The Vocabulary of Myth, Part II

Harley Price

Mythic Archetypes…

The Philosophers’ Critique of Myth…

     What I’ve said about the great cycle of mythology known as the Matter of Troy can be said about most of the other mythic cycles or archetypes, which inspired elaboration after elaboration down the centuries.  There are, of course, any number of explicitly mythological poems, such as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, or Dryden’s Fables.  But even more characteristic of the pre-modern imagination is the velleity to translate non-mythological subjects into mythopoetic idioms.  In his famous poem Lycidas, for example, an elegy written to commemorate the drowning death of Milton’s friend Edward King, the poet identifies King with the ancient dying and reviving gods Thammuz, Osiris, Dionysos, Orpheus, and Christ, thereby eternizing and universalizing what would otherwise have been an affecting, but merely personal, narrative.

Such mythic transpositions and displacements are too numerous to list, so I’ll give you only three more examples.  The Egyptian and Babylonian myth of the killing of the maritime dragon recrudesces, as we’ll see, in the biblical account of creation, informs the entire Judaeo-Christian salvation history, is the central narrative of the Christian sacrament of baptism, and is given new life by Melville in his novel Moby Dick.  The ancient mythologem of the Golden Age informs every page of  Thomas More’s Utopia, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and  Rousseau’s and Margaret Mead’s risible fantasies about “noble savages”.  Everything from the Grail legend, to the medieval romance of Gawain and the Green Knight, to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, to  Eliot’s Wasteland, bears the imprint of the myths of the Ancient Near Eastern and classical dying and reviving gods of the seasons and the vegetation.  And even our fashionable hysteria about the obliteration of the planet as a consequence of “global warming” is an unconscious re-assertion of the ancient Stoic eschatological myth about the destruction of the world in a universal conflagration.

 

Jung has called the archetypes of myth “controlling images”, and indeed, the human psyche does seem to be predisposed to organize and represent the raw data of existence according to these primordial mythic paradigms and categories.  But that is a subject for another course, and even if one is not persuaded by Jung, there are other, simpler explanations of why myth is the default mode of the human imagination.

Since what I have called the human conversation has always revolved around the permanent questions about existence and reality, the resort to myth, as we’ll see in a moment, is practically inevitable.

Does God exist?  Where does he come from?  What is his nature?  What does he want?

Does the soul exist?  Is it created, or has it transmigrated, with Shirley McLaine, from some other realm?  What is its nature?  What does it want?

What is birth, death, rebirth?  Is there an afterlife?

What is the nature of the world?  How has it come into being?  Or has it always existed?  How will it end?  Or will it infinitely endure?

What is the nature of man?  Where did he come from?  Where is he going to?  What are good and evil?  Why does evil exist?  What is the purpose and meaning of life?

These perennial metaphysical questions and their solutions are ultimately beyond direct human experience, comprehension, or expression; and this is, paradoxically, why they must be posited and posed by the mythic psyche.

As a prisoner of time and space, man’s imagination is constrained by the sensual and finite framework of his worldly and corporeal existence, through which he is constrained to conceive of and represent such transcendent realities– God, the soul, the afterlife–as are by definition beyond sense and time.   Myth and poetry are, of course, just such sensual and limited categories– so rankly sensual, in fact, that Plato banished the poets from his enlightened Republic.

When he did so, the criticism of poetry and myth on those grounds was already a century old.  The Pre-Socratic philosophers Heracleitus and Xenophanes had indignantly accused the poets in general, and Homer in particular, of having insulted the dignity of the ineffable Godhead in their absurd depictions of the Olympian deities in the corporeal habit and with all of the moral and psychological fallibilities of men.

Such crude anthropomorphisms suggested to them that myth was the least likely modality through which the human imagination could possibly transcend its own existential limitations.

The Vocabulary of Myth, Part I

Harley Price

The Matter of Troy…

 The Obligation of the Poet to “hand the matter on”…

     I’ve called this course “The Vocabulary of Myth”, and grandly described its purpose in the Calendar of Priceton University as to furnish the basic “grammar” of the human imagination down to the eighteenth century.  I must leave aside the question of why the eighteenth century sounded the death-knell of man’s mythic consciousness—my chronology is arbitrary, in any case–on the assumption that forty-eight centuries out of fifty of civilized man’s pre-occupation with mythological forms of expression represents something enduring and significant, and not to be discounted or discarded on the basis of a mere two-century-long cultural anomaly.  So, I return, unapologetically, to my description.

In this context, words such as “vocabulary” and “grammar” are metaphors, of course, poetic figures—myths, in fact, since for the Greeks poesis and mythos were synonyms—by means of which I am attempting to express the idea that mythology has always been the principal well-spring from which the basic themes of the human conversation have  bubbled up.  Let me try to prove to you that that is true, and more than merely figuratively so.  I’ll start with what is dismissed by the modern mind—at least that of my undergraduates–as the least consequential aspect of civilization, poetry, and move on to religion, philosophy, and science.

As a matter of both tradition and empirical fact, there are two grand themes, two great bodies of stories, that have been subject to endless restatement and elaboration throughout the centuries of Western literature and art from antiquity right down to our own time.  The first of these is the salvation history of the Judaeo-Christian Bible, a body of narrative whose relationship to myth will be discussed in what follows, and whose centrality to the Western Tradition requires no proof.

The second is “the Matter of Troy” (as it was called in the Middle Ages):  the story of the Trojan War and its aftermath, including the maritime adventures and homecomings (nostoi) of the Greek heroes Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Menelaus, but more generally including the entire cycle of Greek mythology whose great fountainhead was Homer’s two epic poems, the Iliad, or story of Troy (Ilion in Greek), and the Odyssey, which records the wanderings of Odysseus.  The Odyssey was thus the first successful sequel in the history of popular fiction, and its continuing influence illustrates Northrop Frye’s abiding principle about the genesis of  literature:  that it is simply made out of other literature.

As another eminent literary critic, C.S. Lewis, has characterized them, writers before the modern age were “bookish”; they felt no compunction about, indeed, only felt justified in, recapitulating the narrative themes and traditions of the great auctores who lived before them, and whose auctoritas they revered and borrowed.  As they themselves saw it, their principal vocation was to “hand the matter on” (in Lewis’ formulation), the “matter” being whatever narrative theme or tradition they had inherited gratefully from their ancient “authors”.  (Here, notably, the Christian writers of the Middle Ages and thereafter showed no diminution of reverence because those authors were pagan).   Once in the possession of a great theme, it would never have occurred to them to invent something out of whole cloth; indeed, they would have regarded the modern artistic fetish for “originality” as the symptom of a profound cultural poverty.

