Salman Rushdie: The Laughing Exile

 

"This is what he thought: I'm a dead man. He wondered how many days he had left to live and thought the answer was probably a single-digit number." 

The passage appears on the first page of Salman Rushdie's 2012 memoir, "Joseph Anton," the story of how the author dealt with the 1989 fatwa leveled on him by the Ayatollah Khomeini following the publication of his novel, "The Satanic Verses." 

The stabbing of Rushdie shortly before a talk at New York State's Chautauqua Institution last Friday came more than 33 years after Khomeini's death sentence, a span during which Rushdie has written 17 books, including novels (with one publishing next year), collections of essays, and the aforementioned autobiography of his time on the run. 

Even before it began, as he documented many times, Rushdie’s career is one of exile – making a home away from the place where you were born, the feeling of disconnection which becomes a second skin. In “The Satanic Verses,” the novel that would define not only his career but his life, he wrote, “Paranoia, for the exile, is a prerequisite for survival.”

Rushdie is a figure of absolutes and extremes. An atheist, much of his work deals in characters who are believers. A figure of the cultural left, he found himself needing the protection of Margaret Thatcher and various right wing Western governments. He has attained the kind of world historical significance that most authors dream of, albeit at a terrible price, while surviving the traumatic period to occasionally make forays into films, pop music, and the general culture. At the same time, how many people who know his name have actually read his work?

And the attack comes at a time when Rushdie's creative star has been in decline. The New York Times last year trashed his novel “Quichotte” and accused him of a formula - "Classic Novel or Myth used as Scaffolding, Femme Fatale, Story within the Story (recounted by a Garrulous Narrator), Topical Concerns, Defense of Hybridity."

“The Satanic Verses” deals with the great obsessions of Rushdie’s life – the consciousness of the immigrant, the clash of belief and unbelief, and the question of identity. The two main characters, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are Indian Muslim actors living in the present onboard a hijacked plane. The aircraft explodes, but the two survive, with Gibreel at first transformed into the archangel Gabriel, and Saladin into a devil. The parts of the novel that prompted the fatwa involve extended dream sequences involving a character the reader will recognize as Muhammad. There is also a character who is functions as a parody of Khomeini.

Eventually, through a series of further transformations, the two men eventually make it back to India, but they cannot escape from who they are. The journey has changed them in some areas while leaving intact the loves and concerns that drove them through the story. Gibreel, struggling with mental illness, eventually kills himself. Saladin embraces his identity in his homeland. Each man clings defiantly to who he perceives himself to be. The end, he seems to be saying, does not look promising.

“Who is he? An exile. Which must not be confused with, allowed to run into, all the other words that people throw around: émigré, expatriate, refugee, immigrant, silence, cunning. Exile is a realm of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St. Helena. It Is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.”

The tone of the work is so highly literary, but uniquely Rushdie – one can come from his culture and get all the winks without perhaps noticing homages and asides to Joyce, Shakespeare, Frank Herbert or Pynchon. By the same token, many western readers, who have no familiarity with the hosts of Hindu gods or Muslim apocrypha, might sail right past puns and wordplay devoted to them while seizing on some bit of literary filigree. I never read Rushdie that I don’t feel a bit lost, but that too, I believe, is a calculation on his part. To be an immigrant, an outsider, he appears to say, is to feel a concentrated disorientation, a hysterical blindness, as though you aren’t getting it all, that your understanding is incomplete, and that can be a blessing and a curse. For none of us are really getting it all all the time, are we? Having a pair of cultural blinders on can sometimes allow us to get a little bit farther faster. But what we blind to?

When “The Satanic Verses” appeared on bookshelves, followed by the hysteria, I dutifully bought my hardbound copy and began setting to read what all the fuss was about. The tone mystified me, I will admit. I was a very immature 18-year-old. My pride puffed up at the references I understood, the rest sailed over my head. It was only almost 20 years later, after the end of Rushdie’s exile, 9/11, and the Iraq War that I successfully made my way through the book, able to enjoy it and realize just how prescient Rushdie had been about the world that was about to burst forth. 

