The Name of the Rose: Reading the

World, Reading the Text

In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco has written a historiographic metafiction. It is a historical novel. It is also a detective novel. It is also a book about books, the nature of books, the nature of reading and the nature of interpretation. Through what the text has to say about reading, the reader of Ecos novel is brought to consider his own acts of reading, the ways he interprets, and the way in which he relates to the world. This is the function of metafiction with regard to the novel, or at least one of the functions.

It is one of those ironies, I suspect an intentional one, that we, in reading The Name of the Rose, are made to encounter a text about the difficulties or problematics of interpretation which is itself difficult to interpret or at least difficult to establish a critical reading of. Or to put it another way, it resists interpretation. There are at least two questions that one ought to ask: first, what is it that makes it difficult to work out a critical reading of the novel? Next, what is the text attempting to say through its difficulty?

Lets think first about the question of what it is that makes the novel hard to get a handle on.

1) First, theres what we could call overdetermination. What I mean is that nothing in the novel has only one meaning: everything means more than one thing. There are millions of examples. (Okay, not exactly millions, but (defensively) I bet its not that far off) Everything is both itself and simultaneously also a sign or an emblem for something else. Adso, on the Second Day, remarks that Symbol

sometimes of the Devil, sometimes of the Risen Christ, no animal is more untrustworthy than the cock. (101) So here, you have the cock, which is a cock, but its also a symbol; its not just a symbol, its a symbol with more than one meaning, and those meanings are opposed: it both stands for the Devil as well as the Devils opposite number, Christ. As Eco says through the voice of his

narrator, doubtlessly tongue-in-cheek, no animal is more untrustworthy than the cock The cock, as exemplary of the symbol is both overdetermined as well as untrustworthy, or unstable. (However, before you all start angsting again about instability, let me say in advance that I think Name of the Rose is in fact quite a stable novel even its instabilities, if there are any, are stable well come back to that later)

Or, (another example of an overdetermined image or symbol), as Adso says of the library, For these men devoted to writing, the library was at once the celestial Jerusalem and an underground world on the border between terra incognita and Hades. (184) Again, as with the cock, the library is a library, but also celestial Jerusalem and its opposite: an underground world between terra incognita and Hades. But where the cock is sometimes a symbol of the Devil and sometimes a symbol of Christ (but not all the time, with the result that you might end up not being sure how to read the cock, at times), the library is at once (simultaneously) celestial Jerusalem and the underground world on the border between terra incognita and Hades. In other words, the library is different from the cock, in that it is simultaneously one thing and another thing not sometimes, but all the time. The point Im trying to make is that it is a different kind of problem, but nonetheless one still deriving from an attempt to read, to interpret, to make sense of the world. You can still tease out the implications of

the description above. Not only is it at once its own opposite, it (the library as symbol) stands in that no-mans land, a place not even defined, a place on the border and on the border between the unknown and Hades. In every which way, the whole problem of definition is being highlighted here. The library is arguably the texts central symbol. Given this, the

problematisation of the library in terms of its significance, this positioning of the library on the border at which place it is neither one thing nor the other, and furthermore its symbolic position with regard to undefined terrain, and also its contestation not just between heaven and hell, but also the Christian (celestial Jerusalem) and the pagan (Hades), necessarily heightens the difficulty of ascertaining what the text is saying. The novel has a problem of

overdetermination in general, but on top of that, the texts central symbol, the library, is superbly overdetermined. (Incidentally, in thinking about the

contestation between Jerusalem/ Hades it strikes me that it's a perfect emblem in itself of one of the central issues in the text: I'm referring to the contest between the 'doctrines' encoded in the Bible and Aristotle's lost book on comedy. For Jorge, Aristotle's writings don't just represent subversive notions through what they have to say about comedy as subversive; they also represent the challenge of the pagan world to the authority of the Christian world. And isn't it interesting that the whole point is formulated in terms of a challenge between books; one of the implications of the point is that books shape the world and all its power-play because they shape conception.)

Continuing with the same point the difficulty of arriving at a reading of the text due to the texts representation of meaning as overdetermined, -- we find the library continuing to proliferate as a sign of meaning. Alinardo says, The library

is a great labyrinth, sign of the labyrinth of the world. (158) and here, the library, already a contested site, becomes in addition a labyrinth, a space dedicated to confusion, and also an emblem or microcosm of a larger entity.