 

The Odyssey itself thus unleashed a deluge of imitations, extrapolations, and continuations, right down to James Joyce’s Ulysses in the early part of the twentieth century.  The first of such were the anonymous “Trojan Cycle”, or “Homerica”, as they were called, that anthology of five or six minor epics written by the “Homeridae” (figurative “sons of Homer”) from the seventh through the fifth centuries B.C., with the ostensible purpose of filling in the gaps in the record of the Trojan war and the journeys and adventures of the returning Greek heroes that their adoptive literary father, the great bard, might have left out.

Greek drama was similarly a gap-filling child of Homer:  the first Greek trilogy, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, tells the tragic story of the murder of Agamemnon upon his return from Troy at the hands of his treacherous wife Clytemnestra and her paramour Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s own brother (with the Homeric theme–comic, in the ancient sense of the word–of Odysseus’ happy return to the side of his ever faithful Penelope in mind).  It then records the tormented resolve of Agamemnon’s young son Orestes to avenge his father’s death.  (Shakespeare’s Hamlet borrows heavily from it.)

Following the Trojan Cycle and the Greek drama, the next and by far the most important Homeric continuation was Virgil’s epic the Aeneid, which recounts the escape of the Trojan prince Aeneas from the burning city of Troy, and his wanderings and adventures at sea, where he encounters, by no mere coincidence, many of the same mythological monsters and temptresses from whom Homer’s Odysseus had escaped.  In book VI of Virgil’s epic, Aeneas descends into the underworld, just as Homer’s hero had done in book XI of the Odyssey, and navigates an already familiar infernal landscape.  Landing finally on the western shores of Italy, he launches a protracted siege against the local inhabitants that follows all of the stages of the Greek campaign against Troy, until he emerges victorious and founds there the city of Rome.

The Aeneid was written in the last decades before Christ to provide the civilization of Rome, and the incipient Empire inaugurated by Caesar Augustus (under whom the poem was penned), with an appropriately grand mythological pre-history and divine pedigree.   Such is the authority of the Homeric mythological tradition that from then on it became de rigeur for every people and nation to trace its ancestry, as did Virgil’s Romans, to one or other of the escaping heroes of Troy.

Thus, according to the twelfth-century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, the island of Britain was discovered by an eponymous founder named Brutus, another Trojan prince who (though wholly unmentioned by either Homer or Virgil) spent many years lost at sea before finally finding safe harbour on another western shore and founding there a new nation by divine destiny.  In due course, within a half century or so, two Welsh poets, Wace and Layamon, composed (one in Latin, the other in Welsh) consecutive epics about Brutus’ wanderings and fathering of the British people, both separately entitled Brut.  (But besides the epic “Bruts”, several other poems were written in the Christian Middle Ages under the apparently pressing moral and artistic obligation to hand on the matter of Troy:  the French Roman de Troie of one Benoit of St. Maur, for example, and another anonymous French Roman d’Aeneas.) 

Everyone knows the next and most important of the medieval poems in debt to Homer and his literary progeny:  Dante’s Divine Comedy.  It is, of course, the shade of Virgil himself who acts as Dante’s guide through the underworld, a descent that is explicitly modeled on that of Aeneas into Hades in Aeneid VI, which was modeled on that of Odysseus in Odyssey XI.

One could adduce any number of other examples of works by medieval sons of Homer.  In the late-fourteenth century, Chaucer wrote his romantic epic Troilus and Criseyde, Troilus being another Prince of Troy belatedly thrust into the limelight, though scarcely mentioned by Homer or Virgil.  Chaucer’s story of Troilus was, in turn, handed on to Shakespeare, who made a splendid tragedy of it, and so it went, on and on.

Words, II

Harley Price

Long, long before the structuralists, post-structuralists, semioticians, and deconstructionists made the discovery that there is an often tenuous relationship between words and what they signify (taking possession of the academic sandbox ever since), their dubeity was already old-hat. The Sophists of the fifth century B.C. were doubtful that words could have fixed and objective meanings, until Plato answered them. The Skeptics, Cynics, and Stoics reaffirmed the old sophistical reservations, until the Middle and Neo-Platonists answered them. In the high Middle Ages, the problem of language reasserted itself in the controversies between the so-called Nominalists and Realists.

Beyond this, both the ancient Greeks and medieval Christians were well aware that one could use words with a conscious and deliberate ambiguism. A well-known definition of allegory (by the early seventh-century encyclopedist and Bishop, Isidore of Seville) was “saying one thing to mean another.” Poets, prophets, sibyls, and mystics employed language in this way as a matter of vocation; and of course, being the Author of Scripture, God was the Arch-Allegorist. (In using words that say one thing while meaning another, the current generation of speakers and writers may also be called allegorists, except that they are usually unconscious of their duplicity.)

Then there is the use of words to mean precisely their opposite:  for instance, when Chaucer calls his Pardoner “a noble preacher” or the Wife of Bath a “good wife”, or when Moliere’s Alceste heaps praise on the poetic doggerel of a hopeless hack. The rhetoricians have called this trope by many names, including “irony” and “sarcasm”, and it remains to this day a useful route of escape from difficult social situations.

In their essays, today’s undergraduates not only regularly choose the wrong words, but, in their casual and arbitrary selection of them–on the assumption that any word can be imperially commanded to mean whatever they have in mind–, they very often hit upon exactly the wrong word: i.e., the word that means the diametrical opposite of what they intend. The first number on Today’s List illustrates this uncanny facility:

 

     Enervate, enervated, enervating, as in, “Mayor Ford’s brilliant performance in the debates seems to have enervated his campaign.” Au contraire, “to enervate” means “to lessen the vitality or vigour of”, “to unnerve”. The contemporary abusers of “enervate” seem to think it means “energize”, an error worthy of Mrs. Malaprop or Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella character. (Never mind.)

     Aggravate, aggravated, aggravating, aggravation, as in, “You’re aggravating me”, or “I don’t need the aggravation.” Knowing a little French, or even less Latin, would go a long way toward the understanding and proper usage of this shopworn word. The French grave means “serious”, the Latin gravis, “heavy, burdensome, grievous, or important”. (Hence our adjective “grave”, and our noun “grave”—residing in which is the gravest human situation of all). The Latin verb aggravare, aggravatus means “to make heavier”. Thus in English, “to aggravate” is “to make worse, more serious, more severe”. One cannot therefore “aggravate” a person (though one can aggravate his mood—his annoyance or irritation).

     They, as in, “Honey, someone from the office left a message, but the line was bad; I think they said something about sexual harassment.” “They” is the third-person-plural personal pronoun; it requires, accordingly, a plural antecedent. The caller (singular) cannot have been a “they”. The contemporary use of “they” to mean “someone” or “something”, i.e., a person or entity of unknown identity, is a breach of kindergarten grammar.

