Eco’s The Name of the Rose : Bricolage and montage of cultural history

In the late 1950s Umberto Eco completed a remarkable study of James Joyce that appeared in the first edition of Opera aperta (Eco, 1962, 1989a). ¹ A revised edition was published in 1965 as Le poetiche di Joyce (Eco, 1966). The English translation, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, came out in 1982 and again in 1989 (Eco, 1982, 1989b). The influence of this meticulous analysis of puns, riddles, metonymy, and metaphors resurfaces with his encyclopedic knowledge in Il nome della rosa (1980, 1983). ² During the debate between William, Venantius, and Jorge of Burgos regarding Aristotle and metaphors, we recognize an echo of The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: “The question, in fact, was whether metaphors and puns and riddles, which also seem conceived by poets for sheer pleasure, do not lead us to speculate on things in a new and surprising way” (Eco, 1983: 101). There is also the element of circularity that links the beginning and the ending of both Finnegans Wake and The Name of the Rose, but let us look briefly at some of Eco’s thoughts on Joyce which are applicable to The Rose.

In “The Epiphany as an Epistemological Metaphor,” ³ Eco makes a key observation:

The work thus becomes a grandiose epistemological metaphor. It is a metaphor—not a literal model but an analogy. Rather, it is a field of analogies, for Finnegans Wake does not embody one particular description of the world but utilizes contradictory images from diverse frameworks. It is as if the author has sensed new ways of seeing things and mirrored these different points of view, simultaneously, in the linguistic structure. (Eco, 1989a: 74)

In The Role of the Reader (Eco, 1979) we find other interesting comments, such as: “Since Finnegans Wake is itself a metaphor for the process of unlimited semiosis, I have chosen it for metaphoric reasons as a field of inquiry in order to cover certain itineraries of knowledge” (p. 70); and, “the pun … constitutes a particular form of metaphor founded on subsequent chains of metonymies” (p. 72). Lastly, in “Joyce, Semiosis and Semiotics,” in The Limits of Interpretation (1990), Eco states in a nutshell: “The whole Joycean opus is a living example of a cultural universe ruled by the laws of Unlimited Semiosis” (Eco, 1990: 142).

Metaphor, puns, frames, structure, knowledge, images, and field of analogies are also the main topics in my treatment of The Rose. My initial argument is that Eco, keeping the famous Irish writer in mind, generated his own novels as dynamic epistemological metaphors. Eco has written extensively on the interactive and cognitive function of metaphor, citing works from Aristotle to Max Black and Paul Ricoeur, as well as on aesthetics in the Middle Ages, especially in Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (Eco, 1985) ⁴ and Metafora e conoscenza nel medioevo—now part of Scritti sul pensiero medievale (Eco, 2012)—a collection of over 1300 pages on the Middle Ages for over half a century. And to these I would add his panoramic and informative introduction in Volume I of Il Medioevo: Barbari Cristiani Musulmani, in the Encyclomedia edition (2010), where again Eco explains how in the Middle Ages symbols, metaphors, and allegory were often not differentiated. They were all effective vehicles of association. See for example in The Rose how William explains difficult concepts and theoretical notions to Adso through metaphors and images of allegory (pp. 224–225). Setting aside a discussion on symbols and allegory, my focus will center mainly on Eco’s strategy of suggesting meanings through the power of images and the semiosis of chains of metonymic and metaphoric cultural discourses.

Eco was an amazing observer of society and cultural phenomena. He was an acute flaneur, always noticing and registering. As Eco would agree, it is important to summarize the general zeitgeist when in 1978 he began to construct his first possible world of fiction. ⁵ The social, political, philosophical, and literary realities of the time are an integral element of the encyclopedia of information that contributes to making The Rose an outstanding educating and entertaining experience. I am referring to the cultural milieu that sees literature associated with French literary theories and cultural gurus (e.g. Barthes, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and Derrida), decentered structures, the influence of the media and popular culture, disorder, and conspiracy theories, while Italy was undergoing a decade of kidnappings, terrorism, suspicion, and fear. The 1970s witness a crisis of reason, objectivity, and ideologies, and renewed interest in Nietzsche. Gianni Vattimo prepares Il pensiero debole (1983; Weak Thought) that included Eco’s article on the Porphyrian tree, labyrinths, and rhizome. And in the world of fiction we see Borgesian metaphysical narratives, secrets, and paranoia, as in Thomas Pynchon’s novels, and self-reflexive narratives like Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter Night a Traveler (1979). It is also important to note that Eco was well acquainted with French and Italian translations of Bakhtin’s works. Therefore, it is not surprising that The Rose is, among many other things, a mosaic of quotations with references to poliphony, the Coena cypriani, the world upside down, laughter, and the carnival. Bakhtin is a reminder that a text is not an isolated object but an intersection of voices from our cultural history, and that polyphony and intertextuality go hand in hand.