(Let me deviate, momentarily, to explain a few things pertaining to the background and mindset both of characters in the novel and the reader who is metafictively pointed at by the novel. I'll come back to 'overdetermination' after the commercial break... In the example in the paragraph above, incidentally, you're being pointed towards a particular metafictional device of the text, one which will help to stabilise the text even while it appears to be one of the devices which distracts the reader and problematises his/her getting a firm grip on the text. The device of a thing being an emblem of a larger thing is a sign of two tendencies at work in the text: first, the tendency towards symbol-making which was both a feature of the medieval mind (or at least a feature of the medieval mind as represented in the text) as well as of Eco's text itself, and second, its a feature of the work as metafiction itself. Some of you are already probably familiar with the term mise en abyme, but if not, it refers to an image containing an image of itself containing an image of itself and so on ad infinitum. It's a kind of infinite regress. According to Lucien Dallenbach in The Mirror in the Text, the term was coined by Andr Gide.

At one level, this device creates that sense of an over-proliferation of meaning and symbols that contributes to the confusion of the reader encountering the text. On another level, however, it could be considered to be a stabilising mechanism, and hence, reassuring to those who've been worried about the perceived instability in metafiction, because what it does do is display a pattern of correspondances.

Correspondance works on the principle of similarity, and the device of the mise en abyme points to the principle of iterability or repeatability. The reason why this could be considered stabilizing should be fairly clear. It suggests that if you can read or understand one thing, you can then read or understand the thing to which it corresponds, or of which it is an emblem. It partly explains why people in the text as well as readers of the text are as anxious as they are to interpret, to make sense of the various texts, encountered both as actual texts, or manuscripts (btw, people, sudden epiphany: 'manuscript: manus is Latin for hand: 'script' comes from 'scribere': to write; manuscript is the hand-written text written ...yay!) as well as texts in the form of architecture (I'm tempted to say 'architexture'), or even bodies as texts. Dont forget that the novel proper begins with the words that also open the Gospel of St. John: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (12) While the text of The Name of the Rose does not itself continue the quote, the continuing text in the Bible goes on to talk about how the Word became flesh (1: 14) and dwelt among men. My point is that the Biblical text which The Name of the Rose begins by invoking explicitly conflates (and it is a point of utmost theological significance) Word and flesh Christ is both logos the Word, and body. The body is the Word, yet another text to be read Ill come back to this later. In the end it all comes back to epistemology: their anxiety about symbols derives from a desire to understand and make sense of the world. Similarly to the way that the Victorians were drawn to Paley's 'watchmaker' argument, the characters within The Name of the Rose are attracted to symbols and symbolreading activity inspired by a desire to -- to use the words of William -- retrace in our minds the operations of the artificer. (219).

To clarify a point arising from the discussion above, after which I'll return to overdetermination in the text, let me elaborate a little on what I mean by the medieval tendency towards symbolization. The medieval mind was very much drawn towards typology which I should explain in case the terms unfamiliar to anyone. Typology, as defined by the O.E.D., is: 1. The study of symbolic representation, esp. of the origin and meaning of Scripture types; also transf. symbolic significance, representation, or treatment; symbolism. 2. The study of or a discourse on printing types or printing. 3. The study of classes with common characteristics;

classification, esp. of human products, behaviour, characteristics, etc., according to type; the comparative analysis of structural or other characteristics; a classification or analysis of this kind. Obviously, the second definition isnt what were talking about, but both 1 and 3 are relevant. 3 is relevant in the sense that the medieval mindset, at least as we

understand it or as we understand it to be depicted in the novel, is a mindset focused on and fascinated by the study of classes with common characteristics and the business of classification. Again, we could come back to the library as exemplary of this. Witness, for example the way in which, on p. 75, William asks, Splendid works. But in what order are they listed? . . . The librarian must have a list of all books, carefully ordered by subjects and authors, and they must be classified on the shelves with numerical indications. Or another example -- the way in which the Abbot, on p. 144, looking at his gems, says This ivory, this onyx, but also the stone that surrounds us, are a light, because I perceive that they are good and beautiful, that they exist according to their own rules of proportion, that they differ in genus and species from all other genera and

species, that they are defined by their own number, that they are true to their order, that they seek their specific place according to their weight Or yet another example -the discussion between William and Adso on pp. 304-5 on horned animals and the number of stomachs they have and the way in which the scholars of the time are in search of explicative laws in natural facts, i.e. structural laws that will allow things to fall into natural classifications which will in turn reveal an underlying order in the world. These are just some examples to make my point about the medieval mind as represented in the text trafficking in typologies in sense 3 Im sure you can find others. The macro-point being made here is an epistemological one it has to do with showing the ways in which the monks, etc are attempting to make sense of the world, by establishing the systems that give it shape.

