Text and Glose

I

The great Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun is now chiefly celebrated, it would seem, for its celebrity — known by name and reputation to even the most casual student of late medieval culture but read in toto by only the most indefatigable. We hear of its enormous vogue as evidenced by the remarkable number of manuscripts surviving from the two centuries following its completion, its widespread influence on its own and other vernacular literatures, its prose redactions, foreign translations, imitations, moralizations. Its place in literary history is entirely secure: that of a catalyst for a dozen other poems; the dunghill of Ennius from which Chaucer and perhaps Dante gathered gold; a happy hunting ground in which to stalk sources. To literary historians it is a famous poem and, by common consent, a naughty one. A recent English translation renders what Jean was pleased to call his jolis Romanz as "the rollicking Romance of the Rose."

The Roman was famous in the Middle Ages, too, especially in the fourteenth century, though there is no historical evidence to suggest that its great reputation then rested on any "rollicking" qualities. It rested, rather, upon what a knowledgeable French rhetorician and literary historian at the beginning of the fifteenth century called Jean de Meun's "moult noble doctrine," a doctrine rooted also in his translation of Boethius and in his beautiful Testament. The present book is an attempt to discover what that doctrine was and, by focusing attention upon the poem as illuminated by a wealth of neglected manuscript materials, to advance a "medieval reading" of it which can perhaps explain its medieval as opposed to its modern reputation. My book attempts, in short, to outline that interpretation of the Roman de la Rose enjoyed by its urbane readers at the apex of its popularity in the fourteenth century.

Such an undertaking is not without obstacles, since the very possibility of the "historical" criticism of literature is doubted by many literary theoreticians. "The total meaning of a work of art cannot be defined merely in the terms of its meaning for the author and his contemporaries," says one book widely read and respected by literary students. "It is rather the result of a process of accretion, i.e., the history of its criticism by its many readers in many ages." With the first half of this pronouncement even the would-be "historical" critic must be sympathetic, for he knows that he can never, however hard he may try, recapture the significantly mutable cultural milieux of Homer or Chapman's Homer or Keats' "Chapman's Homer." He can only make what he hopes are intelligent attempts to do so. He can only, in Boccaccio's words, "read, persevere, sit up nights, inquire, and exert the utmost power of his mind." The accretion theory, on the other hand, is rather more difficult to accept, for it is painful to think of works of genius as so many of Rorschach's ink blots, accreting "meaning" with each new patient who views them. With specific reference to the Roman such a suggestion is particularly depressing. The "total meaning" of some works presumably mellows nicely, like a Stilton cheese at Christmas, with age and nibbling; but the "meaning" of the Roman in this sense has curdled, soured. Indeed, the Roman can hardly survive its modern interpretation.

One of the great canards of Western aesthetics maintains that "Ars longa, vita brevis est." The life of a work of art is seldom much longer than that of its maker. It merely has a much more durable corpse. In truth, a work of art is captured forever within its capsule of stylistic history, and when the style of the times changes it faces three possible fates. It may disappear from view, unsympathetic and unadaptable to a new stylistic moment, as did the once "great" pilgrimage poems of Guillaume de Deguilleville. Or, by overt adaptation or "renovation" it may be made acceptable to the prevailing style: witness Molinet's recension of the Roman, or Dryden's All for Love. Finally — and this is by far the most common case — it can, by critical accommodation, survive, indeed thrive, in a stylistic moment far different from its own. Milton becomes a Satanist, Langland a Marxist, and both sell in paperback editions.

What seemed at first with Wellek and Warren the modest beginnings of another attack on Geistesgeschichte thus reveals an audacious yet valid claim: that of the literary critic as creator, a modern resurrection man, who deals in old bones but rather miraculously makes all things new. Quite rightly did Alan Gunn subtitle his ambitious and exacting modernist reconstruction of the Roman a "Reinterpretation of the Romance of the Rose." A "reinterpretation" can give the poem "value for our age."

The present work does not aspire to the creation of meaning nor to the discovery of any but medieval meanings in the poem. Yet even such a narrowly historical, indeed archeological, undertaking as my own can make some claims to creativity if not to art, for it involves new formulations of historical materials. Such creativity, however, will not involve any ingenious explications of the allegory of the Roman, though it must begin with the claim that the poem is indeed an allegory. So far as I know this premise has never been denied. The poem is either a tedious account of a young man with horticultural interests or it is alieniloquium, "saying something else," as Isidore's standard definition of allegoria puts it. Furthermore, everybody knows just what else it is that the story is all about.

The allegory of the Roman (unlike that, say, of The Pearl) is hardly recherché; its few tricky aspects are carefully glossed within the text of the poem itself. Jean de Meun's thousands of lines of verse add very little to the allegorical story. Gunn shows nicely the extent to which Jean prefers amplificatio to narratio, how he sustains his poem not with a narrative flow of his hero's experiences — as did his imitator Deguilleville — but with the wealth of illustrative, exemplary materials which have threatened to categorize him misleadingly as an encyclopedist. While it is true that many of the exempla require mythographic, and therefore allegorical, understanding, there is no indication that Jean de Meun was interested in constructing ingenious allegories, dark conceits.

The account of the Roman which follows, therefore, does not for the most part depend upon controversial methods of interpreting the allegorical plot; the problem of interpreting the Roman begins rather than ends with the unveiling of the surface allegory. The rose quest is a sexual metaphor, slightly less blatant with Guillaume de Lorris than with Jean de Meun but always obvious. The few emblems within the poem of any allegorical difficulty — e.g., the carbuncle in the Heavenly Garden — are explained by Jean de Meun himself. So far as I...