Demystifying The Objective Correlative

Jul 01, 2025

Philippe Petit walking between the Twin Towers in 1974. From IMDB.

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Demystifying The Objective Correlative

When the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001, many Americans felt that two national icons had been destroyed. As the native son of the Mountain West, I felt no particular allegiance to temples of commerce. I had my own touchstones for national identity, most of them deep in the wilderness. But I understood how New Yorkers had grown accustomed to the World Trade Center dominating the skyline as a reminder of the city’s economic prowess.

One of the most powerful tributes to the Twin Towers is Rudolf Chelminski’s “Turning Point,” a dramatization of Philippe Petit’s historic wire walk between the towers in 1974, while they were still under construction. It’s also one of the best examples I know of the objective correlative.

Petit is a notorious daredevil whose wire walks are often meant to amplify certain qualities of the places he honors with his art. Before his NYC exploit, Petit had staged impromptu walks between the towers of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and between two huge pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge on the Australian coast. His purpose was to call attention to himself, for sure, but even more so to reawaken his audience to the grandeur of those places through his artistry.

Here’s Chelminski on how Petit helped New Yorkers see those monoliths differently:

Haunted, as we all are, by the images of the towers in their final moments, Petit told me it was his hope that they would be remembered not as they appeared then but as they were on that magical August day more than a generation ago, when he danced between them on a wire and made an entire city look up in awe. "In a very small way I helped frame them with glory," he said, "and I want to remember them in their glory."

The objective correlative is poorly understood because of its pretentious-sounding name. Leave it to T.S. Eliot, the priest of high modernism, to pick such an obscure term for it, but there we have it.

The idea is actually quite simple: to anchor emotions or abstract ideas in physical things. Eliot said that objective correlatives might include “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.” The “objective” part of the term refers to something external and physical, and “correlative” alludes to the relation of that thing to the feeling or idea it represents.

It’s worth remembering that many generations of writers have not felt the need to anchor feelings in physical things. This is a particular bias that emerged from literary naturalism and then matured as part of the modernist aesthetic, particularly Imagism. William Carlos Williams was one of the leading Imagists, and his poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” is perhaps the most iconic example of it.1

I hated this poem as a high school student. The lowercase lines, the ambiguity, the prosaic imagery all violated my Romantic sensibilities. But perhaps that was because I had raised chickens my whole life, detested their foul ways, and saw no poetry in them. Perhaps it was also because I had not yet experienced the fragility and potential desperation that Williams captures in farm life.

What Williams conveys in four couplets and sixteen words, Willa Cather says in two paragraphs at the end of “A Wagner Matinée,” when the narrator’s Aunt Georgianna cannot bear the thought of leaving Carnegie Hall to return to her Nebraska farm.

The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering and laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswoman made no effort to rise. I spoke gently to her. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly, "I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!"
I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert-hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs, the tall, unpainted house, naked as a tower, with weather-curled boards; the crook-backed ash-seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry, the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.

The feeling here is squalor, and Cather brings into brutal relief with the “black pond,” the “weather-curled boards,” drying dishcloths, and (ugh) those “moulting turkeys” feeding on food scraps. It is precisely the feeling I had when my father would throw elk carcasses into the front lawn for our dog to enjoy after we had packaged the meat. The spring thaw in Montana always evoked a feeling of bleakness in me as mud, dead grass, and dog shit emerged from the snow. But nothing captured the feeling more than those rotting rib cages and leg bones resurfacing all over the lawn.

Petit’s wire walk between the Twin Towers was an objective act that captured the reverence, wonder, and awe that he felt toward them. The idea was to convey that feeling to onlookers as they gazed up at him dangling 400 meters above. As a result, Calvin Tompkins wrote that Petit “achieved the almost unimaginable feat of investing the World Trade Center...with a thrilling and terrible beauty."

Indeed, this seems to have been Chelminski’s goal in interviewing Petit about his historic feat, less to convey the idea that the World Trade Center represented than to revive the feelings that it once inspired and preserve those feelings in public memory. Instead of focusing on the more familiar view from below, Chelminski takes us out onto the wire with Petit:

With his eyes riveted to the edge of the far tower–wire walkers aren't supposed to look down–Petit glided his buffalo-hide slippers along the cable, feeling his way until he was halfway across. He knelt, put his weight on one knee and swung his right arm free. This was his "salute," the signature gesture of the high-wire artist. Each has his own, and each is an individual trademark creation. Arising, he continued to the north tower, hopped off the wire, double-checked the cable's anchoring points, made a few adjustments and hopped back on.
By now traffic had stopped in the environs of Wall Street, and Petit could already hear the first police and ambulance sirens as he nimbly set forth again. Off he went, humming and mumbling to himself, puffing grunts of concentration at tricky moments. Halfway across, he steadied, halted, then knelt again. And then, God in heaven, he lay down, placing his spine directly atop the cable and resting the balancing pole on his stomach. Breathless, in Zen-like calm, he lay there for a long moment, contemplating the red-eyed seabird hovering motionless above him.2

The objective correlative is more powerful if hidden in plain sight as part of the setting, background, or a character’s sensory experience. It is one way to establish mood. Consider how much emotional impact simple light and dark imagery can have. A scene with rain streaming down the windows evokes a different feeling from one with a clear blue sky. The sun passing behind a cloud, the crack of a rifle, a ticking clock, a buzzing fluorescent light — all of these can bring an abstract feeling into focus, helping the reader participate imaginatively.

What are some of your favorite examples of the objective correlative in literature or film?