It’s upon reading “The Satanic Verses” that one realizes perhaps the harshest bit of irony – the audience Rushdie wrote for, the one who would have presumably appreciated what he was trying to do, was the segment of society which reacted the most violently toward it. Rushdie himself wrote that one of the paradoxes of Islam is that its conservative theology “looking backward with affection toward a vanishing culture, became a revolutionary idea, because the people whom it attracted most strongly were those who had been marginalized by urbanization…” Yet that same group of people reacted violently when they perceived a westernized, urbanized critique (or parody) of Islam. At one time, it was possible to believe in the inevitable triumph of Western-style objectivity against obscurantism, fanaticism, and conspiracy in the service of religion. But to do so, one had to employ one’s own bit of magical realism, chiefly by not consulting the rest of the world.

The constellations of Rushdie’s multiverse can best be viewed in miniature in “Chekov and Zulu,” a short story published in his collection “East/West.” In it, we encounter the title characters, Sikhs known by their nicknames borrowed from “Star Trek.” They are successful, professional men in their conversation, which is sprinkled with the codewords and linguistic vestiges of British colonialism. Why not “Sulu?” Because Zulu “sounds like a wild man” and evokes another image from England’s empire. Coincidentally, because they did not grow up in England, the two men first encountered “Star Trek” not as reruns of American television, but in the only way open to them at the time - paperback novelizations of the episodes.

But in approximately taking the names of the Starship Enterprise’s helmsman and ensign, they are honoring “the ultimate professional servants.” The story begins in 1984 on the day Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. This sets in motion their mission to uncover intelligence about Sikh radicals in the U.K. England has always been a breeding ground for Indian radicals, they observe. Eventually, Chekov “by chance” finds himself with Indira’s son Rajiv on the day in 1991 when he was assassinated by a Tamil revolutionary – a threat closer to home.

“So, finally, we have learned to produce the goods at home, and no longer need to import,” Chekov thinks. “The tragedy is not how one dies… It is how one has lived.” In the calculus of East and West, as on the Enterprise, our two heroes are supposed to be the bit players. The pop mythology merges with their own stories, and all they have is the bond they share with each other.

It is the mind of the exile that Rushdie returns to – the idea of being simultaneously in two worlds, and neither. A richness of life that comes with a terrible poverty – a man who can solve a riddle that people are only asking thousands of miles away in another language, driven by the grudges and creeds recorded in history books that cannot be read in the tongue of those around him on the morning bus. If we find ourselves in such a world, we might feel like a punchline, but unaware of what the joke is supposed to signify. Rushdie might tell us the only option is to still laugh, as an act of defiance.

As of this writing, Rushdie is alive but his recovery appears to be long and uncertain. Many times over the last three decades, he has probably had occasion to imagine something like what occurred on that stage, but perhaps not what might happen after. He has only lived with the knowledge that any freedom is bitterly contested, a fact that one becomes numb to in a setting where nothing seems up for grabs. Rushdie's life, surviving as it has, may once again breathe vigor into the persistent idea that the life of the mind will eventually triumph over all its foes. It's a dangerously complacent idea, and he knew better. In May, speaking at the PEN America Emergency World Voices Congress of Writers, Rushdie said, "A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all satirists are heroes."

One particular quote from "Anton" jumps out at me: 

"Compromise destroyed the compromiser and did not placate the uncompromising foe. You did not become a blackbird by painting your wings black, but like an oil-slicked gull you lost the power of flight. The greatest danger of the growing menace was that good men would commit intellectual suicide and call it peace. Good men would give in to fear and call it respect." 

The Burden of Prometheus: Benjamin Labatut's Chorus of Broken Mechanics

 

“I believe in science…”

When I heard these words, several years ago, I was standing at the threshold of a ramshackle house in rural Alabama, after having invited the man who answered the door to visit my church. I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me. It was a rainy, drowsy Sunday afternoon, and the man looked out at me with a skeptical eye, something in the tone of his voice approaching the frontiers of politeness. His Southern accent and bass voice rendered the word as “SIGH-uhns,” like a man losing patience with existence.

“Really?” I asked. “O.K.” I glanced over his shoulder, failing to see test tubes over a Bunsen burner, a blackboard of indecipherable equations chalked up, perhaps a chart or two cataloguing the progress of a molecule. “Well, there’s only so much science can tell us about life…” I said, angling toward the concept of purpose, with a hopeful stop at faith.

“I’m more about science,” he insisted, edging the door ever so slightly closed. I thanked him for his time, and eagerly awaited his next paper on the nature of whatever. 

I thought of this after I finished “When We Cease to Understand the World,” the novel by Benjamin Labatut, which mixes the collected biographies of early 20^th century physicists with elements of fiction to examine the progress of atoms, lives, and theories. 

As I said, I didn’t know the man, so he very well could have been hiding his fusion reactor in the garage. Science doesn’t necessarily need to be confirmed by hard won degrees in great institutions, as this book illustrates. There are plenty of examples of self-taught men and women who unlocked daunting mysteries through persistence and the arrogance of ignorance - people who aren't aware that they aren't supposed to know. But I also understood that any theory will do when one doesn’t want to go to church. 

I also remembered that science brings its own salvations and damnations. A year from now, the director Christopher Nolan has promised “Oppenheimer,” a biographical motion picture on the life of the father of the atomic bomb. While Oppenheimer was able to shepherd a group of committed scientists into successfully creating the ultimate weapon, thus ending the Second World War, he had to live with the consequences, and the damnation of his fellow scientists for unleashing the Bomb. Beat the Nazis and the Japanese, and you may eventually be suspected of subversion by your own government. Life is like that.

But my skepticism at my rural scientist’s skepticism was healthy, and taught me a familiar lesson: Just as faith has much to do with personality, and motivation, so does unbelief. Some truths, we believe, are better left unconfronted, to our individual and everlasting damnations. 

In the case of Labatut's novel, the title tells the story: In seeking to understand the world better, we lose what command we had of the facts that got us there, acquiring along the way a whole new set of vexing and devastating questions. 

Quantum mechanics seeks to explain and understand existence at its most essential and most theoretical – the interaction of particles we cannot see, and how they make up the space of matter: in essence, the stuff of existence itself. At the same time from this interplay, which deals with a mind-numbingly infinitesimal world, we can understand the workings of the universe, a space so unutterably vast that we become atoms. We are masses of conscious matter. What are we, when we are barely tangible? Quantum physicists seek to make these arcane concepts, dealing with a subatomic universe, tangible with clean metaphor. Is there one theory? Two? An array as vast as the universe?

What Labatut’s novel does is accomplish the same work as the subjects of his work – render the quirky personalities, sometimes blazing like Old Testament prophets, sometimes like movie set Poindexters – into understandable quantities. Why is that some personalities gravitate toward each other, while still others are repelled away? What happens when a Heisenberg comes in contact with a Schrodinger? What happens when highly egotistical, highly intelligent, highly fragile men come face-to-face with their own mortality, and constitute their own singularities? What will get sucked into their maws, and be spit out into the unsuspecting universe? What spooky action results? What reactions?

There is rich ore here to be mined, not just in the personalities, but in the times. The background of quantum physics mirrors that of the modern world – the fin de siècle period just before World War I, when European civilization was careening toward the cataclysm of the Great War and the end of so many objective truths. What Labatut does is use these personalities and their theories to predict the outcomes that await them. The tortured front-line theorist Schwarzschild, by unlocking Einstein’s relativity to theorize the existence of black holes, correctly foresees the coming of Hitler, occupying the same trenches, wounded by the mustard gas brought about by science. When Heisenberg begins to understand that matter is not something we can gaze at objectively, he becomes pursued by the ghosts of atomized families, wiped from existence by the atomic bomb. 

The guts of the book is contained in the fourth and longest section, which bears the same title as the book. This dramatizes the struggle between Schrodinger and Heisenberg, with Bohr and Einstein serving as mathematical referees. Is the universe understandable, even graspable, at least when one looks at the numbers? It is the figure of Heisenberg who unleashes uncertainty – that great concept that lays beneath so much of our contemporary thought and discourse. Einstein is allowed his famous rebuttal to uncertainty: "God does not play dice with the universe!" To which Bohr replies, "It is not our place to tell Him how to run the world." This is what we are, whether we like it or not.

Labatut, a Chilean writer born in Europe, largely abandons his scientific rouge’s gallery in the final section of the book, instead giving us the fragmented story of a gardener who abandons science in ways similar to some of the theorists we have already encountered. “It was as if Einstein had given up physics after publishing his theory of relativity, or Maradona had decided never to touch a ball after winning the World Cup,” he writes. Though the man has had some trauma in his life, as we all have, he understood the terrible consequences of mathematics:

“It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips when its paradoxes and contradictions.” 

If we go back to the dawn of the 20th century, we would find figures in Western thought sitting in the shade of Marx, Freud and Darwin. We would hear people saying that science was behind their theories, and facts are immune to personalities and the caprices of the individual. Yet the century since has allowed us to see all three of these figures, and their theories, in a new light. And recent history reveals that even scientific truth isn't immune to the clash of some personalities, and the impenetrability of others. 

Where the Victorian world venerated order, the modern world embraces uncertainty. It is better not to know than that understand, for by not knowing, we both know and are understood. A person may be a hero until they are not. The unknown quantities in life allow us to say whatever we want.

Looking for The Name in 'The Name of the Rose'

 

Years before he sent readers around the world into the labyrinth of a medieval monastery in search of a lost book, Umberto Eco stated the dangers inherent in reading any text, in “The Role of the Reader”:

“An ideological bias can lead a critical reader to make a given text say more than it apparently says, that is, to find out what in that text is ideologically presupposed, untold. In this movement…fiction is transformed into document and the innocence of fancy is translated into the disturbing evidence of a philosophical statement.”

It is, with this in mind, that I hesitantly but enthusiastically write about one of my favorite novels, “The Name of the Rose,” Eco’s 1980 novel of murder, signs and supposed apocalypse. I read it again recently after more than 25 years away from it, my mind never quite that far during the whole time. Much has been, and could still be written, about the worldwide success of this book, crammed with medieval lore, church politics, long Latin quotations, and the enigma of its title. The author himself referred to the form of the novel as “a machine for generating interpretations.” Still, with Eco’s warning on my mind against reading too much into a work of fiction, I’d like to write a little bit about what might be going on at the novel’s “moment of truth.”

“The Name of the Rose” follows a Franciscan friar, William of Baskerville, and his young Benedictine novice, Adso of Melk, as they arrive at a monastery in Northern Italy in the fall of 1327. William is there on the eve of a summit to settle a dispute between the church and the secular government. Against this contretemps regarding the poverty of Christ, a series of murders begins over the course of one week.

Inside this monastery, William discovers, is an immense library, laid out as a maze, with a hidden room somewhere at its center. The monks who die mysteriously seem to be connected to a forbidden book, the long-lost second book of Poetics, by Aristotle, which deals with comedy.

Once William and Adso arrive at the hidden room, they find the blind monk, Jorge of Burgos, who has been waiting on them. What follows, as told by Adso many years later, is a scene where two personalities confront each other, a seduction, he says. The two old men represent the twin extremes of the classical Church – its zealot, busy to stamp out any presumed heresy in the womb, and its scholar, walking through life tying the richness of theology with the rediscovered wonders of the Western pagan philosophic tradition. Adso realizes, with a shudder, that the two are admiring each other “as if each had acted only to win the other’s applause.” Naturally, because we stand on the other side of the Enlightenment, and we have followed William in hopes of unlocking the mystery of the murders, we side with the Englishman and his weary Christian skepticism. 

But the author has also given us, in Jorge, a forbidding figure who guards the labyrinth, an allusion to Jorge Luis Borges, the legendary blind Chilean author of “The Library of Babel.” In that story, the librarian was “analogous to a god.” Eco, in his “Postscript,” which explained the novel writing process, said that he did not originally conceive of Jorge as the murderer. There has been much speculation as to whether Jorge is a comment on Borges’ support for the Pinochet regime.

But I would like to call attention to his relation to another famous literary figure set in the Middle Ages. As Jorge does his dance with William, he explains himself, and how he sees William’s rationalism. “Before, we used to look at heaven, deigning only a frowning glance at the mire of matter; now we look at the earth, and we believe in the heavens because of earthly testimony.”

Jorge says he hid the second book of Poetics because of what it might do to humanity, in introducing and schooling common people in the richness of comedy, where they would no longer fear the Devil, or the Church. “Laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh,” he says, arguing that even William would be swept away by the “impatient dismantling and upsetting of every holy and venerable image." 

