Challenging the assumptions which underlie Eliot’s understanding of Hamlet’s emotion as a failure, this paper problematizes the ‘objective correlative’ which has served as a touchstone of poetic Modernism and epitomized a major transformation from the romantic poetics of authorial self-expression to a new modernist poetics based on objectivity and impersonality. Why Eliot termed Hamlet an artistic failure instead of inheriting the tradition of the Romantic Hamlet from Schlegel to Freud can be newly discussed by locating and re-examining the ‘objective correlative’ in comparison with Hitchcock’s ‘MacGuffin’ and Lacan’s ‘object a.’ As is well known, ‘MacGuffin’ is the empty pretext which just serves to set a story in motion, but has no value in itself. If the alienation of subject into the symbolic order means to set a story of him or her in motion, ‘MacGuffin’ can be said to play a similar role with Lacan’s ‘object a’ which “takes the place of what the subject is symbolically deprived of” in that both of two indicate the lack of the Real and set in motion the symbolic movement at the same time. While claiming that Hamlet’s emotion is in excess of facts and lacking an objective correlative, Eliot tries to deny that there exists a void in the symbolic order or signification which “is inexpressible,” called ‘MacGuffin’ by Hitchcock or ‘object a’ by Lacan and escape from ‘the real’ of Hamlet or the world to secure a corner in the room and continue his fictive dominance over women or the world like ‘Prufrock.’ This can be why Eliot failed to see Hamlet as “the drama of an individual subjectivity.”

Challenging the assumptions which underlie Eliot’s understanding of Hamlet’s emotion as a failure, this paper problematizes the ‘objective correlative’ which has served as a touchstone of poetic Modernism and epitomized a major transformation from the romantic poetics of authorial self-expression to a new modernist poetics based on objectivity and impersonality. Why Eliot termed Hamlet an artistic failure instead of inheriting the tradition of the Romantic Hamlet from Schlegel to Freud can be newly discussed by locating and re-examining the ‘objective correlative’ in comparison with Hitchcock’s ‘MacGuffin’ and Lacan’s ‘object a.’ As is well known, ‘MacGuffin’ is the empty pretext which just serves to set a story in motion, but has no value in itself. If the alienation of subject into the symbolic order means to set a story of him or her in motion, ‘MacGuffin’ can be said to play a similar role with Lacan’s ‘object a’ which “takes the place of what the subject is symbolically deprived of” in that both of two indicate the lack of the Real and set in motion the symbolic movement at the same time. While claiming that Hamlet’s emotion is in excess of facts and lacking an objective correlative, Eliot tries to deny that there exists a void in the symbolic order or signification which “is inexpressible,” called ‘MacGuffin’ by Hitchcock or ‘object a’ by Lacan and escape from ‘the real’ of Hamlet or the world to secure a corner in the room and continue his fictive dominance over women or the world like ‘Prufrock.’ This can be why Eliot failed to see Hamlet as “the drama of an individual subjectivity.”

objective correlative, object a, MacGuffin, the symbolic order, the real