The Name of the Rose

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For the feature-length film of the same story, see The Name of the Rose (film). For the unrelated 2003 short film, see Name of the Rose (2003).
The Name of the Rose  
Author Umberto Eco
Original title Il nome della rosa
Country Italy
Language Italian
Genre(s) Historical novel, Mystery
Publisher Harcourt (1983)
Publication date 1980
Media type print (paperback)
Pages 512 pp (paperback edition)
ISBN ISBN 0-15-144647-4 (paperback edition)
Followed by Foucault's Pendulum

The Name of the Rose, a novel by Umberto Eco, is a historical whodunnit — a murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327. It is an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. First published in Italian in 1980 under the title Il nome della rosa, it appeared in 1983 in an English translation by William Weaver.

Contents

[edit] Plot summary

Along with his apprentice Adso of Melk (named after the Benedictine abbey Stift Melk), the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville journeys to an abbey where a murder has been committed.

As the plot unfolds, several other people mysteriously die. The protagonists explore a labyrinthine medieval library, the subversive power of laughter, and come face to face with the Inquisition. It is left primarily to William's enormous powers of logic and deduction to solve the mysteries of the abbey.

On one level, the book is an exposition of the scholastic method which was very popular in the 14th century. William demonstrates the power of deductive reasoning, especially syllogisms. He refuses to accept the diagnosis of simple demonic possession despite demonology being the traditional monastic explanation. Despite the abbey being under the misapprehension that they are experiencing the last days before the second coming of Christ (a topic closely examined in the book), William, through his empirical mindset, manages to show that the murders are, in fact, committed by a more corporeal instrument. By keeping an open mind, collecting facts and observations, following pure intuition, and the dialectic method, he makes decisions as to what he should investigate, exactly as a scholastic would do. However, the simple use of reason does not suffice. The various signs and happenings only have meaning in their given contexts, and William must constantly be wary of which context he interprets the mystery. Indeed, the entire story challenges the narrator, William's young apprentice Adso, and the reader to continually recognize the context he is using to interpret, bringing the whole text to various levels which can all have different hermeneutical meanings. The narrative ties in many varied plot lines, all of which consider various interpretations and sources of meanings. Many of the interpretations and sources were highly volatile controversies in the medieval religious setting, all while spiraling towards what seems to be the key to understanding and truly interpreting the case. Although William's final theorems do not exactly match the actual events as written, those theorems do allow him to solve the abbey's mystery.

[edit] Characters

Primary characters
  • William of Baskerville — main protagonist, a Franciscan friar
  • Adso of Melk — narrator, Benedictine novice, scribe, and disciple to William
At the monastery
  • Abo of Fossanova — the abbot of the Benedictine monastery
  • Ubertino of Casale — Franciscan friar in exile, and friend of William
  • Severinus of Sankt Wendel — herbalist
  • Malachi of Hildesheim — librarian
  • Berengar of Arundel — assistant librarian, in love with Adelmo
  • Adelmo of Otranto — illuminator, novice, and first to die
  • Venantius of Salvemec — translator of manuscripts
  • Benno of Uppsala — student of rhetoric
  • Alinardo of Grottaferrata — eldest monk
  • Jorge of Burgos — elderly monk, and blind scholar
  • Remigio of Varagine — cellarer
  • Salvatore of Montferrat — monk, and associate of Remigio
  • Nicholas of Morimondo — glazier
  • Aymaro of Alessandria — gossipy, sneering monk
Outsiders 

[edit] Major themes

Eco is a pioneer of Reader Response theory and the idea of the ‘open’ text. He often focuses on the reader's role in creating the meaning and experience of a literary work. He combines this with the science of Semiotics, the study of sign processes and the creation and interpretation of symbols.

Eco uses the process of solving the murders as an extended metaphor for a reader’s experience of interpreting a text. William’s search for the truth is a reflection of Post-modernist ideas on the relativistic nature of truth and meaning in this process. The various signs and events in The Name of the Rose only have meaning in their given contexts, and William must constantly be wary of which context is relevant when he interprets the mystery. Though William's final theories do not exactly match the actual events, they allow him to solve the abbey's mystery and thus attain a measure of truth.