     So, as in, “Thank you so much”, or “I am so sorry”, or “That was so delicious”, or (more imaginatively contemporary), “If Britney comes near Hunter, I am so going to scratch that shank’s eyes out.” By itself, “so” confirms a previously mentioned action or idea; it means “this/that”, “in this/that way”, as in “I think so”, or “Do so”. When employed as an adverbial modifier of an adjective, however, it introduces a clause or phrase. Thus, not “I am so sorry”, but “I am so sorry for offending her that I will don a hair shirt and retire to a monastery”, or “His injury was so serious as to have hospitalized him for a month” (cf. Fr. tant…que).  When contemporaries say “so sorry” or “so good”, they mistake our word for an intensifier: what they mean is “I am very sorry…”

     To go, to be, as in, “Then he went, ‘Let’s have another vodka’, and I went, ‘But we’ve had six already’”, or (from one Flynn McGarry, fifteen-year-old prodigy chef, as recorded in The National Post), “People are always, like, ‘You shouldn’t mark what you want by someone else’s standards’—like three Michelin stars or four New York Times stars—but it’s kind of like a goal to look up to…” When I grew up, “to go” meant (kind of like) “to move, leave, depart”; “to be” (kind of like) “to exist”. Neither meant “to say”.

Words

Harley Price

–What do you read, my lord?

        –Words, words, words.

 

It is now widely acknowledged–by others than merely radical reactionaries such as myself—that the state of English usage has reached an all-time low. If English were a person, he would be sipping his dinner through a straw in the palliative care unit of the state hospital.

The current generation’s inability to speak or write is usually ascribed to its addiction to technology; but the abbreviations and neologisms of techno-babble are merely the late-born symptoms of a disease whose gestation and aetiology hearken back to a time well before the advent of personal computers and video games. Its incubation began in the Sixties, with the pedagogical and ideological assault on grammar, syntax, spelling, usage, and diction prosecuted by savants who regarded these conventions as fascistic impositions on the autonomy and spontaneous creativity of youth. Little Johnny is a flower, it was said; do not step on him, and do not fence him in. Since then, we have reaped a weedy harvest of creativity; my undergraduates are so creative that they are severally the inventors of their own proprietary systems of syntax and orthography, and use words with less relation to any standard dictionary meaning than to their own subjective and varying moods.

Until now, words have tended to acquire fixed meanings through a tacit consensus arrived at freely over the centuries by the users of a language for their mutual benefit: i.e., so that interlocutors might understand one another. But unitary and universally agreed-upon meanings are now as passé as heterosexual marriage. “Alternative lifestyles” and alternative definitions of words go together like a horse and carriage.

In spite of the flexibility of their diction, however, it is interesting that today’s linguistic free spirits have an alarmingly meager vocabulary, and seem to depend, en masse and by default, upon a very small number of locutions. Every generation has its clichés, of course, but clichés become shopworn and ubiquitous only because they express some universally comprehensible idea or truth.   (I.e., they communicate more or less fixed universally accepted meanings.) Today’s reflexive usages are probably too faddish to ever achieve the venerable dignity of clichés, and in any case, are too creative to signify.

 

Beginning with this post, and sporadically in the future, I will exorcise my indignation against some of the more irritating barbarisms in current parlance. I know there is nothing original in what follows; but then, originality (as per the above) is one of the plagues of contemporary culture.

Today’s list:

     Quote, as in “I love this quote…It goes something like this…”. No, what you love (and remember vaguely) is a passage, a verse, a sentence, a phrase, a maxim, a proverb, an aphorism, a dictum, a logion. Such loci, if memorable, might be collected in a book of quotations. Or, hearing someone recite “To be or not to be…”, one might observe cleverly that “That is a quotation from Hamlet.” A “quote” is an estimate, or bid on a job.

     Issue, as in “Fred can’t make lunch; he has an issue at home.” Now, if Fred is having an issue at home, he ought to forget about lunch entirely and go straight to the hospital to have it staunched. An “issue” is an effluence of liquid (cf. “the woman with an issue of blood”). Or it can mean a subject or topic of policy, discussion, debate, or controversy. What Fred has is a “problem”.

     Speak to, as in “The President will speak to the issue of health care during his press conference tomorrow.” No, one cannot speak to an impersonal noun; the President might “speak to” the members of the press; he might “speak about” health care; but but he can’t speak to it. What our speaker meant was that the President will “address” or “discuss” health care tomorrow.

     Fulsome, as in “President Obama offered a fulsome apology for misleading the American people when he promised that they could keep their health care.” Well, if the speaker meant that Obama’s apology was “offensive because of insincerity”, “fulsome” is the mot juste. But I take my quotation (see above) from the Associated Press, a regular apologist for Obama and his apologies. What the AP writer intended to convey was that the President’s apology was “total”, “without reservation” (cf. “full”). Out of the mouths of babes…

     Very unique, as in “Her golf swing is very unique.” Unique, maybe; but not very unique. Something that is “unique” (from unus, “one”) is the only one of its kind in the whole wide world. You can’t get more unique than that.   “Unique”, like other superlatives, is an absolute that does not admit of degrees, and therefore cannot be modified by an intensifier such as “very”.

     Perfect, as in you walk into a restaurant with your spouse, and your hostess inquires, “Where would you guys like to sit.” Your wife has by now gotten used to being addressed in masculine casual, and she indicates the table in the corner. To which your hostess replies approvingly, “Perfect”. An eternity later, your server arrives to take your order. “Have you guys decided.” (Yes, you’ve had enough time to decide on every leg of your upcoming European vacation.)  “I’ll have the rabbit”, says your wife. “Perfect”. “And I’ll have the octopus”, say you.  Also “Perfect”.   “And bring us a bottle of your cheapest house plonk.”  “Perfect”.

Freddy Couples’ golf swing is perfect; Handel’s Amen chorus is perfect; God is perfect. Our word is the capstone of an escalating hyperbole in which “good” or “fine” became “excellent”, then “amazing”, then “awesome”. Now everything is “perfect”. Next year, look out for “very perfect”; the year after, “totally perfect”.

Hope, Change, and the Historical Narcissist

Harley Price

The myth of progress, to which modern liberals glibly subscribe, imagines that the present is ineluctably better—more enlightened, more compassionate, more egalitarian, more just–than the past; and that the future will be ineluctably better than the present. Progressives are always intoning the mantras of “change”, “hope”, and the “future”. While they deride any such superstitious fantasies as Paul’s “faith in things unseen”, that is precisely what their faith in the future amounts to. And though they are reflexively skeptical about the past, only the past, ontologically speaking, possesses substantial reality. The future has none. (Even the present, which they also extol–as in the injunction to “live in the moment”–has no empirical status. The present is an infinitesimally narrow line of division between past and future: a mere mathematical concept.)

