Symbolic metaphor and reading-processes in Ausiàs March
Robert Archer
La Trobe University
Metaphors which are repeatedly employed in the same poetic context and with reference to the same central core of meaningful associations, either when appearing within a given tradition or within the corpus of a single poet's work, will usually come to acquire a certain fixity of meaning. Such metaphors have the qualities of «recurrence and persistence»
which, according to Wellek and Warren1, can be taken as the distinguishing marks of the symbol: «an image may be invoked once as a metaphor, but if it persistently recurs both as presentation and representation, it becomes a symbol»
2. The difficulties of implementing this definition become clear when it is realized that certain images can be both symbol and metaphor; that is, they have a certain fixity to the central meaning they designate while still retaining the capacity to bring into play a broad complex of implications which will spread, according to contexts, a varying aura of metaphorical meaning around the centrally-designated sense. Such images as these are perhaps best thought of as «symbolic metaphor»
3, a term which acknowledges the role of both their constituent properties. «Symbolic metaphor» of this sort constitutes an important part of the poetic vocabulary of Ausiàs March, «metaphorical» in its connotative range but with a «symbolic» fixity to its central meaning. One example of it is the image through which the situation of the poet is described in terms of a ship (nau) upon a dangerous sea (mar) which seeks safe harbourage (port, etc.); another involves the less complex correlative between the poet and a malalt.
The general metaphorical area to which the former of these symbolic metaphors belongs has already been studied by Rosa Leveroni4 and Wendy L. Rolph5. Leveroni has insisted upon the originality of March's powerful marine imagery, and like Rolph after her, has defined the function of the sea-imagery, especially in the form of the sea-storm, as symbolizing the interior conflict which is characteristic of March's poetry6. It is not the object of this article to add to what has already been said about the poetic merit and contextual aptness of this element of March's imagery as a «symbol» in a looser sense of the word ―that is, as potent and comprehensive metaphor― which seems to be intended by Leveroni and Rolph. This article is, rather, concerned with the function of the symbol in the narrow sense defined above: that is, with the power of certain images to produce, in any poetic context, a fixed core of recognizable meaning. It is intended, in particular, to examine the effect of this symbolism upon the processes involved in reading certain passages of allegory and simile. Nevertheless, this very emphasis upon reading- processes should also be the means by which to display the function of the passages concerned beyond that of symbolizing (in the broad sense) the poetic situation in an original and effective way.
Initially, however, one will need to substantiate the claim made above that certain metaphors in March's poetry are symbolic in the narrow sense. In the case of the malalt metaphor, which appears in sixteen places in March's work as an element of simile, this is not a real difficulty. The metaphor of the ailing patient has a traditional role in European literature as a symbol which denotes the lover (or poet-lover), and is intrinsically related to what Peter Dronke has shown to be the «age-old topos»
of love as a malady, firmly rooted in the love-lyric from its earliest extant manifestations7. Beyond this generally literary precedence, the use of the topos as part of a simile's imagery is observable in the troubadour tradition immediately preceding March, as in this passage of Sordello:
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Similarly, Cerverí de Girona describes himself as malaute d'amor and employs an extensive malaltes analogy:
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A more contemporary instance of it occurs in a poem of Jordi de Sant Jordi:
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This is not to deny March an idiosyncratic use of the topos which is, in any case, employed idiosyncratically by the poets quoted above. Where March does differ from this preceding tradition is in always employing the malalt image as a symbol that not only denotes the suffering lover but also implies an attitude of moral self-criticism. All cases of its use bear this moral «charge», both in poems which have an explicit context of self-criticism and in those in which this remains implicit11.
This element of its symbolism will obviously become more immediately relevant as the symbol recurs in various contexts. What is more important for our own purposes is that the use of the malalt immediately denotes, as an established symbol, a certain fixed body of meaning: the suffering lover who can only be cured by the physician-beloved.
