Egzystencja i eschatologia: genezyjska wyobraźnia Słowackiego

Abstract

The book is an attempt to understand the late poetry by Słowacki. Its perspective is defined by hermeneutics whereas its concrete shape is determined by a phenomenology of imagination. Part one concerns the genesis poetry as a lens, the way of shaping the genesis reality and the perspective making it available. The analyses of the poetical picture show how it receives a unique, discontinuous and multi-dimensional form as a result of the act of decomposition and new combination. It describes its theoretical model, types of construction (a multi-existential picture) and the phenomenon of the nest picture. Further on, it specifies the model of the genesis symbol, and archim, an internal symbolic mechanism in its functioning. Also, specific and complex types of genesis symbols, such as multifaceted and cobwebby were described. The second part of the book treats about a genesis person, constituting the centre and source of the most important subject-matter of the late poetry by Słowacki. What was investigated was the way the poet created a modern “I” leaning towards the modernist future, reconstructing the subjectivity on the basis of a changed and dynamized model of a transcendental person destroyed at the stage of the crisis of Romanticism. The next subchapters (Oblicza, Sytuacje metafizyczne, among others) examined concrete shapes of the genesis “I”, as well as reconstructed an intrapoetic model of a genesis person. On the basis of Guardini’s theological model, the shape of a “teandric I”, developing not on the basis of a simple metamorphosis of man into ghost, but a real and metaphysic inculcation of Christ’s “another-I” into an existential nucleus of a human being was presented. The very changes, shown in the interpretations of “central” lyrics (Przez Furie jestem targan ja, Orfeusz…, Do pastereczki…, Córka Cerery), are finalised in the last subchapter with a synthetic ontology of a living changeable person. The “I” model was complemented with a bit different shape of a genesis person in mystic dramas by Słowacki and his epic poem King- -Ghost. Not only was the well-known Calderonian model described, but also more radical changes of “I” in Samuel Zborowski. In a deep destruction of the shape of the person and its borderlines (in synchrony and diachrony), ending in the last act with a global metamorphosis — a clearly presented mergence of individual characters into the Ghost — a super-person, joins the author’s “I”. The final and ultimate metamorphosis means going gradually beyond the Being, and the abandonment of being as the form of “I”. This radical direction of change, and the creation of “Super-I” which is difficult to imagine, was also investigated in King-Ghost, an epic poem written from the perspective of an individual “I”. The main feature of such a narrator is multi-perspectivity, and mergence of many voices — “I” of a given character-king, a superior “I-Ghost” (sculpturing its shape in subsequent characters of King-Ghosts) and the author’s “I” being one of his/her faces. Part three deals with eschaton, the farthest horizon of the whole genesis poetry, specifying the image of the world, the sense of the symbols, and the shape of a person. First, the question on the possibility of tragedy in the genesis world was posed, thereby, considering its fundamental shape and ontological-theological bases. What may be considered the most striking here is a dissonance between a theoretical image of the philosophical system and a concrete shape of the world in poetry. The genesis poetry, though, reveals the deepest tragedy of the Being — the pain of creation engrossed in the matter itself, and the nature of creation which is the loss of oneself for each “I”, and the tragedy of God — painful marks on God’s face appearing as an imprint of the human history bound to remain even after the completion of apocatastasis. Next, the role of mythicness in a mystic poetry by Słowacki was outlined, as well as a telluric path of man’s transgression portrayed by mythic symbols. As a matter of fact, mythicness in the genesis poetry changes the theological and Christ symbols, radicalizing their sense and digging out the aspects slightly exposed in the tradition. The analysed lyrics show this dark pole of Being as an important shape of God and eschaton. The examination of images, apocalyptic symbols and specification of what apocalypticness is in the genesis work completes the third part of the book. What turns out to be the basic apocalyptic image is the tearing of the world border, and braking through the inside of the transcendental being. Further on, it reads out Sen Dobrawny from the III Rhapsody of King-Ghost. Not only does it have a double (mythicfictional) structure, but, in the epic poem, it also fulfills the function of an internal myth shaping the stem of genesis, defining the final image of the world history, and the form of estachon. Actually, it is a fundamental reinterpretation of the cosmogonic and central myth of our culture, functioning as a model also in the Bible. It expresses a peculiar variant of apocatastasis — difficult, gloomy and painful. It liquidates an opposition polarity of the Being though at the cost of immersing a bright and celestial particle in the Abyss, and exposing it to difficulties and risk of going through its dark side. That is the final horizon of the genesis work.