Envoi: A Review Journal of Medieval Literature 5.1 (1996 for 1994): 1-9.
Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot, eds. Rethinking the Romance of the Rose: Text, Image, Reception. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Pp. x + 383. ISBN 0-8122-3115-5 (0- 8122-1395-5 paper). $44.95 ($18.95 paper).
Jillian M. L. Hill. The Medieval Debate on Jean de Meung's Roman de la Rose: Morality versus Art. Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991. Pp. xiv + 269. ISBN 0- 88946-318-2. $89.95.
Sylvia Huot. The Romance of the Rose and its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xvi + 404. ISBN 0- 521-41713-9. $59.95.
Susan Stakel. False Roses: Structures of Duality and Deceit in Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose. Stanford French and Italian Studies. Stanford: Anma Libri, 1991. Pp. 142. ISBN 0-915838-0. $46.50.
We should be better at understanding and translating the language of dreams if we knew more about the development of language.
Sigmund Freud
The anagrams (French, Latin, and Greek) in my title--rose, dare, sow/compose/late, eros--suggest the argument I wish to pursue: the Rose is perhaps the medieval poem that challenges the ordinary sense of linguistic stability; it is also, therefore, arguably the medieval poem that most vividly exposes the conventionality of linguistic propriety. If we ask why the Rose is the subject of such intense critical response by later readers, especially medieval poets themselves, we find the answer to this question in the realization that it is itself critical, especially in Jean de Meun's continuation. The Rose is poetry that is also critical in its belatedness or posteriority, in the sense of these terms that psychoanalytically informed critics recognize (the most famous of whom, I suppose, is Harold Bloom). Like all literature that is belated or secondary, the Rose critically examines its own discursivity: whether we consider (in the Aeneid) Aeneas "reading" the walls of Carthage, or (in the Rose) Amants' experience of the walls of the Garden of Delight, or Raison's deconstruction of euphemism, we encounter in each case of belatedness the necessity of interpretation within the narrative that offers itself to be interpreted. To construct itself the poem must also construct its own canons of criticism.
Hence the anxiety in the Rose as in all belated poems with the status of the author: the author's agency is always subject to unpredictable intervention by the textual precedence in which s/he himself would intervene. Jean's decision to narrate, belatedly, his own birth and eventual assumption of the authorship of the Rose (lines 10554-72) is only one, if an especially brilliant, instance of an author's self-understanding as critic in the attempt to compass this intervention; an equally brilliant instance is Dante's decision to introduce into his own text the text that he is re-writing as the character of its author, Virgil; similarly, Christine de Pisan will over-write Dante as Dante over-wrote Virgil (in Le livre du chemin de long estude). Here is one sense in which all sources are "mirages": they are present as source only to be troped as "source" (cf. Dragonetti).
Let me clarify my position in certain particulars before I proceed. My argument is not the weak claim that the Rose is poetry about poetry--weak, that is, in the sense that such a claim is so general as to be almost banal. Nor am I arguing some version of "tradition and the individual talent" (though, like Bloom, I run the risk of sounding as if I am). My claim is ultimately the very different one that the Rose, especially Jean's part, is the "criticism" that the subsequent European tradition will aspire to write, down to and indeed including our own current theoretical moment. For, after all, when we listen to Jean's words
Ainsinc va des contreres choses,
les unes sunt des autres gloses,
et qui l'une an veust definir,
de l'autre li doit souvenir,
ou ja, par nule antancion,
n'i metra diffinicion,
car qui des .II. n'a connoissance,
ja n'i connoistra differeance,
san quoi ne peut venir en place
diffinicion que l'an face(Thus things go by contraries; one is the gloss of the other. If one wants to define one of the pair, he must remember the other, or he will never, by any intention, assign a definition to it; for he who has no understanding of the two will never understand the difference between them, and without this difference no definition that one may make can come to anything),
is it really possible not to hear Derrida?
Chaucer's response to this particular critical moment near the end of Jean's text will help to extend and clarify my argument (and suggest, incidentally, the relevance of Derrida to reading Chaucer's poetry). His response occurs in Troilus and Criseyde, book one, and probably serves more thoroughly than any other single passage in the poem to characterize Pandarus's logic and his "logos" (and his phallogocentrism):
"By his contrarie is every thyng declared.
For how myghte evere swetnesse han ben knowe
To him that nevere tasted bitternesse?
Ne no man may ben inly glad, I trowe,
That nevere was in sorwe or som destresse.
Eke whit by blak, by shame ek worthinesse,
Ech set by other, more for other semeth,
As men may se, and so the wyse it demeth.