In this love of fear, this love of order, Jorge seems to me closest to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor from “The Brothers Karamazov.” In a parable enclosed within the novel, Ivan Karamazov tells his brother Alyosha of a fictional incident during the height of the Spanish Inquisition, where Christ is taken into custody after raising the dead and healing the members of a sobbing crowd. He is questioned by the Inquisitor, who is described as a tall, gaunt man in his nineties with a look of “implacable outrage.”

Alone, the Inquisitor tells Jesus He has “no right to add a syllable to what you spoke before.” Instead, the Inquisitor cites Jesus’ command that “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.” (Matt. 18:18). And what he proposes to bind is the human race – to keep it from exercising its free will. He argues that Jesus must have known how base humanity would be, if left to choose its own way. Instead, he says, the church lies to the people to preserve them from freedom. “For this deceit, we suffer profoundly,” he says,“…for we act out of a greater, a more practical, tenderness than the rigorous love with which You obstruct our work.”

The Inquisitor plans on burning Jesus, but the Savior does not change his expression during the harangue. Instead, he rises and kisses the Inquisitor on the lips, Ivan says. The old man then shudders, walks to the door, and lets Jesus depart. Here the parable ends.

Mitchell Bishop, writing about Ivan’s tale, says Dostoyevsky is implying that a Christian faith corrupted by worldly objectives and “reason” would inevitably adopt unbelief as its credo and build something vain in place of the Church, inspired by an ultimate contempt for humanity. Only by learning to love like Jesus can we make the mystery of the Gospel apparent. Only the grace of God can render humanity, in all of its individual corruption, lovable.

There is something very similar in Jorge’s fear of what comedy will do to the peasant. “And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?” Jorge asks. The proposition is ludicrous, for one thing. Comedy is so natural a human facet that the instruction of a dead Greek philosopher is hardly needed. Jorge attitude betrays the fact that the blind man's devotion has twisted him beyond hope, beyond faith. The monk Remigio alluded to the dangers of this attitude in his confession, under duress of the Inquisition, that a man can sin “through overweening love of God, through superabundance of perfection.”

In “The Key to the Name of the Rose,” a book by three authors, the fact that William and Adso pass through a mirror to get to Jorge is no accident. Jorge is William’s double, and vice versa; two figures of “cleverness and mad skill,” each bursting with pride at their own ingenuity.

But these are two figures of a religious order, of course, and pride is most definitely a sin. “For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world.” (I John 2:16)

We are quick to condemn the pride in Jorge, as we should, as we do the pride of the Grand Inquisitor, in thinking that a twisted man can thwart the Will of God. William rightly calls him a devil, a grim, arrogant spirit, "faith without smile." But William will wound himself later with his own pride, in conceiving a theory of the crime that mirrors the Seven Trumpets of Revelation. It is his theory, imposed on a series of murders manipulated by Jorge, that eventually inspires Jorge in the later deaths. In doing so, Jorge assumes divine favor on his acts.

About the only good thing that can be said for Jorge, in contrast to the Grand Inquisitor, is that Jorge understands what he is doing is sinful. A lifetime in the Church has taught him that Christ will forgive. But the apocalyptic trumpets remind me of the first part of Revelation - not the beast with ten horns or the lake of fire, but the early letters to the seven churches, where Christ diagnoses their ailments and recommends cures. The loveless church, the first He addresses, has not become weary, but risks losing its place unless it repents of losing sight of its first love-Him.

Then there is the figure of Adso, telling the story. Though Eco resists telling us what the novel is “about,” in his Postscript, he says it was important to tell the story through the novice, as an old man, so the story could be “understood through the words of one who understands nothing.”  

But Eco indicates that Adso did not understand, even as an old man, what he had witnessed. Instead, Adso, he says, chooses a “flight into the divine nothingness, which was not what his master taught him.” This is as close as Eco comes to indicating a possible theme to be drawn from the story, since saying someone failed to see the point means there was, in fact, a point to be seen. Does he mean that Adso, if he had been paying attention, might have left his life as a monk and abandoned the church? But the story does not say that William did this, though he died a seemingly meaningless death in the Great Plague.

When William realizes his miscalculation, he asks the legitimate question, “Where is all my wisdom, then?” William of Baskerville clung to an idea of order, when he later states that there “is no order in the universe.” But he is a man who is the member of an Order, who has dedicated his life to the idea of an order to the universe, who has lived in expectation of many orders, in education, philosophy, logic. He sounds much like a middle-aged Italian philosopher, as well as the author of Ecclesiastes.

