«E ja en mi alterat és l'arbitre»: dramatic representation in Ausiàs March's «Cant Espiritual»

Robert Archer

Pere Ramírez's recent article on the Cant Espiritual brings to light a vital aspect of the poem which previous interpretations have tended to overlook¹. In one sense, the Cant Espiritual is less difficult or obscure than the majority of March's poems: the series of statements of which it is composed has at least a fairly consistent clarity of expression and an immediacy of meaning. But these same features of the poem hide its inherent difficulty, one which it does not share with March's other poems: the lack of thematic unity. The special peculiarity of the Cant Espiritual (Poem CV) is that while its meaning is unusually lucid at nearly every juncture, so that it appears on the surface to be perfectly intelligible, close examination reveals a distinct irreconcilability between the various statements of which it is composed. It is made up, in effect, of a series of wholly or partially contradictory assertions which belie its apparently firm conclusion. Disparate viewpoints are presented not as necessary stages in a developing argument but as largely disconnected areas of thought, with no transitional material to allow an easy logical passage from one to the other. The poem's various viewpoints are all perfectly coherent in themselves but the progression from one to the other is not.

Until the appearance of Ramírez's article, the work which was already under way in the preparation of this article was directed both towards establishing the nature of the inherent difficulty of CV when read like any other of March's poems and towards resolving this difficulty in a fresh interpretation. However, since Ramírez fully establishes the difficulty of the poem, one need only concern oneself here with the second aspect. At the same time, since the interpretation of the Cant Espiritual put forward here conflicts strongly with Ramírez's suggested explanation of the cause of this difficulty, this article will necessarily take the form of a reply to Ramírez.

Through an analysis of the poem under the main functional aspects of self-examination and prayer, seen within the framework of doctrinal statement (32-38), Ramírez reveals the 'ziga-zaga en l'exposició dels temes' with 'interrupcions i represes d'una mateixa qüestió', 'repeticions' and 'contrasts de disposició anímica i alguna contradicció doctrinal' (38). These structural and thematic difficulties of the poem indicate two possible conclusions about it. Its apparent lack of a 'pla estricte' and the development of the poem 'per juxtaposició' of one stanza with another (38) can be explained either by (1) the supposition that the poem has 'una forma oberta, d'extensió teòricament indefinida' (39), or (2) the intervention of later hands in the final eight stanzas of the poem which are not documented in the older manuscripts. The author does not come to a firm conclusion either way, pending an examination of other later pieces attributed to March which only have the backing of manuscripts and editions of 1539 or after. But although, in support of the first of the two alternative explanations, Ramírez points out that the stanzas in question cannot be excluded on the grounds of inferior poetic quality, the weight of his arguments supports the second alternative. While, for instance, the article is written under the shadow of doubt about the authenticity of the later poetry (see especially pp. 39-40), the notion of 'open structure' is not elaborated. This article is intended to demonstrate the artistic integrity of CV, but it is not to be viewed as a mere elaboration of Dr. Ramírez's first alternative.

The interpretation of the Cant Espiritual to be put forward here involves seeing the poem as made up of six main thematic 'blocks', with each transition characterized by a shift in viewpoint towards three obsessive preoccupations: (a) the poet's view of God, (b) his fear of damnation and (c) his attitude towards death. The six main thematic 'blocks' are: (I) lines 180, (II) 81-104, (III) 105-44, (IV) 145-92, (V) 193-216, (VI) 217-24².