In engineering The Name of the Rose, Eco intertwined a myriad of Bloomian anxieties of influences. ⁶ To Joyce, Borges, and the Italian historical novelist A Manzoni, we can add thinkers like CS Peirce and Foucault, narratologists like G Genette and W Booth, a vast array of ancient and modern authors, and experts of detective fiction from Poe to Agatha Christie. Not to be overlooked are two early icons of postmodernism: Leslie Fiedler, who advocated “closing the gap” between erudite and pop culture, and John Barth, who in 1967 popularized the concept of recycling in a “Literature of Exhaustion” followed by a “Literature of Replenishment.” ⁷ These and other names are mentioned in the Postscript to the Name of the Rose (Eco, 1984a). I am also convinced that Calvino was a model for Eco. They shared the same views on the novel in terms of “lightness”, networks of relationships, and cognitive experiences. Also, both reflected the qualities outlined in the closing lines of “Multiplicity” in Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Calvino, 1988):

Who are we […] if not a combinatorial of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable. (Calvino, 1988: 124)

Moreover, both felt that “divertire è una cosa seria” (“to entertain is a serious activity”). ⁸ On the other hand, as indicated in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Eco, 1994b), while Calvino was a minimalist, Eco was a maximalist—apart from his last novel, Numero Zero (2015), all his novels are around 500 pages. And whereas Calvino preferred “quickness,” Eco enjoyed lingering—indugio. ⁹ William states that what frightens him the most is “haste” (p. 429), and reminds Adso: “First of all, Adso, we must try not to let ourselves be overcome by haste” (p. 241). Indeed, it is ironic that Adso at the beginning of “Day One” should be worried about “lingering too long over marginalia” (p. 35). In a Tristram Shandy fashion, digressions abound from the opening pages of the novel where we find a long historical account of the feuds among religious orders, popes, and kings, a fascinating description of William’s conjectures about the horse Brunellus, a detailed map of the layout, structures, and architecture ¹⁰ of the entire abbey, and frequent addresses to readers. In fact, Adso’s narration at once entices and metafictionally distances readers, who become self-conscious of their roles as spectators and investigators. For Eco, lingering in the woods of narratives, enjoying descriptions and digressions, widens our knowledge of the world and gives us a fuller understanding of a novel. It is also a slowing down technique necessary for taking “inferential walks”.

The Name of the Rose focuses on some of Eco’s favorite topics such as formative journeys, quests for a grail, knowledge as power, ideas, auctoritas, interpreting signs, intertextuality, and making analogies between past history and our present. It took Eco on average four to six years to write a novel but only two to complete The Rose. This was possible because it deals with theological, philosophical, and literary works that he had studied in the preparation of his 1956 thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. Eco was well acquainted with the works of illustrious medievalists like Johan Huizinga, E Robert Curtius, Etienne Gilson, and especially of his close friend Jacques Le Goff on history, culture, and society in the Middle Ages. I must add that important background material used for The Rose can be gathered in his collections of so-called scritti occasionali (“occasion al writings” is Eco’s expression referring to his lectures, brief essays, and journalistic writings) in Dalla periferia dell’impero (1977) and Sugli specchi e altri saggi (1985). I am referring specifically to essays that he incorporated in his first novel, especially the writings on Thomas Aquinas, Pirandello and humor, Borges, Huizinga, the film Casablanca, “Dante’s epistola XIII, on medieval allegory and modern symbolism,” the apocalypse of Beatus of Liébana, and of course “Verso un nuovo medioevo,” revised as “Dreaming of the Middle Ages” in Travels in Hyperreality (1990).

Thus it is understandable that his first novel takes place in 1327 in an abbey dominated by a library, that the library is structured like a labyrinth, that at its center there is a forbidden book on comedy protected by a dogmatic blind monk who believes in censoring texts that undermine authority, and that the opinionated monk, anti-Aristotle and anti-laughter, should be called Jorge of Burgos in order to recall, with irony, the famous Argentinian writer Borges, the icon of metaphysical stories about encyclopedia, mirrors, apocryphal texts, libraries, and labyrinths. And of course, Jorge of Burgos hides in the labyrinth-library behind a mirrored door. By the way, in Day Five like a blurb on a book cover, Adso summarizes the plot of the novel: “it is a story of theft and vengeance among monks of scant virtue! … Because of a forbidden book” (p. 439).

