A Master of Possibilities

...Where is all my wisdom, then...

...his peace initiative has failed utterly...

...The novel is as much Ad-so's story as anyone's...

...Yet Eco's work offers much more than a clever combination of Dorothy Sayers and Horace Walpole...

...Still, The Name of the Rose does not simply take the side of English empiricism...

...Finally, the crimes frequently partake of the grotesque: One monk is discovered stuffed headfirst into a vat of pig's blood, another has been left at the bottom of his bath...

...Part of thecement is supplied by the narrator, a young German monk named Adso who accompanies William as his scribe...

...This parallels his effort to solve the homicides, and the two searches are a model of what happens when the reader tries to decode The Name of the Rose...

...At such moments, The Name of the Rose reveals itself to be as much concerned with the20th century as the 14th...

...To Eco, that philosophy, too, is merely one way of interpreting the infinitely varied text of reality...

...Indeed, it can be read on so many levels that we are continually forced to remember that our interpretation or understanding of it necessarily ignores many others...

...Lastly, The Name of the Rose is an impressive example of contemporary self-reflexive fiction: works that explore the acts of creating and interpreting literature...

...Questions of free will versus determinism, individual freedom versus institutional censorship, and humanistic philosophy versus religious fanaticism are skillfully and subtly woven into the fabric...

...This standard detective-story plot is hung with all the trappings of the Gothic thriller-from the abbey's huge, forbidding maze-like library building, full of secret rooms and passages, to messages written in invisible ink, elaborate codes for entering hidden chambers, and a collection of bizarre and suspicious characters...

...It turns out that zealotry lies at the bottom of the violent deaths, and after William discovers the killer and his motives, he tells Adso he has seen the Antichrist, a figure that haunts the book throughout, in the guilty man's face...

...The killings in the monastery mirror the larger turbulence of the age, represented by the struggle between the corrupt Pope John XXII-who refused to return the Papal Court to Rome from Avignon and relentlessly persecuted supporters of the move-and a number of rebellious, antimaterialist orders, ranging from William's Franciscans to a variety of extremist heretical sects...

...It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptive 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...

...Reviewed by Gregory A. Schirmer Assistant Professor of English, University of Notre Dame The reader of this internationally acclaimed first novel by one of the world's most distinguished semioticists and literary critics might bear in mind a theory the author put forward about works of the imagination: "Every work of art, even though it is produced by following an explicit or implicit poetic of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste, or perspective...

...he asks Adso...

...its resemblances to Voltaire's philosophical tales in particular are striking...

...On the contrary, he amused himself by imagining how many possibilities were possible...

...On still another level, this novel belongs to the tradition of the philosophical narrative...

...The Name of the Rose is very like that library, a complex treasure-trove of dark and lasting secrets...

...He happens to be a monk named William of Baskerville, who travels to a Benedictine abbey in Italy on a diplomatic mission but is quickly drawn into investigating the death of a young brother found at the bottom of the cliff on which the monastery sits...

...In the simplest sense, Eco tells a mar-velously complex sleuth story, complete with the conventional English detective trusting to his considerable powers of ratiocination...

...The young German thereupon muses: "In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me...

...The cast includes a sinister and secretive abbot, a chief librarian with the telling name of Malachi, a herbalist familiar with a wide range of deadly poisons, and an ancient blind scholar who disconcertingly shows up when least expected...

...The moderate Englishman has in fact come south to talk with members of the Pontiffs entourage on the more or less neutral turf of a Benedictine establishment...

...At the center of Eco's novel is the vast library kept under the censorious control of the abbot and his librarian, and William's attempt to find his way through the labyrinthine structure...

...It is also a historical novel, depicting both the everyday life of the Benedictines and the broader world of political and religious intrigue that surrounds them in vivid and remarkably accurate detail...

...and the abbey, with its grand library, has burned to theground...

...Before William is able to unravel all the clues, six more monks are dead, one meeting his end on each of the six days following the outsider's arrival...

...For at the center of the abbey mystery is a volume considered so dangerous, if read in certain ways, that it can and does serve as a motive for the murders...

...Remarkably, the author manages to keep all these different books going without splintering the whole into fragments...

...The Name of the Rose, ostensibly a murder mystery set amid the splendors and intricacies of a 14th-century Italian monastery, seems written to demonstrate the point...

...I behaved stubbornly, pursuingasem-blance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe...

...The novel is also held together by a dominant thematic concern-the opposition of William's faith in rationalism to the religious fanaticism mounting everywhere...

...Whatever taste or perspective one reader brings to it-from the logic of William of Bas-kerville to the prophetic intuition of the old monk Alinardo who believes that the pattern of the murders is to be found in the Book of Revelation-one is bound to fall short of a completely satisfying understanding...

...His passage to maturity through the events he describes reflects in microcosm the fall of the abbey from innocence into experience, and the decline of the era as a whole into political and moral corruption...

...The Antichrist can be born from piety itself," he says, "from excessive love of God or of truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer...

...William himself realizes this after the world has come down in ruins around him: his apprehension of the criminal has come too late...

...Despite Eco's introductory remark that he is presenting Adso's story "for sheer narrative pleasure," the issues he raises are thoroughly modern: the perversion of political and religious institutions, the abuse of power, the evils of fanaticism, and perhaps most important, the loss of faith in some discernible and benevolent force guiding the cosmos...

...Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them...

...The reader must take his cue, instead, from Adso's early per-ception of William: "I had the impression that [he] was not interested in truth...

...William tells Adso at one point that books do not necessarily refer to the realities of the outside world, that they can sometimes refer only to each other...