by David Lodge
In old age Asdo believes that ‘inquisitors create heretics’. His mentor, William, was once an Inquisitor too, but resigned his position because he came to the conclusion that torture violates a person’s free will, which is an essential component of being human. William, anachronistically, represents the modern liberal humanist mind, and he speaks, one feels, for the author himself. He perceives that Bernard’s obsessive persecution of alleged heretics is motivated less by religious zeal than by a determination to defend the authority and temporal power of the official Church against any kind of individualism. The mind behind the murders, the mind of the blind old monk Jorge of Burgos, however, is more theologically motivated, and the story ends with an extended argument, a kind of philosophical duel, between him and William. This debate has already been foreshadowed in several conversations earlier in the book, and in Jorge’s sermon after the death of Severinus. It centres, perhaps surprisingly, on the place of laughter in human civilisation. Here the second kind of reading of The Name of the Rose, the ideological, segues into the third, the intertextual.
The very name Jorge of Burgos, especially occurring in connection with an immense monastic library of labyrinthine but geometrical construction, will suggest to alert readers the name of Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine poet and fabulist who for many years was director of the National Library of Argentina, whose work has been anthologised in a widely read book entitled, in English, Labyrinths, which contains a story called ‘The Library of Babel’, beginning: ‘The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries . . .’14 An early hint of this strain of allusion is to be found in the pseudo-editorial apparatus to The Name of the Rose – itself an hommage to Borges’s witty inventions of fictitious works of arcane scholarship – where the author states that he first discovered some quotations from the narrative of Adso of Melk in a copy of ‘the Castilian version of a little work by Milo Temesvar, On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess’, which he came across in a bookshop on the Avenue Corrientes in Buenos Aires. The same bookshop is mentioned in the first story in Labyrinths, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, which begins, ‘I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopaedia.’ At the climax of The Name of the Rose the criminal waits for the detective to find him, hidden behind a mirror in a library. That Eco gave Borges’s name to his villain implies no disrespect for the Argentine writer – quite the contrary – but, along with the old monk’s blindness, it may have been designed to put the reader off the scent on the whodunnit level of the story.
The monastery’s library is at the very heart of this story, and so is the idea of the library as labyrinth. A library is itself intertextuality in material form, as Adso learns from William: ‘I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realised that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.’ But the labyrinthine construction of this building denies a library’s true function, because it is designed to prevent the spread of knowledge rather than to facilitate it. ‘The library defends itself, immeasurable as the truth it houses, deceitful as the falsehood it preserves,’ the Abbot declares complacently to William. ‘A spiritual labyrinth, it is also a terrestrial labyrinth. You might enter and you might not emerge.’ Adso later wonders aloud: ‘And is a library, then, an instrument not for distributing the truth but for delaying its appearance?’ and his master answers, ‘In this case it is.’ Later William is more explicitly condemnatory:
‘The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book . . . is dumb. This library was perhaps born to save the books it houses, but now it lives to bury them. That is why it becomes a sink of iniquity.’
The murders in the abbey are all connected with the library and with one book in particular, hidden in its labyrinthine stacks, a ‘forbidden book’ – forbidden, that is, by its authoritarian custodians, who fear the ideas it contains.
This book turns out to be Aristotle’s lost treatise on Comedy – a brilliant stroke on Eco’s part, though one that perhaps only fellow scholars will relish to the full. Aristotle’s Poetics (probably a version of his lecture notes) is one of the foundation stones of literary criticism – nothing much of value was added to the theory of narrative until the twentieth century AD – but it is incomplete. The Poetics deals mainly with the genre of tragedy, and refers to a complementary Aristotelian study of comedy which did not survive. The consequences of this loss were immense, because it biased literary criticism in favour of ‘serious’ literature, and narrative forms that obeyed generic rules and observed stylistic decorum: tragedy and epic. Comedy was relegated to an inferior cultural status, and when the novel emerged as a distinctive literary form in the modern era, it for a long time suffered a similar fate because it could not be fitted into the available generic categories. The theorist who did more than any other single writer to restore the balance of general poetics was the Russian Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), and his texts are among the most important of those woven into the ‘textile’ of The Name of the Rose.
What is distinctive about the novel as a form, according to Bakhtin, is that it is not written in a single style, like classical tragedy and epic, but in a medley of many styles, or voices – literary, colloquial, regional, technical, sublime, crude, parodic, and so on – which are combined in a ‘polyphonic’ discourse that imitates the dialogic character of ordinary speech, where every utterance implicitly or explicitly answers or echoes a previous utterance and anticipates another response. This makes the novel a literary medium that tends to question and subvert all ‘totalising’ ideologies which try to impose a single world-view. Bakhtin traces the genealogy of the novel back to the tradition of classical comedy, and the parodying-travestying tradition of carnival which preserved a spirit of demotic irreverence and liberty of thought through the Middle Ages. It was Rabelais, the subject of Bahktin’s best-known work, Rabelais and His World (1986), who pre-eminently demonstrates the link between this carnivalesque tradition and the evolution of the modern novel. When William, in his final confrontation with Jorge, offers a speculative summary of Aristotle’s argument in the treatise on Comedy, he (which is to say Eco) is essentially summarising Bakhtin:
‘Comedy does not tell of famous and powerful men, but of base and ridiculous creatures, though not wicked; and it does not end with the death of the protagonists. It achieves the effect of the ridiculous by showing the defects and vices of ordinary men. Here Aristotle sees the tendency to laughter as a force for good, which can also have instructive value: through witty riddles and unexpected metaphors, though it tells us things differently from the way they are, as if it were lying, it actually obliges us to examine them more closely, and makes us say: Ah, this is just how things are, and I didn’t know it. Truth is reached by depicting men and the world as worse than they are, or than we believe them to be, worse in any case than the epics, the tragedies, lives of the saints have shown them to us. Is that it?’
‘Fairly close,’ Jorge concedes.
Not till we reach this point in The Name of the Rose do we realise why there has been so much discussion between William and the monks of the abbey previously about the question of whether Christ laughed (he is never described as doing so in the New Testament), or why Jorge so vehemently insists that he did not. In the denouement William asks Jorge why he is so fearful of laughter, and of Aristotle’s treatise, and Jorge replies that it is because the latter might convert carnival’s temporary reversal of hierarchical order into a permanent state of radical libertarianism:
‘. . . this book could teach learned men the clever . . . artifices that could legitimise the reversal. Then what in the villein [i.e., peasant] is still, fortunately, an operation of the belly would be transformed into an operation of the brain. That laughter is proper to man is a sign of o
ur limitation, sinners that we are . . . Laughter, for a few moments, distracts the villein from fear. But the law is imposed by fear, whose true name is fear of God. This book could strike the Luciferine spark that would set a new fire to the world, and laughter would be defined as the new art, unknown to Prometheus, for cancelling fear.’
In his powerful sermon Jorge cites an Oriental caliph who burned a famous library on the grounds that the books it contained were either repeating what the Koran said and were therefore redundant, or contradicting it in which case they were harmful. Jorge says the Christian practice, in contrast, is to preserve useful commentary on Scripture and also heretical and infidel literature, so that the latter can be contradicted ‘in the ways and times that the Lord chooses’. In practice, however, no one is allowed to read texts in the monastery library deemed to be subversive (many of which owe their survival to Arab scholars). Jorge describes the sin of pride which tempts the scholar-monk as ‘that of seeking some information not yet vouchsafed mankind, as if the last word had not already resounded in the words of the last angel who speaks in the last book of Scripture’.
In the debate between Jorge and William, therefore, immutable dogma is opposed to open-minded enquiry, and fear to laughter. To prevent William, and posterity, from reading Aristotle’s dangerous treatise on comedy, Jorge first attempts to eat it, then to burn it, and this action sets fire to the library, and eventually destroys the whole monastery. In a sense this is a punishment for the arrogance of the institution, personified by Jorge – ‘the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt’, as William says; but the destruction of so many priceless books is also a catastrophe for William and Adso. At the end all is ashes and disillusionment. William derives no satisfaction from solving the mystery of the murders, and in opposing the tyranny of prescriptive orthodoxy he finds himself questioning the existence of order in the universe, and therefore of God. Along with his anticipation of modern liberal values he encounters the philosophical downside of modernity – the possibility that there are no solid foundations for any belief. Paradoxically The Name of the Rose is an essentially tragic novel, even though it contains a good deal of incidental humour and at its climax affirms the central place of comedy in human culture.
Adso, coming to the end of his story in his old age, on the threshold of death, cannot decide whether it ‘contains some hidden meaning, or more than one, or many, or none at all . . . I leave this manuscript, I do not know for whom; I no longer know what it is about: stat rosa pristine nomine, nomina nuda tememus’. At the beginning of Reflections, Umberto Eco reveals that many readers of The Name of the Rose wrote to him wanting to know the meaning of this Latin hexameter and why it gives the novel its title. Their curiosity and puzzlement are not surprising, since there is no previous significant mention of a rose in the story. Eco explains that it is a line from a poem, De contemptu mundi, by Bernard of Morlay, a twelfth-century Benedictine, a meditation on the inevitable transitoriness of worldly things:
But to the usual topos (the great of yesteryear, the once-famous cities, the lovely princesses: everything disappears into the void), Bernard adds that all these departed things leave (only, or at least) pure names behind them . . . The idea of calling my book The Name of the Rose came to me virtually by chance, and I liked it because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left . . . The title rightly disoriented the reader, who was unable to choose just one interpretation; and even if he were able to catch the possible nominalist readings of the concluding verse, he would come to them only at the end, having made God knows what other choices. A title must muddle the reader’s ideas, not regiment them.
