Over the past several decades, Anglo-American medievalists have come to expect a new monograph on the Romance of the Rose every five years or so. Sylvia Huot's contributions to this rich critical tradition are particularly indispensable. They include the volume reviewed here, an earlier one on transmission and reception (thankfully now reissued in paperback), and a volume of essays coedited with Kevin Brownlee. [1] One might imagine that Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets would constitute a summation of Huot's decades of work on the Rose, and indeed it offers just that: an authoritative contribution to current critical debates on the poem's aesthetic, intellectual, and ideological worlds. At just over one hundred pages, it is dwarfed by the Rose itself; and yet Huot manages to be both comprehensive and detailed in her analysis. I can confidently, indeed urgently, recommend the book to readers well acquainted with the Rose and, with certain provisos, to less expert readers as well. The latter will find in it a rich and original, if somewhat dense and elliptical, examination of some of the major interpretive issues associated with the text. The former will value it for the sharp focus it brings to the Rose's principal Latin sources (Ovid, Virgil, Boethius, and Alain de Lille) and to the ways in which the poem's constructions of sexual and intellectual desire emerge out of, and are greatly complicated by, a web of intertextual references. Though Huot wears her theoretical scholarship lightly (Lacan alone is cited, and only in passing), the volume is replete with telltale signs of a fruitful, but far from servile, engagement with poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory. Since these references (like many of the Latin allusions in the Rose) remain largely implicit, I will not attempt to tease them out here but will instead account for the broad lines of the argument and will point to some of the ways in which Huot expands our understanding of a text that is notorious for eluding critical mastery. Huot begins, appropriately enough, with a discussion of the Rose's self-conscious attempts both to totalize love and knowledge and to defer sexual fulfillment and intellectual coherence. The poem "freely acknowledges its own impossibility" (1) by suggesting at one moment that it encloses the art of love and at another that love cannot possibly be contained in a book. Huot argues that the poem's erotic quest and the desire for knowledge that accompanies it are fueled by tensions between claims of rational totalization and the overt failure of these claims. Just as love cannot be captured in "straightforward, expository language," so the "discourse of desire and sexuality emerges as a deflection from or resistance to some other discourse; or as a kind of undertow, hidden but still discernible in what passes overtly for a discussion of some wholly other topic" (4). The entanglement of desire and resistance, reference and play is most fully developed by Jean de Meun, for whom "the poetic discourse of desire, pain and pleasure [is] something nebulous, produced almost as if by accident from the cross-currents of other discourses" (4). Yet both authors suggest that knowledge is to be accessed not only through explicit references but also through latent meanings and readers' affective, intellectual, and somatic responses to the text: "The kaleidoscopic discourses of the Rose are infiltrated by something intangible, an unspoken but powerful energy that circulates through the poem: the ineffable force of desire, struggling to release itself as the drive to jouissance, and holding out the promise of a different sort of knowledge altogether--a knowledge accessed not through language, but through the body" (5). As Huot convincingly argues in the book's five chapters, the quest for knowledge and pleasure is mediated through an "often unacknowledged web of allusions to prior texts" (5). Chapter One focuses on two of these: a discourse of desire that develops through references to Ovid's Amores and a "Boethian model of philosophical discourse as a resistance to or deflection from a discourse of desire" (5). If Ovid encourages his readers simultaneously to identify with the Amores's fictional lover and to understand love itself as a fictional performance, Guillaume de Lorris's Lover is overly identified with his poetic persona and misreads the Rose as a real object of desire. Narcissus's fountain further complicates the problem of identification, allowing the Lover to glimpse himself as a character in an allegorical poem. When the Lover's desires for sexual and narrative completion are frustrated, however, we come to understand that he lacks the ironic distance that accompanies emotional and sexual identification in the Amores. By contrast, Jean de Meun's Reason, like Boethius's Philosophy, proposes the repudiation of earthly desires in favor of a rational pursuit of wisdom. When the Lover repudiates Reason herself, he nonetheless promises to undertake a version of the intellectual project she recommends once he has recovered from love's wounds. In undoing "Boethius's