Typology, however, in the first sense, is the main sense being invoked here. It refers to the study of symbolic represention, especially with regard to types or tropes in the Bible. Typology was a means of looking at and interpreting history (Biblical history); in The Name of the Rose, it is still seen as a framework by which the characters are trying to interpret their own times. As defined by David L. Baker (in Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1985.: 327-328)

"A TYPE is a biblical event, person, or institution which serves as an example or pattern for other events, persons, or institutions; and "TYPOLOGY is the study of types and the historical and theological correspondences between them; the basis of typology is God's consistent activity in the history of his chosen people.

Medieval scholars, following the tradition of thinking laid down by the New Testament authors, were prone to studying the Bible in typological or structural terms, trying to understand its underlying plan or design in terms of patterns, analogies, foreshadowings. So, for instance, they would read the Tree in the Creation myth as a type of the Cross, leading them to the pattern in which man falls by the Tree, but is saved by the Tree (loosely and figuratively speaking). Or, another favourite: Abraham sacrificing Isaac (or preparing to) as a type for God giving Christ up to be killed for mans sake. The general idea was that the patterns of the Old Testament look forward to those of the New Testament which offer a perfected form of the old. The iterable pattern I referred to just now is therefore an iterable pattern projected forward towards completion; we are not talking about meaning forever deferred, but promised effectively, an eventual clarification. It is precisely this kind of tendency towards seeing typologies in thought that Jorge of Burgos is able to exploit when he makes use of the accidental pattern of the earlier deaths to lead people off on a false chain of reasoning or interpretation. Because of their natural tendency to see pattern, or typologies in things, Jorge sets out the later bodies in such a way as to work auto-suggestively; and, true enough, the monks begin to see in the disposition of the bodies a pattern of, as they think, the coming Apocalypse.

Returning to more examples of overdetermination in the text: should you need more examples of overdetermined signs or symbols you only have to look: you have the girl who is on the one hand a sign of the displaced and marginalised. She represents the poor, who are the embodiment of the Fraticellis debates on poverty which are intrinsic to the novel, the female (shes practically the only one in the novel, the laity (as defined against the monastics). At the same time, she also represents (to Bernard Gui) a witch (the demonized other), love (to Adso) (look at the way in which she becomes the

embodiment and realization to him of that book of the Bible, the Song of Solomon). She means many things, possibly even more than the brief list Ive given you here; in the end, to William, she is just burned meat this stark comment is possibly an important one, offering, as it does in place of the multiplicity of meanings, a terrible simplicity, a refusal to play symbolic games, a return to the literal. In the film of the book, not that its important, which doesnt have the girl burned, but saved from the stake after Bernard Gui dies from falling on some sharpened stakes, she stands, looking at the departing William and Adso; the closing lines of the film are and I never (pause) knew her name. Given that the name of the girl is never a particular issue in the text, the only point of the last line would be either to be the point which the concluding Latin tag in the book gives: that in the end, only the pure names are left, after the thing signified by the name has gone, or, in fact, to suggest, through a process of association, that the girl is the rose of the title. Anyway, this observation regarding the film was just to add more flesh onto the point about the girl being one of the texts over-determined symbols, this affirmed by the film. I remind you that the larger point that is being made is that the overdetermination of symbols, the over-proliferation of meaning in the text makes it difficult to work out a critical reading of the novel. Next, we could argue that additionally, something we could call maximalism also problematises our reading and interpretation of The Name of the Rose. 2) Maximalism. Ecos fiction could be described as maximalist. Im using this term in a very general sense, and what I mean by it is that, in contrast to works in which very little happens Mondrian, in painting, John Cage, in music, perhaps Beckett, in literature in Ecos works, we tend to find canvasses on which theres too much information. Theres too much information about various minor

heretical sects of the Middle Ages, the ecclesiastical politics of the time, too much description of detail of things in the Abbey. We learn about herbs, about rare

