I’ve Changed My Mind

Blogging about reading means, among other things, coming up with something to say about a book while I’m in the middle of it. And sometimes I decide by the end of the book that what I said in the middle wasn’t exactly right. And that’s just what happened with The Romance of the Rose.

In an earlier post, I said that I thought second author Jean de Meun disapproved of the lover’s pursuit of the rose. But in the end, the lover gets his way, and I think Jean does, too. But then why does Jean bring in Reason with a long sermon against getting swept away by passion? And why does he make Friend offer advice so wanton that even the young man in love thinks he’s gone too far?

The key for me lay in the characters False Seeming and Nature. False Seeming (or Hypocrisy) defends himself to the God of Love (i.e. Cupid), who reluctantly agrees to ally with him. And in this apologia, he concentrates on the advantages religious hypocrites have. In fact, sometimes it sounds like False Seeming works with no one who isn’t a monk, nun, or priest. And the hypocrisy he works in these people all goes to hide the sexual activities of people who have taken vows of celibacy. Nature’s long (all the monologues in Jean’s part are long) speech basically says that God gave sex to Nature as her way of perpetuating the species, so where would the human race be if everyone took the vow of celibacy?

Now, remembering that Jean, in order to have the knowledge of classical works that he does, must have been trained in a monastery or cathedral school, I saw the pieces fall into place. He takes (or is ready to take, or has contemplated taking) the vow of celibacy, and then he reads Guillaume de Lorris’s aborted poem, its lovely verses singing the beauty of the passion of love. And then he experiences a debate. Perhaps he actually argues with his superior, or perhaps the conflict of ideas is all in his mind. One way or another, like my hero Mortimer Adler, he came to see the authors he had studied facing off against each other in a Great Conversation. And in the grand debate he witnesses, it soon becomes clear that the answer can’t be as simple as yes or no. The arguments on both sides are too good. So Jean must find a way to reconcile the rationale for virginity that he receives from the Church and from Reason, with Nature’s lesson that sex is God’s good gift to the world. On the negative side, he has to find the golden mean between the excess of Friend’s promiscuity and the defect of Hypocrisy’s call for total abstinence from everyone. The protagonist may land a little on the excessive side in my view, but at least he gives us noncelibates a model of enjoying a rose as a blessing of God.

Layers

As I began to read The Romance of the Rose with its poetic, allegorical depiction of a young heart pierced by Cupid’s arrow, I often imagined myself a thirteenth-century scholar discovering the book. I would have to have lived in a monastery to be able to read, but my training would have made me much more able to read Latin than French, even if French were my first spoken language. The books I would have read in Latin would mostly concern the Christian faith: the Vulgate Bible, the prayers and texts of the mass and offices, devotionals, theological works, and so on. I would also have read Latin treatises on the mathematical arts; perhaps I would have learned music from Guido of Arezzo. And I might have read some of the orations of Cicero or some other classical authors.

But then I come across a poem in French – the language of cooking and cleaning, the language I argued with my brother in while we were growing up – and this French poem speaks of a passion that consumes the thoughts, overthrows reason, and brings both the best and the worst possible emotions. What do I make of it? I might be tempted to forsake my vows. I might scoff at it as so much nonsense. But either way, I’m sure I would be fascinated.

Then the real me realized that my imagined scenario was exactly that of Jean de Meun. Original poet Guillaume de Lorris never finished his romance, so Jean undertook to complete it about forty years after it was begun. And Jean was clearly educated in Latin classics. (See the previous post.) So then I thought about a reader from the next century coming across the dual-authored work and what he might have made of it. Guillaume’s part would have led him to Jean, and Jean’s part might have sent him back to Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy or to Ovid or Homer.

Or maybe I’m Shakespeare reading the work three hundred years later. I come across these lines from Reason:

Love is hostile peace and loving hatred, disloyal loyalty and loyal disloyalty; it is confident fear and desperate hope, demented reason and reasonable madness. . . . It is a most healthful sickness and a most sickly health.

I might then decide to write a play (based on yet other sources) in which I give the male lead these lines about love:

Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O any thing, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!

Or maybe I’m a twenty-first century reader trying to work his way back through historical patterns of thought by reading the classics, and peel back the onion skins one by one: Shakespeare, Jean De Meun, Boethius, the Bible, Cicero, Plato. This would make a good book itself: the story of an archeologist of literature who uncovers past civilizations by digging through layer upon layer, each later culture built on the ruined foundations of the one prior.

Or maybe you are the protagonist of the story. If any of my poor accounts lead you to a good book, then your journey of archeological discovery has begun.

Romancing the Rose

I first learned about The Romance of the Rose in music history class back in college. And so now of course I’m reading it. It only took me thirty-eight years to get around to it.

This long allegorical poem was begun by Guillaume de Lorris in the early 1200s. A half a century or so later, a fellow named Jean de Meun picked it up and did something like finish it. The plot, which runs seamlessly from one author to another, concerns a first-person, male narrator who wanders to the Garden of Pleasure and falls in love there with a rosebud that he wishes to pluck. Both authors promise to explain what it all means, and neither ever follows through, but we all know that deflowering represents deflowering.

In her preface, the editor proffers the puzzle of whether the two authors approve of the lover’s pursuit of his goal, disapprove of the young man’s quest, or disagree on the commendability of their joint protagonist’s obsession with the rose. As she points out, the narrator’s voice, which always at least partially masks an author’s, is in turn mostly hidden by still other voices in this book. Each author brings in several allegorical characters who speak quite a bit and occupy almost all of the poem’s lines. So which character or characters does each author identify with? Which presents the point of view to which the authors are sympathetic?

Well, I don’t know the answer. I’m no trained expert in medieval hermeneutics, and I’m only halfway through the book. But I have an opinion, and of course I’m going to share it. In other words, I’m not a medieval scholar, but I play one on the internet.

My extremely interesting, well-founded, and highly plausible hypothesis begins with a clear distinction of style between the two poets. If the plot flows seamlessly and the authors’ sympathies lie hidden in the Pleasure Garden’s grass, their respective tones are clearly differentiated. Guillaume is concerned with the psychological dynamic of wooing a rose, while Jean spends his efforts intellectually exploring the ethical issues involved. The former author introduces a parade of allegorical figures representing the feelings and thoughts of a young man and woman as their acquaintance, shall we say, develops: Love and Reason, Fair Welcome and Rebuff, Courtesy and Shame all step apace into and out of the dance of courtship. The latter, on the other hand, gives a handful of the characters one long chapter each in which, one by one, they present their advice to the young lover. And Jean fills these sermons with classical allusions, revealing even more clearly his scholarly approach.

Jean de Meun’s bookish, philosophical view of the matter suggests to me that he disapproves of the romance. Reason, for instance, gives the young lover a long lesson on the perils of passion and the necessity of basing a relationship between a man and a woman on piety and purpose. It is so convincing, so full of good arguments drawn from Plato, Boethius, and others, that Jean must have believed it all when he learned it in the first place. Two details seal the deal for me. First, Reason mentions that someone ought to translate Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy into French so modern laypersons can benefit from it, and the editor tells us that Jean himself executed that translation a few years later. So surely Reason speaks for Jean. And second, when Friend gives his advice simply to bribe and lie to the rose and everyone surrounding her until the young man gets what he wants, the lover himself balks and calls for rational, virtuous discourse with both humans and plants.

So at this point I have an idea what this classic poem is about, what it might mean, and what the authors thought readers should get out of it. Now I just have to go back and reread that chapter in my old textbook to see what any of it has to do with medieval music.