39. Alan M. F. Gunn, The Mirror of Love: A Reinterpretation of The Romance of the Rose
This long, but never tedious, book has the charm of being written by an enthusiast. Professor Gunn loves the Roman de la Rose. The highest praises given to it by previous critics are for him wholly inadequate: we are all mere enemies and traducers of Jean de Meun. For in Professor Gunn's view the second part of the Roman has not only incidental merit but true poetic unity.
His first proof of this thesis, from medieval and Renaissance testimony, is by far the weakest. Professor Gunn has no difficulty in showing that the Roman was regarded, in the centuries that immediately followed its appearance, as a work on a single subject, Love. But in some sense or other no one would deny this: of course it is about Love, as the Metamorphoses are about shape-changing or Burton's Anatomy is about melancholy. The question is whether it has true organic unity. Again, Professor Gunn shows that in early times it was not accused of lacking unity. But surely it is very possible that a medieval book might in fact commit that fault though no medieval critic complained of it.
The second argument is much stronger. Professor Gunn maintains (in my opinion successfully) that all the apparent ramblings of Jean de Meun conform to the rules of amplificatio. His various topics sprout out of his main theme in such manner and such profusion as the rhetoricians commended. Critics who have complained of them as irrelevancies were not reading his work ‘with the same spirit that its author writ’. As one of those critics I plead guilty. For certainly, as Professor Gunn says, ‘Every artist deserves to be judged first by the standards of his own time’ (p. 141). There is a profound difference between Dante's work and Jean de Meun's when both are obeying the rhetoricians. We hardly need to notice – we certainly do not need to plead in extenuation – Dante's obedience to local and temporary rules, because his work is, in addition, obedient to rules of a far subtler and more permanent kind. Two women, the one beautiful and the other absurdly dressed, may be in the fashion. We think of fashion when we look at the second because it is her only excuse. When we are looking at the first her conformity to fashion hardly seems to matter.
Of this distinction Professor Gunn is, of course, perfectly well aware. That is why, having shown Jean de Meun's construction to be satisfactory by the standard of medieval rhetoric, he proceeds to argue that it is also satisfactory by a far higher standard; that it has a unity which is ‘fundamental and not simply rhetorical’ (p. 141).
We are now at the heart of the book and Professor Gunn writes with a fervour and exaltation which will arouse suspicion in some but which I myself have found curiously impressive. In these glowing pages, seeing the Roman through Professor Gunn's eyes, I certainly feel the presence of an ‘esemplastic’ imagination imposing unity on a great wealth of attractive material. What is hard to decide is whose imagination it is. Are we being shown at last the poetic whole which Jean de Meun made out of chaotic experience, or are we being shown the poetic whole which Professor Gunn has made out of the chaotic Roman? Either way, it is excellent reading: but as scholars we should like the question to be settled. At the same time it is not easy to see how the methods of scholarship can settle it.
At first sight the solution may seem easy. On p. 151 Professor Gunn says that in certain passages of the Roman hitherto suspected of irrelevance, ‘there is no part which is not related in some way to the theme of love’. The words ‘in some way’ are ominous. Surely it is not enough that the parts of a poem should be in some way related to the main theme. The question is, in what way? We may then turn back to our text and find that the various topics are actually related like this. At 18488 we are reading about Dame Abonde. This subject arose out of illusions in general, which arose out of optical illusions in particular, which arose out of optics, which arose out of rainbows, which arose out of meteorology in general, which resumed (after a discussion on Free Will, 17101–874) an account of planets, which arose out of a general account of Nature, which was part of Nature's confession, which is relevant to the main theme because Nature is concerned with procreation, and an instance of procreation might occur if the Amant won the Rose.
Thus, if we go back a very long way, we shall find ourselves on the main road, without anywhere proceeding per saltum. To which one is naturally tempted to reply that, if we are satisfied with a unity dependent on such connexions, then Jane Austen's Miss Bates has long been shamefully misrepresented as a type of irrelevant garrulity. In her speech (Emma cap. xix) beginning ‘Thank you. You are so kind’ everything is related to the main theme – Jane Fairfax's letter – far more closely than most of Nature's topics seem to be related to the theme of Love.
But Professor Gunn's withers would be quite unwrung by such criticism. From his point of view our abstract has left out all the real links in the passage under consideration. First of all (and here I agree with him) we have left out the grand connexion between the whole figure of Nature and Jean de Meun's theme of fertility, the ‘Philosophy of Plentitude’, which is dealt with in a fine chapter. But Professor Gunn wants to go much further than that. He sees the poem as a unity because he sees all sorts of implicit links which Jean de Meun has not put into words at all. The rainbows (18021–44) may be superficially and verbally linked as my abstract shows; to Professor Gunn they recall ‘the familiar bow and arrows of Amors’ (p. 266). The passage on optics reveals its true (implicit) relevance when it includes an account of mirrors (18045–208) and so becomes ‘expressive of what is most central and profound in the poet's thought’ (p. 267); for of course the whole Roman is le mirouer aus Amoreus (10651) and the original Amant had first seen the rosebed in a mirror (1615). In the same way a passage on alchemy (16083–148) is highly relevant because the Philosopher's Stone is gold, which begets gold and is thus (like the lover) concerned with begetting, perpetuation, and ‘the perfecting of Nature's work’ (p. 263).
