Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets: Poetry, Knowledge, and Desire in the ‘Roman de la Rose’ (review)

To have called this book The ‘Roman de la rose’ and the Latin Poets would have prepared the reader for a pedestrian calendar of sources rather than what Sylvia Huot gives us: a subtle and powerful analysis of the romance in Bakhtinian dialogue with major and minor predecessors and readers. ‘It was never Jean’s intent merely to produce a compilation of wisdom from the Latin authors: the distortions to which he subjects their material [. . .] are the very means by which he generates the amorous and sexual knowledge so tantalizingly promised throughout the poem’ (p. 50). Huot organizes her argument around poetic features in the early Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and the later one of Jean de Meun — authorship (Chapter 1), the characters Narcissus (2) and Orpheus (3 and 4), and Virgilian citations (5) — and relates them to the poetry of Ovid, Boethius, and Virgil, creating a conversation among five principal voices, with cameo roles for Paul and Augustine, Alain de Lille, John of Salisbury, Jean Gerson, Christine de Pizan, and anonymous medieval readers, interpolators, and illuminators. The strongest voice among the antecedents is Ovid’s, who outshines Boethius and reaches a stalemate with Virgil, as he must in a poem dedicated to the conflict between desire and prohibition. Huot traces the dominant model of poetic composition in the romance to the Amores, where Ovid’s effort to write serious epic is interrupted by Cupid, as Guillaume is distracted from his desire for the rosebud by Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis and as Jean is turned from Boethian Reason by his own version of Ovid. Narcissus is not a figure of self-love as in Freud but one of failed self-knowledge, ‘a parodic inversion of the moral trope of self-knowledge as salvific’ (p. 35), ‘the central model in Guillaume’s text’ (p. 44); as such he is replaced in Jean’s by Genius, whose ‘only real concern is to promote heterosexual consummation’ (p. 49). Orpheus, who looked back at Hell, goes from failed rescuer of Eurydice and victim of the Thracian women in the Metamorphoses to failed philosopher in Boethius to Jean’s struggling Lover, sceptical of flying too high. The same Orpheus, who turned pederast and sang the forbidden loves of Pygmalion, Myrrha, and Adonis, haunts the dialogue between Reason and the Lover, whose ‘construction and defence of his identity as lover circle endlessly round the forbidden topic of homoeroticism, while leaving it largely unacknowledged’ (p. 76). ‘The Virgilian presence implies a critique of the Lover’s sensuality and grandiosity, but one that is resisted by the Ovidian tenor of the poem’ (p. 84). ‘It is for the reader to decide whether the resulting text is a tribute to Lady Reason or to the God of Love — or possibly to Genius and his procreative imperative’ (p. 102). Huot’s argument is lively and cogent. This slim, persuasive book leaves little meaning in any claim that creative immersion in the ancients was unknown until the Renaissance. It gives us a richly polymorphous reading of the Rose.