In The Rose Eco historicizes debates surrounding realism, nominalism, science, theology, and philosophy that continue today. In Foucault’s Pendulum, he treats hermetic drift from the Middle Ages to the present and paranoid readings encouraged by deconstructionism. These and other issues are often narrated with subtle irony and parodies that present a problem of ambivalence for readers who want to be clear about Eco’s own position on religious, philosophical, and literary arguments. Jesuits have denounced Eco’s novels, however Guido Sommavilla’s negative criticism of Eco’s “allegro nominalismo” deserves some attention. In the Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica, ¹¹ Sommavilla questions William’s nominalism and nihilism, underlines the last exchange between William and Jorge where they accuse one another of being the devil, and scrutinizes Adso’s conclusion.

And so, who is the devil? Dolcino, the Pope in Avignon, Bernardo Gui, to name a few. And who is the Antichrist? Ubertino has a long list that includes Roger Bacon (p. 80). And where is the truth—a word repeated frequently in the novel? Swallowing his intellectual pride, to Abo William answers: “Nowhere, at times” (p. 176), suggesting that many opposites tend to cancel each other. For example, there is very little difference between the faith of devoted mystics and the faith of heretics (pp. 73, 76, 99). About the accused heretics, William can only say: “They were all right in their way, and all were mistaken”, to which Adso reacts “why don’t you take a position, why won’t you tell me where the truth is?” (p. 232). At the end of the novel, William cites Wittgenstein: “The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away” (p. 541). And is Adso’s faith shaken for stating: “Isn’t affirming God’s absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?” (p. 492)? But is he a nihilist for citing the German verse “Gott ist ein lauter Nichts”? The incomplete anachronistic verses of the mystic poet Angelus Silesius on the nature of God can in fact be understood to mean that “God is a pure nothing.” ¹² Setting aside that Eco may also be alluding ironically to Nietzsche’s The Will to power, ¹³ let us listen to Adso’s closing words: “I shall sink into the divine shadow, in a dumb silence and an ineffable union, and in this sinking all equality and all inequality shall be lost, and in that abyss my spirit will lose itself” (p. 501).

Adso is left with many doubts that will remain unresolved with his death. He is burdened by contradictions ¹⁴ that he heard from Ubertino about women, Dolcino, and the poverty of the church, from the picaresque tales of Salvatore (pp. 215–221) and most of all from William’s explanations about science, truth, reality, Roger Bacon, William of Occam, reason, and faith. William was an excellent mentor and an impressive investigator but he doesn’t instill a lot of optimism in Adso. He admits that Occam has sown doubts in his mind (p. 234) and agrees not to have an answer to many queries and issues, adding with sharp irony, ‘if I did I would teach theology in Paris” (p. 344). Stefano Tani (1984) includes William among the doomed anti-detectives. This is not surprising. William does not save the forbidden book, does not succeed in mediating Franciscans and papal delegates, he concedes defeat to Bernardo Gui ¹⁵ and admits that he has solved the mystery of the forbidden book by chance, concluding: “Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved, stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe” (p. 541). ¹⁶

On this last point, I argue that while William is debunking the notion that the murdering in the abbey followed the biblical structure of the seven trumpets of the apocalypse—the a priori “apocalyptic pattern” is in fact a red herring (a familiar strategy of detective fiction) first suggested by Ubertino and Alinardo—Eco is also indirectly refuting Levi-Strauss’ ontological structuralism that he had examined in La struttura assente (Eco, 1968). We recall Eco’s famous statement: “È struttura quella che non c’è ancora” (p. 323). I disagree with Eco’s critics who call him an absolute relativist or a craftsman. Eco is a creative writer, ¹⁷ with his own style which he defines as such: “To the realm of style (as a way of giving form) belongs not only the use of language … but also the way of deploying narrative structures, portraying characters, and articulating points of view.” ¹⁸ Eco did not accept simple either-or interpretations, but, as demonstrated in The Limits of Interpretation (Eco, 1990), neither did he advocate infinite interpretations. I believe that Eco was not apocalyptic or entirely integrated, and that unlike his trust in semiotics and the rights of the text he never fully embraced the death of the author, the neoavanguardia, structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, Vattimo’s Weak Thought, or Maurizio Ferraris’ New Realism, ¹⁹ and I would add the Catholic Church, the Communist party, and the internet that he had once defined as the mother of all libraries.

