The Romance of the Rose, Jean de Meun

I've taken a longer hiatus than I had hoped.

I have just finished reading Jean de Meun's version of the poem. I should call it an addendum. I'm still not quite sure what to make of it.

One fair point is that he uses the allegory differently. Guillaume de Lorris is not inclined to long speeches. His allegorical characters are significant in their dress, behavior, and how they act to each other. Jean de Meun keeps these aspects somewhat, but deluges them in the very long speeches that many of his figures (like Friend, Reason, Wealth, the Old Woman, Nature, and Genius) give. They speak for long periods of time, such that it becomes difficult to remember that it isn't just the narrator speaking. This leads to delightful confusions, like being confused about why the main character hates women so.

I needn't repeat the allegorical figures, since they are largely the same as Guillaume's, with shifts in their qualities. It is similarly difficult to summarize each speech, but I will attempt to do so.

We left Guillaume (hereafter the name of the speaker) when he was despairing over never entering the castle. He gives a fair summation of the current predicament. Then Reason comes along. In this version, she presents a separate allegory, featuring such figures as Youth, Old Age, Delight, Death, Travail, and Suffering. This leads into a long discussion on love, and particularly a debate between what loves are appropriate and inappropriate. The speaker is unconvinced, though, because the pure loves that Reason speaks of are irrecoverable after the fall. He misses the point of holding such a pure love, one outside of Fortune's domain, as an ideal. After a long turn into a debate about Justice, a concept that ties into Love through Christian theology, and then to Fortune and its mishaps at greater length, Reason abandons Guillaume.

Then Friend comes, again reflecting the order of the original. After his advice of ways to reach the rosebud, he then speaks at length about courtship. His main contention, which has several other parts, is that there is no such thing as a good woman. His contradictory advice vacillates between recommending that they should be avoided, and counseling him on how to handle women when the seemingly inevitable hitch occurs. Like Reason, Friend brings to mind a postlapsarian view of life in his own allegory, with Fraud, Sin, Misfortune, Pride, Covetousness, Avarice, Envy, Poverty, Larceny, Faint Heart, and Lady Laverna (goddess of thieves) overtaking Contentment. Quite a rabble. To the fallen men and women, little bits of good advice emerge, like not restraining women, correcting them kindly in the case of jealousy, and so on, pieces of advice that might double as willful but fortunate blindnesses.

Soon they assemble an army of Love. Again, they have the trouble of False Seeming and Constrained Abstinence (who will in the course of time have the Antichrist?!?). False Seeming, while convincing them that he should be there, delivers a sermon of his own that is duplicitous, though I don't recall the details. He marches a contingent to confront Evil Tongue, and after a debate between them, they fight and Evil Tongue is killed with all of his Norman soldiers. The tongue is cut out, and he is cast into a ditch. Perhaps the only way to quell the lashes of unfair rumors is to appear more virtuous than the tongue can attack, though such seeming will be false.

Then comes Old Woman, who gives plenty of advice as a woman who had once lived the life of a lady swindling her way through men. Fair Welcome and she have a discussion, as she urges him to wear the chaplet that Guillaume has given for him. He finally does, but she seems always to be egging him on to admit of some greater affection, one of the points that I suspect the work keeps male-male sexual tendencies uneasily alongside the allegory that places those affections as towards the rosebud. As for Old Woman's speech, she loved but one man, who swindled her. In the trading of gifts for the goods (if not the affection) of love, she emphatically preaches for trickiness and wariness in all dealings between the sexes. Her ultimate caution is to not wait too long - his youth will turn to age someday.

After the speech, Fair Welcome reiterates his honorable friendship with Guillaume, and they soon meet (with Pleasant Looks accompanying). Fear, Shame, and Rebuff prevent an extended reunion, and thus the assault on the castle picks up steam. At this point, the crux of battle, arround lines 15105 and 15165, Jean de Meun makes an important disclaimer. He doesn't want to offend men, or especially women by the following account. The words are intended only to instruct. His defense of his own conduct partly foists the blame on other authors that report the same thing, and (where it is true, I suppose) begs leave to tell truth for the sake of instruction. Talk about seeking suitors.

Then Nature and Genius come after the battle, and the account is nearly done. They talk between each other for a while, Nature then gives a confession in which she admits the power that she has and its one limitation towards the sinfulness of man. Genius hears the confession, absolves her, and excommunicates all of those who work against Nature's commands to procreate, in metaphors of plowing, writing, and so on.

Finally, Guillaume takes up his place, puts a staff in a hole, breaks the barrier in the aperture, and gains access to the rosebud. And by all that, I think it means they have sex. :P

Overall Observations

It's painfully obvious now why there is not a plot summary on Wikipedia. The introduction of this book attempts one, but acknowledges its own inadequate brevity. It is just not an easy thing to summarize, especially when many of the events happen twice, allegory depends on the details imparted to its characters, and much of the second part consists of speeches that often constitute stories and tangents of their own. Only a schematic plot description is possible if one wants to spend less than an entire day on doing just that.

I can imagine that this poem was read in installments on evenings to a particularly refined audience that would have been intimate witness to the contemporary allusions of Jean de Meun or Guillaume. Each poet's rendition perhaps appealed to its own time, but certainly Jean de Meun's work was only an addition rather than an adaptation based on how it occurs after Guillaume's in manuscripts. So Guillaume's version had not lost much if any currency. Instead, much like the new Star Wars movies did to the old, perhaps Jean's version capitalized on the first one's fame while itself appearing as a product of its time, with better special effects and the same dressings of the original wrapped in somewhat worse dialogue.

This is the classic example of medieval allegory. It does not descend into a simple allegory of virtues and vices. Wealth, Love, Shame, Jealousy, Reason, and False Seeming each have their own advantages and disadvantages, light sides and dark sides and rather gray sides that emerge in their actions. No post-Capellanus lover would argue that Jealousy was unnecessary to Love. No lover would argue that Love was always fair to them. The same with Reason, the Boethian complaint against some of Reason's attempted consolations foremost in my mind when Guillaume refused Reason's advice. This is an allegory that seeks to imprint itself in the bustle of things, amongst humanity, and the need to reproach men and women both for their behavior is a needed reproach against the subjects of such allegorical realism. Of course allegory appears prior to and after this, and not nearly always in this mode. But I think that religious and political allegories both owe something to this example. I wonder what those terms are.