Between Men, Mourning: Authorship, Love, and the Gift in the Roman de la Rose

And [I] beg with joined hands for mercy for poor, sorrowful Guillaume, who has behaved so well towards me; may he be helped and comforted. If I did not pray to you on his behalf, I certainly ought to pray you at least to relieve Jean and make it easier for him to write; you confer this benefit upon him (for he will be born, I prophesy it).

—Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose

Does not the most affirmative fidelity, its most concerned act of memory, involve us with an absolute past, not reducible to any form of presence: the dead being that will never itself return, never again be there, present to answer to or to share this faith?

—Jacques Derrida, Mémoires: For Paul de Man

This article is concerned with two romances--Jean de Meun's with Guillaume de Lorris and Jacques Derrida's with Paul de Man. While I do not imagine either couple as being together in an erotically romantic sense, this is an article about love between men. It is also and particularly an article about mourning as one of the functions of such romances. But it is a mourning without sadness, performed by philosophers and as philosophy. It might be read as a mourning of the very possibility of having loved, "a mourning for unlived possibilities."¹ I will argue that this mourning takes on the challenge of internalizing the work rather than the being of the lost other, mourning without introjecting what is mourned but leaving it intact in its alterity.

My discussion of these romances focuses on an instance when the writing of a text serves as a gift of mourning, forming a bond between men. First and foremost, what follows is a reading of the Roman de la Rose, a thirteenth-century French allegorical poem. According to a story contained in it, this poem was begun by Guillaume de Lorris and was both finished and greatly expanded by Jean de Meun after Guillaume's death. The poem figures its own double authorship through the unusual device of a character who tells the story's origins from inside the story itself: in the narrative, Amors, the God of Love (the speaker of the first epigraph above), mourns the death of the first author and attempts to safeguard the birth of the second. Since Guillaume's name does not appear in his part of the text, we know his name only because Jean includes it.² In fact, he does not merely include it; he enshrines Guillaume's name at the center of his own work, his continuation of the poem. In figuring its authorship thus, I argue, the Roman de la Rose offers its own unusual, immanent theory of the relationship between authors and commentators, mourners and mourned, past and present--a theory whose intelligibility rests on the possibility, indeed the necessity, of romance between men.

This article discusses the figure of a mourning Jean de Meun produced with the narrative of the Roman de la Rose. For the purposes of my argument, what is interesting about the lived choices of the writer remembered by history as Jean de Meun is not the "truth" about his sexual orientation but his decision to figure the economy of same-sex mourning in the midst of his poem's heterosexual quest.³ In what follows, I examine how Jean's rhetoric of mourning in the continuation of the Roman de la Rose thematizes the act of continuing Guillaume's work.

One of the most confusing aspects of the Roman de la Rose is the profound distrust of heterosexuality that the poem's speakers evince amid a "plot" ostensibly committed to the attainment of heterosexual union. This distrust tends to be figured through discussions of gift exchange, "don/guerredon" or...