It’s easy to demand change when the collateral offered is the gauzy promise of a “better future”. (Try that with your bank manager.) But progressives never tell us precisely what that future will look like. The question they must be made to answer, as Joseph Sobran has insisted, is in what kind of society they would be conservatives.

Liberals assume that traditional social arrangements, religious institutions, and moral and philosophical ideas are atavisms preserved only by a cravenly uncritical acceptance of authority, or a blind intellectual conformity. Their antinomianism is worn as the badge of a fearless and heroic independence of mind. Yet practically every major progressive initiative has been the product of mass sentiment, and thereafter celebrated as the triumph of the collective “will of the people”.   Once victorious, the progressive herd of independent minds has betrayed a depressingly ruthless habit of eliminating dissent: from the Gulag, to the speech codes of the modern Academy, to the heresy trials of global warming “deniers” or the defendants arraigned before our human rights tribunals. Today, major sectors of society—the educational establishment; journalism; the television, film, and music industries; the arts and literary community; the public unions and functionaries of the Welfare State—are hothouses of progressive ideological purity, hermetically sealed against contamination by even a spore of non-conforming opinion.

If traditions survive, on the contrary, it’s usually because, as the end-product of centuries of social and moral experimentation and amelioration, they have been proven to work. In this regard, conservatives are the real skeptics; they demand empirical evidence of the efficacy of “alternative lifestyles” before they are prepared to make the leap into the beyond.

In their attitude toward the past, conservatives thus also show a far deeper respect for the mores and opinions of “ordinary people” than those who are constantly lecturing them on their supposed “elitism”. It was Chesterton who famously defined tradition as “the democracy of the dead”. He might have taken the next step and defined modern liberalism as the tyranny of those who happen at this moment to be alive.

It is a natural human tendency, of course, to perceive one’s own historical period in exquisite focus and detail, and esteem it accordingly, while The Rest of History recedes like the background of an Early Netherlandish painting into the mists of obscurity. Every generation tends to regard its advent as the long-awaited fruition of the world-process. But the perspective of the current generation has become so foreshortened that its members seem to think and live as though the world were created the day they were born. That perspective is the temporal equivalent of the geographical self-centricity of Manhattanites, as it was famously satirized on the cover of an old New Yorker magazine, whose cartoon mappa mundi showed Manhattan, in exquisite focus and detail, occupying most of the frame, the Hudson River on its edge, and beyond that, in a narrow band, New Jersey and The Rest of the World.

The historical Narcissism of those who happen at this moment to be alive has become so overwhelming that our contemporaries can hardly imagine that things could ever have been different, or that humans once believed or behaved other than they do now. After listening to a lecture on the House of Pride in Book I (canto iv) of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a perplexed young undergraduate approached my desk to inquire, “Do you mean that pride isn’t a good thing?” No, pride is a capital sin, and has been counted as such for at least the previous three millennia of Western Civilization–with the exception, that is, of the past fifty years. But then, having been taught that everyone is “special” (but never having been taught to reason that, ergo, no one is special); having received prizes for losing; having watched videos of the Pride Parade, year after year, in her Sexual Diversity Class; and having graduated magna cum sua laude from Self-Esteem High, one can hardly blame my student for thinking of pride as an immemorial virtue.

 

Readers of these pages will be familiar with the traditional Western credendum that wisdom, happiness, and self-realization depend upon a man’s living a life of reason in control of his passions, rejecting the spurious goods and pleasures of the senses and the world, while contemplating the higher intelligible realities sometimes designated by the felicitous Pauline phrase invisibilia Dei. These moral presuppositions remained unchanged from the birth of Greek philosophy in the sixth-century B.C. down, at least, to the beginning of the Romantic Period. In the relatively brief time since then, their opposites have become settled norms, accepted without question in spite of their callow novelty. Today, we are all disciples of the Playboy School of Philosophy, in spite of the social and psychological carnage it has wrought. And with what seems to me a breathless lack of intellectual humility, the moral attitudes that prevailed universally in the West for centuries are dismissed as unnatural, morbid, or impossible. No one (as I am assured repeatedly by my students and acquaintances) could have actually lived in indifference to, or denial of, the flesh and the world.

I am consoled to have come across a passage from the great early twentieth century classicist, Gilbert Murray, which muscularly refutes such modernist prejudices. About Platonism and Stoicism (the two principal schools of thought from Hellenistic times right down to the dawn of modernity), Murray asserts that

…amid their differences there is one faith which was held by both in common. It is the great characteristic faith of the ancient world, revealing itself in many divergent guises and seldom fully intelligible to modern men; faith in the absolute supremacy of the inward life over things external. These men really believed that wisdom is more precious than jewels, that poverty and ill health are things of no import, that the good man is happy whatever befall him, and all the rest. And in generation after generation many of the ablest men, and women also, acted upon the belief. They lived by free choice lives whose simplicity and privation would horrify a modern labourer, and the world about hem seems to have respected rather than despised their poverty. To the Middle Age, with its monks and mendicants expectant of reward in heaven, such an attitude, except for its disinterestedness, would be easily understood. To some eastern nations, with their cults of asceticism and contemplation, the same doctrines have appealed almost like a physical passion or a dangerous drug running riot in their veins. But modern western man cannot believe them, nor believe seriously that others believe them. On us the power of the material world has, through our very mastery of it and the dependence which results from that mastery, both inwardly and outwardly increased its hold. Capta ferum victorem cepit. We have taken possession of it, and now we cannot move without it.

In our pyrrhic victory over the material world, as Murray observes, we have been taken captive by it. The image of our captivity to and in the corporeal order, so edifyingly expressive of our modern predicament, is itself, one should note, a venerable Platonist topos.

Involuted Mysteries, II: A Grammar of Symbols and Ideas. Some Perennial Themes, Image-complexes, Mythic Archetypes, and Philosophical Topoi in Literature and Art before 1800, Part XXXVIII

Harley Price

The Shepherd’s Park and the Garden of Deduit…

Their Biblical Archetypes:  the True Paradise and the Post-lapsarian Eden…

The Roman as an Allegory of the Fall…

     Near the end of the Roman, Jean de Meun devotes several hundred lines to the description of a second garden.  Within its verdant borders, the flowers are as bright and virginal as springtime; but they keep their youthful colours forever, and their beauty never fades.  Indeed, one can pluck their buds morning and night, and in every season of the year.  Here the Good Shepherd keeps his flock:  “no mighty throng”, but only a “few”.

At  lines 20279f., the poet begins to make explicit the narrative and moral significance of this episode (though the alert reader requires no authorial guidance).  Whoever, he says, would compare the beauty of that garden, in which the lover saw Sir Delight and his capering minions, to the beauty of this garden, is a fool.  There is no lack of abundance of beautiful flowers, birds, and streams in the Garden of Delight, to be sure; but “These things are fables, vain imaginings; no stable facts but fictions that will fade.”  Like the rose, the dreamer’s Garden of Delights is another figment of his overcharged imagination.  In the Shepherd’s Park, by contrast, the joys and pleasures are real and everlasting.