books, about illumination, about herbs and simples, about spectacles, paints, architecture, etc. The point Im making here is that in a work which deploys such a great deal of information and detail, what is crucial and what secondary, what intrinsic to a critical interpretation and what not, becomes obscured. It is of course deliberate. For a start, this is a useful strategy in detective fiction; the barer the board, the easier to weed out and see patterns. The converse is also true: the more information of all kinds, the more difficult to ascertain what the pattern is because too much detail obscures. However, apart from the sheer devilish delight in detail for its own sake and for the sake of the detective plot, Ecos inclusion of immense amounts of data is also there, I think, for the sake of the larger philosophical point which is being pursued, which Ill come to very shortly. (Im moving on to what the novel is about now.) One of the strands of the novel, which is where the question of the novels philosophical agenda will come in, concerns the issue of authority and control. Even at the level of simple content (if content in Eco is ever simple!), we see a dynamic shaped in terms of authority and control at one pole, and, at the other and countering it, a challenge to it. Authority, as principle, is represented by the Church, the Pope, Bernard Gui, the Abbot, the librarian, etc. Within the ecclesiastical domain, the contest is between the Pope, who represents, both literally and also in symbolic terms within the novel, a centralizing authority unprepared to accept alterity, that which diverges or attempts to diverge from a code of doctrine, and which attempts to set up alternative doctrines, centres or nodes of power, etc. The point about heresy, then, is there not merely to flesh out the historical aspect of a literary work, but to dramatise the philosophical point which is in contention. Heresy represents a divergence from a master-narrative, setting up

competing narratives. authorities.

In place of the single authority, it sets up multiple

Where Eco, or rather, where the text stands on the authority question is probably where William of Baskerville does. It is worth noting that the overt raison detre for William and Adso being at the Abbey in the first place is for William to act as mediator between the Papacy and Michael of Cesena. William is a middle-man, a Franciscan, and an Englishman. As a churchman, he owes at least technical allegiance to the Pope. As an Englishman, his allegiances have a degree of independence even when England was, as at the time that the novel is set in 1327, a Catholic country, it was, by virtue of its history, geography and temperament, always a little independent of Rome. The choice of Williams nationality is in part influenced by Ecos wanting us at least to entertain the idea of Williams correspondance with Doyles Sherlock Holmes, but also, I suspect, for the kind of philosophical distance and/ or detachment and independence that being English would make credible. His Franciscanism is also deliberate, I think the Franciscans, as the novel makes clear, were sympathetic to the Fraticelli on the score of poverty. Where Bernard Gui is totally the Popes creature, and where Adso of Melk returns in later life to a kind of ecclesiastical conservatism, William represents a kind of via media, a middle-ground between the Fraticelli heretics to whom, as I mentioned, the Franciscans were sympathetic, and the Pope and Catholic church to whom William affirms allegiance. The point that Im making is that the text would appear to support the value of plurality as opposed to tightly controlled authority. The implications for where the text itself stands on the matter of meaning and interpretation should also be clear. If you think about it, the same principle is demonstrated with the library. What Jorge of Burgos is is a librarian who controls what people can access in the

library, and hence, what they can read, and thus what they can think, a bit like a medieval Orwellian ministry. The library, as a labyrinth, at some level represents a closed system. Books, as we understand, are meant to be free it is the nature of texts to propagate themselves, to be read and disseminated in writing, to influence. They are not meant to be sealed away and rigidly controlled. That Jorge, as regards the library is meant to be understood as paralleling the Pope or Bernard Gui as regards heresy, can be seen. First, dont forget the way in which, in this text, things are, as I said earlier, emblems of each other, or mirrors of each other. Next, I think the parallel is meant to be recalled in part through the absolutism of the two men as evidenced in the way in which they are prepared to put others to death in order that the purity of the system they stand for be maintained. But in any case, Jorges custodianship of the books and his attitude in particular as regards Aristotles book on comedy has already told us that for him, only the one book and one interpretation matter and can claim to represent truth. The Bible, he says, never said that Christ laughed, and this, he says, is indicative of the little value inherent in laughter and comedy. The Bible, as the book representing Authority, cannot and should not be challenged. What makes Aristotles text so dangerous in Jorges eyes is that it is a brilliant but pagan text whose conclusions threaten to subvert church teachings. As we see, however, the library, which under Jorge and the Abbot has become a closed system, a hermetic (in all senses of the word) system, instead of being an open economy, is burned down and this can be read as an allegory of what Ecos text is saying about control and authority. Earlier, I mentioned what I called maximalist tendencies in the novel, and if you think about it as well, a claim could be made for the maximalism representing a joyous riot of things, objects, details, existing for the sake of a glorious diversity diversity