Eco wrote that during the Middle Ages there was a conflict between "a geometrically rational schema of what beauty ought to be, and the unmediated life of art with its dialectic of forms and intentions". Eco uses several dialogues and events to link these ideas with the desire to resolve the seeming conflict of structured religion with the spirituality. He sets up several parallel philosophical conflicts within the novel: absolute truth vs. individual interpretation, stylised art vs. natural beauty, predestination vs. free will, spirituality vs. religion.

Eco also translates these medieval religious controversies and heresies into modern political and economic terms. This gives the reader a modern context to help them come to their own conclusions about the meaning of the novel and the views of the characters.

Eco, being a semiotician, is hailed by semiotics students who like to use his novel to explain their discipline. The techniques of telling stories within stories, partial fictionalization, and purposeful linguistic ambiguity are prominent in Eco's narrative style. The solution to the central murder mystery hinges on the contents of Aristotle's book on Comedy, of which no copy survives; Eco nevertheless plausibly describes it and has his characters react to it appropriately in their medieval setting, which, however, though realistically described, is partly based on Eco's scholarly guesses and imagination. It is virtually impossible to untangle fact / history from fiction / conjecture in the novel.

Umberto Eco is a significant postmodernist theorist and The Name of the Rose is a postmodern novel.[1] For example he says in the novel "books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told." This refers to a postmodern ideal that all texts perpetually refer to other texts, rather than external reality.[1] In true postmodern style, the novel ends with uncertainty: "very little is discovered and the detective is defeated" (postscript). William of Baskerville solves the mystery by mistake; he thought there was a pattern but it was all in fact accidental. Thus Eco has turned the modernist quest for finality, certainty and meaning on its head leaving the overall plot simply one of accident and without meaning.[1] Even the novel's title is without meaning, Eco saying in the Postscript he chose the title "because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left".[2]

[edit] Title

Much attention has been paid to the mystery of what the title of the novel refers to. In fact, Eco has stated that his intention was to find a "totally neutral title".[2] In one version of the story, when he had finished writing the novel, Eco hurriedly suggested some ten names for it and asked a few of his friends to choose one. They chose The Name of the Rose.[citation needed] In another version of the story, Eco had wanted the neutral title Adso of Melk, but that was vetoed by his publisher, and then the title The Name of the Rose "came to me virtually by chance".[2] Eco wrote that he liked this title "because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left."[2]

The book's last line, "Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus" translates literally as "Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names". The general sense, as Eco pointed out,[3] was that from the beauty of the past, now disappeared, we hold only the name. In this novel, the lost "rose" could be seen as Aristotle's book on comedy (now forever lost), the exquisite library now destroyed, or the beautiful peasant girl now dead. We only know them by the description Adso provides us — we only have the name of the book on comedy, not its contents. As Adso points out at the end of the fifth day, he does not even know the name of the peasant girl to lament her. Does this mean she does not endure at all?

Perhaps this is a deliberate mis-translation. This quote has also been translated as "Yesterday's Rome stands only in name, we hold only empty names".This line is a verse by twelfth century monk Bernard of Cluny (also known as Bernard of Morlaix). Medieval manuscripts of this line are not in agreement; Eco quotes one Medieval variant verbatim,[4] but Eco was not aware at the time of the text more commonly printed in modern editions, in which the reference is to Rome (Roma), not to a rose (rosa). [5] The alternative text, with its context, runs: Nunc ubi Regulus aut ubi Romulus aut ubi Remus? / Stat Roma pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus. This translates as "Now where is Regulus, or Romulus, or Remus? / Yesterday's Rome stands only in name, we hold empty names".[6]

[edit] Allusions

[edit] To other works

The name of the central character, William of Baskerville, alludes both to the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes (compare The Hound of the Baskervilles) and to William of Ockham (see the next section). The name of the narrator, his apprentice Adso, is among other things a pun on Simplicio from Galileo Galilei's Dialogue; Adso = ad Simplicio ("to Simplicio"). It is also a play on Holmes's friend Dr. Watson.

As usual in Eco's novels, there is a display of erudition. The blind librarian Jorge from Burgos is a pun on Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, a major influence on Eco. Borges was blind during his later years and was also director of Argentina's national library; his short story "The Library of Babel" was a clear inspiration for the secret library in Eco's book: "The Library is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings". Another one of Borges's stories, "The Secret Miracle", features a blind librarian. In addition, a number of other themes drawn from various of Borges's works are used throughout The Name of the Rose: labyrinths, mirrors, sects and obscure manuscripts and books.