Eco kept an ironic critical distance from all trends. However, we must ask if by playing with double coded postmodernism (an expression that Eco borrowed from Charles J Jencks on postmodern architecture) he relied too much on double coding irony and parodies. On the other hand, through irony and parody Eco kept a distance from characters and stories. His irony, like his skepticism, was creative and liberating. Irony and parody were for Eco what “Perseus’ shield” was for Calvino—an instrument of distance necessary for reflecting reality indirectly. When in the midst of the 1968 revolution Eco was asked to give his views on the role of organic intellectuals, he praised Calvino’s conte philosophique, The Baron in the Tree (1957), citing the importance of the distance with which the protagonist Cosimo of Piovasco observes reality from up high on trees. ²⁰

Eco’s strategy of mixing reality and fiction, story and history, and erudition and pop culture runs throughout all of his novels. But his applications of irony, ambiguity, and openness are not for all readers. We recall how Adso defines William’s irony and points out that the ironic retort “Truly this is the sweetest of theologies” (p. 167) is not understood by Abo. And we have seen how after Foucault’s Pendulum and The Prague Cemetery some critics accused Eco of relativism and antisemitism. To his defense, Eco is not responsible for outlandish interpretations or for not proposing absolute truths. It is sufficient to read Six Walks in the Fictional Woods and several Bustine di Minerva on conspiracy theories to understand his coherent criticism of racism, lies, paranoia, and forgeries. ²¹ Furthermore, in Opera aperta Eco had already explained how openness, discontinuity, and plurality of meanings are elements of contemporary aesthetics that reflect our society:

contemporary art can be seen as an epistemological metaphor. The discontinuity of phenomena has called into question the possibility of a unified, definitive image of our universe; art suggests a way for us to see the world in which we live. The open work assumes the task of giving us an image of discontinuity. It does not narrate it; it is it. (Eco, 1989a: 90)

In his witty fashion, in an early ‘occasional writing’, speaking about lies and truths in the media, he concludes: “One must get used from childhood to having confused ideas, in order to have clear ideas.” ²² I like to think that Eco has always been faithful to William’s words: “Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we must not ask ourselves what it says but what it means” (p. 355), and, “To know what one book says you must read others (p. 321). Readers, just as Adso, must be aware that in Eco’s novels often De te fabula narratur (pp. 188, 322; this book is also about you), and like Adso citing St. Augustine, tolle et lege (p. 547). Contrary to Benno’s credo that in the abbey they live for books away from a world dominated by “disorder and decay” (p. 131), William, like Eco, does not believe in knowledge for knowledge’s sake; he has faith in truths derived from books—they are a source of knowledge and information for everyone. He states emphatically: “The truth shall make us free” (p. 398). Christians are expected to recognize this citation, repeated twice, from John’s Gospel 8:32 (pp. 306, 398), ²³ as well as many other biblical references like “The Song of Songs: and especially the ‘Book of Revelation’” and “the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth” (p. 540, emphasis in original).

In The Role of the Reader (1979), Eco displayed his knowledge of narratology. Later, in Postscript to the Name of the Rose (1984) and in the article “Small worlds” (Eco, 1989c), Eco underlined a fundamental rule in generating his possible worlds as a cultural construct: “Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis […] What I mean is that to tell a story you must first of all construct a world, furnished as much as possible, down to the slightest details” (Eco, 1984: 20, 23). Indeed, the importance of details made Eco walk away from JJ Annaud’s set during the filming of The Rose and decide that his future novels would not be adapted for the screen while he was alive. Eco maintained that “A fictional text has an ontology of its own which must be respected” (Eco, 1989c: 60)—so too for its rules and constraints, as he also learned from Raymond Queneau and the French OULIPO. Eco addressed the function of structure and form in Opera aperta, La struttura assente, and in the article “Le sporcizie della forma,” where he discusses Luigi Pareyson’s Estetica. ²⁴

Pareyson’s studies of Immanuel Kant, and above all his Estetica. Teoria della formatività (1954), cannot be overlooked when examining Eco’s process in generating a world of fiction. Already in Le poetiche di Joyce we read: “In effect, a work of art is a form” (Eco, 1989b: 17). And when Elio Vittorini, in the journal Il Menabò (1962), was advocating new modes of writing in order to examine the alienating effects of technology and industrialization in Italy, Eco articulated his argumentation in terms of “form and formativity as social commitment”, expanded in the revised second edition of Opera aperta. ²⁵ In fact, Le poetiche di Joyce, Opera aperta, and his essays “The Narrative Structures in Ian Fleming” and “Function and Sign: Semiotics of Architecture” indicate that Eco’s interests in structure and form owe a great deal to his university professor.

The Rose is an engaging example of structure and form as epistemological and textual strategies. Through a process of bricolage and montage Eco constructed his novel with drawings, time frames, intertextuality, theological and philosophical queries, history, circularity, digressions, suspense, self-reflexive elements, and comic relief. But we must remember that while the narrator imagines and draws the map of a place, the unnamed abbey (a possible world of fiction with a nameless woman), before describing it in detail, the world of the Middle Ages that surrounds the abbey is a real one, it is the world recalled and reconstructed by Eco the medievalist. Furthermore, while illustrating, and playing with Bakhtinian dialogism and dialogic discourses, he exploits Socratic dialogues modeled after St. Augustine’s De Magistro, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Eco was not afraid of flaunting his astonishing encyclopedic competence, and nor was he concerned with information overload, because he believed strongly that only knowledge can save us. This was the main message in his speech delivered at Milano Expo 2015.