Sith thus of two contraries is o lore..."T&C 637-45
The totalizing urgency in Pandarus's "sith thus of two contraries is o lore" marks all his dealings with Troilus and Criseyde: in order to produce the "o lore" of his "romaunce" (3.980), Pandarus will scruple at no "engyn" (3.274) or "fantasye" (3.275) of seduction or reduction (as of two to one). This is reading ("and fond his contenaunce / As for to loke upon an old romaunce"--3.979-80) that Chaucer finds insufficiently critical: lacking any scruple to differentiate and distinguish (Criseyde's needs from Troilus's, for example), Pandarus's reading refuses to acknowledge that if discourse is a kind of intercourse, intercourse is also a kind of discourse, a dialogue and dialogic that can ignore one of the partners (Criseyde, in this case) only at the risk of discovering too late that she can speak for herself, and of herself. If Pandarus's dealings with Criseyde are morally suspect, it is in part because he is himself critically suspect--recall that he interrupts and stops Criseyde and her women reading when he enters her chambers at the opening of book two (2.94-95): he tropes the prior "text," Criseyde (whom he treats like a text) with no anxiety about the text's priority (recall also Troilus' exclamation: "`Though ther be mercy writen in youre cheere, / God woot, the text ful hard is, soth, to fynde!'" (3.1356-57).
Chaucer, even at the beginning of his career, is a very different kind of reader from Pandarus and Troilus--a critical reader:
And alle the walles with colours fyne
Were peynted, bothe text and glose,
Of al the Romaunce of the Rose.Book of the Duchess 332-4
The Narrator of the Book of the Duchess wakes up, within his dream, "inside" the Rose (inside a hall whose walls are painted with the text and gloss of the Rose): in a very specific sense, the Book of the Duchess "emerges" from the Rose, and just so we can read the Book of the Duchess as critical of the Rose, especially in the complex relationship we may see between Chaucer's Black Knight and Amans. Moreover, we must remember that the Book of the Duchess is an "occasional" poem--it marks the occasion of the death of Blanch, Duchess of Lancaster, wife of Chaucer's patron, John of Gaunt--and thus it is irrelevant, or worse, to claim that "poetry makes nothing happen" (Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"), or criticism makes nothing happen: all sociality is discursive (even, sadly, when violence replaces dialogue), and if late medieval exegesis categorizes poetry as a branch of ethics (subponitur ethice--see Allen and Minnis), we do well to honor their understanding of the agency of discourse--after all, as the imagery of the confessional throughout the Book of the Duchess suggests, the Black Knight "repents" of his obsessive mourning, while Amant explicitly refuses ever to repent (Rose 4186-89 [Dahlberg 92-93]; and see Shoaf 1981: 165-68). "Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch" ("Poetically man dwells"), though a line of Hölderin (expanded critically by Heidegger [213-29]), is an idea, in Europe, whose time has always already come.
It is an idea that also underlies the work of psychoanalysis: in Lacan's trenchant formulation, "it is precisely because desire is articulated that it is not articulable" (Écrits 302). Because desire must pass through the signifier (or refuse to pass through the signifier), the signifier always constrains desire to a certain deficit. Hence the desire to turn on the signifier. David Hult (Re-thinking, 125-6), in his reading of Raison's account of Nero's dismemberment of his mother, calls attention to the following wordplay:
et puis qu'il la vit desmenbree,
selonc l'estoire remenbree,
la beauté des menbres juja.lines 6167-69
(after he saw her dismembered, according to the story as it is remembered, he judged the beauty of her limbs (or members).
Nero's madness is the refusal of membership, of the metonymy to which desire subjects us (through the signifier, we are always parts of wholes); Jean's insight, though, is to turn on the signifier and release through the series desmenbree / remenbree / menbres an understanding of madness that frees our desire into "l'estoire."
For Jean, as for Beckett, "in the beginning was the pun" (Murphy, 65). For that matter, for Guillaume, too: Karl Uitti (Re-thinking, 39-40) brilliantly demonstrates how the rose described in Guillaume's part is a "phallic, masculine sort of rose ... as it reposes, closed in its budlike shape, on its long and stiffly upright stem." And Sylvia Huot calls attention, especially in the context of the reception of the Rose, to Faux Samblant
as the embodiment of fiction ... the link between poetry and seduction, the problematic mendacity that lies at the heart of both the literary and the erotic quest.
324
Moreover, Susan Stakel devotes her entire book to a study of the "semantic field" of "deceit (decevoir, déception) in the second part" of the poem:
Of the approximately 130,500 words in the text, 410 of them belong to this field which ... should be termed a conceptual field within the semantic field of the vices. Seventy-six other words and expressions belong to the neighboring or associated field of treachery, and 38 to the associated field of falsity.
