The Name of the Rose
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| 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 murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327. First published in Italian in 1980 under the title Il nome della rosa, it appeared in 1983 in an English translation by William Weaver.
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 excellent 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. The story also demonstrates the crucial importance of chance in any investigative endeavor. Though William's theorized solutions do not exactly match the actual events of the cases, he could not have solved the abbey's mysteries without them.
Characters
- Primary characters
- William of Baskerville – main protagonist, a Franciscan friar
- Adso of Melk – narrator, Benedictine novice, and 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
- 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 – monk, and associate of Remigio
- Nicholas of Morimondo – glazier
- Aymaro of Alessandria – gossipy, sneering monk
- Outsiders
Michael of Cesena – leader of Spiritual Franciscans- Bernard Gui – inquisitor, and leader of Papal legation
- Bertrand del Poggetto – Cardinal and leader of the Papal legation
- Peasant girl from the village below the monastery
Major themes
Eco, being a famous semiotician, is hailed by semiotics students who like to use his novel to explain their arcane 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.
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".[1] In one version of history, 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 history, 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."[3]
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". It can also be translated more roughly as "Of the rose of the past, we have only its name". The general sense, as Eco pointed out,[4] 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? 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,[5] and there is no indication whether he knew the text more commonly printed in modern editions, in which the reference is to Rome (Roma), not to a rose (rosa). 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]
Allusions
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' 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: "[T]he 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' stories, "The Secret Miracle" features a blind librarian. In addition, a number of other themes drawn from various of Borges' 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
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. A number of the characters, such as the
Inquisitor Bernard Gui and the Minorite
Adaptations
The Name of The Rose was made into a film in 1986, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Sean Connery as William of Baskerville and Christian Slater as Adso.
A play adaptation in two parts was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 commencing Sunday 16 July 2006 and ending Sunday 23 July 2006.
A radio spoof inspired by the film adaptation was made as part of the Creme De La Crime series by Hugh Dennis and Steve Punt on BBC Radio 4.
A Spanish videogame adaptation was released in 1987 under the title La Abadía del Crimen (The Abbey of Crime). A modern remake is underway, and is largely complete.
Notes
- ^ "Postscript to the Name of the Rose", printed in The Name of the Rose (Harcourt, Inc., 1984), p. 506.
- ^ "Postscript to the Name of the Rose", p. 506.
- ^ Ibid.
- ^ Name of the Rose: Title and Last Line. Retrieved on 2007-03-15.
- ^ 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.
- ^ The work can be found at http://la.wikisource.org/wiki/De_contemptu_mundi.
References
- Eco, Umberto (1983). The Name of the Rose. Harcourt.
- Coletti, Theresa (1988). Naming the Rose. Cornell University Press.
- Haft, Adele (1999). The Key to The Name the Rose. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 9780472086214
- Ketzan, Erik. Borges and The Name of the Rose. Retrieved on 2007-08-18.
External links
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