The Lovers’ Glass: Nature’s Discourse on Optics and the Optical Design of the Romance of the Rose

PATRICIA J. EBERLE The Lovers' Glass: Nature's Discourse on Optics and the Optical Design of the Romance ofthe Rose Nature's discourse on optics has long been regarded as the most notorious digression in a poem noted for its digressive tendencies. Jean de Meun's continuation of the Romance of the Rose does not simply continue the story ofthe Lover's quest for the Rose as begun by Guillaume de Lorris. A continuation based on Guillaume's narrative plan bringing the story to its natural conclusion could be briefly and simply composed, as was one anonymous seventy-eight line conclusion to the Romance. However , in Jean's poem, after more than seventeen thousand lines, the Lover is still where Guillaume left him, outside the castle of Jealousy, languishing in despair of ever attaining the Rose. Once Venus launches her firebrand at the castle, the action goes forward very quickly, butuntil that point Jean's poem can hardly be said to continue the action of the story at all. Talk replaces action. A number of allegorical figures interrupt the story for thousands of lines at a time while they offer discourses that are supposed to provide the Lover with counsel on the art of love. Although the Lover is seeking an art of love that will reveal the 'shortest path' ('le plus brief chemin,' t0,032)1 to the Rose, the discourses in the second part of the Romance are 'digressions' in the etymological sense of the word: they divert the Lover from the direct pursuit ofhis chosen path and they use love as a point of departure for a series of excurses on a bewildering variety of other topics. The excursus on optics is a striking example of the digressive tendency of Jean's poem as a whole. It is a digression enclosed in a series of digressions that make up the discourse of a feminine and very loquacious Lady Nature. Nature's discourse interrupts the story at a turningpoint in the action, just as the barons of the God of Love have taken up arms in theLover's cause and are preparing to storm the castle ofJealousy and take the Rose. Cast in the form of a complaint, generally patterned after the Complaint ofNature of Alain de Lille, her discourse is indirectly connected to the action of the poem. Her complaint about the failure of humans to follow the law of nature that enjoins them to procreate and multiply the species serves as a roundabout way of justifying her command to her priestGenius to bring aid and comfort to the barons ofLove. Nature herself takes no direct part in the action, however, and her discourse does not deal directly with the subject oflove. The command to UTQ, Volume XLVI, Number ) ,Spring 1977 242 PATRICIA J. EBERLE Genius that concludes her complaint fills only eighty-three lines, while the justification that prefaces the command is a lengthy discourse ofover two thousand lines. · The main subject of Nature's discourse is the divinely established order over which she presides, the order that humans violate, in her view, when they fail to follow the law of nature. She begins her discourse with an account of the divinely established pattern of the heavens, but the account of the heavens that Jean gives toNature can hardly be viewed as itself a model of order. Jean's Nature expands the twenty lines on the order of the heavens in the Complaint of Nature (Prosa IV, 35- 55) with a series of digressions that have no precedent in Alain de Lille. The digression on optics forms part of a digression on rainbows that is part of a digression on meteorology that is part of the main subject of her discourse: the order of the heavenly bodies and their influence on the sublunary world of man. Her ostensible purpose is to justify her command to Genius by demonstrating two points: first, that the law ofnature she invokes is part of the ordermanifest in the heavens; and, second, that heavenly influences that affect the sublunary realm do not prevent humans from following this law if they will. As this brief summary suggests, the digressions are not without...