Change in the ethos: from metaphorical to pronominal representation

 Through the organization of its stanzas, the sirventés Tartarassa ni voutor seems to reflect Peire Cardenal’s divided position as a critic of the clergy (and of society) and as a spokesman who addresses “sinners” in order to convert. The first two stanzas represent a description of the depraved world of the clerics, that combines several layers of an imaginative vision, going from metaphorical images (“tartarassa”, “voutor”) to very realistic ones (“franses e clerc an lauzor / de mal, quar ben lur en pren”). Not only are religious people satirized, but also foreign people, as the satire includes here a more extended political criticism. The corrupted world is seen from an outside perspective. There are no traces of deictic elements in the first or second person. The lyrical voice presents a strong satirical discourse that keeps the satirized people at a maximum distance.  In the last three stanzas, the ethos changes radically. The lyrical voice becomes a spokesman that loudly addresses, in each stanza, what seems to be very different interlocutors. But the vague “you” that could be associated with the general community is most probably the generic “I” representing the same people whose defects were harshly criticized in the previous stanzas. Using the same tropic form of the singular for the plural, Peire Cardenal continues to address every “man” in a much more intimate way. In the last stanza, the troubadour raises the pitch of his invocation, as he directly addresses to God in the name of the same sinners, as if the false “person to person” talk created a certain community, reflected in the last stanza by the usage of the pronoun “nos”, that enables the spokesmen to plead for the forgiveness of the same people he severely criticized in the first two stanzas. I wonder if the apparition of Death in the third stanza does not represent an impulse that completely changes the mask of the lyrical voice, since Death represents, in spite of all the differences, the only element that could create, at the end, the feeling of a human community. The diversity of representations, both at the metaphorical and pronominal levels, seems to represent a powerful rhetorical resource that dialectically separates and reunites different types of voices, different types of discourses.