including ethics, economics, cosmology, astronomy, optics, alchemy, and the university.
The knowledge in the speculum, however, is granted unity and coherence by means of its
inclusion under the category of love, which Jean expounds in all facets, both good (sex
and reproduction, friendship, justice, the love of reason, one’s neighbor, and God) and
bad (lust for money, enslavement to Fortune, clerical celibacy, and the hypocrisy and
deceit that exist between false lovers and false friends).
That the Roman de la Rose is didactic no one denies, but the precise nature of the
message, the world vision that Jean de Meun wishes to instill, is subject to controversy.
Most scholars believe that Jean transforms and refutes Guillaume de Lorris’s Rose, that
he derides, undermines, and destroys the ideal of fin’amors at every turn. One school of
thought argues that Jean counters fin’amors with a call to procreation, to free love in the
service of cosmic plenitude. Another school proposes that Jean treats all his characters,
with the exception of Lady Reason, with irony and that his philosophy conforms to
orthodox, Augustinian Christianity. The reason scholarly opinion differs so strikingly,
why it is so difficult to pin down the author’s personal doctrine, lies in the fact that Jean
de Meun has chosen to exploit a unique version of narrative technique, quite different
from that of his predecessors. Jean distinguishes himself as author from the
dreamerprotagonist of his story, proclaimed to be Guillaume de Lorris, thus creating a
first level of irony and distance. Second, the dreamer-protagonist, Fair Welcome, and
Genius listen to and approve or disapprove of the lengthy discourses listed above, all of
which are also presented with comedy and irony. Speakers have a proclivity to contradict
themselves, and to cite texts from antiquity that refute rather than support their position.
There is no foolproof method for determining which, if any, of the discourses are to be
given greater wẹight than the others; which, if any, carry Jean’s own conviction. Readers
must judge each of these delegated voices in turn, analyzing the facts and rhetoric, to
come to their own conclusions. The result, perhaps intended by Jean de Meun, is a state
of doctrinal indeterminacy, in which the Lover and the audience are offered a sequence of
philosophies and worldviews. The Lover, in the end, decides—he opens the sanctuary
with joy—but the reader-audience is not obliged to applaud his decision. The
indeterminacy remains, part and parcel of Jean’s text and of a certain late Gothic
mentality of which he is the first outstanding master.
Less controversial are the texture and ambience of Jean’s imaginative world, a domain
in which he is as great an innovator as in narrative technique. Compared with Guillaume
de Lorris, Jean is a master of truculent vulgar speech, material detail, and picaresque
naturalism. He shifts the audience’s perspective from top to bottom, from rose petals to
what they hide. A generation before Dante, three generations before Chaucer, Jean
juxtaposes lofty and humble registers of style. Scenes, images, and speech once reserved
to the fabliaux or excluded from polite letters altogether are now included in a serious
work of art, alongside the sublime.
Jean’s demystification of courtly love assumes several forms. His characters
underscore the role of money in the erotic life, that so often the opposite sex is an object
to be purchased, bartered, or exchanged for money or other commodities. The process of
reification, and perhaps of antifeminism, is crowned by Jean de Meun’s transformation of
the woman-rose into a piece of lifeless architecture, a sanctuary, which the Lover pries
open with his pilgrim’s staff.
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