Tantalisingly, Eco does not supply a translation of Bernard’s line. The Key to ‘The Name of the Rose’, a useful reference book written by three enthusiasts, containing translations of all the non-English passages in the English text, offers: ‘Yesterday’s rose endures in its name. We hold empty names.’15 This is elegant but takes a certain poetic licence in rendering ‘pristine’ as ‘yesterday’ and ‘nuda’ as ‘empty’. A more literal translation would be: ‘the pre-existing rose exists through its name, we have [only] bare names’. In scholastic philosophy ‘nominalism’ was the argument (espoused by William of Occam among others) that universals are mere names, and have no existence apart from being thought (as opposed to ‘realism’ which held that they had substantial existence); but Eco’s commentary gives nominalism a modern, deconstructionist spin, embracing the proliferation of meanings which the poetic use of language inevitably brings into play. Signs can only be interpreted with other signs. It has since been suggested that ‘rosa’ in Bernard’s line might be a scribe’s misreading of ‘Roma’, which would fit better as the conclusion to a series of verses dedicated to famous Romans and would be more appropriate to the theme of transitoriness. If, as is almost certain, Umberto Eco is acquainted with this scholarly hypothesis he must be highly delighted at the possibility that a monk’s mistranscription provided him with his polysemous title.
Notes
1 Published as ‘Ambiguously Ever After: Problematical Endings in English Fiction’, in Working with Structuralism (1981).
2 Umberto Eco, Reflections on ‘The Name of the Rose’ (1985), pp. 48–9.
3 These sales figures are cited in a profile of Umberto Eco in the London Times, 29 September 1983, and the Porto Ludovico website, http://www.themodernworld.com
4 Bookseller, 7 August 1992.
5 Wall Street Journal, 23 September 1983.
6 The Times, 29 September 1983.
7 Sunday Times, 2 October 1983.
8 See note 2, above. The first Italian edition was published in 1983.
9 Time, 12 December 1983.
10 Quoted and translated by Walter E. Stephens, ‘Ec(h)o in Fabula’, Diacritics, 13, 2 (1983), p. 51.
11 M. P. Caesar, ‘Secrets: a Reading of Umberto Eco’, Inaugural Lecture, University of Birmingham, Department of Italian Studies (1996), p. 5.
12 Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, in The Poetics of Prose, translated by Richard Howard (1971), pp. 42–52.
13 Interview with Umberto Eco by Malcolm Imrie, City Limits, 14–20 October 1983.
14 Labyrinths, Penguin edn (1970), p. 78.
15 Adele J. Haft, Jane G. White, and Robert J. White, The Key to ‘The Name of the Rose’ (1999), p. 176.
* * *
fn1 This perhaps accounts for the inaccuracy of some descriptions of the novel. The blurb on the jacket of the first Secker edition begins: ‘Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate.’ This misrepresentation derived from the American printing of the jacket and was corrected in subsequent editions. But the catalogue entry for the most recent English edition of the novel on the Amazon UK website states: ‘One after another, half a dozen monks are found murdered in the most bizarre of ways. A learned Franciscan who is sent to solve the mysteries finds himself involved in the frightening events’ [my emphasis].
* * *
THE BEST OF
YOUNG AMERICAN
NOVELISTS,
1996
* * *
This is a lightly revised and corrected version of a review, first published in The New York Review of Books, of the Summer 1996 edition of the magazine Granta, edited by Ian Jack, devoted to samples of the work of twenty young American writers who had been chosen as ‘The Best of Young American Novelists’. Both the edition of Granta and the review were attempts to take the measure of American prose fiction by young writers at a particular moment in time, and both inevitably provoke different or further reflections when reread ten years later. I have not, however, attempted to revise my piece in the wisdom of hindsight, and any afterthoughts are accommodated in footnotes, along with information for which there was no room in the original review. The implicit time base of the essay is therefore 1996.
; First, a little cultural archaeology; for the story behind this publication is almost as interesting as its contents. It begins in England in the late 1970s, when a young American expat called Bill Buford purchased the title of a languishing Cambridge University magazine, Granta,fn1 and relaunched it as a literary periodical of extramural ambition and scope. Buford was a man with a mission. He thought British fiction was moribund – ‘critically and aesthetically negligible’ – and he aimed to revivify it by introducing the Brits to the work of their American contemporaries, ‘some of the most challenging, diversified and adventurous writing today . . . a literary renaissance’. These quotations are taken from Buford’s feisty introduction to his first issue, Spring 1979. In it, and the next one, he published the work of, among others, John Hawkes, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Sontag, James Purdy, Ronald Sukenick, Donald Barthelme, Stanley Elkin, Leonard Michaels, William Gass, Walter Abish and Robert Coover.
As it happened, British fiction, invigorated partly by new immigrant cultural influences, was on the threshold of a renaissance of its own, and Buford was quick to recognise and encourage the new wave. In his third issue he showcased a long extract from the forthcoming second novel of a writer whose first attempt had sunk without trace – Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. Beside it he printed a piece by Angela Carter, who, though better known than Rushdie, was a long way from being what she eventually became (posthumously, alas), the modern author most widely studied in British universities and colleges. Granta soon acquired a reputation as the place to look for up-and-coming literary talent. It prospered, and deserved to. It grew thicker and glossier, resembling a paperback book rather than a magazine, with themed contents, and in due course was taken under Penguin’s prestigious wing for distribution purposes.