Department of British and American Studies at the - Univerzita ...

At the same time, of course, this is the identity of the text composed of fragments of
texts and images and artefacts that themselves have their identity of separate contexts, carry
both their own original contexts in terms of cultural history, as well as their own
phenomenological and iconic quality – the identity of their original time and cultural
perception and identity as defined by their reading or misreading over time and across
cultures.
Even though this is primarily an ontological poem, a poem of ontological strife – it is
also irreducibly personal, at least to a degree. The strife of reassembling an identity via a very
specific kind of archaeology of meaning actually integrates cultural fragments – revived by
personal relation – with occasional references to a map of personal journeying and being, loci
of personal myth and experience (especially Munich, the City of London, Margate, etc.). The
purging process, scanning and refining the mental debris, in the same breath, stays very much
in line with Eliot‘s personal and original concept of authorial appropriation as a way of
rejuvenating the tradition, and thus remains also necessarily ―personal‖.
As we have indicated, a major problem for the positive identification of the poem‘s
clearly defined field of identity is a relativity of the voices‘ intent and tone. As we have hinted
above, the working method of the poem is a kind of ―Shakespearian rag‖ (verse 128) – a kind
of processing of samples of ―tunes‖ of works into different overall pattern. But, as a result,
partial expressions become relative as the samples put together correlate differently in
different mutual relations. This new constellation produces a whole range of variegated
meaningful emanations and tensions, previously non-existent, which range from the grotesque
to metaphysical, from the trivial to Wagnerian, and often subvert or relativise the notion of the
very genres and genre identities they originated from.
For instance, the voice of Madam Larisch here is no longer just safely set in its
original context of her book of memories My Past, but plays out as a vocal counterpoint in the
operatic environment of Wagner‘s Tristan and Isolde, which itself is in a way conducted by
a leading voice of The Ezekiel‘s command ―rise to thy feet, son of man‖, which is the ―voice
from above‖. The divine and divining voice is of course possibly mocked and made mundane
by later motifs of Ms. Porter, and other, but also developed in the gravely pious while
possibly also jocular presence and voice of Madame Sosostris – a famous clairvoyant dealing
and reading the Tarot ―pack of wicked cards‖, who cannot be attached any particular historic
identity but, perhaps, Madame Blavatsky or, equally possibly, Pharaoh Sesostris, one of the
greatest military leaders Egypt ever had, who also was the one to introduce a cult of Serapis,
a syncretic Hellenic Egyptian God. The effort of the poem is very much similar to cultural
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