Fire in the Placa - Dorothy Noyes

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achieves wholeness by a radically different semiotic strategy than that of most political ceremonies created since the transition to democracy.2 The Patum relies on multivocal pluralism rather than abstract singularities. That is, rather than offering single collective emblems empty enough for a particular content to be projected into them, it provides a heterogeneous ensemble of concrete references allowing multiple points of entry into the whole and multiple stances within it. In Durkheim’s terms, rather than a mechanical solidarity in which everyone stands in identical and individual relation to a thinly defined collectivity, the Patum defines an organic solidarity, a true social body that reflects the sense of everyday economic and social interdependence between different positions. These links of the Patum to the lived social world are not merely semiotic but performed in modes of festival interaction that mimic and intensify everyday encounters, as Part II will show. This union of representation and interaction is what gives the Patum its intensity and Berga its reality.

      The rest of the chapter will lay out the representational dimensions of the process; but a final point must be made about representation in the political sense. Berga, although geographically it can be seen as isolated, is in no way self-sufficient: it must speak downward to attract clients and upward to attract patrons. Since its emergence in the early seventeenth century, the Patum has been the language through which Berga proclaimed itself to its hinterland; since at least the eighteenth century, when the Patum began to savor of archaism, it has been its most conspicuous cultural capital for trading with the metropolis.

      While the peasants who came in for the festival participated in a relatively direct and sustained way, the Patum had to be interpreted to the less accommodating outside forces of church, state, and market. This has been the task of the professional class—clergy, lawyers, and doctors—and later of bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, teachers, and journalists. All of these derive their power from their intermediary position, representing the metropolis to the local and vice versa. But they are doubly dependent as much as doubly powerful. Without the constraint of force or the incentive of resources (and the latter, at least, have been scarce enough in Spain to make even the former difficult to sustain at the local level), their power to impose hegemonic languages upon their constituencies is limited. Instead they must, to some degree, adapt themselves to the population that constitutes their clientele. They can give to the metropolis only what the local has to offer—but in a voice the metropolis is willing and able to hear. They are thus professional interpreters, through whom local interests and cultural models reach the center; they translate, with greater or lesser fidelity according to their ability and the degree of distance, from the restricted code of the local to the elaborated code of the metropolis (Bernstein 1971).3 Occasionally—and later we will see a prime example in Berga’s Mossèn Armengou—a gifted interpreter can succeed in teaching a local model to the metropolis.

      There is thus a rich history—dating back at least to 1725, when the bishop complained about disorder on Corpus Christi—of Berguedan explications of the Patum (Farràs i Farràs 1979; Noguera i Canal 1992; Noyes 1992). Such accounts typically provide both an allegorical interpretation of the dances and, since the nineteenth century, an origin narrative. The allegory allows the Patum’s combats to be read as the triumph of the current orthodoxy: the Church Triumphant over irrational nature, Carlists over liberals, liberals over Carlists, Catalonia over the Castilian invader, the people over feudalism, Imperial Spain over the infidel reds, democracy over repression, and so forth. The origin narrative places the Patum at the founding moment claimed in the current political master narrative: this has traditionally been medieval and, more recently, pre-Christian.

      Both allegory and origin narrative serve a second purpose, especially in periods of political repression. In performing submission to the dominant order, they deflect outside interference. The emphasis on origins as determining factor was especially important during and after the Franco regime as a protective means of “denying coevalness” to the festival (Fabian 1983), which thus makes no controversial commentaries on the present nor threatens to transform it.

      There are some popular origin legends too, although they reach us so much colored by their elite transcribers that not much can be made of them. But in general it can be said that elite origin narratives valorize the symbols of order in the festival and view the danced combats as the conquest of the disorderly elements, imagined as both lower-status and external to the community. Conversely, the popular narratives, many of which feature emergence from caves, celebrate these lower elements—the mules and the devils, even the Moors—as indigenous forces able to hold off impositions from above and outside the community. The fundamental story that the community tells itself about itself through the Patum has thus to do with social divisions and what each class fears in the other.

      From Corpus Mysticum to Body Politic

      Most historians of the Patum have been so urgently imbricated in the dialogue between local and metropolis—the latter primarily Catalanist Barcelona—that their work must be used with enormous caution: where documents have not actually been fabricated to fill the voids left by the frequent burning of the archives in civil war, the reading of them has at least been highly interested. The skepticism fostered by life under Francoist representations encouraged the emergence of a different kind of historian, and the three principal scholars of the Patum—Mossèn Armengou at the end of the Franco regime, Jaume Farràs i Farms during the Transition, and more recently Josep Noguera i Canal—have been progressively more critical of the historiography and less committed to a given line on the event; this ironic turn, of course, also reflects a change in dominant representations and Berga’s relationship to them. Based on their historicizing rereadings of earlier scholarship, their new primary research in local archives, and the comparative data available on Catalan Corpus Christi celebrations in other towns, we can reconstruct the early history of the Patum in its large outlines, and suggest the continuities of meaning over time which give the Patum its depth and richness.4

      The Patum is an outgrowth of the late medieval Corpus Christi procession, particularly elaborate in Catalonia because when the liturgical feast was made obligatory in 1311, the King of Aragon had just come out of papal interdiction and urgently needed to demonstrate his orthodoxy and that of his subjects. These processions, in the first instance, paid homage to the sacrament of the Eucharist. The consecrated Host was carried in a raised monstrance under a canopy supported by the highest-ranking members of the community, clerical or secular. Around the Body of Christ, the entire Corpus Mysticum of which Christ was the head articulated itself. The various corporations and elements of the local community lined up in much-contested hierarchical order—and the feast thus immediately became an occasion for civic display and competition, both between and within cities. This assembly of the Church Militant, Christ’s kingdom on Earth, was complemented, insofar as local resources permitted, by representations of the Church Triumphant: allegorical figures or mobile tableaux of Biblical figures, saints, and all the company of heaven.

      These representations, generally sponsored by guilds and confraternities, had to be acted by community members not important enough to be marching in their own persons; and they called upon the performance repertoires of that lower level of the community, sometimes incorporating older genres. As medievalists know, different vernacular traditions emerged from these processions, including both the English mystery plays and the Castilian autos sacramentales. In Catalonia, the procession featured entremesos, dances with masked performers and/or effigies animated by a carrier. Often these might be the emblem of a saint, such as the Lion of Saint Mark or the Eagle of Saint John, or the supporting figures of a Biblical tableau, such as the ox and the ass of the Nativity.

      It took little time for the animal and fantastic figures to become dissociated from their liturgical occasions: for some scholars, an argument for their older and indigenous status. The verifiable contemporary reasons have rather to do with their popularity among festival spectators and the consequent disruptions of the procession’s solemnity. Because of the guild sponsorship and the popularity, however, the entremesos survived various phases of ecclesiastical repression, gradually moving to the head of the procession as entertainments safely distanced from the culminating Host or separating from the procession entirely and furnishing a parallel, secular celebration, in some cases moving from Corpus Christi to a community’s

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