Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets

Poetry, Knowledge and Desire in the "Roman De La Rose"

Sylvia Huot

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351569194
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Roman de la Rose explicitly offers an 'art of love', while also repeatedly asserting that the experience of love is impossible to put into words. An examination of the intertextual density of the Rose, with its citations and adaptations of a range of Latin authors, shows that the discourse of bodily desire, pleasure, and trauma emerges indirectly from the juxtaposition and conflation of sources. Huot's new book focuses on Guillaume de Lorris's use of the Ovidian corpus, and on Jean de Meun's dazzling orchestration of allusions to a wider range of Latin writers: principally Ovid, Boethius, and Virgil, but also including John of Salisbury and Alain de Lille. In both parts of the Rose, poetic allegory is a language that can express the unspeakable and the ineffable.

Chapter 1
The Desire for Knowledge and the Knowledge of Desire

Models of Poetic Composition in the Roman de la Rose

Guillaume de Lorris’s characterization of his poem as one in which ‘l’ars d’Amors est tote enclose’ [the art of love is fully enclosed] (RR, 38) has led critics to see it as (among other things) a medieval recasting of Ovid’s Ars amatoria. And indeed it does contain a lengthy ‘art of love’, set prominently at the centre of the poem. Though it is far from Ovid’s worldly advice about techniques of seduction and the management of erotic liaisons, Cupid’s discourse to the Lover does touch on familiar Ovidian motifs: sleepless nights, vigils at the door of the lady, the importance of careful grooming. That Guillaume de Lorris had Ovid’s famous Ars in mind, and that medieval readers would have made the association, is surely beyond dispute.

Aside from its more discreet exposition of erotic desire, however, Guillaume’s Rose also differs from the Ars amatoria in purporting to present an account of the author’s own initiation into love. Though Ovid repeatedly claims amorous experience as the basis for his teachings, it is in the Amores that he most fully casts himself in the role of amorous protagonist. And Jean de Meun, in the famous midpoint passage, draws on a passage in the Amores — Ovid’s elegy for the death of Tibullus (Am. III.

ix) — to inscribe both Guillaume and himself in a tradition of elegiac love poets. To shed light on the portrayal of poetic identity and erotic desire in both portions of the Rose, I would like to consider the importance of the Amores as an additional model for Guillaume’s art d’amors.

‘Quod [...] canas, vates, accipe’ dixit ‘opus!’

In a famous scene at the beginning of the Amores, Ovid portrays himself starting out to write a ‘serious’ epic detailing the assault of the mythical giants on Mount Olympus; but his project is derailed when Cupid intervenes to transform his hexameters into elegiac couplets:¹

par erat inferior versus — risisse Cupido

dicitur atque unum surripuisse pedem. (I.i, 3–4)

[The second verse was equal to the first — but Cupid, they say, with a laugh stole away one foot.]

When the poet complains that Cupid has no business interfering with poetry and that in any case, he has no love object of whom to write, the god swiftly remedies that lack:

lunavitque genu sinuosum fortiter arcum,

‘quod’ que ‘canas, vates, accipe’ dixit ‘opus!’ (I.i, 23–24)

[Against his knee he stoutly bent moonshape the sinuous bow, and ‘Singer,’ he said, ‘here, take that (which) will be matter for thy song!’]

A torrent of love poetry follows, interrupted only briefly when the Tragic Muse endeavours to talk the poet into abandoning his folly and writing something more edifying (III.i). He resists her appeals, however, until the final poem of the collection, where he finally takes his leave of elegy: ‘Quaere novum vatem, tenerorum mater Amorum!’ [Seek a new bard, mother of tender Loves!] (III.xv, 1).²

