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

To illustrate the problem of relative intentionality, let us pose a few questions related
to Tiresias, the only possible central persona of the poem.
How do we imagine Tiresias? What voice does he or it speak or use? Old or young?
More similar to the music of Babylonia or Ragtime (or this metaphysical ―oooo
Shakespearean rag‖ – verse 128)? Is his voice a high pitch or a bass, more masculine or
feminine, or ―androgynous‖? Is it engaged, enflamed, or rather withdrawn or even robotic-
automatic? Melodramatic or reconciled? Is his mind still in the time immemorial, in the
mythic time as he peers at the banality of the mundane unreal city life? How does his
atemporal experience and its tension with the experience of the present inform his voice, tone,
and supposed intentionality?
A single-minded answer to any and all of these questions would demand reducing our
overall interpretation of the poem‘s meaning to one level, to one line. But that would not be
productive or appropriate at all because the poem‘s identity, its distinct quality, also lies in the
fact it is designed as a meaningful field of multiple identities, voices and even relative pitches
or intentionalities working in a mode of both affirmative and subversive appropriation of the
original genre and cultural and historic identity and canonised or established version of the
―message‖.
Tiresias‘ mind is not only present in all points in time in a linear line, but his
perspective is also as if on a plane above the causality and temporary or limited identity of
those immersed in ―local‖ time and sense of space. As a result, his ―mind‖, not necessarily
just as a biological identity but also as an identity of tradition, transcends conventional
concepts of identity of a ―human‖ lyrical subject.
Given this quality of ―experience‖ of the totality of experience, Tiresias does not fall
victim to emotions, but is rather a dry, desolate, even more strongly a depersonalized
observer. As his is primarily the consciousness of what is ―bound to come‖, it is a
consciousness of evidence rather than experience, even though from his perspective the
unfolding history is still his ―mental event‖ – while outside his will, still not outside his
sensory and cognitive experience.
So, in a sense, the figure of Tiresias, with its weight of universal evidence made
personally relevant, stands for Eliot‘s own controlling self in the text. All of the allusions,
literary references, themes, and images made their way into the poem only because there was
Eliot‘s control combining conscious and intuitive (i.e. anthropologically atemporal and
archetypal) approaches and procedures of inclusion.
Slovak Studies in English, Vol. 3, 2011 – Identity in Intercultural Communication
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