(I) These first ten stanzas contain most of the strands of the complex web composed on the one hand of personal doubts and fears, and on the other of theological dogma within which the rest of the poem is to develop. The prevailing emotion in this passage is that which informs most of the other sections: the fear of Hell. This fear is prompted initially by the poet's awareness of his own terribles colpes (10) which make him unworthy of God's mercy (15-16) and is justified on the grounds that even the virtuous have cause to fear Hell (64-66). But the overpowering reason for this fear is the perception of the seemingly unbreakable pattern of pursuit and obstruction of one moral reality by another: the poet cannot free himself from sin except by exercising his free will, but he is unable to exercise his free will because of his sin. This deadlock created by the poet's own guilt renders the constant plea for God's aid hopelessly futile. As he recognizes (20), God will only help those who help themselves by deploying their voluntat francha. It is this self-perpetuating fear, moreover, which is at the basis of the poet's relationship with God: he confesses that he fears Him more than loves Him (57-58). Yet he professes to believe Him 'just e misericorde' (61) and to bear no anger against Him (34-35) while still unable to believe that His mercy can be extended to him. This complex relationship, split between the attitude of the entendre on the one hand, and that of the voler on the other, is the cause of a further moral quandary which is linked to the first: the inability to cast aside his sins leads the poet to fear of God rather than love of Him, while it is only through love of God that he can begin to cast aside those sins. All rests ultimately on the poet's exercise of his voluntat francha. Despair of ever accomplishing this, engendered by the two interlocking rings of moral crisis, produces the plea for death -anticipated by the brief offer of atonement of sins by death in 55-56- before the poet can damn himself more utterly by further acts of sin (78-80).

(II) By the end of the first section the fear of Hell has become in effect the only positive element in the poet's complex moral situation. In stanza XI, he clutches at the fear itself for the possibility of a solution. Can he explain his inability to act by insufficient fear? Since fear is all he has, should he fear even more strongly (81-82)? An explanation is tentatively put forward which would account for a lack of sufficient fear: it is beyond man's imagination to conceive of Hell (83-84). The suggestion is at once rejected: it is a flaca scusa, even if it is true that his fear alone is not strong enough to put him on the road to salvation. It is a flaca scusa particularly in the light of previous statements in the first section; the fear of Hell was real enough in lines 25-26, and in 67-68 the poet views Hell imaginatively in terms of the senses:

But at the same time an insufficient fear of Hell seems confirmed by the corresponding lack of stima in which the poet holds Heaven (87). He concludes that he suffers from insufficient por (for Hell) and esperança (for Heaven); but in rejecting the proposed explanation of 83-84, he places the blame for this fretura squarely upon himself. As if to counter the implications of divine responsibility for his moral failure underlying 83-84, the poet confesses to having blamed God in the past (89-96). This recalls 33-40, where he affirms that he does not hold God in ira, and prepares the way for the accusation to be made in lines 193-96. The brief reflection of his past blame of God leads to the repetition (100-04) of the plea for death, which is tempered again by a renewed fear of life's coming to an end as in 75-77.

(III) The abrupt change to the third section is announced by line 104:

The change in his will refers in effect to the desire to continue living in order to draw nearer to God rather than to die before he can sin further. This new desig (103) is formulated into a plea (143-44) at the end of the section. In these stanzas, the sporadic affirmation of points of doctrine that has featured in the first two thematic blocks of the poem (32-33, 38, 89-90, 93-94) is sublimated into a continuous didactic statement upon which subjective doubts do not intrude. The passage constitutes a sustained demonstration that the poet does not sin 'tant clarament en l'entendre' as he does in the exercise of his voler (17-18). The rapturous expression of piety in these stanzas marks a high point in the poem: it is only here that a resolution of the poetic dilemma appears within reach. The affirmation of faith untrammelled by subjective doubts, the demonstration of the poet's knowledge of God, engenders the desire to continue living; the fear of damnation is significantly absent in this section.

(IV) But the hope which has been nurtured in these stanzas is at once dispelled: the sudden recollection of his sins (145) drags back into the foreground the whole complex of fears and doubts which makes the truth expounded in section III once more unattainable. The old terror of Hell grips him again (162), and initiates a fresh, intensified request for God's intervention in his actions (166-92). The poet emphasizes a lack of natural strength to withstand the temptations of the flesh (189-90) or to conceive of a higher pleasure (157-58), but forestalls attributing any blame to God by accepting that he has himself corrupted his nature from its original disposició recta (146-47, 179-80), reiterating the confession of 53-54. Implicit in this section is the desire to continue living.