undoing of the Ovidian model" (24), Jean redirects the poem toward jouissance; at the same time, he suggests that the love quest, once completed, will prepare the ground for a serious intellectual study. It is difficult to know whether the Rose is the story of the love quest or the scientific treatise that is meant to follow it. What is clear is that it is "the Rose, rather than the Rose, that inflames the young Jean's desires" (25). Unlike Guillaume, Jean approaches the art of love "through an intellectual knowledge of love's 'sciance,' rather than a bodily knowledge of erotic discourse" (26). Chapter Two examines the myth of Narcissus and focuses specifically on the ways in which Ovidian and Boethian allusions develop links between desire, knowledge, and self-knowledge. Whereas Boethius describes self-knowledge as a spiritual link between humanity and God, the Ovid of the Ars amatoria emphasizes instead bodily forms of self- knowledge that can be used to seduce a beloved object. Tensions between spiritual and somatic self-knowledge pervade the Rose, notably in the discourses of Reason and Nature (who are intimately tied to Boethius's Philosophy) and Ami and La Vieille (who are profoundly Ovidian characters). Reason and Nature urge the Lover to free himself from bondage to love and to achieve the spiritual self- knowledge Narcissus lacked. The Lover's refusal to heed their advice "replays not only Narcissus's initial misrecognition, but also his irrational persistence in love even after he has, in fact, recognized himself" (35). The Lover also embraces an Ovidian eroticism in which Narcissus's tragic fate allows us to understand that "[e]rotic desire must, by its very nature, be routed through an 'other' with whom one can experience the bliss of contact, without suffering the permanence of a true union that would put an end both to the prolongation of desire, and to the prospect of repeated, if always ephemeral, pleasures" (36). The Rose promises to guide the Lover toward claiming his beloved Rose, thereby allowing him to avoid Narcissus's fate; it also claims to offer the reader the knowledge needed to do the same. The deferral of sexual consummation and textual closure does not invalidate this quest but instead demonstrates that desire is predicated upon the anticipation of grasping something that remains perpetually out of reach. If, for Guillaume, the Rose remains an unattainable fantasy, for Jean the poetic evocation of the desire to reach the Rose inaugurates an intellectual quest and the depiction of that quest in poetry. Chapters Three and Four are devoted to the figure of Orpheus and the characters whose stories he narrates in the Metamorphoses: Pygmalion, Myrrha, and Adonis. Though Orpheus is mentioned only once in the Rose (in Genius's discourse), Huot argues that there are indirect references to him in Reason's discourse, specifically to Boethius's evocation of Orpheus as emblematic of "the destructive nature of sensual desire" (56). Reason encourages the Lover not to glance backward toward fatal love (as Orpheus did while leading Eurydice out of the Underworld), but instead to turn his gaze heavenward, toward wisdom and enlightenment. In rejecting her advice, he both imitates Orpheus's example (by yielding to earthly desire) and repudiates it (by clinging to heterosexual love and eschewing Orphic pederasty). The association of Orpheus with homoeroticism derives principally from Alain de Lille and is evoked implicitly by Reason and explicitly by Genius. Reason proclaims that the Lover must not behave like those men who spurn women (Narcissus, but also, implicitly, Orpheus, who adopts the love of boys after losing Eurydice); at the same time, she urges him to flee erotic love altogether. Genius warns men not to be taken in by scheming women but also argues that men must consent to marry and produce progeny. These contradictions are not resolved but are instead passed over, as the Lover pursues his quest for sexual consummation, in which the problem of deviant sexuality continues to loom large. In Chapter Five, Huot turns to the ambivalent treatment of women in the Rose as it is mediated through citations of Virgil. Noting that Virgilian allusions bracket the battle for the Rose, the three Orphic tales, and the discourses of Nature and Genius, she argues that "the symmetrical structure created by these citations both questions and celebrates the Lover's success" (84). References to Hercules's battle with Cacus propel the lover "through the series of Orphic myths that stand between him and the Rose." A series of citations of the Eclogues "first raises the troubling spectre of feminine betrayal, but then defuses that danger with the affirmation of love triumphant" (84). Though these allusions suggest a critique of Ovidian love poetry, Huot is quick to argue that some of them are Ovidian citations in disguise and that Jean often subjects his Virgilian sources to Ovidian misreadings. Thus if La Vieille, like Virgil, tells Dido's story sympathetically, she also promises to train young women to extract revenge on Dido's behalf. Similarly, though the Rose is a "Lavinian" object in