The case of March's other symbolic metaphor that I have singled out ―namely, the marine image― is rather different. Here there is evidently a clearer need to establish the existence of a previous tradition that would have endowed the metaphor with the quality of a symbol from its inception in March's work, in the same way as the malalt image: the nau-mar-port image does not seem to be a traditional symbol of the same sort of antiquity for a certain poetic treatment of amor12.
Within the troubadour tradition itself, however, the symbol is well established. Even if one confines oneself to their simile-images, the sea is clearly a constant symbol for amorous suffering among the Provençal poets, as in this passage of Raimon Jordan:
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or in the comparison of Folquet de Lunel:
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Through their constant use in the same poetic context, the metaphors of naus, mar and tempiers come to take on a specific symbolic meaning: mar = amor (an association which is underscored by the pun in the last passage between auta mar and aut amar), tempiers = amorous suffering, naus (or voyager in, captain of naus) = poet as suffering lover. This group is complemented by a third symbolic metaphor, as in the following passage:
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Here the lady is addressed as one able to guide the poet-naus to a bon port, signifying the end of the poet's amorous torment in his acceptance by the lady. Similarly in a poem of Sordello, the lady is invoked as the estela luzens which is able to guide the naus en mar to a riba or port16. In Giraut de Calanson, she is a belhs auratges that has taken the poet to a bon port through a mala mar17. The symbol is also sometimes combined with a different symbolic situation, as in a comparison of Cadenet in which the naus is becalmed rather than endangered by the storm and the lady is invoked as one able to bring the poet to a port de salvamen:
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The symbols of nau-mar-tempiers-port are later taken up by the Escola de Tolosa poets:
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The evidence of this brief discussion inevitably corrects the view of Leveroni that the troubadour mar is «pàl.lid i esvai»
(p. 156): the mar is well established before March as a place of danger and violence in the troubadouresque metaphor and as the central element in a commonly employed symbol for the standard poetic situation of the troubadour canso. Nevertheless, such evidence does not detract from the main claim in the Leveroni article, namely that the Marchian sea-image is of vastly greater poetic power than any example to be found in the troubadours. It is also clear from this evidence that March took over from the Provençal lyric a traditional pattern of fixed correlatives which had been established by the persistent use of the same metaphors with reference to one recurrent poetic situation. His use of marine imagery in II 1-16, XX 36-40, XXVII 25-33, XLVI passim, LX 35-36, LXXIV 17-24, LXXXI and LXXXII 1-3 attests to this influence. In these passages, there are occasional variants of metaphorical value ―in XX 36-40, for instance, the ship corresponds to the poet's voluntat― and a number of variations in the metaphors are introduced, such as platja
(II 1-16) or terra
(XXXVII 31-32) for port, but in each case the metaphors perform their established symbolic function. One consequence of this symbolic aspect of the marine imagery in March is that the presence of one or two of the symbols in a poem calls into play the other related symbols even when these are not explicitly mentioned. Another, more important, consequence of March's use of the metaphors is that they produce a central body of meaning which is immediately relevant to the poetic situation.
Both these effects of the symbolic metaphor can be seen in the following passage:
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| (LXXVII-12) | ||
The first two lines of the poem endow the reader with the knowledge that the search of the poet is for a loch where his penssa and voler will be satisfied. But all explicit reference to the problem which the passage describes ceases at line 3 and is not resumed until lines 9-10 with the allusion to la qui.m entenia. The interim lines function purely as a metaphoric narrative, that is, as an allegory21. The passage constitutes what, in classical terms, is tota allegoria
(Quintilian, VIII, vi, 47-48), that is, continuous metaphor without the presence of words which refer literally to the sense intended metaphorically (when such words are present, the allegory becomes commixta). The reader can only come to understand the passage by construing the sense of the continued metaphor from whatever «clues» may be available in the metaphors themselves. It is in aiding the reader to perform this task that certain elements of the imagery here come into play as symbolic metaphor, providing the «clues» to the hidden sense for which the reader is casting around.
