The Name of the Rose:

...ham's excommunication and at the height of the debate on poverty which raged at the papal court at Avignon and throughout Europe...

...Moderate mainstream Franciscans look suspiciously like certain party leaders and intellectuals...

...It is more than a happy accident that a long, quintessen-tially medieval poem, "On Contempt of the World," should call to mind Gertrude Stein ("A rose is a rose is a rose"), Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida and semiotics...

...Plump curial cardinals who support drastic interpretations of poverty resemble extremist, tenured, state-paid professors who will do anything for the revolution but make it...

...Behind this fic-tive narrator one feels frequently the mocking presence of his far more intelligent creator...

...It is still harder to see any genuine basis of analogy between Eco's Jorge and Jorge Borges, other than superficial ones...

...It is hardly surprising then that he should try his hand at the genre, writing a detective story readable on several levels (historical novel, gothic romance, roman a clef, intellectual history), set it in the fourteenth century and treat in it the collapse of an elaborate Italian, Benedictine monastery under its own internal pressures and the benign, penetrating scrutiny of a laconic Anglo-Saxon intellectual, a friar in whom converge elements of Ockham, Peirce, Roger Bacon, Sherlock Holmes, and Eco himself...

...William of Basker-ville and other theologians and prelates have recently arrived from Avignon to which they will shortly return...

...What fascinates him now-the collapse of the Scholastic Synthesis under the onslaughts of nominalists such as William of Ockham-is also the subject of this his first work of fiction...

...One is reluctant to quibble over the library's extraordinary size and labyrinthine structure because they play so important and satisfying a part in the tale, but they too strain credibility...

...His attempts to suppress a recently discovered Aristotelian treatise on laughter precipitate most of the action...

...TTie action occurs late in the third decade of the century, on the eve of Ock...

...In particular, the heretic Fra Dolcino, who goes down to defeat with his wife and band of Utopian revolutionaries, invites comparison with Renato Curcio, the currently imprisoned leader of the Red Brigades...

...Reasonably alert readers can not help feeling superior to Adso if only because they hold more enlightened opinions and perceive the significance of the events he narrates before he does...

...The book concludes with a distich from the twelfth century Benedictine Bernard of Cluny: stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus 'the pristine rose is in its name, we hold naked names.' Hence its title, The Name of the Rose, states one of its central themes, the troubling relation of names and things, language and reality...

...Which, one wonders, is the original and which (Continued on page 600) (Continued from page 597) the reflection...

...It is hard to understand why the great synthesis should depend upon and be destroyed by such dour, anti-intellectual, and apocalyptic humorless-ness...

...At present he is reported to be engaged in a study of late medieval language and sign theory...

...The gratuitous violence with which Eco portrays this repellent character leads one to speculate on the possible, extra-literary causes of such hostility...

...Throughout the book the author's patronizing of his narrator made this reader uneasy...

...Many Italian readers were astonished and amused by the similarities between Franciscan debates about true poverty and postwar debates in Italy about true Communism...

...The abbey they visit is a microcosm of intricate, interlocking social, economic, and intellectual structures that are about to explode...

...In addition to literary criticism on Joyce, important studies of twentieth century aesthetic theory, several volumes of Barthes-like cultural essays, Eco has produced a series of brilliant, indispensable analyses of nineteenth and twentieth century popular fiction from Eugene Sue to Ian Fleming...

...Throughout the novel the fourteenth and twentieth centuries are not so distant mirrors of each other...

...Adso's total recall of every scriptural and mystical text that passed through his sexually aroused adolescent's mind strains credibility...

...John Ahern IN the late fifties the young Umberto Eco, then a leader in FUCI (a kind of Italian Newman Club) published a first book on aesthetics in Aquinas...

...He and William represent the split of faith and reason, the divergence of the via mystica and the via moderna...

...One hopes that the popular success of this engrossing, playful, serious, multi-layered book will inspire far-sighted publishers to make available in English other parts of Eco's enormous body of work...

...Today Eco is famous for his work in semiotics, the science of signs, founded or refounded in this century by C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand Saussure...

...Back in Germany in his old age he recounts the extraordinary events he witnessed in Italy in his youth...

...If it surprises some that a thinker and scholar should write a popular novel set in the Middle Ages and succeed, it is in part because so little of his other work is available in English...

...Surely only an infinitesimal part of the book's readers can read the numerous untranslated passages in Latin...

...This leads to certain implausible scenes, as when Adso forty years later recounts in detail his single act of love-making, to a scullery maid shortly thereafter executed as a witch...

...The tale is told by Adso, a slightly obtuse German Benedictine, who plays Watson to William of Baskerville's Sherlock Holmes...

...This ancient, elitist device establishes the author's scholarly credentials, but interferes with his readers' understanding of the text...

...Readers of this journal may recall the fascination which the medieval synthesis, as filtered through twentieth century French sensibilities, exercised on Catholic intellectuals in the postwar period...

...The librarian, a consummately literate, blind elderly Spanish monk named Jorge, whose resemblance to Jorge Borges could not be sharper, is the novel's least convincing character...

...Baskerville, the nominalist denier of universals, the defender of God's absolute freedom and the autonomy of the state, the man of the future and Adso, a mystic, like his contemporary fellow countrymen, Suso, Tauler, and Eckhardt, the man of the past who sees God as "nothingness" and a "desert" in which he, despite William's warning, will seek obliteration...

...A certain didactic heavy-handedness and complacency is also evident, but particularly in the first hundred pages...

...In the best tradition of Cervantes and Manzoni, the original manuscript will be lost and will turn up again centuries later in a mysterious, suspect version...