8
And in her conclusion, she argues that
Jean is a master of wordcraft. His wordplay, intricately bound up with the rhyme scheme and frequently serving as commentary on RI, amazes by its ingenuity ....
113-14
And Jillian Hill makes clear in her long study of the "Querelle de la Rose" that the language of the poem, as in the question of propriety, played a crucial role in the debate (Debate, 88- 89). All of the studies under review, in short, insist on wordplay as a defining characteristic of the Rose, and this consensus can be traced, I think, to the critical function of the pun.
"Criticism," the word, derives by way of Greek from a root that means to "cut" or "incise" for purposes of "separating" or "distinguishing" or "differentiating" (the same root produces Latin scribere, "to write"). A pun is always critical because (unlike Pandarus) it distinguishes or separates two in an apparent one: in the rose, for example (as Uitti reads the pun in its description), we have both the female and the male genitalia, such that we understand more efficiently and rapidly than would otherwise be possible what it is Amant loves (and also how the object of his love will change over the course of the two parts of the poem). If "good poets have a weakness for bad puns" (Auden, "The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning"), it is, at least in part, because puns, even bad puns, are critical to poetry.
Jean's puns are, of course, a subset of his larger concern with the proper sense. Numerous medievalists have addressed this exciting but vexed issue--Howard Bloch, Kevin Brownlee, Jane Burns, Roger Dragonetti, David Hult, Alexandre Leupin, Stephen Nichols, Eugene Vance, to name just a few. If I, as a Middle English scholar, raise the issue here, in concluding this essay on the four books under review, it is chiefly because I understand the Rose (and these four books reinforce even as they refine this understanding) to be the text that most overtly stages the issue and its attendant crises for subsequent vernacular writers (even if, perhaps especially if, the response of these writers to the Rose is hostile).
Jean's concern with the proper participates in the similar concern in fin'amors poetry generally. Obviously in a poet like, say, Arnaut Daniel, "où est le sens propre?" is an insistent question (as it is also, of course, in medieval Biblical exegesis--see de Lubac, 3:99-113), but the question is there, too, already in William the Ninth of Aquitaine--why else write "un vers de dreyt nien" (Goldin, 24-25)? Indeed, one way of characterizing Provençal poetry as a cultural phenomenon would be to categorize the many instances and means in it for interrogating the proper sense (especially in trobar clus). Such an enterprise would confirm anew, I think, that the impulse to interrogate the proper is coterminous in troubadour lyric with that lyric's rediscovery of the basically Ovidian insight that analysis of eros is also analysis of the psyche--troubadour lyric is post-imperial Europe's first psychoanalysis (one reason why Lacan on occasion has recourse to fin'amors poetry--e.g., "Love Letter," 156; and see also Cholakian, 5). And as psychoanalysis, or exploration of the "trou" ("hole") of desire in human being, troubadour lyric is repeatedly also an examination of the signifier's part in the (w)hole (Bloch, 81-99)--troubadour lyric is the vernacular poetry that first turns on the signifier.
The Roman de la Rose is the pan-European dissemination of this psycho(erotic)analysis (we know it circulated in over 200 manuscripts). It succeeds in this way largely because Jean de Meun saw and expressed the inescapable mutual contamination of the languages of love, philosophy, and theology (here, too, is why Laurent de Premierfait could claim that Dante's Commedia is a mappa mundi on the model of the Roman de la Rose--Hill, 161). In Jean's poem it is not only possible but also necessary to see that discourse, any discourse, like intercourse, is double and thus always potentially duplicitous. In the early fifteenth-century debate about the Rose, Gerson complained
Propterea opus illud chaos informe recte nominatur, et babilonica confusio et brodium quoddam almanicum et Protheus in omnes se formas mutans--tale demum cui dici possit illud pueris decontatum: "Conveniet nulli qui secum dissidet ipse."
Hence his book is said to be a formless chaos, a veritable tower of Babel, a sort of German brew, a Proteus assuming every possible shape, indeed a work to which can be applied that proverb so often recited to children: "He who is not in agreement with himself will never agree with anyone."
Hill 239n88 and 228 (her translation)
If I am on the mark in my hunch that Jean would have laughed at the ironic appropriateness of this profile of his book, I may also be on the mark in calling our attention to the surprising relevance of the "proverb" Gerson quotes to the insights of psychoanalysis, especially psychoanalysis's realization of the failure of self-coincidence in human beings, experienced as the gap or hole between the unconscious and the conscious (because of which each of us is all too often "not in agreement with himself" [cf. Felman, 21]). And if it should be objected, but that is not what Gerson meant, I would reply, with Jean de Meun and the troubadours, yes, that's true.