that she is "a passive prize" claimed by the victor in a "heroic battle," it remains unclear how a man can ever know what kind of prize he has received if women are "fundamentally mendacious and ever-changing creatures" (86). The Virgilian allusion to Hercules and Cacus at the moment of the plucking of the Rose marks "a resolution of sorts": "Hercules slew the monster and recovered his cattle; Aeneas defeated Turnus and won Lavinia in marriage; the Lover routs Dangier and plucks the Rose. But any real sense of closure is possible only in a superficial reading. Even if the battle with Cacus is accepted as a mock-heroic analogy for the rambunctiousness of the youthful sex drive, there is a further problem with the Lover's chosen model" (88-89). Indeed, Hercules was destroyed by the desires of a jealous, impetuous woman, Deianira, and is therefore a profoundly ambiguous hero. Such ambiguities pervade the Rose and simultaneously frustrate, complicate, and stoke desire. How, Huot asks in her conclusion, should we understand the contradictions of a poem that is simultaneously "irrational," "didactic," and "consolatory" (99)? She dismisses rigid moral interpretations of the Rose, arguing that it is not simply a poetic fiction that, like the Ovide moralisé, urges the reader to discover the "intellectually and spiritually edifying truths" (100) hidden beneath a layer of deception. Under Cupid's tutelage, Jean de Meun seeks "less to strip away layers of illusion than to provide an alluring screen, from within which there emerges a discourse operating in direct opposition to Reason and her movement from body to spirit" (100). Indeed, Huot argues, it is possible to read the poem in a very different way--not as a Christian moral allegory but as a work of pornography depicting, in veiled terms, a nocturnal emission, that is an act that flies in the face of Genius's advice and that links the poem once again to Narcissistic and Orphic perversity. Ultimately, the reader must decide whether the Rose is "a tribute to Lady Reason or to the God of Love--or possibly to Genius and his procreative imperative. And readers have been debating this very point virtually ever since the poem was written" (102). It is difficult to know whether the Lover should be thought of as "a Narcissus who never admits that the Rose is only a fictional manifestation of ideals within his own imagination; an Orpheus unconcerned with definitive possession or knowledge of the poetically constituted love object; an Adonis who willfully believes the lies of women; a Pygmalion whose erotic art participates in a textual genealogy of poetic fictions, rather than a lineage of sexual deviancy" (103). However he is understood, "masculine jouissance lurks at the inaccessible exterior of poetic fictions, of idealized images, of spiritual sublimation" (103). There is perhaps nothing terribly radical about Huot's emphasis on the sexual and semantic indeterminacy of the Rose; indeed, contemporary critics have largely abandoned the tendentious claims of previous scholars who sought to resolve the text's ambivalence by seeing one or another of the poem's major discourses as its master narrative. What is altogether remarkable about Huot's approach is her deft tracking of literary allusions and her ability to link those allusions to the poem's polyphonic texture and its knottiest aesthetic, conceptual, and ideological problems. In this and other regards, Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets deserves to take its place alongside Alastair Minnis's Magister Amoris as one of the most illuminating and comprehensive monographs on the Rose to emerge in the last twenty years. [2] A brief comparison with Magister Amoris will allow me to offer the one substantive critique of Huot's book that I am able to summon up. Though Minnis focuses more narrowly on Ovidian sources, his volume is three times as long as Huot's; of the two books, it is also (in my opinion) the more pleasurable to read. As often as I found myself marveling at Huot's subtlety and concision, I also found myself occasionally longing for a more explanatory, breezier style. Readers who are not fully conversant with the Rose, its sources, and its critical tradition may need help in navigating some of the denser passages in this book. It will certainly repay their efforts, however, and it would be churlish of me to belabor this criticism. The value of Huot's new study cannot be overemphasized. She has done a tremendous service to literary medievalists of all stripes by offering precious insight into a work whose difficulty is matched only by its influence and importance. -------- Notes: 1. Sylvia Huot, The "Romance of the Rose" and Its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission (1993; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Kevin Brownlee and Huot, Rethinking the "Romance of the Rose": Text, Image, Reception (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). 2. Alastair Minnis, Magister Amoris: The "Roman de la Rose" and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
11.04.18, Huot, Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets
