Thoughts on Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, 35 Years of Rereading

The Year of Aesthetics №41 2022–10–04

I have reread this book over the longest period of my life I have been reading it for more than 35 years. Now listening for the first time to wonderful audio book and wanted to discuss some things I found and attracted me during these latest readings. Think its only rival for rereading have been Around the World in 80 Days, Cyrano De Bergerac and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. The only book that has been with me as long and still holds it charms after all these years are the Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

When I came to this book, stood simply as a mystery and the book can completely stand is just as a great who done it. It is well crafted and the translation by William Weaver is glorious.

I only later learned more of what was hidden inside the narrative and the games that Eco was playing. It has become more and more with each reading and it is a book that speaks to ideas across several other books.

Homage to Borges

I had not read Borges, before this reading, so I did not see all the references to Borges. The first is character Jorge of Borges, a blind man (monk), who is associated with a labyrinthine library that encompass the vastness of human knowledge is quite a nod to Borges. Like Borges, Eco has rules and thoughts on labyrinth and goes through thoughts of being trapped in an endless library and that parallels the distraction of books and problems with limitless knowledge and limitless mans. Eco’s Library hints at the geometry of Borges’ Infinite Library.

Eco starts his book in the most Borgesian manner describing an imagined manuscript and with a delectable artificial (Eco)(Eco), Eco says he has copied the now stolen book and can find no trace of it or any reference to it. Now out of reach of the copyist (Eco) of 14 century manuscript worries about publication but relies on minimal dubious provenance (Eco)worries that the book is now a waste of his time and unpublishable. Then he finds a spurious reference to the story with a different enough but less real provenance that allows him to publish. He parallels like Borges in his body of the main story a book everyone wants to read but no one can hold onto and is lost like Eco pseudo-manuscript. Like Borges’ Book of Sand, the book no one can hold on to is dangerous and devastation its hold on the reader.

ECo plays with Borges idea from the Theologians that heretics and theologians do not look so different before the eyes of God. He has a scene of fire like the Theologians, and a monastery very similar to Borges’ in the Theologians. Eco’s monks and clerics are full of false reliance on theological athorities constantly making arguments base on passages from books of coequal value and this appeal to authority is a running joke may only be bettered in Bolano’s 2666 with the made up papers in the Part about the Academics, a secular version of Eco’s game in the name of the rose.

The Book Game

Eco writes about authors answering authors with books, which he, Calvino and Kundera were famous for. This is a central theme of the Theologians as well. These writers often wrote books that complement or contrasted books within a school of authors.

He loves showing how the monks learn stories and narratives and use these stories to threaten enemies and heretics, but attributing stories and narratives falsely. William is constantly calling out fellow monks for their rehashing of old stories and mixing up the sins of heretics and saints. He goes so far as to say one monk’s claim sainthood for two woman who had ties to heretics and that the monk proclaiming the woman saints knew all heretics in woman's circle firsthand and he only separates them by narrative and not fact. This motif of two opposite persons being the same person or sharing the same sin is heavily exploited in Borges’ short stories in The Aleph.

As well Eco plays on the folly of the weak and simple and the exploitation of the strong and learned. He attaches the use of narrative by the inquisitors, and how confessions are often route quotation from texts that are never questioned, by the inquisitor. It is a book about books, a story about stories. At the heart there is an unreadable book you long to hold and read, Bolano takes this idea as far as possible in 2666.

Adso the lovely narrator is both a young man in the story and an old wise and self-doubting old monk telling the tale again two men in one and also the same man again, a Borgesian luxury.

Othello

In Baudilino and The Name of The Rose Eco refers to Othello’s Anthropophagi and extends the catalog of monster men in The Name of The Rose and has Baudilino meet these beast men in Baudilino.

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders. -Othello act 1 scene 3

Homage to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

William of Baskerville is the Holmes of the Name of the Rose again the name Baskerville, a proud Holmesesque deductions to introduce William. He is constant in arguments about limitation of logic and method. As well he has a sense of justice that is much in Holmes’s style forgiving minor sins of the weak but exploiting them for knowledge, while leveling his ire at the miss users of power and authority. To set all this theology in a great mystery while showing the flaws and limits of Holmes is wonderful. William does not have the same triumph as Holmes, at the end he is faced with the limits of Bacon’s paths to knowledge in reading the book of nature through reason .

I have found it well worth reading for 35 year and found new things on yet another pass.