(V) With an abrupt change of mood, the possibility which had been brought to the surface in 33-34 and 93-94 only to be rejected, and which had been forestalled in the last section, breaks in upon the poem in a brief accusation of divine injustice. God created the poet so that he might save his own soul (193), while perhaps knowing that it is doomed. The accusation undoes all that the poet has asserted about his acceptance of responsibility for his state of sin, and implicitly denies the possibility of grace. God is charged with failing to employ His knowledge of future events to prevent the birth of those who will damn themselves. The sense of utter hopelessness which results from this conclusion is expressed in the wish neither to continue living so as to draw closer to God, nor to die before damning himself further, but to be unborn (270-72). The exemplum of Judes (199) is particularly telling, forming a counter example to lo Ladre (29). The Thief is invoked as an instance not of God's mercy or of the effect of repentance, but of the possible workings of grace, resting upon the will of God:

The Thief is depicted as being saved not because of his repentance but because God so willed it. Judes, on the other hand, is an instance of the withholding of God's grace: God's warning to Judas implies His prior knowledge that he will damn himself by betraying Him.

(VI) The final stanzas show a further switch in attitudes. The poet now asks again (cf. 55-56) that he be allowed to atone for his sins with bodily death (211). The accusations against God give way again to the confession of guilt (210), the plea for divine intervention (213-15) and the expression of the desire for contrite repentance (217-20). The poem finally comes almost full circle since it ends at the point at which 'attrition' must inevitably lead once more to the examination of that complex of moral dogma and personal doubts which has kept 'contrition' beyond the poet's reach throughout the poem. Nothing has been finally solved, and the concluding statement is not, as Pagès suggests, 'lé résume' of the rest of the poem³ so much as the point at which the struggle for a fixed viewpoint breaks off. There is, too, a bitter irony in the affirmation of the final line: the expressed hope that the tears of attrition will be a via e camí for those of contrition is undermined by the tortuous and endless via e camí of the arguments and objections through which the poem has run its course.

This summary analysis has been carried out in accordance with the principle that all reconcilable elements should be incorporated into any major statement of viewpoint. Where there is no explicit or implicit clash between what is said in adjacent stanzas, these are taken to be written with reference to essentially the same viewpoint. This method of procedure has revealed a clear underlying structure in the poem, consisting of a series of thematic 'blocks' which contain significant changes in the discussion of the major preoccupations of the poem (attitudes to God, death, and damnation). The appearance of other motifs at different points -the pleas for divine help, for instance- does not bring about any of these important changes in viewpoint: they are, rather, themselves the result of a fresh viewpoint about one of the major preoccupations. Such topics are, as it were, subject to constant reshuffling and reemphasis within new frameworks of attitude. By placing more emphasis upon shifts of viewpoint than upon the thematic changes which give Ramírez's 'ziga-zaga en l'exposició dels temes', this approach reveals a meaningful pattern to the poem's sequence of themes. Thus, after establishing the complex of elements which make a resolution of the poetic dilemma impossible (I), the poem examines one possible way out, only to reject it (II). An attempt to reach caritat (the way out offered by moral dogma), and to leave behind the por which has informed the past two sections, is made by turning to a purely objective didactic standpoint (III). This is brought to an end by the sudden intrusion of the subjective (IV). The desire to retain the spirit in which caritat was almost reached in III brings an increase in the intensity and length of direct pleas for divine aid (IV). But another persistent and underlying theme -the possibility of holding God responsible for the error by which a man damns himself- comes suddenly to the surface to break this mood and brings the theme of the death-wish to its climax in the plea to be unborn (V). But this gives way to a further upsurge of esperança in which, since no way out has even now been found, the original complex of problems is seen to be still implicit (VI).