 

At its centre, beside an ever-verdant olive tree which “bears salvation’s fruit”, stands a fountain, from whose waters those sheep who are permitted to drink will gain innumerable blessings.  Once they have imbibed,

                   no more thirst they have,
But live together as they will, nor feel
The blight of illness or the sting of death.
In lucky hour they pass within these gates;
In lucky hour they see the Lamb of God,
Whom they may follow in the narrow path,
While the Good Shepherd guards, whose only wish
Is to purvey them harborage with Him.
None who once drink from that pure stream can die.

Then, the contrast, once again, is solemnly drawn:

          this is not the fountain ‘neath the tree
The Lover saw enclosed in marble verge.
He should be ridiculed who praised that spring—
The bitter, poisonous Fountain Perilous
That killed the fair Narcissus, who therein
Admired himself until he pined away.
The Lover himself was not ashamed, indeed,
To recognize and testimony give
About that fountain’s character, nor hide
Its cruelty, when he applied the name
Of Mirror Perilous to it, and said
That when he looked therein he felt a throb
Of painful grief, and heaved a heavy sigh.
You see what sweetness in the spring he found!
Fine fountain this, that makes well people ill!

When he first surveyed the Garden of Sir Pleasure through the two crystals in that fountain of self-love, the dreamer saw only illusions and fantasies.  But in the fountain in the Shepherd’s Park,

Always, from whatsoever side [one] looks,
[He] sees all things contained within the park
And recognizes each for what it is,
And ever knows its worth.  He who has seen
Himself reflected there at once becomes
So wise a master that he nevermore
Can be deceived by aught that may occur.

The section then concludes with the poet’s question to his readers:

What think you of this park that I’ve described
And of the Lover’s garden?  Tell me, lords.
On accident and substance give your votes
And reasonable verdict.  By your faith
Declare which seems to you more beautiful.
Consider the two fountains, and decide
Which furnishes the more health-giving stream
And water the more pure and virtuous.
Judging the nature of the conduits,
Say which is more praiseworthy.  Judge the pine
And olive which o’ershade the living streams;…
That sooner an agreement you may reach
I’ll briefly summarize what I have said
About the fountains’ virtues and true worth:
The one intoxicates a living man
And brings him to his death; whereas, in truth,
The dead are by the other spring revived.

The moral force of Jean de Meun’s antinomies depends, of course, upon their biblical referents, which no medieval reader could fail to recognize beneath the surface of the allegory.  Deduit’s garden is a garden of earthly delights, a parody of the Edenic Paradise, or rather, an image of Eden corrupted by the Fall.  The Shepherd’s Park is the True Eden, the heavenly Paradise regenerated from the dead and sin-laden desert of human history by Christ’s Sacrifice.  The dreamer’s false paradise of carnal and sensible delights is inhabited by a throng of revelers; the Shepherd’s Park is home to the elect few, the virtuous and wise who can distinguish reality from appearance and find their happiness in the pursuit of the eternal and invisible things of God.  Related to this is the image of the “narrow” path and gate that lead to the Shepherd’s Park, a commonplace allusion to the famous verses (7:13-14) from Matthew:

Enter ye in at the strait gate:  for wide is the gate and broad is the way, the leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

Because strait is the gate and narrow is the way, which leadeth into life, and few there be that find it.

The pine in Deduit’s garden is, plainly enough, a type of the Tree of Knowledge; conversely in the Shepherd’s Park, the olive that “bears salvation’s fruit” recalls the Tree of Life, whose pendant fruit is Christ crucified upon that Tree in the form of the Cross.  The two fountains, similarly, have their antitypes in the Fountains of Death and Life that traditionally belong to the iconography of the biblical Eden.

The Roman de la Rose is thus, like so many other medieval narratives, a grand allegory of the Fall, whose three-stage process, as re-actualized in every subsequent act of sin (and especially the passio of lust), we have already discussed at length.  Such underlying image-complexes and ideas, with which every medieval reader was familiar, aggrandize an otherwise trivial, if not puerile theme, into a universal human and literary context.  Though I trust that the Roman’s moral irony and satirical humour are readily appreciated on their own, a modern reader’s enjoyment and understanding of such texts can only be enriched by his awareness of these allegorical traditions.

Involuted Mysteries, II: A Grammar of Symbols and Ideas. Some Perennial Themes, Image-complexes, Mythic Archetypes, and Philosophical Topoi in Literature and Art before 1800, Part XXXVII

Harley Price

Jean de Meun’s Continuation of the Roman…

“Idolatry” in the Middle Ages…

The Myth of Pygmalion in Medieval Commentary…

Pygmalion, Narcissus, and the Dreamer…

     The didactic sententiousness of Jean de Meun’s c. 1277 “continuation” of Guillaume de Lorris’Roman is, if anything, even plainer.  At over 15,000 lines–it swamps the original–, it is too long for anything more than cursory treatment here.  Two sections near the end of the poem are of special relevance, however, to the themes and topoi we have been tracing in these essays:  Jean’s digression on the myth of Pygmalion, and his beautiful description of the “Shepherd’s Park”.

The moral relevance of the myth of Pygmalion to that of Narcissus and, by extension, the plight of the dreamer, will become clear enough.  But before turning to Jean’s paraphrase, it will be useful to preface it with a little medieval sermon on the subject of idolatry.

In medieval symbolism, idolatry means far more than “worshiping graven images”–hardly a problem in the high Middle Ages–but refers, once again, to an attitude of mind.  Robert Holcot, an English friar who was a contemporary of Chaucer, explains the meaning of “idolatry” in his commentary on the  Book of Wisdom.  In connection with the verses, “Give not the power of thy soul to a woman lest she enter upon thy strength, and thou be confounded”, and “Turn away thy face from a woman dressed up, and gaze not upon her beauty”, Holcot explains that the beauty of a woman is a snare (one of the conventional images of lust, as we’ve seen from both Andreas and Guillaume de Lorris) and a false idol, and quotes another verse from Wisdom, “the beginning of fornication is the devising of idols”.  Then he comments, “For it is impossible for a curious and lascivious man associating with these idols not to be corrupted by them; indeed, a man, diligently seeking out and considering in his thought the beauty of women so that he makes idols for himself, necessarily prepares for his own fall” (my emphasis).

An “idol”, therefore, is not always a concrete image, but can be one constructed in the mind, such as the images of feminine beauty that, as we’ve already seen, are set up and fixed in the imaginations of those suffering from the passio of love.