The metaphors of the search from one place of harbourage (port) to another for a place of rest for the penssa and the voler call up the symbols of nau and mar as traditionally inherent elements of the marine imagery. The poet becomes identified implicitly with the captain of the nau, while the mar in which the events of the narrative take place immediately suggests the corresponding poetic context of amorous suffering. The construction of the traditional symbolic situation is completed by the symbol of the port which is explicitly introduced in line 4 and set against its metaphorical antithesis, the cruel plaga deserta. Given the «clues» of these implicit and explicit symbolic metaphors, the reader is able to construe, to a limited extent, an underlying meaning to the passage as a whole: the poet appears to be complaining that he had previously found a certain woman (la qui.m entenia) to be all that he could wish for but now is cruelly rejected by her: the bon port has become the cruel plaga deserta.
But while the recognition of symbolic metaphor enables the reader to construe this much of the apparent sense, the central meaning of the metaphorical statement remains elusive. In particular, if the lady is represented by a port, then the ports and tot fons could refer to other women, or women in general, but it is not clear in what way the ports are dangerous (port no trob on aturar-me gose) or the fons unsuitable. Nor is there anything in the remaining full stanzas of the poem that elucidates the sense of the passage further. The second stanza largely insists upon the poet's lack of responsibility in having loved the wrong woman; lines 17-28 describe the tristor and dolor which result from the state of affairs referred to in the allegory, while 29-32 again insist upon the poet's lack of responsibility for it all.
In effect, the mystery of what the allegory actually describes is not lifted until the tornada itself:
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These final lines explain all. The danger attaching to the lady and to womankind in general lies in an innate lack of rahó and virtuts. If the particular woman March alludes to had once seemed to possess the necessary qualities (and had thus been the poet's bon port), he now sees this as illusion since in reality only her calitat and particular circumstances (loch) give her the appearance of being ruled by reason; no woman actually is so except temporarily. This moral inadequacy of womankind (the ports where the poet has not dared to tarry, the tot fons which he, vagabunt, has sounded) means that all dealings with them can only lead to foll.Amor. The danger which the allegory describes is thus that of a lapse to the moral level of woman, and the search for a loch in which to satisfy the penssa and voler is for spiritual, non-physical love, not for that type of amor with which the symbolic metaphor of the nau-mar-port would normally be associated in the tradition in which March wrote.
The effect of the allegory had been to set the reader thinking along the lines of traditional love-lyric by the use of a symbolic metaphor and the development of it into cruel plaga deserta which together led the reader to believe that the poem was a complaint about the lady's lack of response to the poet's importunements. But the tornada makes it clear that the poet's complaint is not that the lady will not cede to his amorous desires, but that she has such desires herself which make her unworthy to be the recipient of the particular type of amor which he had once hoped to place in her. The poem has all the appearance of a deliberate, subtly executed inversion of the traditional love-poem. Only the context revealed by the tornada gives the lie to the complaint of unrequited love ostensibly formulated in it.
In the allegory of LXXVI, metaphor is a necessary element in the production of its meaning. The reader perceives that the passage does not make sense literally, that as literal statement it has a «logical absurdity»
to it22, and he is therefore involved at once in a metaphorical reading which may or may not be able to reveal the «other» sense of the passage. Under these conditions, any symbolic metaphors present in the passage can be expected to play a particularly active part in the reading-processes necessary to make sense of it. But the part of symbolic metaphor also extends to non-allegorical contexts. This is particularly true in the work of March where passages involving apparently literal reference, as in simile, are far more frequent than those of allegory. Representative of this larger group are the cobles esparces LXXXI, LXXXII, LXXXIII.