In a similar vein, we could see Guillaume’s narrator as starting out to write a ‘serious’ work of didactic allegory modelled on the Somnium Scipionis. Arguing for the truth-value of his dream, as is well known, Guillaume de Lorris cites Macro-bius’s commentary on the Somnium.³ In Cicero’s narrative, Scipio’s dreamer finds himself transported to the Heavens, a place filled with the entrancing music of the spheres. As he continually turns his eyes from the dazzling stars to the tiny point of the earth, Scipio is chastised: ‘ “Quaeso” inquit Africanus, “quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa ueneris?” ’ [Africanus said, ‘Tell me, how long will your thoughts be fixed down on the ground? Do you not see into what regions you have come?’] (IV: 9 [17]). In the remainder of the dream, Scipio is exhorted to turn his mind to spiritual concerns, realizing the pettiness of all earthly glory, as well as receiving personal admonitions and political prophecies. Guillaume de Lorris’s narrator also begins by going to a place that is patently outside of ‘normal reality’, to which he is attracted by another sort of natural music — exceptionally beautiful birdsong — and in which he encounters a series of allegorical figures that represent a didactic programme of courtly values.⁴ His investigation of the Garden is increasingly inflected by desire, however: not the desire for moral clarity, political knowledge or spiritual redemption, but a sensual desire stoked by the sounds, colours and textures of the Garden. And his intent gaze into the vanishing point of the crystals, unlike that of Scipio onto the earth, is never deflected; instead, he zeroes in on an even tinier point within the already miniaturized image of the Garden — the rosebud — and fixates obsessively on it. At this point the decisive intervention of Cupid turns the poem into a set of love teachings, followed by the narrative of an attempted love quest, in which the poetic narrator is no longer the detached observer but the protagonist.⁵

That this turning point takes place at the Fountain of Narcissus is a fact that has attracted more critical attention than any other aspect of the poem, and I will examine the significance of Narcissus more fully in the next chapter. For now, however, I wish to point out that in mythographic tradition the myth of Narcissus was seen as the vehicle for a moral lesson very similar to the one that Scipio absorbs in his dream. From the vantage point of the Heavens, the earth is revealed to be tiny and insignificant: ‘iam ipsa terra ita mihi parua est, ut me imperii nostri, quo quasi punctum eius attingimus, paeniteret’ [now the earth itself seemed to me so small that I was ashamed of our empire, which reaches hardly more than a point on its surface] (Som. III: 8 [16]). Turning his attention to celestial bodies, Scipio successfully relinquishes his worldly preoccupations. Narcissus, in the Neoplatonic reading elaborated by Plotinus and adapted by medieval mythographers, fails at precisely this task: enamoured of the insubstantial and ephemeral beauty of his own image, he turns his love to the creature rather than the Creator and thus condemns himself to spiritual death.⁶ To the extent that Guillaume’s opening allusion to Macrobius still operates in the reader’s memory by the time we hear about Narcissus, we might expect to read him in a similar light. The narrator’s gloss, however, identifies Narcissus as an exemplary warning to those — ladies in particular — who refuse the love not of God, but of their human admirers. Far from admonishing its readers to renounce earthly love, the story of Narcissus as it figures in the Rose teaches that such love is to be embraced. This is, after all, a poem designed to present an ‘art d’amors’, and erotic desire is the context in which its allegory unfolds. Though he begins by citing Scipio’s dream as though it were analogous to his own, it is not long before Guillaume’s narrator has left Scipio’s political, astronomical and spiritual concerns very far behind.

Even given the shift from spirit to body, however, the reader might still expect Guillaume’s poem to adhere to a familiar didactic format, in which an authority figure — in this case Cupid — offers his teachings, and then charges the narrator-protagonist with the mission of writing this up for wider circulation. At the very least, one expects the persona to wake up from his dream and reflect, however briefly, on the lessons he has learnt. This kind of trajectory is followed, for example, in the allegorical dream-visions of Alain de Lille, and the tradition continues in the thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century dits of such poets as Raoul de Houdenc, Rutebeuf, Baudouin and Jean de Condé, and Watriquet de Couvin.⁷ In the Rose, however, Cupid applies these teachings directly and pointedly to the narrator himself, who thereby becomes a player within the allegorical world. As others have noted, Guillaume’s Rose is the earliest example of a text in which the narrator’s own subjective experience is the focus of the allegory.⁸ And if this is a departure from the norm of didactic allegory, it is very much in keeping with the Ovidian model. When Ovid’s authorial persona is shot by Cupid, he becomes a fictional character in his own poetry.⁹ Cupid’s arrow fills him with desire, but also strangely splits him, so that he now makes himself exemplary, stages himself as the central figure in a book of amorous verse. Guillaume de Lorris likewise portrays himself in an effort to become the exemplary hero of a love story, and by the end of the poem he speaks as the persona of a lyric complainte.¹⁰ But since his adventure begins with a reading of edifying images — rather than with the composition of edifying poetry — we need to consider the way in which Guillaume’s text presents a model not only of writing, but also of reading inflected by desire, and leading, by implication, to the composition of amorous verse. Here too, the Ovidian example is illuminating.