Milan Kundera in the opening pages of The Art of the Novel (2003) affirms: “The sole raison d’être of a novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.” I believe that Umberto Eco’s novels are ethical and moral because they reflect a social conscience and encourage readers to expand their knowledge of society and cultural history. William has strong words for Benno, Abo, and Jorge who censor and abuse knowledge: “Knowledge is used to conceal, rather than to enlighten. I don’t like it. A perverse mind presides over the holy defense of the library” (p. 201). Earlier he had said: “often the treasures of learning must be defended, not against the simple but, rather, against other learned men” (p. 108). And to Jorge he responds “the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt” (p. 524).

It is worth emphasizing that our cultural anthropologist had the enviable talent of docere et delectare driven by his eagerness for acquiring and disseminating knowledge. It is a passion that he verbalizes admirably in his novels, essays, and illustrated histories of Beauty, Ugliness, Lists, and Legendary Lands. His ingenious art of teaching while entertaining encourages even non-model readers, who do not read The Rose in a library or next to a computer connected to the internet ready to take inferential walks, to learn from a myriad of topics such as semiotics, logic, nominalism, universals, allegory, monastic life, empire versus papacy, Biblical passages, and all sorts of heretical groups and medieval events, including the banning of the Order of Templars, by Pope Clement and King Philip of France, that become a central element in Foucault’s Pendulum.

In The Role of the Reader we learn that “frames” and familiar scripts (sceneggiature) are vehicles of knowledge containing information. Eco refers to them as condensed stories and virtual realities (Eco, 1979: 20–21). They are sources of common knowledge and helpful tools for making mental comparisons. Like Kantian a priori experiences and categories, they too are cognitive instruments for interpretation and analogical thinking. In the text we find this interesting explanation of metaphors:

When faced with metaphor, we sense that it is turning into a vehicle of knowledge, and intuitively (in surveying the subjacent metonymic chains) we grasp its legitimacy; but until analysis has brought these subjacent metonymic chains to light, we must recognize that metaphors imply additional knowledge. (Eco, 1979: 87)

Also: “There are cases in which from one or more metaphors the interpreter is led to an allegorical reading, or to a symbolic interpretation, where the boundaries between metaphor, allegory, and symbol can be very imprecise” (Eco, 1979: 124). And in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language we read: “a metaphor allows us to travel along the pathways of semiosis and to discover the labyrinths of the encyclopedia” (Eco, 1984b: 126–127). Pertinent to our discussion is also a comment in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods: “one of the least analyzed of rhetorical figures is Hypotyposis. How can a verbal text put something before our eyes as we could see it? (Eco, 1994b: 70). Eco explains Hypotyposis and ekphrasis in “Far Vedere,” in Dire quasi la stessa cosa (Eco, 2003: 197–212). But it is in the article “Les semaphores sous la pluie” ²⁶ that he outlines the differences between naming and describing the visible giving examples of different techniques of hypotyposis including the list, adding that hypotyposis asks the reader to recall their own visual experiences.

Eco’s constant attention to the relationships between words and images leads us to his fondness for figurative language—il parlar figurato. ²⁷ His lifelong enthusiasm for a visual culture made of images, comic books, graphic novels, art, movies, and illustrated texts is cleverly illustrated in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. And let us not forget his hobby of drawing. Eco stated that he would start narrating following a seminal image in his head—his drawings in preparation for The Rose are now public. ²⁸ I wish to point out his practice of constructing and suggesting images for cognitive associations. Eco liked to combine the notion of pictura est laicorum literatura with literatura est laicorum picture and, I would add, seeing a mental film while reading a novel. In The Rose we meet Abbot Suger who believes in making cathedrals like books for the illiterate, and Honorius ²⁹ for whom, contrary to the reactionary St. Bernard, painting was the literature of the masses. William defends the pictorial work of the illuminators in the Scriptorium, reminding Jorge that “Marginal images often provoke smiles, but to edifying ends” (p. 98). Later, with echoes of Dante’s verses “sotto il velame delli versi strani” (Inferno IX, 63), William refutes Jorge’s rejection of Apuleius’ and Lucian’s fables, asserting: “But this fable, beneath the veil of its fictions, contains also a good moral, for it teaches how we pay for our errors” (p. 151).

