Words and Deeds: Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose and the Hermeneutics of Censorship

Abstract

obscene or objectionable for political or moral reasons. Lest we simply believe that such attacks are primarily motivated by social and religious conservatives, Wendy Steiner's recent analysis of several of the most infamous cases has pointed out that the tendency to read verbal and visual fictions as a simple component of the world to which they refer, or as indistinguishable from their referents, unites proponents of the ideological left and right in a collapsing [of] the doubleness of aesthetic reference.1 Divergent though these critiques may be, they share a profound literalizing tendency, the inability (or refusal) to understand what Steiner calls the paradox of art, referring to the position art occupies simultaneously within reality (as a referential construct) and outside of reality (perhaps one of the most basic definitions of what art is). It is, in other words, not so much a matter of political stances as of aesthetic response: in this regard, the liberal humanist of the sort represented by Steiner finds herself caught in the middle in opposition to the literalizing readings that have made strange bedfellows of political conservatives and certain left-leaning intellectuals of the feminist or Marxist camp.