It is needless to multiply examples. Professor Gunn's case depends mainly on connexions which Jean de Meun has never mentioned. It is idle to ask Professor Gunn to prove his case ‘from the text’ in the ordinary sense. He is not pretending that the words of the text prove it: he is claiming, if I understand him rightly, that the text as a whole will show this sort of implicit or occult unity if read by a sufficiently alert and suggestive mind. For he believes that Jean de Meun ‘makes use of suggestion and indirection, of symbolic rather than logical reference, of foreshadowing and repetition and variation and contrast of significant images and apologies’: in fact, of a method rather like that of the symphony (pp. 299–300).
It is easy to foresee how a book like this may be rejected with contempt by a certain kind of scholar, or swallowed whole (and turned into a public nuisance for a year or two) by some literary man writing in an unscholarly but ‘highbrow’ weekly. It would be better that judgment should be suspended till we have all had time to re-read the Roman in its entirety (nothing less would be fair) and to consider how far Professor Gunn's conception of Jean de Meun is consistent with all we know about medieval habits of composition and even of the medieval mind in general. Could Jean really have been quite so like a modern symboliste as Professor Gunn's theory demands? Could that theory be propounded in Old French or medieval Latin and made intelligible to Jean de Meun himself? Perhaps Professor Gunn would think such a test worthless: for he very honestly admits (p. 312) that the poet ‘can hardly, indeed, be proved’ to have used this symphonic method consciously.
Of Jean de Meun's ideas, as distinct from his technique, Professor Gunn is aware that his view will seem ‘strangely un-medieval – according to the usual modern view’ (p. 255). Historically considered, the protests against virginity and praises of generation uttered by Nature and Genius might be regarded as a magnificent hypertrophe of similar speeches given to Cupid in Latin epithalamiums. Most of us would go further and say that Jean, excusing such sentiments by their obvious dramatic propriety, pours into them his real delight in the spectacle of Nature's fecundity. Many of us would go a stage further still and say that, through dramatic hyperboles not perfectly serious, he is seriously pleading (against extreme ascetics) the view of Bernardus Silvester that the use of our procreative powers is commodus if it is quando, qualis, quantus oportet (De Mundi Universitate. Metr. xiv.155).
But when we have done all that, we shall still be very far from Professor Gunn. Unless I misunderstand him, he attributes to Jean de Meun as wholly serious the doctrine that copulation is (1) ‘the chief duty of every human being’ (p. 488); (2) ‘the chief concern of God’ (p. 487); obligatory on pain of damnation (p. 258); and (4) ‘the chief manifestation of the goodness, the love, the overflowing bounty of God’ (p. 495). (This last, if taken seriously, would mean that it was a greater manifestation of divine bounty than the Passion.)
That any man of European stock could have thought thus before the twentieth century is to me incredible. Such ideas seem to me to belong wholly to a modern monistic outlook in which biological values are primary. But Jean de Meun is not monistic: his Nature herself tells us that there is a part in every man which is not of her making (19055 et seq.). I think he would have been very startled to hear Professor Gunn calling Nature (p. 498) and even Genius (p. 501) ‘emanations’ of God, and puzzled at a phrase like ‘the decision of life itself, insisting upon its own perpetuation’ (p. 494). I am not arguing that Professor Gunn is wrong; I am trying to make clear what very drastic revolutions in the history of ideas will be necessary if he should be right.
There is, however, one point on which I think him almost certainly wrong. Quoting (on page 221) Bernardus (II Metrum xiv) he treats as unacceptable the view that the genitals come last in the order of exposition because Bernardus placed them lowest in a hierarchical order. But surely this becomes quite clear if we glance back at Prosa xiii, where the parallel between the macrocosmic and microcosmic hierarchies is fully drawn out and regerentur partes infimae answers to terrena gubernantur?
Some of Professor Gunn's best work is done in answer to the charge that Jean de Meun has no final and coherent view of love, sketching the ‘period of ferment’ (p. 476) in which he lived and exhibiting his ‘plural-mindedness’ (p. 479) or ‘systematic pluralism’ (p. 480). I am not certain how far the author means to carry this view. In chapter xxiv it would seem that the pluralism extends to an unresolved tension between the assertions of Raison on the one hand and those of Nature and Genius on the other: in the preceding chapter Professor Gunn comes near to saying (p. 495) that on one subject, ‘the value of human love’ (as understood by Nature and Genius) Jean de Meun had really made up his mind.
No one who is interested in the subject can afford to neglect this book; its quality can hardly be represented in a review. If Professor Gunn has hold of a truth at all, it is a very novel truth: we run the risk of losing it if we do not listen to him with sympathy and even with a certain (temporary) readiness to meet him halfway. Then, of course, we must go back to the text, and the whole text. He has offered us a new interpretation of an old score; the only test is to try playing it that way.