Fortune's Faces: The 'Roman de la Rose' and the Poetics of Contingency by Daniel Heller-Roazen (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.3, 2005 809 and Fables as thesis and antithesis, with the Espurgatoire Seint Patriz combining what is satisfactory in each while responding to lacks in both. Whereas in the 1980s Bloch's writing celebrated language forits comic and transformingpotential, here the Lais are considered to document its inevitable turn to tragedy; there is 'a fatalism of language such that one is wounded or dead in the instant one speaks' (p. 242). The Fables al? low language some positive efficacy(one may save one's life by speaking), but limit it through a political context in which might remains right. Bloch shows the philosophi? cal sophistication of the Fables and their author, drawing out parallels with Aristotle and Abelard. In the Espurgatoire, theology (glossed as a concentration on absolute values, as in the Lais) combines with an insistence on the efficacyof the will (found to some extent in the Fables) to produce a 'salvific language [. . .] according to which saying the right word at the right time produces a liberating result' (p. 223). This view of language is not confined to the religious text, whose similarity with courtly romance Bloch draws out. As always, Bloch's arguments tend to rely on analogy as much as on logic, while his discussions of language often concentrate on alleged plays on words. A defensive tone clings to some of these (Bloch repeats that he is not the first to have noticed particular connections). Since some of the material included on the Lais was firstpublished and responded to twenty years ago, it is unlikely to make many new converts among scholars familiar with the counter-arguments, but its reproduction here will make it available to a new generation. Bloch also argues that Marie was responding to social and political changes brought about by Henry H's administration, which took the Anglo-Normans from a feudal age to recognizably modern forms of social, political, and economic organization. Rather too recognizably: one could wish that the modernity portrayed here as a late twelfth-century phenomenon did not share quite so many traits with US-style liberal capitalism. This is one of a number of points where Bloch's identification with Marie succumbs to projection. Nevertheless, Bloch does raise interesting perspectives, es? pecially in his reading of the Espurgatoire as a contribution to the colonization of Ireland. The Anonymous Marie de France is a stimulating and provocative book, important principally as the firstwork on the author to discuss at length all three of the works ascribed to her. Its most obvious failing is Bloch's repeated insistence that he stands alone among modern critics in appreciating the writer's complexity: 'in contrast to almost all that has been written or said about Marie to date [. . .] we have encountered an extraordinarily coherent, sophisticated poet' (p. 312). It is remarkable how Bloch elides the many distinguished contributions of the last half century or so, preferringto construct an image of Marie scholarship based on (what now appear the more imperceptive ) comments drawn from critics writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. University College London Jane Gilbert Fortune's Faces: The 'Roman de la Rose' and the Poetics of Contingency. By Daniel Heller-Roazen. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. xvi + 2o6pp. ?33.50. ISBN 0-8081-7191-3. This informative book addresses an aspect of the Roman de la Rose that has received little attention: its treatment of Fortune, necessity, and contingency. The opening chapter provides a survey of philosophical treatments of these themes, examining such writers as Aristotle, Boethius, Abelard, Albert the Great, and Dante. With that background in place Daniel Heller-Roazen turns to the Rose to offerreadings of its 'contingent subject', the notoriously slippery first-person voice that is explicitly used 810 Reviews by two differentauthors with reference to the same protagonist; the 'contingent figure' of Fortune herself as she appears in the discourse of Reason; and the 'knowledge of contingency' as it emerges from Nature's lengthy discussion of free will, divine foreknowledge, and moral responsibility. There is no question that these themes are important to the text overall, and Heller-Roazen's book helps to redress a very real gap in modern...