 

Now, the story of Pygmalion is introduced at the point in the poem at which Venus is about to release her arrow at a statue of a woman, sculpted out of silver, and erected in a sort of shrine.  It is noteworthy that Venus is not aiming at a lady, or even at the dreamer’s rose, but at an idol (as one can see from figure 17), which is to say, at the image into which the rose has been turned by the dreamer’s desires.

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The poet then compares this image to the statue of Pygmalion, so beautiful that Pygmalion fell desperately–in his case, one would have to say, madly–in love with it.

In the course of his long lamentation, as Jean recounts it, Pygmalion affects to find a certain consolation in comparing himself to Narcissus, who fell in love with “sa propre figure”, just as he has fallen in love with “his own figure”, which at least, unlike Narcissus, he can dress up, kiss, fondle, and even take to bed with him (figure. 19), though his statue remains disappointingly unresponsive.

38_2

It is interesting that Pygmalion, in a state which he himself describes repeatedly as “madness”, executes all of the conventional gestures and undergoes all of the obligatory sufferings supposedly enjoined by the “code” of courtly love:  the reversals of mood, the feelings of rejection, and yet the certainty that but a single smile from his lady would repay all his pain, and so on, with the implication that the supposedly “courtly” behaviour of the dreamer is equally unhinged.

Finally, Pygmalion prays to Venus.  In figure 20, one notes that (as this scene was conventionally illustrated in medieval manuscripts of the Roman), both Venus and Pygmalion’s statue are set upon pedestals, and are thus also depicted as idols.

Venus, obligingly, answers Pygmalion’s prayer, so that when he returns to his image, he is astonished by what he finds.  “What is this?”, he asks.  “Have I been deceived.  Am I awake?  No, this must be a dream.  No one has ever seen a vision so beautiful apart from a dream.  How has this marvel occurred?  Is it some phantasm or fiend that has entered my image?”

There can, of course, be no doubt about the relevance of Pygmalion’s delusion to the erotic dream of the speaker in the Roman.  And indeed, just as in the wish-fueled fantasy of the dreamer, Pygmalion’s image obligingly assures him that she is real, and afterwards does all that he longs for.

 

Now, the romantic sensibility has tended to prettify the story of Pygmalion into a fairy tale like those in which the frog always turns into a prince, or an exemplum of the heroic power of art to outdo nature; but neither Jean de Meun nor his audience would have been quite so credulous of, or sentimental about, this supposed miracle.

As Arnulph of Orleans, a twelfth-century commentator on Ovid’s Metanorphoses, explains, “Ovid says the statue of Pygmalion was changed into a living woman.  As a matter of fact, Pygmalion made an ivory statue, and conceiving so irrational a love for it, persuaded himself that it was alive and began to abuse it as though it were a real woman.”  But if Pygmalion became so aroused in pursuit of his fantasy that the pleasure generated by it caused him to lose all reason to the point of convincing himself that the statue had come to life, he was simply doing what Guillaume’s lover did in his own dream when he imagined his rose lying naked in bed beside him.

 

At the end of his re-telling of the Pygmalion myth, Jean de Meun apologizes for his long digression from the narrative, adding, “However, you shall see what all this means before my tale has reached an end.”  Like Pygmalion, the dreamer too has created an “image”, an idol in the mind such as those described by Holcot, which is warmed and animated by the flame of his own runaway passion.  But when his rose has been transformed by the magic of this passion and he is on the verge of fulfilling his desires, he suddenly awakens.  The fantasy created by his fevered imagination dissolves like the proverbial Castle in Spain, into thin air.

Involuted Mysteries, II: A Grammar of Symbols and Ideas. Some Perennial Themes, Image-complexes, Mythic Archetypes, and Philosophical Topoi in Literature and Art before 1800, Part XXXVI

Harley Price

Reason…The Immanent Image of the Logos…

Physician of Souls...

Her Rejection:  The Third and Final Stage of the Fall…

Priceton Quiz:  What does the rosebud signify?…

     The third and final step in the fall of Guillaume’s lover occurs when he refuses to listen to the voice of Lady Reason–which is foolish enough in the context of a philosophical and theological tradition in which reason is the highest virtue and divine element within man, but even more so insofar as the lover explicitly recognizes the lady’s exalted identity:

She wore a noble crown upon her head.
A queen she might have been, but more did seem,
To judge by her appearance and her face,
An angel come, perhaps, from paradise.
Nature could hardly frame a work so fair.
‘Twas God himself, unless the Scriptures lie,
Who in his image and his likeness formed
This godlike one, and her with power endowed
To rescue men from rash and foolish acts,
Provided that her counsel they’ll believe.

But the lover doesn’t accept her counsel, any more than he accepted the counsel of the admonitory tale of Narcissus, which he blithely re-actualizes.  He rejects it (though its function, as he notes, is “to rescue men from rash and foolish acts”), and though the Reason that appears to him is the Logos itself, second Person of the Trinity, “the likeness and image” of God the Father, of which the reason immanent in the human soul is also the “likeness and image”.

When the dreamer disdains to take Reason’s advice, he is thus denying what is highest in himself, and, of course, repeating the archetypal pattern.  Instead of referring the beauty of the rose to the sovereign rational and masculine component of the soul–like the beauty of the vase in John’s the Scot’s allegory of the Fall–, the dreamer allows its image to remain fixed in his “outer garden”, “the woman”.

Like Lady Philosophy in Boethius’ Consolation, Dame Reason tells the lover in the Roman that he is himself the cause of his own imprisonment.  Only a fool, she says, would make a friend of Idleness:

                             ‘Twas evil hour
At which you came into that shady park
Of which the key is kept by Idleness,
Who ope’d the gate for you.  One is a fool
Who makes acquaintance with that tempting maid,
Whose sweet companionship is perilous.
You’ve been deceived and brought to grief by her;
For had not Idleness conducted you
Into the garden that is named Delight
The God of Love had never seen you there…
But ‘tis no wonder; men are fools in youth.
Now I should like to give you this advice:
Into oblivion consign that god
Who has so weakened, tortured, conquered you.
I see no other way to healthful cure…
Nothing but foolishness is this disease
Called love; ‘twere better it were folly named.

Reason has come as the physician of the soul (another classical and thereafter Christian topos) to cure his “lover’s malady”, and then describes his condition using the same equestrian imagery as Andreas Capellanus employs to describe that of his friend Walter:

From day to day it will entrench itself
If you allow this folly to remain.
Now firmly seize the bits between your teeth;
Resist the guidance of your stubborn heart,
Against whose will you’ll have to use some force.
You will be ditched if passion keeps the reins.

 

I needn’t say much more about Guillaume’s Roman.  In future installments, we’ll look at a few brief excerpts from the much longer and more philosophically rich second part by Jean de Meun.  In that part, Reason plays a rather bigger role, comparing Blind Cupid to the capricious Goddess Fortuna, and identifying the pleasures of carnal love as one of the Goddess’s deceptive and transitory earthly gifts.  The poem ends with a description, moreover, of another garden, the Shepherd’s Park, which is the true Paradise, and the direct antithesis to the garden of Deduit.