One reasonable inference that can be made about the symbolic metaphor is that its presence will inevitably mean that the reader of the simile of the sort found in LXXXI and LXXXHI will be aware of a secondary sense to the image before the correlative sense is actually formulated. That is to say, the metaphors, by their very familiarity, become «clues» to the primary level of meaning to which the secondary meaning of the metaphors (their own «literal» sense) alludes. Such metaphorical «clues» must inevitably influence the way in which the reader interprets the passage; lines which possess an identity as literal statement take on an extra dimension of meaning as partial or total allegory:
Here the reference to mar in the image suggests the context of Amor while the mal temps and perill qualify this as «Love's trials»; lo loch on se pot restaurar itself contains an implicit reference to the metaphor of the port (for the lady). The sense of the poetic situation is clear to the reader even before the explicit statement of the correlative, or the «referent» as we shall henceforth call it, is given23. The process of reading involved here is consequently less one of the correlation of explicitly-given subjects in order to perceive certain analogies between image and referent, than one of metaphorical «interaction»24. The passage's heavy dependence upon these metaphorical processes to communicate its meaning can be gauged from the following schema (where meaning produced by other means than literal correlation is shown in parentheses)25:
| IMAGE | REFERENT | ||||
| (a) | One who is near to death (l. I) | Poet, who endures affanys (l. 5) | |||
| (b) | going through bad weather (l. 2) | ||||
| (c) | exposed to the dangers of the sea (l. 2) | ||||
| mar ......................................... symbol of amorous suffering | |||||
| (d) | sees the place where he could de safe (l. 3) | sees the lady, capable of removing his mals (l. 3) | |||
| loch ........................ symbol of lady as port | |||||
| (e) | but does not reach it (l. 4) | (but does not attain the lady) | |||
| (f) | because of his malvada sort (l. 4) | (because of this malvada sort in love) | |||
| (g) | (despairs of reaching the loch) | despairs of fulfilling his desires (l. 7) | |||
| (h) | (and is content to wander) | and will go through the world (l. 8) | |||
| (i) | proclaiming his lady's pride (l. 8) | ||||
Thus, the only point at which the referent functions as an explicit correlative to the image is at (d), which only serves to identify overtly the lady with the loch where the poet can be restored. The detailed situation described in lines 1-2 is given the bare correlative que vaig affanys passant
(l. 5), while the concepts of mort, mal temps, mar remain without explicit explanation. Once these minimum details of explicit correlative meaning have been given to prevent any possibility of obscurity (ll. 5-6), elements (g), (h), and (i) of the referent extend the poetic situation in a direction which has no explicit place in the corresponding situation of the image but which remains faithful, in part at least (g, h), to the dominant metaphoric context, so that the allegory is indirectly extended in this part of the referent to suggest that the voyager of the image does not actually meet his death but continues to remain in a perilous condition. This structure points to the fact that the poet relied upon the symbolic metaphors to supply the central core of meaning in his simile. Such a strategy presupposes both that the poet assumed that his readers would recognize the meaning of the symbols and that he deliberately fashioned the simile so that it would function primarily as allegory.
A somewhat different situation obtains in LXXXIII:
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As a symbolic metaphor, the simile of the malalt differs from that developed by LXXVI and LXXXI in not being restricted to a determined narrative framework of metaphoric development such as that prescribed for the nau metaphor by the accompanying conditions of mar and port. The extent to which the malalt metaphor is symbolic is thus much more limited; malalt here indicates, as in all instances of it in March, a context of self-criticism, helped out somewhat by the use of virtut in line 3 (i. e. instead of a força or other alternative), but this context does not entail a specific narrative situation in the same way as the nautical metaphors. Consequently, the narrative development of the malalt metaphor into a simile-image does not suggest its primary meaning with the immediacy of LXXXI. Moreover, the amount of explicit correlation in the simile indicates that March did not expect the image to be as directly meaningful metaphorically as that of the preceding poem:
| IMAGE | REFERENT | ||
| (a) | malalt has long been confined to the sick-bed (l. 1) | (poet has long been subject to Amor) | |
| malalt .......................... symbolic metaphor for one enfeebled by love | |||
| (b) | one day he tries to rise (l. 2) | wants to act in accordance with his seny, and opposes Amor (ll. 5-6) | |
| (c) | but his strength (virtut) is not equal to it (l. 3) | but his power to do is taken from him (l. 7) | |
| (d) | (because of the mal estrem) | by the mal estrem of Amor (l. 8) | |
| (e) | so that when he gets to his feet, he at once collapses (l. 4) | so that when he strives against Amor, he is unable to achieve his seny's commands (l. 7) | |
Of the elements in the image left unexplained in the referent, (a) is clearly meant to be inferred from the associative context of the symbolic metaphor, malalt. Thus, as the malalt is understood in terms of «the poet enfeebled by love»
, the context of long confinement in such sickness is at once transferred in the referent to that of long subjection to Amor. The other, central elements of the narrative line, (b), (c), and (e) are overtly correlated; (d) in the referent uses a metaphor which derives from the complex of associations inherent in malalt and which thus reinforces in retrospect the strength of the metaphoric context. The full correlative here indicates that the poet did not anticipate an allegorical reading of the passage. While malalt has the effect of establishing a metaphorical level to the literal narrative, the lack of further related metaphors giving a specific slant to the metaphorical sense means that any potential reading of the passage as allegory has to be «suspended» in favour of the more accesible prima facie sense.