The key to the explanation of why the Cant Espiritual has this sort of structure lies in the poem's constant presentation of its subject matter as an 'on-going' situation. The whole piece is directed towards giving moment-to-moment relevance to the problem it discusses, and it is in order to achieve this that it has recourse to foregoing coherence of perspective and logical continuity. This gives the poem the disjointed appearance which makes it critically problematic. Yet behind the episodic form of the Cant Espiritual there lies an artistic logic: it could only be after the problem it deals with was solved that the problem itself could be seen in a coherent perspective. If the problem is to be presented as essentially an unsolved and continuing conflict, then the only true formal correlative for it in the poem is a series of viewpoints. The single viewpoint would presuppose that the conflict and contradiction between these viewpoints had been resolved. In this respect, the Cant Espiritual can be usefully contrasted with CXII. This contains none of the tormented heart-searching of CV, and the subjective material of the poem is minimal. It seems, in a number of ways, to be the demonstration of the gap that separates it from CV in the attitudes to God, death and the possibility of salvation. The attempt at objective didactism made in CV (105-44) which broke down under the pressure of subjective objections is brought to a successful conclusion in this poem. The extent of the lack of subjective material is in a sense the measure of the poet's transcendence of his former objections to certain tenets of Christian belief: that God might withhold grace and that some men might be innately incapable of saving themselves from damnation. Essentially, the poem deals with matters that no longer constitute a living problem on a personal level. For this reason, the poet is able to write from a single viewpoint: that in which all possible conflict surrounding the matter under discussion has been solved. This single viewpoint of the Cant Moral, whose vehicle is the didactic statement, is the inevitable artistic expression of the resolution of the conflict between objective moral dogma and subjective misgivings, just as the multiple viewpoint is the only effective means of communicating the unsolved conflict in the Cant Espiritual.

In CV, while the problem described is a living problem it remains essentially the object of subjective consideration: its resolution, as in CXII, would produce an objectivization of it in didactic statement. March maintains the multiple viewpoint consonant with a subjective relationship with the problem involved. Yet to speak of an artistic logic to the use of the multiple viewpoint is not to say that this was the only possible one: the subject could have been treated from the viewpoint of a 'borrowed' objectivity. This would not have been consistent with the mental attitude which the speaker intends the reader to understand, but it would have had the virtue of lending to the poem a coherence which it could not otherwise have, and which the poet might have deemed preferable to the potential incoherence of the other alternative. Clearly, there is a question of artistic choice here, and the very difficulty of the Cant Espiritual would seem to indicate that in taking the option of the multiple viewpoint, March placed it outside the main tradition of mediaeval and Renaissance cultured poetry. But March evidently saw good reason for taking this option. It allowed him to communicate a sense of the subjective moment-to-moment urgency of the problem and to simulate in the text the experience of the struggle itself. The poem thereby becomes a dramatic representation of the problem. The lack of integral coherence between the poem's parts is a formal correlative to the mental attitude which it is meant to describe. The narrator acts out the changing states of mind, passion or thought, while all the material which would normally be used to suggest that the state of mind had been rationalized -that it had been taken beyond the point of direct impulsive thought- is stripped from the poem. Shifts, vacillations, and adjustments of viewpoint are shown as taking place without the intervention of an objective narrator who, since he would be a force of rationalization, would have been distinguishable from the impassioned protagonist of the mental struggle represented in the poem. The specific means by which the presence of this secondary speaker is excluded is the omission of all phrases which would indicate that what is described is a piece of argumentation, e. g. phrases indicating a transition from one argument to another, or which otherwise explain why one line of thought is abandoned and another adopted. Any indications of self-awareness in the poet's analysis of his problems in the Cant Espiritual only serve to indicate that a change of attitude has occurred, not to explain why or how it has come about, as, for instance, in the acknowledgment of line 104:

Without this quality of dramatic representation, the poem could only have been a description of the patterns of the poet's own thoughts as observed phenomena ('Now I think A, now I think B'). Through it, the reader is afforded a sense of direct and immediate experience. The poem owes its compelling urgency purely to this.