Throughout The Rose we can enjoy making analogies between Eco’s descriptions and our database of familiar images. ³⁰ For instance the Aedificium resembles the octagonal structure of Castel del Monte, the skulls and skeletons stacked along the walls of the ossarium are like those in the Crypt of the Capuchins in Palermo, and the library resembles a mixture of those at Harvard and the University of Toronto mentioned in his essay “De Biblioteca” (1981). JJ Annaud pictured the labyrinthine stairways of the library, exploiting an anachronistic image of stairs by Escher that also recalls Gianbattista Piranesi’s famous etchings “Carceri d’invenzione” of 1745. Also, the sense of anxiety and mystery felt by Adso in seeing the abbey from a distance reminds us of Drogo as he sees for the first time the fortress Bastiani in Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe—Zurlini’s award-winning movie adaptation was released in 1976. This is obvious in the opening scene of Annau’s adaptation. And we smile at Adso’s physical description of William that recalls Dr. Watson’s description of Sherlock Holmes in A Study of Scarlet, or when the querelle of ancients and modern is encapsulated in the image linked to the metaphoric aphorism “we are midgets on the shoulders of giants.” Some critics have mentioned how the list of devils, monsters, and naked figures resembles Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. This is reasonable given that Adso calls the crowded sculptures “enigmatic polyphony of sainted limbs and infernal sinews” (p. 57). I like especially the allusion to Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Theresa when Adso feels a “wicked ecstasy” as he recalls his sexual experience (p. 280) together with Brother Michael’s death scene, while also citing Saint Hildegard and an “ecstatic rapture” (p. 271). ³¹

Briefly put, like Adso, we learn that “omnis mundi creatura quasi liber et pictura nobis est in speculum” (p. 34). Yes, books and images in The Rose speak also about our world. I believe that Eco’s love of images combined with his enjoyment in making lists embodies his own aesthetic of excess that he studied from ancient times to the present. This is evident in The Infinity of Lists (2009) where in the introduction we read “the list is the beginning of culture.” In The Rose, lists are numerous and we read: “The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis” (p. 91). In an interview in Der Spiegel, Eco remarked: “we like lists because we don’t want to die” (Beyer and Gorris, 2009). It is certainly a clever way of associating a love of making lists with Sheherazade’s urgency to narrate.

Like Foucault tracing épistémès, Eco revisits history not with nostalgia but by narrating ideas, texts, and events that reflect today’s social, political, and cultural realities and thereby triggering bidirectional analogies. To the similarities between the followers of Dolcino and the red and black brigades of the 1970s we can add various allusions to contemporary Italy present in several discussions—e.g. in the speech of Aymaro, one of several apocalyptic and millenarian characters, about abbeys, libraries, and Italy in general (pp. 144–148), or in William’s criticism of Italians adoring saints and of the role of the church and priests (pp. 139–140). But it is Adso’s remarks that come immediately to my mind, such as: “it is very difficult for a Northerner to form any clear idea of the religious and political vicissitudes of Italy”, or “Italy is a land of conspiracies: they poison popes here” (p. 487). Abo, instead, faced with crimes, secrets, heretics, and a revolution, chooses to say “We live now in very dark times … Because of mankind’s sins the world is teetering on the brink of the abyss … Mundus senescit” (p. 48). In Day Two, William argues with Abo, delivering a sharp criticism of abuses of power, and in Day Three he expands on this topic, explaining to Adso how the poor, Dolcinians, outcasts, and minor orders are pawns in the hands of both Pope and Emperor. He contends that poverty, confusion, and despair lead to populism and revolutions. A memorable line is: “All heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper” (p. 230). Adso concludes that “often inquisitors create heretics” (p. 65).

For Eco, intertextuality implies auctoritas, hypertexts, and analogies—finding connections between books—which leads Adso to conclude: “from the books not hidden you can arrive at the concealed ones” (p. 321). Finding links between past and present is at the core of Eco’s novels because he firmly believed in historia magistra vitae. In a way, he agrees with Benedetto Croce that all history is contemporary history. As a cultural historian, his cognitive hybrid novels map history, culture, legends, and fakes. Eco has often illustrated how there is nothing new under the sun, ³² and that we often repeat history or move backwards like a crab. This is the main message in A passo di gambero (2006; Turning Back the Clock), a collection of writings on the importance of memory and history in order not to repeat mistakes. The Socratic maxim ‘know thyself’ for Eco becomes know your history and your culture.

Our semiotician narrator in The Rose gives many examples of natural semiotics that he analyzes in Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (see Manetti, 1989 and Eco, 1989d). An entire article could be dedicated to Eco’s treatment of his monks’ faces, gestures, and mannerisms, which reminds us of Sergio Leone’s close-ups in spaghetti westerns. The most suggestive verbal signs in the novel are naturally book, library, labyrinth, abbey, and apocalypse. For example, with book we think of microcosm, images of our world, network of signs, and intertextuality; with library we think of auctoritas, encyclopedia, research, knowledge, storage of lies and truths, and unlimited semiosis; and with labyrinth we associate intricate systems of signs, non-linear journeys, structured chaos, making conjectures, and rhizomatic links as explained by Eco in his “antiporfirio.” For images of the abbey we envisage an allegorical closed world, centralized power, secrets, intellectual pride, and censored knowledge. These also function as metaphors that elicit associations. Moreover, a net of relationships is established among these and other metaphors. Again, I am speaking of metaphor, frames, and figurative language as dynamic elements of a cognitive discursive strategy that elicits chains of analogies depending on the reader’s competence, imagination, and willingness to be an investigator.