In both poems, of course, the degree of allegorical action in the images depends entirely upon the reader's responsiveness to Marchian symbols. In the barest kind of reader-response, the images of these poems would be no more than anecdotes with literal value whose vocabulary evoked certain associations which are bound to be «projected» towards an indefinite primary subject (the referent of the simile) the existence of which is indicated either by the explicit comparative term (Axí com [...], Sí co.l...) or by the perceived reference to an extra-poetic context. At any level of reader-response, the effective function of the image remains the same: to set in motion a transference of associations, with varying results. In even the crudest reading, the metaphors of LXXXI will have their function of suggesting a sense of peril and suffering; in a more sophisticated response, these could be identified at once with a certain poetic situation.
In LXXXIII, a sense of pathos and helplessness is communicated by the image, together with the suggestion of moral self-criticism, but it is conceivable that for certain readers these could acquire a more specific meaning. This potentially wide variance in the response of readers to symbolic metaphor, however, need not dissuade us from taking due account of its part in March's poems. As we have seen from LXXXI and LXXXIII, the examination of the extent of literal correlative in the simile provides a means of empirically demonstrating the poet's own dependence upon his metaphors to offer symbols to the reader. In the former poem, he clearly expects the reader to infer meaning from most of the simile-image without the aid of the referent; in the latter, he evidently does not consider his image sufficiently powerful as symbol to allow him to forego explicit explanation of the meaning.
An entirely different relationship between the given literal sense of the image and the symbolic metaphor is in evidence in the two brief images of the other esparça (LXXXII):
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The images in lines 1-3 read as exempla which illustrate the theme of the ineluctability of fate expounded in the sententiae of lines 4-8: (i) no man can be certain of anything (l. 4); (ii) nor does the sabent have any advantage over the pech except in so far as he may be able to foresee the outcome of events more frequently (ll. 5-6): experience and judgement are of no avail against Fortuna and Cas.
The images illustrate these sententiae, it will be noticed, in advance. The exempla might thus be seen as endowing the sententiae with something of the appearance of deductive arguments: they draw conclusions from the given particular instances of Fate. By means of these exempla, the reader is invited to verify the validity of the sententiae against the observed natural phenomena in which even the impossible is seen to happen: a ship goes down even in the safest harbour, men die of what seemed the slightest of maladies.
But while the poem thus functions perfectly well as a combination of exempla and sententiae, there is another plane of possible meaning to the poem according to which its relevance would extend beyond this generalized context. The exempla have the same symbolic significance as images as those of LXXXI and LXXXIII. The terms fusta and segur port imply the third term mar and establish the whole symbolic situation which signifies the poet's amorous torments in trying to secure the lady's love. Without there being any direct reference to another level of meaning, the symbolic metaphors suggest, in their particular development in lines 1-2, the disillusionment of the poet with the lady: he had thought himself safe in amor but this sense of safety has been utterly destroyed. The second image (l. 3) contains the implicit metaphor of poet as malalt, but unlike the preceding image, it does not take the form of an allegory which is directly applicable to the poet. Rather, it provides a means against which the enormity of the mal of Amor can be gauged: if so many die of an unimportant mal, how much greater the poet's chances of dying under the force of the mal d'amor.