Much later, Eco said that fiction suggests that our own view of the world may be as flawed as how fictional characters view their own. No less than Aristotle, in his first book of “Poetics,” says that for a tragedy to be effective, it has to render men as better than they are in actual life, presumably in order to underline the tragic fall, and induce pity.  

Eco had a background in Catholic activism, but later referred to himself as a “stray dog,” keeping away from religious and political movements. Is Eco saying that single-minded actors like Jorge are in some ways superior to William, in that William’s intellectual vanity prevents him from taking the kind of action that neutralizes Jorge’s brand of evil? This question is as relevant today as it was in Eco’s day, as it was in William’s, as in all history.

But then, if William did move proactively to prevent an evil, would William not be in danger of the same sort of excess in the other direction, given his own pride? As both characters would remind us, wisdom is proven right by her children.

Or is Eco bemoaning the meaninglessness of life? William tells Adso that the mind imagines an order to the universe as a way to ascend to some destination, unnamed. But then that order must be cast away in order for the actual ascension to begin. The great semiotician seems to be discarding a pattern in order to better read signs.

One could assume, given his past and his “stray dog” status, that Eco is taking a dagger to the verities of his youth in the Church. Rationalism, as personified by William of Baskerville, is a better, more truthful way to view reality, he appears to be saying, even if one is too late to snuff out the Jorges of the world. David Lodge, for example, points out that while Eco tells us that he wrote the novel because he felt like poisoning a monk, he never actually says why he felt inspired to do so. Jorge isn’t the only symbol of ecclesiastical excess. There are monks who slaughtered the rich, the coerced confessions of Bernard Gui, the hidden passions within the monastery. While there is obviously nostalgia in Eco for the scholastic reverence of the Scriptoriums and the rich intellectual legacy of Catholicism, there is also contempt for its excesses, its empty piety, its pages of history dripping with blood. When he allows Jorge to kill himself and burn the entire library down in order to destroy one book, he shows his cards. But there is Biblical truth in this as well. “Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good.” (Ecclesiastes 9:18) 

Asked about his personal philosophy in 1984, Eco described it as "tragic optimism" - "You know that life is tragic, but you have to look for any form of salvation." Here, once again, is the invoking of a Christian idea - salvation - but eschewing any comprehension of reality beyond that which the senses disclose. The end of his most famous novel is tragic, and pessimistic, because it rejects the idea of order, pattern. The murderer is not punished, per se, because there was no one murderer. Instead, we have a book about books about books, as all books are eventually about other books.

So did Adso, in fact, miss the point? Much later, the elder Adso quotes in German from Meister Eckhart by way of Angelus Silesius: “God is pure nothingness, touched by neither Now nor Here.” Only by completely losing the self can we commune completely with Him, he says, shortly before disclosing that he does not know who he wrote this story for, nor what it all means. Adso has arrived at a place not far from William, and has in some ways, drawn the same conclusion as his master, though in his own way. This would indicate that the moral Adso failed to draw from the story was not his master’s, but his creator’s.

The figure of Christ looms large over the story, as His story dictates the lives of its characters. What was the nature of Christ’s poverty? Did Christ laugh? How does one honor Him best? Is His life the most consequential in history, or yet another system by which human beings can torture each other, thus proving the need for Him, regardless of His ability to redeem? It’s interesting that when Eco discloses to the reader, in his “Postscript,” what his strategy was in keeping the reader engaged, he compares it to a pact with the devil. “I wanted the reader to enjoy himself,” he says, unrepentant. 

He succeeded, as far as I'm concerned. One can be amused that the novel was recognized as contributing to "the dialogue between Christianity and literature." But it is this confrontation between two prideful sinners, at the center of a maze, over a lost book, that I keep returning to, each man impervious to the other in his assumptions. There is much in it that speaks to me of the history of Western Christianity, of the pitfalls of faith, of the dangers of devotion to something other than Christ while still invoking His Name. And so, one struggles for orientation in a mystery without a murderer, a library robbed of its books, a labyrinth disclosed, its blind Minotaur dead, with a defeated detective clutching the last books he could save from the library, clinging to flawed, imperfect knowledge while still wearing the charred robes of a churchman.

I previously wrote about Umberto Eco here.