Odd Jobs (77 page)

One of them, Umberto Eco’s
The Name of the Rose
, in fact has attained, for all its convolution and erudition and blithely untranslated Latin, the top reaches of the best-seller list here, as it has in Italy, France, and Germany. A many-branched murder mystery set in the Middle Ages, it has won as well a number of literary prizes; not since
One Hundred Years of Solitude
has there been such a consensual success on the Continent. The fifty-one-year-old Professor Eco is, the American book jacket tells us, “a world-famous specialist in semiotics, a distinguished historian, philosopher, and aesthetician, and a scholar of James Joyce. He teaches at the University of Bologna and lives in Milan.” Now that Roland Barthes is dead, the popularization of semiotics triumphantly continues in this novel, whose title refers to a medieval aperçu: “
Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus
.”
^*
The novel purports to be an Italian translation of
a nineteenth-century French transcription, by “a certain Abbé Vallet,” of a fourteenth-century manuscript written by one Adso, a Benedictine monk in the Austrian monastery of Melk, recounting events that occurred late in November of 1327 at an Italian abbey situated in “a vague area between Pomposa and Conques, with reasonable likelihood that the community was somewhere along the central ridge of the Apennines, between Piedmont, Liguria, and France.”

Eco’s introduction, heaped with intricate and musty references, pays open homage to Jorge Luis Borges, mentioning his native city as well as imitating his mock-scholarly style: “But then, in 1970, in Buenos Aires, as I was browsing among the shelves of a little antiquarian bookseller on Corrientes, not far from the more illustrious Patio del Tango of that great street, I came upon the Castilian version of a little work by Milo Temesvar,
On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess
.” And one of the monks in the unnamed abbey that serves as the novel’s mise-en-scène is named Jorge of Burgos. Other such punning allusions are woven into
The Name of the Rose
, and other literary influences than Borges’s can be detected—Joyce’s Thomistic rigor of organization, for instance, and the playful bookishness and maze-making of Eco’s compatriot Italo Calvino. Calvino’s recent novel,
If on a winter’s night a traveler
, included a character strongly suggestive of Ian Fleming, and Eco is represented in the recently published critical anthology
The Poetics of Murder
by his analysis of “Narrative Structures in Fleming.” Another structuralist represented in the anthology is Barthes, with two excerpts from
S/Z
entitled “Delay” and “The Hermeneutic Sentence”; these set forth the principle of suspense behind all “classic” narrative, of which the most stylized form (and the one most readily available to structuralist analysis and avant-garde manipulation) is the detective novel. Borges, Calvino, Robbe-Grillet, and Michel Butor are among the modernist writers who have come to the detective novel from on high, as it were—out of a certain theoretical attraction, as opposed to those practitioners like Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, and Simenon, who have lifted it toward literary status from below, with no initial condescension. Eco now joins
en haut
the former ranks, but without disregarding the main requirements of the popular form, and indeed managing to achieve popular success.

The Name of the Rose
, twice as long as the conventional mystery, marshals these conventional ingredients: an eccentric detective given to inscrutable swoops of deduction, an amiable but naïve sidekick who narrates the tale, a closed setting wherein a succession of ghastly murders
takes place, a restricted array of characters that must include the murderer, an unsympathetic and bumbling official detective, maps and codes and secret passageways and hidden latches and missing documents, and a final, cleansing elucidation and denouement. The detective is a “learned Franciscan, Brother William of Baskerville”; like the hero of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
and its companion narratives, William is English, tall, thin, beak-nosed, and takes dope:

In the manner perfected by Conan Doyle, Eco has William astound his “clients” at the calamitous abbey with an instant feat of apparent clairvoyance: “Come, come, it is obvious you are hunting for Brunellus, the abbot’s favorite horse, fifteen hands, the fastest in your stables, with a dark coat, a full tail, small round hoofs, but a very steady gait; small head, sharp ears, big eyes.” He never quite says, “Elementary, my dear Adso,” though he does patronize his disciple in Holmesian fashion: “My good Adso, during our whole journey I have been teaching you to recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book.”

Young Adso (who is recalling these events in highly circumstantial detail toward the end of his life, over half a century later—a medieval miracle of sorts) has been assigned, as a young Benedictine novice, to accompany Brother William on a complicated mission that involves seeking a reconciliation between the Holy Roman Emperor Louis the Bavarian, to whose court William is attached, and the Avignon Pope, Jacques of Cahors—“an old man of seventy-two who took … the name of John XXII, and heaven grant that no pontiff take again a name now so distasteful to the righteous.” Along with the intricacies of the deepening and increasingly gory murder mystery, a strong dose of the multifarious ins and outs of fourteenth-century politics is administered to the reader. The official detective who arrives at the seething abbey is an inquisitor, the venerable bishop Bernard Gui, to whom the Pope has
entrusted the command of French soldiers assigned to protect the papal legation that is to meet, at the abbey, with Michael, minister general of the Minorite Franciscans, a body whose resolution in 1322 emphasizing the poverty of Christ had displeased the money-minded Pope and therefore pleased the excommunicated Emperor. Gui succeeds in unearthing some heretics in the lower regions of the abbey’s personnel and leaves satisfied, though crime still rages. “Bernard is interested,” says William ruefully, “not in discovering the guilty, but in burning the accused. And I, on the contrary, find the most joyful delight in unraveling a nice, complicated knot.”

No doubt those who like their history lessons wrapped in colorful fiction have joined mystery aficionados in swelling this novel’s international audience. As a paradigm of bloody turmoil and scintillant rot, of the cruellest cynicism confounded with the most extravagant religious passion, the fourteenth century is inexhaustibly fascinating, as Barbara Tuchman recently showed, and Jacob Burckhardt and Johan Huizinga before her. A hot issue of the time, according to
The Name of the Rose
, was the poverty of Christ and by extension that of Christ’s by now notoriously wealthy and corrupt church. The Franciscans were part of a widespread protest movement, which included heretical sects such as the Fraticelli or Friars of the Poor Life, who broke off from the Franciscan order and supported themselves entirely by begging, and the even more radical Pseudo Apostles of Gherardo, who preached disregard of the laws of private property and discounted marriage vows. A disciple of Gherardo, Fra Dolcino, founded a roving band that practiced free love and banditry and urged the complete destruction of the church. When, under Bernard Gui’s interrogation, the cellarer of the abbey confesses to having been a Dolcinian, he cries out:

The parallel with the rationale of modern terrorism, which has afflicted Italy above all Western nations, is as clear as the sly allusion to Pope John XXIII quoted earlier. Eco spells out the revolutionary impulse behind heresy, and the oppressive poverty of the “simple” that lies behind the impulse: William of Baskerville tells the conservative, jewel-loving abbot, “I say that many of these heresies, independently of the doctrines they assert, encounter success among the simple because they suggest to such people the possibility of a different life.” Yet he is frightened by the cellarer’s outburst of radical fervor, the cellarer’s lust for purity. When Adso asks, “What terrifies you most in purity?,” William answers “Haste,” and seems the very voice of the modern liberal paralyzed between the system’s enforcers and its unappetizing would-be revisers.

Though a cleric and an imperial envoy, William of Baskerville is presented as an incipient modern man. He wears reading spectacles, concocts a magnet, and knows how to use—another fresh invention—a fork. He is an intellectual follower of the empiricist Roger Bacon and the nominalist William of Occam, both of whom he has known at Oxford, where, Jorge of Burgos accuses him, he has been taught to idolize reason. He foresees a future when “the community of the learned will have to propose this new and humane theology which is natural philosophy and positive magic.” Yet he also enters vigorously into medieval debate, with its stupefying mix of idle analogy, scholastic chop-logic, and reverent quotation from the Bible and its sainted commentators. Eco’s picture of late-medieval intellectual life is one of the richest aspects of this richly worked book; where we tend to imagine a gray monochrome like that of the era’s limestone cathedrals, he gives us splashes of brilliant debate upon issues still fundamental, in lurid colors taken from such now-faded sources as the apocalyptic Revelation of St. John and the
Coena Cypriani
, a kind of rhyming underground joke-book that flourished beneath the stern surface of orthodoxy and turned its images upside down. Eco even manages to give us a sex scene, bejewelled in quotations from the Song of Solomon; Adso, having been seduced by a young peasant girl from a village near the abbey, is thereby provoked to a noble philosophical examination of the nature of love:

Yet it cannot be said that Umberto Eco immerses us in the Middle Ages as, say, Zoé Oldenbourg or a host of lesser historical novelists have striven to. We are always aware of—indeed, the very lavishness of his displayed erudition serves to remind us of—the play of his detached, very contemporary mind across the reflecting surfaces of his brittle invention. The book is semiotic in essence, a glittering assembly of signs vacant at the center; or, rather, at the book’s center is its own bookishness, of which dozens of bookish references remind us. The preface is elaborately bibliographical. The first sentence posits the primacy of the Word. The central mystery involves the abbey’s library and scriptorium and a certain priceless volume therein. “Here we are trying to understand,” William explains, “what has happened among men who live among books, with books, from books.” For William, Adso observes, “every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land,” and, a semiotic scholar before his time, he tells Adso, “Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means.” Borges’s beautiful parable of “The Library of Babel” has been here monstrously expanded, with the aid of the medieval belief that “
omnis mundi creatura, quasi liber et scriptura
”—“every creature of the world is as a book and scripture.” A world composed altogether of signs, however, wears thin: medieval probability is strained as Eco smoothly leads his pious young narrator into what seems limpid late-twentieth-century atheism. “But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible?” Adso is made to ask. “What difference is there, then, between God and primigenial chaos? 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?” As an old monk near death, he prepares to sink into a God who “
ist ein lauter Nichts
”—“a pure Nothing,” a “silent and uninhabited divinity where there is no work and no image.” Even granted that the Age of Belief had considerable daring in its thought and mysticism, and like our own was haunted by the void (St. Thomas discusses God, for instance, almost entirely in terms of what He is not), these stately stoic negations do seem forced upon our fourteenth-century monk from afar—from the University of Bologna, to be exact.

A murder mystery is the most bookish of novels, with its characters made to be killed and its puzzles knotted to be unravelled. As Eco observed in connection with Fleming, a mystery “seems to be built on a series of oppositions which allow a limited number of permutations and interactions.” The reader/writer contract is plainly drawn up; after the hermeneutic delay, as Barthes wrote, “everything falls into place, the sentence can end.” But an abrupt deflation accompanies the resolution of mysteries so formally limited, and a novel thus constructed ends by seeming terribly much smaller than while in progress. Indeed, the reader feels he has earned the right to have it disappear entirely; Agatha Christie fans hope for the total forgetfulness that will enable them to read her works all over again. I do not think (as did the distinguished Boston critic Robert Taylor) that
The Name of the Rose
, as a historical exploration, would be better without the murder mystery in it; it is the mystery which keeps us going through all the history. But once a code has been broken, it becomes a trinket. Once this novel is set down, it feels more miniature and toylike than it should, considering the large amount of passionate wit and learning poured into its pages.