representing a continual challenge to the singularizing imagination that would seek to colonise everything. As Macneice writes, World is crazier than we think it is. In this regard, (not with regard to MacNeice, but diversity) it is interesting to note that the description of Salvatore, given on p. 47 of the text is presented in terms of a diversity: And yet, one way or another, I did understand what Salvatore meant, and so did the others. Proof that he spoke not one, but all languages, none correctly, taking words sometimes from one and sometimes from another. I also noticed afterward that he might refer to something first in Latin and later in Provencal, and I realized that he was not so much inventing his own sentences as using the disiecta membra of other sentences, heard some time in the past, according to the present situation and the things he wanted to say, as if he could speak of a food, for instance, only with the words of the people among whom he had eaten that food, and express his joy only with sentences that he had heard uttered by joyful people the day when he had similarly experienced joy. His speech was somehow like his face, put together with pieces from other peoples faces, or like some precious reliquaries I have seen (si licet magnis componere parva, if I may link diabolical things with the divine), fabricated from the shards of other holy objects. At that moment, when I met him for the first time, Salvatore seemed to me, because of both his face and his way of speaking, a creature not unlike the hairy and hoofed hybrids I had just seen under the portal. Later I realized that the man was probably good-hearted and humorous

Not only does this description function as yet another emblem or mirror of something else this could also describe the workings of intertextuality the way in which all texts are already infected by other texts, informed by other texts,

modified by other texts the way in which we can only read texts through other texts but also acts as an emblem of the great whole made up of diverse small pieces. Fragmentation can be treated as a sign of the apocalypse or disaster, (as, for instance, the fragments of manuscripts that Adso finds in the ruins of the Abbey) but it is also a sign of plurality and manifoldness. It is out of fragments that new wholes can be composed. As with Salvatores face. As with the reliquaries mentioned by Adso in the passage above. Salvatore himself is

described in terms of a composite, a hairy and hoofed hybrid a satyr. And it is worth noting, I think, given that the emphasis is on plurality, the way in which the passage also manages to suggest that there is more than one side, or aspect to Salvatore: at one moment, he is configured in terms of a satyr, at another, spoken of as being good-natured and humorous. This is an important fact, and one, one suspects, made in order to dramatise the novels governing philosophy: that things and people are complex truths rather than simple ones; that while there may be the desire to categorise, nonetheless the world is diverse and much less easily categorisable than one might have liked to think, just as books are; just as The Name of the Rose itself is. William, at one point in the novel, notes that there is a night-time abbey as well as a day-time one, and what William is saying about the complexity of truth as regards the Abbey is an emblem of the truth about the world. Not only is this important as a philosophy generally, but is also there in order to sharpen the point that to burn someone because he/she is a heretic or a witch is to ignore the plurality of human nature and the way in which the individual lies outside simple categorization. In line with this support for a philosophy of diversity and challenge offered to a singularizing authority goes what The Name of the Rose is saying about laughter. At the heart of the novel is the poisoned book, the book that

makes the rounds, the book that despite the utmost care of its anal-retentive custodian, escapes him to infect and inform its various readers. This is, as mentioned earlier, Aristotles lost treatise on comedy, and the point that Eco is making is not just that books are subversive, but that comedy is subversive. In the exchange between Jorge and William on laughter at the refectory table (pp. 95/96) William points out that the ability to laugh is a weapon which can be used to humiliate enemies, which Jorge responds to by saying that this proves that laughter is something very close to death and to the corruption of the body. The debate essentially turns on whether laughter can function as a vehicle of the truth (Aristotles point), or whether it is subversive because it evacuates fear and represents a refusal to treat things seriously; in the atmosphere of laughter, the dictator cannot survive. The book is not just a book on comedy; it also represents subversiveness, the subversiveness of laughter itself. While the novel makes many metafictional points, this is arguably the most important of them. There are many other aspects of the text to think about, of course. You might want to give some thought to what else the text is saying about books, reading and interpretation. You might also want to give some thought to the texts emphasis on mundus senescit: the notion of the aging world were obviously never going to escape from the notion of exhaustion