Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory by Suzanne Conklin Akbari (review)

REVIEWS Suzanne Conklin Akbari. Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Pp. x, 354. $65.00. This learned, stimulating, and uncommonly well-written book pursues an essentially new approach to medieval literary allegory through the application of medieval optical theory. The book’s title alludes to a vocabulary typical of medieval writers who speak of allegory. Since to read an allegory is to see beneath or around or through or under or behind what first meets the eye, it proves highly instructive to examine in some detail what medieval scientists and their popularizers, some of whom were widely read poets like Jean de Meun and Dante, actually believed about the mechanics and physiology of human vision. There is, of course, a fairly large body of medieval optical writings, which the author succinctly reviews in her second chapter. The ideas were varied. Was the human eye a mirror or a lamp? For Akbari the key distinction is between optical theories tending toward ‘‘intromission’’ on the one hand and ‘‘extramission’’ on the other: ‘‘Although both mechanisms facilitate the purpose of vision—the meeting of subject and object —intromission stresses the primacy of the object, extramission the primacy of the subject’’ (pp. 23–24). As this statement implies, ‘‘subjectivity ’’ is among the author’s principal interests. From the point of view of modern science, the most impressive of medieval opticians was the Arab Alhazen, whose book is explicitly cited by Jean de Meun (under the suggestive title Livre des Regards, and whose technical vocabulary remains standard among ophthalmologists still). It is impossible in brief compass to suggest either the copiousness or the complexity of the book’s argument. If the implicit attempt to formulate a general field theory of medieval allegory is not finally successful , neither is it less successful than some previous explicit attempts. Medieval literary allegory is too varied in its compositional ambition, and above all in its artistic achievement, to invite any but a capacious and rhetorical definition. In my opinion, that of Isidore of Seville remains the most satisfactory. Allegory is alieniloquium, saying one thing PAGE 271 271 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:04:54 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER to mean another. The most urgent task of literary historians with regard to medieval allegory is in my opinion not the synoptic panorama, in which the most devilish and interesting details of individual works invariably fade away in horizontal depth, but the specific and if necessary even microscopic examination that can, when deftly performed, genuinely advance our understanding of ever much studied poems. Professor Akbari has identified a fruitful ‘‘optical’’ species of the allegorical genus, and the most important parts of her important book are her specific ‘‘readings’’ of important works in several vernaculars. The authors of the Roman de la Rose are the first and most apt of the important vernacular writers (the others being Dante and Chaucer) subjected to Akbari’s illuminating lens. Guillaume de Lorris placed at the very center of his garden an Ovidian emblem of ambiguous vision, the mirror of Narcissus. That Jean de Meun fully appreciated that Guillaume had reshaped his Ovid to construct an allegory of the operations of the human eye is attested to by his exegetical reprise of the garden setting at the end of his poem. At the moment when Jean sees through the veil of the poem inherited from his predecessor, it is revealed to be not a veil but a retina. The Roman de la Rose is the indispensable text for any attempt at a synoptic account of late medieval literary allegory, and the two chapters devoted to it in Seeing Through the Veil are the best and strongest parts of a good and strong book. The analysis devoted to Dante and to Chaucer , both of whom claim two chapters, while no less learned or spirited, perhaps inevitably lacks the thickness of the discussion of the French allegorists. The fifth chapter takes up the Vita nuova and the Convivio, the sixth the Commedia. Many dantisti have attempted to describe an artistic trajectory that in one way or another reveals the mature poet of the Commedia moving...