The notion that in The Name of the Rose Eco had put into practice his studies on the Middle Ages and his own theoretical works was easy to pursue. With Teresa de Lauretis (1981) and Walter Stephens, “Eco in fabula” was a path I followed when in 1981 I wrote “Intertextuality and semiosis. Eco’s education semiotique” ³³ (Capozzi, 1983) and “Scriptor et Lector in fabula ne Il nome della rosa” (Capozzi, 1982). I searched mainly in Opera aperta, A Theory of Semiotics, and The Role of the Reader for clues. Actually, the words and images that appeared on the original red book cover of the first edition suggested this avenue of research. One clear clue was the winking at readers and at Wittgenstein: “those things about which we cannot theorize, we must narrate.” ³⁴ The paper jacket with its image of a labyrinth—a rich paratext, in Genette’s terms—was not used for subsequent editions and translations. However, the astute divertissement “Naturally a Manuscript,” loaded with blatant self-disclosing metafictional elements, attracted, as expected, or better as planted by Eco, a lot of attention. I found of particular interest the admission: “I really don’t know why I have decided to pluck up my courage and present, as if it were authentic, the manuscript of Adso of Melk. Let us say it is an act of love. Or, if you like, a way of ridding myself of numerous, persistent obsessions.” In addition to paying a tribute to Manzoni and Borges, two of these obsessions had to be his love for narrating stories and his passion for the Middle Ages that he asserts in Postscript to the Name of the Rose: “The Middle Ages have remained, if not my profession, my hobby and a constant temptation” (Eco, 1984a: 18).

Eco was a master of irony and wordplay. In The Rose we can relish his witty use of names such as Abo the Abbot, Paul of Rimini (thinking of Paolo Fabbri), and Maximus of Bologna (for Massimo Ciavolella), or William’s ironic statements like those directed at Abo. But let me give two brief examples of Eco’s wit taken from the same scene dealing with light humor and a pun. We recall Adso’s reaction in seeing the peasant girl with no name hiding in the kitchen:

I sensed that she did not understand my Latin and instinctively I addressed her in my German vernacular, and this frightened her greatly. Then I smiled, considering that the language of gestures and of the face is more universal than that of words, and she was reassured.” ³⁵

Later on, Adso, reminiscing his sexual initiation, in the Italian edition confesses: “ora dopo anni di distanza, mentre ancora piango amaramente il mio fallo, non posso dimenticare”, and we must keep in mind that a few lines later Eco uses peccato (a sin) instead of fallo. In Weaver’s translation we read: “Now, after years and years, while I still bitterly bemoan my error, I cannot forget how that evening I had felt great pleasure” (p. 283). Considering how much time Adso spends discussing his love sickness (echoing pages from Ciavolella’s (1976) La malattia d’amore), ³⁶ I think that we agree that pleasure goes better with my fallo than with my error, and I wonder if it is mostly Italian readers who are able to enjoy this pun and other wordplays.

The Name of the Rose is an example of an ingenious hybridization (yes, also a pastiche) in which many texts merge with, speak to, and enlighten one another. And so too merge many views on the Middle Ages. In Bakhtinian terms it is an intersection of textual “traces”, a dialogue of texts, and a literary text generated through the endless process of re-reading and re-writing. Our semiotico ludens succeeded in constructing a stimulating possible world and an erudite divertissement full of puns, apocryphal manuscripts, parodies, irony, digressions, and inferential walks while also capturing the reader’s attention with a plot full of suspense, foreshadowing, and other detective fiction strategies like planting red herrings. It is a challenging literary and linguistic collage fabricated in Eco’s scriptorium, laden with parodies that shed light on the new derived from déjà vu. In other words, from familiar frames we construct new meanings. Eco believed in the Latin saying repetita juvant—repetition leads to a better understanding. An erudite parody is found in the opening pages of the novel where we first learn of William’s detective skills and his art of reading all sorts of signs. Eco admitted that William’s feat of peircean abductions in guessing from a set of traces the name and owner of Brunellus was a parody of conjectures present in Voltaire’s Zadig. But let us look at a metaphoric trace. While looking at the footprints in the snow around a pool of Venantius’ blood, William comments: “Snow, dear Adso, is an admirable parchment on which men’s bodies leave very legible writing. But this palimpsest is badly scraped, and perhaps we will read nothing interesting on it” (p. 124).

The Name of the Rose, far from being badly scraped, reveals legible palimpsests that allow different levels of readers to recognize many intertextual traces. While the majority of citations deal with auctoritas ³⁷ —that is, knowledge—and many truths (some contradictory) derived from Aristotle, the Bible, Tomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Occam, and so on, there are also anachronistic authors such as Francois Villon and Wittgenstein, and well-known clichés that enrich the montage of déjà-vu and déjà-lu. But what else among his anxieties of influence encouraged Eco to exploit a strategy of clichés, archetypes, and common and intertextual frames? ³⁸

In 1975, Eco wrote “Casablanca o la nascita degli dei” (Eco, 1977: 138–143). A revised version, “Casablanca: Cult movies and intertextual collage,” appeared in the journal Substance (Eco, 1985b). Eco examined how an intertextual collage of clichés was used constructively, concluding: “two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves and celebrating a reunion” (Eco, 1985: 11). This is also what books, authors, and parodies do in The Rose. In fact, once readers enter into the library, and more deeply into the detective story, they realize that The Rose, as announced on the original paper jacket, is a detective story of citations, a mosaic of books, a book about books. Adso summarizes best the relationships of books in a library:

not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors. (p. 321)

Regardless of the changes we notice in Annaud’s adaptation of The Name of the Rose after reading the article on Casablanca, one gets a feeling that Eco is also talking about the filmic transposition of his novel: “Nevertheless, it is a great example of cinematic discourse, a palimpsest for the future students of twentieth-century religiosity, a paramount laboratory for semiotic research in textual strategies. Moreover, it has become a cult movie” (Eco, 1985b: 3). Eco speaks of Casablanca exactly as The Rose speaks to us:

a living example of living textuality. In the face of this, the addressee must suspect that it is not true that works are created by their authors. Works are created by works, texts are created by texts, and all together they speak to and with one another independently of the intentions of their authors. A cult movie is the proof that, as literature comes from literature, cinema also comes from cinema. (Eco, 1985b: 4) ³⁹

In the article, we find another statement that sheds light on The Rose and on the aesthetics of excess: “Casablanca is a cult movie precisely because all the archetypes are there […] Casablanca has succeeded in becoming a cult movie because it is not one movie. It is ‘the movies’” (Eco, 1985b: 11). De Lauretis summarized Eco’s international bestseller, stating that The Rose is “a narrative summa—the novel most novelistic, the mystery most insoluble, the bildungsroman most picaresque, the text most intertextual, the manuscript found, not just in a bottle but in a Chinese box” (De Lauretis, 1985: 15). Considering all the spinoffs that have followed, we can add: The Name of the Rose is a cult novel. ⁴⁰

Eco’s clever references to Snoopy’s parodic beginning “it was a dark and stormy night,” Dante’s verse “e caddi come corpo morto cade” (p. 284), or any other familiar quotation that may border on extreme banality such as “Elementary, my dear Watson,” “lupus in fabula,” and “It is Greek to me” (p. 192) are part of a calculated strategy that transcends kitsch and approaches the sublime, just as Eco sees the clichés in Casablanca: “Just as extreme pain meets sensual pleasure, and extreme perversion borders on mystical energy, so does extreme banality allow us to catch a glimpse of the sublime” (Eco, 1985b: 11). Of course, the sublime and the playful dialogic relationships of frames, archetypes, and clichés in The Rose are appreciated mostly by readers with a competence in texts, authors, and familiar scripts.

Fragments of Eco’s autobiography ⁴¹ are dispersed in interviews and in many pages of his novels by means of recurring motifs and intratextual references to his works, as in the preface “Naturally a Manuscript” where in the Italian original he also cites Apocalittici e integrati (1964). Fragments of Eco’s alter ego are present in William and Adso. For example, at the end of the novel Adso, a novice monk and a novice narrator, describes how for his “faithful chronicle” (p. 495) he has collected scraps of books and images that have remained impressed in his mind. He narrates what he saw, heard, and learned, adding very little of his own. It is essentially a reflection of Eco, a novice narrator, and of his art of bricolage and montage in The Rose. On the original paper jacket, we find this other ironic wink: “the author, perhaps mendaciously, asserts that not one word is his own.” I also think that Adso describes Eco’s formidable memory and vast erudition when he says: “Often from a word or a surviving image I could recognize what the work had been” (p. 546).

Eco had a most impressive memory, an overwhelming interdisciplinary erudition, the skills of an imaginative architect of possible worlds, great humor, and a profound cultural conscience. Some critics, following Brian McHale and Linda Hutcheon, like to consider The Name of the Rose as a postmodern historiographic metafiction. I have often defined Eco’s educating and entertaining narratives as cognitive hybrid encyclopedic novels, but I should have added that they are dynamic epistemological metaphors.