But before we leave Guillaume’s Roman, let me draw your attention to one more passage, in which the lover describes his beloved rosebud as if looking at it through a macro lense, just before achieving his kiss.

When I approached the Rose, I found it grown
A little larger than it was before;
A little greater height the bush had gained.
But I was pleased that the unfolding flower
Had not yet spread so as to show the seed,
Which still was by the petals well concealed,
That stood up straight and with their tender fold
Hid well the grains with which the bud was filled.
And, thanked be God, the bud’s maturer curves
Were better hued and comelier than before.
I was abashed, and marveled at the sight.
The fairer the bud, the more Love fettered me;
The happier I, the more I felt his chains.

You tell me what this exalted “rosebud” really signifies.

Involuted Mysteries, II: A Grammar of Symbols and Ideas. Some Perennial Themes, Image-complexes, Mythic Archetypes, and Philosophical Topoi in Literature and Art before 1800, Part XXXV

Harley Price

The Conventional Symbolism of Flowers…

The Book of Wisdom and the Playboy Philosophy…

Cupid’s Arrows, “Fairness to the Eyes”, and the First Stage of the Fall…

The Second Stage:  “Pleasurable Thought”…

Cupid’s Laws of Love and the Lover’s Malady...

     The dreamer then explains why he is tempted above all by the bush’s tender buds, not yet unfolded into bloom:

Who could hate
Such folded buds! For roses spreading wide
Within one day will surely all be gone;
But fresh the buds will still remain at least
Two days or three; so they allured me most.

Two days or three!  Hardly objects of eternal and immutable beauty, but then that is the poet’s joke.

Flowers in general, and roses in particular, are conventional symbols of the transience of earthly goods and pleasures, especially the fading beauty of the flesh.  This tradition derives in part from the well-known opening verses of the book of Wisdom, often quoted out of context as though it were an early statement of the Playboy Philosophy:

But ungodly men by their acts and words have summoned Hades…
For they did not reason soundly, but said to themselves:
“Our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud,
And be scattered like mist…
So come, let us enjoy the good things that exist…
Let us have our fill of costly wine and perfumes,
And let us not miss the spring flowers,
Let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they wither…”

In his commentary on Wisdom, Thomas Ringstede, a fourteenth-century English friar and bishop, associates these seizers-of-the-day, who crown themselves with rosebuds, with the servants of Venus.  And since in ancient mythography, the fading rose was an attribute of the vulgar Venus, it became, in turn, an attribute of the Christian vice of luxuria.

To recall a passage from the Third Vatican Mythographer to which I referred earlier:

Roses are ascribed to Venus, for roses redden and prick just as lust causes redness through the opprobrium of shame, and the dart of sin pricks.  Moreover, just as roses delight for a short while but are destroyed by the quick passage of time, so it is with lust.

This, then, is the rosebud, enduring for as long as two or three days, that the dreamer in the Romanyearns to pluck.

 

At this point Cupid, who like everyone else in the Roman is not so much a character as a personification of  “cupidity” or desire, springs into action.  He unleashes his five arrows, the most important of which is the first, called “Biaute”, which enters, says the poet, through the dreamer’s eye.  It is this same beauty that enters the garden of the soul by way of the outer, sensible garden or the “Woman” in John the Scot’s psychological allegory of the Fall, and it is its “fairness to the eye” that in the forbidden fruit first deceived Eve.

The next stage of the Fall is “pleasurable thought”, a point on which the God of Love gives the dreamer explicit instruction:

Next I enjoin as penance, night and day,
Without repentance, that you think on love,
Forever keeping ceaselessly in mind
The happy hour which has such joy in store…

Cupid’s proclamation of the laws of love center on this obsession, but they include all of the other absurd behavioral tics and symptoms of the lover’s malady as we have already noted in Ovid and Andreas Capellanus, and observed in Arcite, Nicholas, and Absolon in Chaucer’s Tales:  the primping and combing of one’s hair; the attention to the tailoring of one’s coat; the stylish lacing of one’s boots; the proper fabric of one’s gloves and purse; the sort of flowers to carry in one’s coronet; the way to cut an impressive figure on horseback; the songs to sing and dances to learn; how to secure a reputation as a big-spending host—how, that is, to appear in order to advance one’s cause with one’s lady.

At the same time, the lover must prove the worthiness and authenticity of his passion by suffering a never-ending cycle of torment followed by joy:  weeping one hour, singing the next,

For everyone should do in every place
That which he knows will advantageous be,
Because by this he gets thanks, grace, and praise.

When reminded of your love, you must depart from company and in secret succumb to

Sighs and complaints, tremors and other ills.
Tormented will you be in many ways:
One hour you will be hot, another cold;
One hour you will be flushed, another pale;
No quartan fever that you ever had—
No quotidian either—could be worse.

Sometimes you will

               half forget yourself, bemused,
And long time stand like graven image mute
Which never budges, stirs, or even moves
Its foot, its hand its finger, or its lips,

until you finally recover from your lover’s reverie.

You will always complain bitterly that you cannot feast your eyes upon your sweetheart, and periodically set out to find her; but your search will usually be in vain.

Then will you be anew in sad estate,
To you will come cold shivering and sighs,
And pains that prick more sharp than hedgehog’s quills.

So you will always be alert to the opportunity to catch a glimpse of your beloved, but what if you succeed?  For then

Her beauty with great joy will fill your soul;
But sight of her your heart will broil and fry.
The glowing coals of love will burst ablaze.
The more you gaze upon her whom you love,
The hotter will the fire engage your heart.
Sight is the grease that swells the amorous flame.
Each lover customarily pursues
The burning conflagration.  Although scorched,
He hugs it closer; for its nature’s such
As makes him contemplate his lady love
Although at sight of her he suffers pain.

After you have been roasted by her flame, you will then accost yourself for not having had the courage to speak, but only

               to have boobied by her side,
Awkward and dumb, and let the chance escape.

And so, bewailing your fate, you will seek a new opportunity to wander into the street where you last saw her but remained mute, and inevitably you will stroll back and forth on the road across from her home, trying meanwhile to explain yourself to the neighbours.  If she does come out,

Then you will feel your color change; a chill
Will run through all your veins; and when you try
To hold converse, your thoughts and words will fail.
Or, if you do succeed to start a speech,
Of every three words you’ll say scarcely two,
So shameful your embarrassment will be.

Once again, you will upbraid yourself for your stammering inarticulateness.

Then will your martyrdom begin again.
This is the struggle, this the sorry strife.
This is the battle that forever lasts.
Lovers will never gain what they seek;
Always it fails them; never have they peace.