There is certainly evidence of the use of this technique, or at least of a modified form of it, in one other poem. In CXXIII, the initial attitude of the poet (one in which he thinks of himself as having transcended the passió of amor) changes abruptly and utterly in the tornada with the confession that his viewpoint (esguart) is not as objective as it had been at the beginning of the poem. As in CV (104), where he states that his arbitre is alterat, the poet explicitly acknowledges the change:

This makes of the poem a 'dramatic representation' of the power of amor which the poet had been objectively analysing. Clearly, however, it lacks in its seventy-six lines the implicit unacknowledged variations and changes of viewpoint which are possible in the greater length of the Cant Espiritual. What is important about it is that it shows March changing his viewpoint as the poem is written, acting out a conflict of attitudes in a way similar to that of CV.

This interpretation of the Cant Espiritual as essentially a poem in which the dispositio of the statements within it is designed to give a 'dramatic representation' of the subject-matter, rather than a more traditional discursive treatment, puts us in a position to take up the points raised by Dr. Ramírez about the poem's integrity and authenticity:

(1) The interpretation of the poem as one which represents an emotional, rather than a logical, movement in the poet's thought supports Dr. Ramírez's contention that there is no 'pla estricte' behind the poem's structure, as long as by 'structure' we understand a logical succession of ideas or linear trajectory. However, if we accord to 'structure' the sense of a perceptible meaningful pattern in a sequence of statements, then the Cant Espiritual has its structure in the pattern which is traced precisely by that emotional movement between por and esperança (the latter linked to the concept of caritat) which prevents the consolidation of a logical trajectory. This structure is marked by six thematic 'blocks', two of which represent important contrasting high and low points in the poem's circular movement.

(2) The poem's final section points to an imminent re-activation of the complex of problems with which the poet struggles throughout. This confirms Ramírez's description of the poem as 'd'extensió teòricament indefinida' (39) but suggests, rather than linear infinity, a circularity of movement corresponding to that of the arguments, dogmatic and subjective, which are responsible for the poetic crisis.

(3) Any division in the poem that may be implicit in the fact that, unlike the first one hundred and sixty lines, its last eight stanzas are not documented in the older manuscripts is not reflected in the structure which our analysis has uncovered. It is to be noted in particular that (a) no thematic change takes place between lines 160 and 161 to support the idea that what comes after line 160 is by another hand or hands, even though this is the point at which one would most expect to find a veering of direction if the last eight stanzas did indeed involve a second poet; (b) the 'thematic block' of 145-92, in which the thought is consistently reconcilable with basically the same viewpoint, spans both divisions of the poem into older and more recent manuscripts and editions.

(4) There is no real 'contradicció dogmàtica' in lines 81-84 and 205-08 as Ramírez suggests (pp. 37-8). The proposition of 81-84 is rejected in 85 as a flaca scusa. If the poet suffers a lack of por, this is his own fault: the capacity to feel sensitively the pains of Hell has already been declared in 67-68 in a statement which is doctrinally consonant with 205-08.

(5) The treatment, on both sides of the documentary division of the poem, of the motif which accompanies this theme -man's capacity to conceive of Heaven- provides further evidence for the thematic integrity of CV. The statement referred to by Ramírez:

reiterates the sense of 157-60:

The essence of this statement is expressed in 188:

All of these passages reflect the same idea: man can conceive of Heaven without the aid of the senses; the latter two of these statements explain that man accomplishes this through the use of the rahó and the saber. The use of forms of the verb jutjar (jutja, 159; jutge, 188; jutjen, 206 / se jutja, 208) add further weight to the consistency of 1-160 and 161-224 in the treatment of this and its accompanying topic.

There are good reasons, therefore, for continuing to think of the Cant Espiritual in its present form. The weight of the evidence of internal thematic coherence between lines 1-160 and 161-224 is against Dr. Ramírez's suggestions. More importantly, the poem's lack of a properly discursive form can be attributed to a deliberate artistic design -'dramatic representation', as we have called it- which marks the poem out from March's other work. This is not to deny the existence of textual problems in CV, or to dismiss the idea that certain stanzas may either have been added by later hands, or displaced, nor that certain stanzas may be missing. But, as we have tried to demonstrate here, these possible defects of the poem do not represent any solid obstruction to making poetic sense of the Cant Espiritual as it stands.