground coffee beans into the filter, inhaling the hearty aroma. Then she placed the filter in the metal basket and replaced it into the coffee pot. Finally, she poured the coffee into the top vents of the appliance, and flipped the switch to activate the perculating process. She flipped it nonchalantly. And did I mention that the coffee pot was forest green?

 

[sweetnpetite]

The catching of eyes.
The tilt of head.
The hesitation as you wait for the moment.
The slow, slow movement towards each other.
The brush of her lips on yours.

Everyone understands the thrill of the first kiss.

The Earl

<<<<flutt-tt-er>>>>

 

[NoJo]

The word I use is "synecdoche", a term in rhetoric referring to a type of metonymy -- using a part of an image or thing to represent the whole.

Synecdoche is the stock in trade of (British) commercials, where subtlety must be combined with rapid communication.

Fictional characters are created through metonymy.

Think how much we readers infer when we read of

The man with the scar
The woman in the red dress
The boy carving on the desk
The girl with the lollipop

 

[BlackShanglan]

My goal was not actually minimalism, although my initial post did lean that way. I went with a list rather than a prose description of those things because I was trying not to confuse the issue. I think Dr. M.'s point on telling details works well to illustrate it - I liked his example of the snow, the sink, the backyard. I think if you combine that with Lauren's post, you get the gist of what I'm talking about. It's not a style as such; that is, you can write in a variety of ways while still keeping this concept in mind. The nuts and bolts of it is that idea that specific images evoke emotional responses in the reader in an almost automatic fashion, and that combinations of images do the same.

I think this idea does tend to connect naturally with minimalism, but only because minimalism (IMHO) ideally focuses on symbolic meaning, a form of communication through images. When Yeats starts "Purgatory" with nothing on the stage but a ruined house and a blasted tree, he's communicating his emotional burden to the audience before the actors ever arrive. There, I think that symbol and the OC combine in a mnimalist setting because minimalism tends to focus audience attention on those one or two images that are the only thing there.

Shanglan

 

[BlackShanglan]

The word I use is "synecdoche", a term in rhetoric referring to a type of metonymy -- using a part of an image or thing to represent the whole.

Synecdoche is the stock in trade of (British) commercials, where subtlety must be combined with rapid communication.

Fictional characters are created through metonymy.

Think how much we readers infer when we read of

The man with the scar
The woman in the red dress
The boy carving on the desk
The girl with the lollipop

Hmmm. I agree that synecdoche and metonymy can be part of good symbolic or imagistic practice. However, I'd argue that they are not completely interchangable with the idea of the objective correlative. Synecdoche and metonymy can achieve the goal of making abstract concepts concrete, which is always useful - "hands" instead of "factory workers," for instance, gives a more immediate and powerful sense of the physicality of the work. And symbol, I would agree, often serves as the visual equivalent of synecdoche, as when the blasted tree in Yeats's "Purgatory" stands for the family via the common usage of the word "tree" to mean "family tree." However, some symbol does not partake of the part/whole or general/specific substitutions of synecdoche and metonymy. When Eliot, for example, writes the lines "Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, / And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, / Which is is blank, is something he carries on his back, / Which I am forbidden to see," he makes allusive and symbolic references to fate and the burdens of life, but not necessarily through the part-for-whole or general-for-specific substitutions. Furthermore, I think that he might argue that the goal of the passage is to instill an emotional response to the mysterious prophecy rather than to have all of the parts make precise intellectual statements.

I'm pondering your list of examples. I think they test the boundaries of metonymy and connotative association. We do infer specific things about a boy carving on a desk, and I think that that image can go either way. If we're introduced to him as a character and that's the "establishing shot" image, I'd call it connotative association. We think of people who carve on desks as certain types of people. If, on the other hand, an advertiser is showing the desk-carving lad using the product, I'd be tempted to see metonymy; the boy stands for the general class of bored and rebellious youth, with whom I am being encouraged to associate myself.

All wonderful tools of the trade. I think the more one sees the fine gradations, the less (hopefully) one will cling to the theory that the words belong on the page in that order because "that's just how they came out." How they come out is a good starting place, but I think that weighing and understanding these sorts of elements helps us recognize how powerful language can be, and how vital if we pare it down and let it do its work.

Shanglan