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.