 

In the panoply of his sufferings, the lover’s nocturnal torments are the most grievous, when the image of the beloved so burns in his imagination that it banishes sleep, or fecundates an erotic dream (of which, as Guillaume well knows, the entire Roman is an example).

A thousand more annoyances at night
You’ll have, and in your bed but small repose;
For, when you wish to sleep, there will commence
Tremblings, agitations, shivers, chills.
From one side to the other you will toss—
Lie on your stomach first, then on your back—
Like one with toothache seeking ease in vain.
Then will return the memory of her
Whose shape and semblance never had a peer.
I’ll state a miracle that may occur:
Sometimes you’ll dream that your beloved one,
Fair-eyed and naked quite, lies in your arms,
And yields herself companion to your love.
Then castles in the land of Spain you’ll build,
And naught will please you but to fool yourself
With pleasant thoughts whose basis is a lie.

As we will see, the “pensee delitable” of the dreamer remains a figment even in the last part of the poem, with the implication that the pleasure of carnal love that the dreamer so ardently pursues is, like the dream itself, a fleeting fancy.

Involuted Mysteries, II: A Grammar of Symbols and Ideas. Some Perennial Themes, Image-complexes, Mythic Archetypes, and Philosophical Topoi in Literature and Art before 1800, Part XXXIV

Harley Price

The Bird-Snare of Pleasure…

Satan the Fowler…

The Mirror of Narcissus…

The Mirror of the Mind…

     Looking into the fountain, the dreamer sees two marvelous crystal stones in which are reflected a hundred different hues:

Just as a mirror will reflect each thing
That near is placed, and one therein can see
Both form and color without variance,
So do these crystals undistorted show
The garden’s each detail to anyone
Who looks into the waters of the spring.
For, from whichever side one chance to look,
He sees one half the garden…

But then he remembers Narcissus:

The Mirror Perilous it is, where proud
Narcissus saw his face and his gray eyes,
Because of which he soon lay on his bier.
There is no charm nor remedy for this;
Whatever thing appears before one’s eyes,
While at these stones he looks, he straightway loves.
Many a valiant man has perished thence;
The wisest, worthiest, most experienced
Have there been trapped and taken unawares…
There a new furor falls to some men’s lot;
There neither sense nor moderation holds
The mastery; there will to love is all;
There no man can take counsel for himself.
‘Tis Cupid, Venus’ son, there sows the seed
Which taints the fountains, and ‘tis there he sets
His nets and snares to capture man and maid;
For Cupid hunts no other sort of bird…

But the dreamer still insists on gazing into the fountain:

Long time it pleased me to remain to view
The fountain and the crystals that displayed
A hundred thousand things which there appeared.
But I remember it as sorry hour.
Alas, how often therefore have I sighed!
The mirrors me deceived.  Had I but known
Their power and their force, I had not then
So close approached.  I fell within the snare
That sorely has betrayed and caught full many a man.

Well, the mirrors didn’t exactly deceive the dreamer; he should have “known their power and their force” from the warning label that explained that Narcissus died as a result of looking into them.  The dreamer’s attempt to exculpate himself is patently unconvincing; but then this is a perfect example of a medieval poem that cares little for realism or psychological verisimilitude.  On the level of the allegory, there is no ambiguity whatsoever.  The dreamer is re-actualizing the myth of Narcissus, and the moral folly of which it is a universal admonitory exemplum.  He is submitting himself to the fate of those countless wise and worthy men whose moderation and reason “could no longer hold the mastery” against the “furor” (that is, the madness) of their all-consuming love, and who thereby ended up in Cupid’s bird-snare.

 

The bird-snare of pleasure is another common medieval topos.  The early tenth-century theologian and poet Odo of Cluny expresses it as follows in his famous philosophical epic on the Redemption, Occupatio:

And just as bait draws flying birds to the snare,
Wicked appetite draws those moved by its sweetness.
Fixed in the lime, they cannot stretch their wings;
They lack devotion to virtue and the wings to fly.
Hunger for a little morsel makes them hungry forever.

     We see the bird snare of pleasure in the illuminations of a number of fourteenth-century Psalters, accompanying the text from Ps. 123: 7, “Our soul hath been delivered as a sparrow out of the snare of the fowlers”.  The bait in the snare (according to the fourteenth-century Glossa Ordinaria on this verse) is “dulcedo huius vitae”—the sweetness of this life, as opposed to the sweetness of the spirit.

This moralized imagery belongs to a larger complex in which Satan is conceived as hunter or a fowler stalking human prey.  In the Roman, this is not coincidentally the occupation of Cupid; but it is the mirror imagery of the well of Narcissus—the Mirror Perilous—that is emphasized above all by Guillaume.

Let me remind you of the allegories of the Fall discussed earlier from John the Scot and Chaucer’s Parson, according to which the crucial stage is that in which the image of the object of beauty becomes fixed in the sensual imagination and the focus of “pleasurable thought” or “excessive meditation”.  This, as you recall, was also the crucial stage, according to Andreas Capellanus, in the lover’s passio.  Here, again,  is the relevant text from Andreas’ De amore:

Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex…That this suffering is inborn I shall show you clearly, because if you will look at the truth, and distinguish carefully you will see that it does not arise out of any action; only from the reflection of the mind upon what it sees does this suffering come.

The Mirror Perilous is, in other words, the mirror of the mind in which the image of the beloved (in the case of Narcissus, himself; in the case of the dreamer, a rosebud) is meditated upon obsessively.  This is the same mirror, of course, that medieval artists depict in the hand of the personification of Luxuria, which is also, as we have seen, carried by Oiseuse (Idleness), the porteress to the garden of Deduit.

The same mirror is visible in figures 15 and 16, in the latter, being held by a Siren, while in both, the women gazing vainly into it do so to the accompaniment of the Old Song, played (in fig. 15) on the bagpipe.

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The two crystals that the dreamer sees in the well of Narcissus are, obviously enough, reflections of his own eyes, and at the same time the mirrors that reflect images of the garden through them onto the mirror of the mind.  As the dreamer gazes into them, he sees a profusion of beautiful flowers (the conventional symbols of the transient beauty of the world and the flesh), and these bring him unimaginable delight.

Amongst them he sees a rosebush, whose beauty enthralls him:

                                     And such desire
Then seized me that I had not failed to seek
The place where that rose-heap was on display
Though Pavia or Paris had tempted me.
When I was thus o’ertaken by this rage,
Which many another better man has crazed.
Straightway I hurried toward the red rosebush.

“Rage”, “craze”, and so on, are words from clinical psychology, and indeed, as we have already seen, love of this kind was typically diagnosed in the Middle Ages as a kind of full-blown mania or mental illness.  It is the same “craze”, as the dreamer recognizes, as that which gripped many a better man before him.