The Rose and Geryon: The Poetics of Fraud and Violence in Jean de Meun and Dante

2. From Jean De Meun’s Multidiscursive Dispersal to Dante’s System of Sins

TWO  FromJeanDeMeun’sMultidiscursive DispersaltoDante’sSystemofSins Car li clers voit en escripture / Avoec les sciences prouvees, / Raisonnables et demoustrees, / Touz maus dont l’en se doit retraire / Et touz les biens que l’en puet faire. / Les choses voit dou monde escriptes / Si comme el sont faites et dites; / Il voit es anciennes vies / De touz vilains les vilanies / Et touz les faiz des cortois hommes / Et des cortoisies les sommes. {Romance of the Rose 18644–54} The epigraph reads: “In the things that are written, clerks see, with proved, reasonable and demonstrated information, all the evil from which one should withdraw and all the good things that one can do. He sees all things of the world written down, just as they are done and said. In the lives of the ancients he sees the villainies of the villains, all the deeds of the courteous men, the summae of all courtesies.” This passage is inserted in Nature’s discourse on the nobility proper to philosophers and aristocrats, nobility that should also characterize clerks, who deserve honor if they follow the path of virtue described in the books they read. 49 50    From Jean to Dante The value of this opening quote lies in Jean’s outline of a clerk’s relationship to his sources, a description that indirectly applies to him as well, and that we can also extend to Dante. In learning (or teaching others) about the evils to be shunned and the good deeds to be done, a clerk’s first impulse and duty is to turn to books. Not to the world out there, built on deceptive perceptions and misleading appearances, but to books. The saeculum is better understood when it has already been described, analyzed, and explained in written texts, which have the merit of offering (and preserving) proofs, rational arguments, and verified information about society. There is nothing in the secular world that is not recorded by writers (historians? theologians ? moralists? poets? translators?—these categorizations lack here), who note down not only how things happen but also how they are said. Both history and orality are subsumed and, at the same time, transcended by the act of writing; they are only the raw materials of it, serving one, overarching purpose: that of instructing potential/future readers. The word “all,” occurring four times in this short quote, emphasizes the reliability of the written sources wherein information and examples of good and evil seem to have the value of rules carved in stone. The act of (clerkly) reading logically postdates the one of historical or moral writing, but although the passage implicitly refers to the past, it does not contain a single verb in the past. This strange collapsing of the temporal distance can be an indication of Jean’s own participation in the present of writing—he reads but at the same time also writes moral texts. More likely, however, this avoidance of the past tense portrays him as reading moral texts that had been written or were still being written during his own time. Either way, what is undisputable is that the entire discussion about a clerk’s necessary manipulation of written sources gravitates around the two poles of ethics: good and evil. In learning and teaching about morality, Jean indirectly depicts himself as supremely addicted to (near) past and contemporary ethical texts. The word sommes is also intriguing, since semantically it points in two different directions: to bookish summaries of noble deeds from the past, but also to the cultural context contemporary with Jean. Dahlberg’s translation of the word as “summae” endorses the latter interpretation, which I myself favor because it testifies to Jean’s familiarity with this fundamental conceptual construction of morality that was the summa of vices and virtues . Another important indication is the one regarding the use of ancient lives that can serve as behavioral examples for readers. I know of no other From Jean to Dante    51 vernacular text written before Jean’s Rose that spells out the procedure of didactic writing so clearly. This description bespeaks the poet’s acquaintance with the methodology of the texts on vices and virtues, a methodology that he himself (and then Dante) will follow, for what Jean is actually giving us here is a sketch of his techné as a moral writer, as an educator. He observes the world and human nature, but before writing about them to instruct others...