Pygmalion’s Folly and the Author’s Craft in Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose

Abstract

This article studies Jean de Meun’s reworking of the Pygmalion myth in his continuation of the Romance of the Rose. Through a close textual reading, we argue that Jean de Meun in his retelling of the myth mimetically interweaves Pygmalion’s folly and the author’s writing. Although earlier critical studies have recognized the figure of Pygmalion in the Rose as symbolizing the poet, they have generally overlooked how Pygmalion’s folly operates on the level of authorship. We will argue that the Cypriot sculptor’s ‘foolish’ transformation of matter (i.e. his statue of Galatea becoming ‘real’) is imitated in Jean’s transformation of poetic matter into a tangible written artifact. Moreover, this artistic substantiation through madness stages authorial craft as a mimesis of divine power in order to confer to the author a quasi-demiurgic status of deus artifex.