Eco spent some time at the University of Toronto while writing the book. The stairs in the monastery's library bear a striking resemblance to those in Robarts Library. Throughout the book, there are Latin quotes, authentic and apocryphal. There are also discussions of the philosophy of Aristotle and of a variety of millenarist heresies, especially those associated with the fraticelli. Numerous other philosophers are referenced throughout the book, often anachronistically, including Wittgenstein. The "poisoned page" theme is in a classic Chinese novel, Jin Ping Mei, usually translated into English as The Golden Lotus.

[edit] To actual history, geography and current science

William of Ockham, who lived during the time of the novel, first put forward the principle known as "Ockham's Razor": often summarised as the dictum that one should always accept as most-likely the simplest explanation that accounts for all the facts (a method used by William of Baskerville in the novel).

The book describes monastic life in the 14th century. The action takes place at a Benedictine abbey during the controversy surrounding the Apostolic poverty between branches of Franciscans and Dominicans; see Renewed controversy on the question of poverty. The Spirituals abhor wealth, bordering on the Apostolics or Dulcinian heresy. The book highlights this tension that existed within Christianity during the medieval era: the Spirituals, one faction within the Franciscan order, demanded that the Church should abandon all wealth, and some heretical sects began killing the well-to-do, while the majority of the Franciscans and the clergy took to a broader interpretation of the gospel.

A number of the characters, such as the Inquisitor Bernard Gui and the Minorite Michael of Cesena, are historical figures, though the novel's characterization of them is not always historically accurate. However, Eco notes in a companion book that he had to site the monastery in mountains so it would experience early frosts, in order for that action to take place at a time when Bernard Gui could have been in the area. For the purposes of the plot, he needed a quantity of pig blood, but at that time pigs were not usually slaughtered until a frost had arrived. Later in the year Gui was known to have been away from Italy and could not have participated in the events at the monastery.

[edit] Adaptations

[edit] References in popular culture

  • The song "Sign of the Cross" from Iron Maiden is about an execution during inquisition and openly cites the novel/movie title in the chorus lyrics.
  • The song "Abbey of Synn", from Ayreon's album Actual Fantasy, is based on The Name of the Rose, specifically referencing the labyrinth, the blackened fingers, and the book that kills, among other plot points.
  • The Japanese rock band "D" named their first album "The Name of the Rose".
  • The song "Opus Magnum", from German trance/techno music group E Nomine's album Gottes Beitrag und Teufels Werk, references maybe The Name of the Rose with the lyrics "Im Namen der Rose, im Namen des Kreuzes / geheimnisvoll, der Bund" (ger. In the name of the rose, in the name of the cross / mysterious, the band/covenant").
  • The song "Neon Bible", from Canadian rock band The Arcade Fire's album "Neon Bible", references The Name of the Rose's famous cause of death with the lyrics "Take the poison of your age / then lick your fingers as you turn the page". In addition, this song (and many others on the album) addresses Eco's theme regarding the futility of reading any text or message as an absolute truth.
  • The non-fiction book "The Game of the Rose", by Niala Maharaj and Gaston Dorren, on the Third World flower trade, puns on Eco's novel.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c Christopher Butler. Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. OUP, 2002. ISBN 978-0-19-280239-2 — see pages 32 and 126 for discussion of the novel.
  2. ^ a b c d "Postscript to the Name of the Rose", printed in The Name of the Rose (Harcourt, Inc., 1984), p. 506.
  3. ^ "Name of the Rose: Title and Last Line". http://www.umbertoeco.com/id-39/UmbertEco_Name_of_the_Rose_Umberto_Eco.html. Retrieved on 2007-03-15. 
  4. ^ Eco would have found this reading in, for example, the standard text edited by H.C. Hoskier (London 1929); only the Hiersemann manuscript preserves "Roma". For the verse quoted in this form before Eco, see e.g. Alexander Cooke, An essay on the origin, progress, and decline of rhyming Latin verse (1828), p. 59, and Hermann Adalbert Daniel, Thesaurus hymnologicus sive hymnorum canticorum sequentiarum (1855), p. 290. See further Pepin, Ronald E. "Adso's closing line in The Name of the Rose." American notes and queries (May–June 1986): 151–152.
  5. ^ As Eco wrote in "The Author and his Interpreters" "Thus the title of my novel, had I come across another version of Morlay's poem, could have been The Name of Rome (thus acquiring fascist overtones)".
  6. ^ De contemptu mundi on the Latin Wikisource

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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