This second plane of meaning to the first three lines influences the way in which the reader interprets the rest of the poem. The allegorical sense which has started to evolve imposes a particularized interpretation upon a passage which at another level had seemed to relate to a purely general, sententious context. This requires us to read the statements of lines 4-8 as if they had specific relevance to the poet. Thus, the poet is seen to disclaim responsibility for his failure in amor: «nuil hom és cert d'algun fet com fenesqua»
. It is implied that since it was the poet's fate to have loved a woman whom he thought to be a segur port for his amor, only to find that she failed to equal his expectations, he bears no responsibility for his own failure. He is to blame only in so far as he did not recognize what is formulated as a truism in line 4; for although he may be considered an hom sabent, he was in no better position than the hom pech to realize his error since the esperiment and juhí are of no avail against Fortuna and Cas. Nor does the poet appear to be suggesting that the lady is to blame for his failure. Such an unexpected outcome to his efforts is pre-ordained (Quant plau a Déu...).
But while this sort of exegesis of the poem will reveal a coherent alternative meaning to that which results from making a straightforward reading of it as exempla preceding sententiae, there is one possible objection to its validity that has to be taken into consideration. This is that there is no intrinsic need to read metaphorically. As literal statement, there is no «logical absurdity» to the passage which makes it in any way self-controverting and so would direct us necessarily towards a metaphoric interpretation. Nor is the reader alerted in any obvious way, such as by the comparative term of the simile of LXXXI, to an intrinsic analogous reference to something beyond its literal meaning. In this poem, allegorical interpretation hinges entirely upon the reader's receptivity to the metaphors as symbols: the poem is not so structured that the allegory is an essential part of the full meaning. However, the poet's use of metaphors in LXXXI to give allegory precisely this role demonstrates that he expected his readers to be alive to them as symbols, and it is reasonable to infer that the same level of response is required for LXXXII.
This awareness of the «other» meaning of the images through their explicit or implicit symbols does imply an unavoidable obligation to reconcile the rest of the passage with this meaning. But the initial metaphors can only set in motion the perception of the particular sense beneath the general one; thereafter, how thoroughly such a sense is worked out depends entirely upon the efforts of the reader, so that the allegory of the passage remains in a sense optional. The exempla, it was noted, precede the sententiae they illustrate. But if illustration was all they were meant to achieve, it would have been more effective to place them after the sententiae. It was clearly consistent with March's intentions for the poem as a whole to put the images of lines 1-3 in a position where their potential as symbolic metaphors was at a maximum. Placed after the sententiae, the images would have functioned in a far more strict relation to the preceding statements so that their metaphoric possibilities would have been minimized. It is at least certain that March sought to give the two exempla/images their best chance to produce symbolic meaning relevant to a highly particularized context beyond the general reference of the sententious literal sense.
The evidence of the small number of poems examined here indicates that the nau-mar-port and malalt images are given a vital functional role as symbolic metaphor. It is demonstrably true that March depended upon their symbolic aspect to supply known fixed meaning where such meaning was not otherwise made explicit. This symbolic value was seen to be invoked for various poetic purposes, among them ironic contrast and the suggestion of a parallel secondary meaning. Beyond this, the deliberate use of imagery as symbolic metaphor reveals a certain aspect of contemporary reading habits: the reader was expected to be acquainted with the symbolic meaning inherent in the metaphors employed. A response to such imagery was clearly required of the reader of March's poetry both on the level of the fixed meaning which is attributable to it within the poetic tradition in which it is employed, and on the level of fresh metaphoric meaning created by the poet's individual use of it.