‘Quo [...] ab indice doctus / conposuit casus iste poeta meos?’

Ovid complains, both in the Amores and elsewhere, that his readers failed to understand the poems as fiction. Despite the well-known mendacity of poets, with their ‘fecunda licentia’ [creative wantonness] untouched by ‘historica [...] fide’ [history’s truth] (Am. III.xii, 41–42), Ovid’s male readers have been so swayed by the eloquence with which he describes the alluring Corinna that they have fallen in love with her themselves:

quae modo dicta mea est, quam coepi solus amare,

cum multis vereor ne sit habenda mihi.

Fallimur, an nostris innotuit illa libellis?

sic erit — ingenio prostitit illa meo. (III.xii, 5–8)

[She who but now was called my own, whom I began alone to love, must now, I fear, be shared with many. Am I mistaken, or is it my books of verse that have made her known? So will it prove — ’tis my genius has made her common.]

Female readers, in turn, long to see themselves recreated as a poetic mistress, and identify with Corinna:

et multae per me nomen habere volunt;

novi aliquam, quae se circumferat esse Corinnam. (II.xvii, 28–29)

[And many a fair one wishes for glory through me; I know one who bruits it about she is Corinna.]

Careless readers also confuse the poet Ovid with his amorous protagonist. Berating the distracted poet, the Tragic Muse informs him that his confessional verses have made him the talk of the town, and that people point him out with the cry, ‘hic, hic est, quem ferus urit Amor!’ [He, he is the one fierce Love is burning up!] (III.i, 20). What the stern Muse sees as gossip, however, the love poet regards as fame; and he throws his lot in once again with the Muse of Elegy, who ‘das nostro victurum nomen amori’ [gives everlasting glory to my love] (III.i, 65). It is only later, as the jocular mood of the Amores gives way to the more urgent tone of the Tristia, that Ovid strives to distance himself from his fictional counterpart: ‘magnaque pars mendax operum est et ficta meorum: / plus sibi permisit compositore suo’ [and most of my work, unreal and fictitious, has allowed itself more licence than its author has had] (Tr. II, 355–56).

Ovid imagines the ideal reader of the Amores as one who would see his or her own experience mirrored in the poems, implying that they do provide an accurate depiction of erotic experience. At the same time, he teases that reader for believing that Ovid is writing specifically about him:

miratusque diu ‘quo’ dicat ‘ab indice doctus

conposuit casus iste poeta meos?’ (Am. II.i, 9–10)

[and, long wondering, (he will) say: ‘From what tattler has this poet learned, that he has put in verse my own mishaps?’]

In short, Ovid complains — humorously at first, and more plaintively in the post-exile writings — that his readers fail to understand the different kinds of ‘truthfulness’ or ‘realism’ contained in poetic fictions.¹¹ The poems are misread both as autobiography and as a gossipy record of the poet’s contemporaries, while the Roman authorities regard them suspiciously as incitement to immoral behaviour. In fact, the poet argues, thei...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Desire for Knowledge and the Knowledge of Desire: Models of Poetic Composition in the Roman de la Rose
• 2 Desire, Knowledge and Self-Knowledge: Narcissus and the Rose
• 3 Orpheus’s Songs (I): The Failed Ascent and the Failure of Lineage
• 4 Orpheus’s Songs (II): Poetry, the Unspoken and the Unspeakable
• 5 The Conquest of the Rose: A Virgilian ‘Art of Love’?
• Conclusion: The Lover’s Dream
• Works Cited
• Index