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

Abstract

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 of the Lover's questfor 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, but until 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: 10,032) 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 of his chosen path and they use love as a point of departure for a series of excurses on a bewildering variety of other topics.