An allegorical mirror: The pool of Narcissus in Guillaume de Lorris' Romance of the Rose

Romanic Review, Nov 2000 by Nouvet, Claire

Borrowing from the allegorical tradition of dream narratives the figure of the cheminement, the Romance of the Rose stages an "I" who from the very beginning of the dream walks. This walk is no aimless wandering. The "I" in the dream (a persona to which I shall refer for the sake of convenience as the "Lover") is indeed beckoned, without his knowledge, toward the pool of Narcissus that the Romance of the Rose excises from the narrative to which it apparently belongs, Ovid's Metamorphoses, in order to graft it at the very core of its own oneiric space. While the Ovidian pool was the site of a deadly self-reflection, such is not its function in the Romance of the Rose. As he looks into the pool, the Lover discovers two crystals where the garden is reflected, as in a mirror. The crystalline mirror of the Romance of the Rose substitutes for the reflecting surface that the silvery water provided in Ovid's text. It becomes the speculum mundi where the Lover sees the entire garden reflected. But since the Lover has already "searched and seen" "tot I'a fere et tot Vestre," "the entire condition and nature of the garden," when he comes upon the fountain:'

Mes j'alai tant destre et senestre

que j'oi tot l'afere et tot l'estre

dou vergier cerchie et veu.

[1415-17 - emphasis mine]

(I wandered to right and to left until I had seen the whole garden and explored all its features. [p. 23])

Why should he see this "estre" one more time reflected in the pool?

As we shall see, the mirror of the pool does not provide a mere reflection of the garden. The pool takes on a new function, which has not so far been sufficiently recognized: it becomes the site where the text reflects its own allegorical "vision." This self-reflection is critical in several respects for it implicitly calls into question the distinction between perception and allegory as well as the status of the lyric "I" as the source of the allegorical "vision" that the text claims to be.

Critics have proposed varied interpretations of the crystals that the Romance of the Rose, in a rather provocative move, grafts onto the Ovidian pool. For C.S. Lewis, they figure the poetic image of the lady's eyes; for others, they figure the lover's eyes, or the reflection of his own eyes in those of the lady.2 Pursuing this line of investigation, more recent interpretations have read the crystals as an allegory for the speculum that the eye is supposed to be. According to medieval optics, the eye provides the reflective surface upon which the images of the world are received, reflected and imprinted. As to the part of the eye which reflects the shape, medieval optics will mostly localize it in the crystalline "humor;" that is, in the glass-like lens suspended in the watery substance which, according to Aristotle, makes up the eye. As Knoespel points out, the existence of the crystalline lens (that Galen called the crystalline humor) was known to the Latin West since the beginning of the 12th century, thanks to Hunain ibn Ishaq's Liber de oculis.3 According to the Liber de oculis:4

The eye is composed of many different parts. Vision, however, arises from only one of these parts which is called the crystalline humor. The rest of the humors and small tissues exist only to aid the crystalline humor. [ ... ] The crystalline humor is white and luminous. It is not completely round, however, because it is somewhat flat. It is situated in the middle of the eye. It is white and shiny so that it may quietly receive a variety of colors. With its white and shiny quality, it rapidly reflects colors just as we find in clear glass.

A receptacle of images, the fountain is, according to Knoespel, "a representation of the human eye,"5 and more specifically, of the crystalline humor which functions as the receptacle for color and form as well as the means by which they are conveyed to the optical nerve and brain:

Hunain's description of the eye's structure provides an important detail for our understanding of Guillaume's fountain, for it indicates that the crystals beneath the water, with their ability to receive color from the sun's rays, are most likely a physical allegory of the crystalline humor situated within the watery substance of the eye. The crystals' receptivity to color, their ability to order the visual imagery of the garden, and their inability to reflect the entire garden at once, point to the process of vision as understood at the beginning of the thirteenth century.6

Knoespel suggests that the allegory could be extended to include all the innovations that the Romance of the Rose inserts within the Ovidian pool:

The bubbling source passing through the silvery gravel [ ... ] may be a representation of the visual spirit issuing from the optic nerve and passing through vitreous and crystalline humors. [ ... ] The two channels correspond to the two crystals and seem to be a representation of the optic nerves leading to the eyes.7

The fact that the Romance of the Rose "drowns" the reflection can also be accounted for in terms of the Aristotelian conception of vision as a reflection which takes place not on the eye but in the eye, and specifically within the crystalline humor: