The Name of the Rose, an introduction

Palimpsest

This material was written for the Trinity Church Book Club, of which I am a member.  It is some introductory material for the current novel that the club is reading.


The Name of the Rose was Umberto Eco's first novel, and published in an English translation in the early 80's.  It led me on a journey with this eminent semiologiest, leading me to other novels such as The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loane, essays on beauty and literature, a nice little volume filled with advice to authors, and other wonderful works.  As a semiologist he fills his work with layer upon layer of meaning and connection.  The connections are both actual and virtual or imagined.  A palimpsest was a piece of parchment or vellum which had an original text erased and another written over it.  Often, with care, one could detect the text beneath.  This is a good example of his work, text above text, story within story.

Even the rose is a good example of what Eco accomplishes, petal within petal, there is interest in the detail, but the beauty is within the whole.  The book is simply a murder mystery, but layered over the usual convolutions of such a story are other "mysteries" and tangents:

1.  The whole culture and life of a 14th Century monastery and its scriptorium.  Here I am indebted to Stephen Greenblatt's wonderful new book, The Swerve, How the World became Modern.  His initial chapters on the medieval search for the ancient is quite enlightening.  In a Benedictine Monastery, one was required to read, some were required to serve as scribes, and others ploughed the fields of the community.  The requirement to read however was betrayed by the other requirement of silence - one did not discuss what one had read.  Thus, contending with dual purposes, the monks were under a great deal of pressure to both possess and dispossess the ancients; hence the conundrum that faces the monks about Aristotle's de Comedia.

2.  Within this moral dilemma there is another, and that is the dispute between the fanatic Franciscans and the Dominicans on the virtue of poverty in Christian ascetic life.  The question, "did Christ own his own clothing" was a simple way of stating the controversy, and the Franciscans thought that he didn't.  This period, just on the cusp of the precursors of the Reformation, in Paris (Jean de Gerson) and in Prague (Jan Hus) raised similar questions and concerns.  It would consume the age, until it was "resolved" with the Reformation and the Council of Trent.  In the novel, however it serves as a reflection of the many moral questions that consume monastic life.

3.  Finally, there are all the allusions that Eco makes in all of his writings, that range from the most ancient of things to the most modern of things.  Along with a feeling of exaggeration (read: Foucault's Pendulum for example) and just plain inventiveness, one can really be on a search into other literature and history when reading Eco.  In this regard, he is similar to both Saramago and Bolaño, making constant reference to tangential or related materials.

For me, reading Eco is always an education.  I hope that this brief but insufficient introduction will help guide your discussion.  I'm sorry that I will not be there.  Rome, does have its mysteries too, and it is to these that I am directing myself.

Enjoy!