by David Lodge
As Eco makes beautifully clear in Reflections, the composition of a novel entails making choices or decisions which are governed by certain constraints, comparable to, but quite different from, the constraints of metre and rhyme which govern the choice of words in the composition of verse. ‘I discovered . . . that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis.’ That is to say, in order to tell a story you must construct a world which has a logical and consistent relation to the real world, and the challenge for the novelist is to explore and develop his narrative idea or ideas within those constraints. The relation between the fictional world and the real world need not be that of realistic imitation (allegory, for instance, may have a logical and consistent but non-realistic relation to the real world) but in the case of The Name of the Rose it is. Although the labyrinthine library which is the centre of the story is Eco’s invention, its architecture is entirely coherent, and the layout of the monastery in which it is situated corresponds closely to Benedictine monasteries of the period. The plan provided in the endpapers of the book allows the reader to trace the characters’ movements precisely, and these are completely credible in terms of temporal sequence and duration. In short, the laws of time and space in the real world are scrupulously observed in the fictional one.
The same applies to the historical and cultural background to the story. Eco tells us he would have found it much easier to set his story in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, a period he knew well; but the intertextual device of making his detective a medieval precursor of Sherlock Holmes was already central to the project, and this compelled him to set his story in the fourteenth century, about which he was initially much less well informed, because William’s empirical investigative approach to the crime, anticipating modern scientific method, could only have been adopted by a Franciscan friar influenced by the philosophical teachings of fellow Franciscans Roger Bacon and William of Occam, the second of whom lived in the first half of the fourteenth century. (The fact that very few of Eco’s readers would be equally well informed is immaterial: once a novelist ‘cheats’ by disregarding his own knowledge about an important matter he risks losing faith in his own imaginary world.) Having placed the action of the novel early in the fourteenth century, and after doing some research into this period, Eco quickly realised that a prominent Franciscan at that time would inevitably have been involved in the debate about ‘poverty’ which was then dividing the Order, and critically affecting relations between it and the papacy, and between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. This then became the political context of his story, and the source of many intriguing parallels between medieval and modern times. The process demonstrates an interesting aspect of the composition of fiction, namely, that the acceptance of a constraint which may seem frustrating and bothersome at first often leads to the discovery of new ideas and story-stuff.
The history of the poverty debate is complicated, and not even Eco’s medieval narrator, Adso, is able fully to grasp all its ramifications, but at the heart of it was the question: does perfect obedience to Christ’s teaching entail the renunciation of all worldly goods and power? St Francis founded his Order on the principle that it did: his friars were forbidden to own property or money and required to live by the work of their hands or by begging. In due course the rigour of this rule was relaxed for practical reasons, leading to the breakaway of groups known as the ‘Spirituals’ or Fraticelli, who insisted on an extreme interpretation of ‘poverty’ and were denounced as heretics or schismatics by the official Church. While distancing themselves from these extremists, the Franciscans still tried to defend a moderate version of the ideal of poverty, and they were supported in this by the Holy Roman Emperor who, for his own political motives, wished to restrict the power of the Pope to jurisdiction over spiritual matters, while Pope John XXII, at that time in exile from Rome and based in Avignon, viewed the Franciscans with disfavour for opposite reasons. In 1321 the head of the Franciscan Order, Michael of Cesena, was invited to Avignon to discuss these issues, but hesitated, fearing, with some reason, that it might be a trap. This is the context of Eco’s fictional story: William of Baskerville comes to a Benedictine monastery in the mountains of northern Italy in November 1321 to attend a meeting of the Emperor’s and the Pope’s theologians which will prepare the ground for a settlement of the dispute in the presence of the Pope himself in Avignon, but his visit coincides with a series of shocking murders in the abbey which then become the focus of narrative attention. Why in November? Because Michael of Cesena actually went to Avignon in December 1321. And why is the monastery in the mountains? Because the plot required a murder victim to be found head down in a vat of pig’s blood, and pigs were customarily slaughtered in cold temperatures, which in Italy in November would be most plausible at high altitude. And why did a victim have to be dunked in pig’s blood? Because the different methods employed by the murderer must seem to correspond to the prophecies of the seven angels of the Apocalypse, or Book of Revelation, announcing the end of the world, the second of which says that part of the sea will turn into blood.
These logical links are the nuts and bolts which hold the structure of the narrative together in the mind of the novelist; they are hardly perceived as such by the reader, who experiences the book in a quite different way, as a flow of information in which many different strands are interwoven, at times confusingly. For instance, it is not until well over a hundred pages into the book that the precise nature of William’s mission is explained, though there are oblique allusions to it.fn1 Nor are these the only challenges to the reader’s patience and pertinacity. First he must pass through the portals of the spoof scholarly apparatus which explains how Adso’s story came into the possession of the ‘editor’; then he must assimilate the rules, routines and protocol of monastic life, learn the temporal division of the day into the canonical hours of Matins, Lauds, etc., attend to Adso’s exhaustive and exhausting description of the carving on the door of the church in which the medieval world picture is lavishly illustrated, and grapple with all manner of recondite theological and scriptural allusions. Eco reveals that friends and editors who read his novel in manuscript recommended that he abbreviate the first hundred pages, which they found ‘very difficult and demanding’. He refused on the grounds that these pages were like a ‘penance or initiation’. Those who could not get through them would never finish the book anyway; those who did would have learned how to read it, and would not be able to stop. This remarkable demonstration of faith in his own work was in the event fully justified, but he tested his readers’ application and attentiveness to the very last lines of the novel, which contain a cryptic Latin clue to the meaning of its title. (I shall return to this later.)
Umberto Eco wrote what was in effect his own ‘blurb’ on the dust jacket of the first Italian edition of The Name of the Rose, in which he predicted that it would be read in three different ways:
Difficult to define (Gothic novel, medieval chronicle, detective story, ideological narrative à clef, allegory) this novel . . . may perhaps be read in three ways. The first category of readers will be taken by the plot and the coups de scène, and will accept even the long bookish discussions and the philosophical dialogues, because it will sense that the signs, the traces and the revelatory symptoms are nesting precisely in those inattentive pages. The second category will be impassioned by the debate of ideas, and will attempt to establish connections (which the author refuses to authorise) with the present. The third will realise that this text is a textile of other texts, a ‘whodunnit’ of quotations, a book built of books.10
Michael Caesar plausibly suggests that there is an implied hierarchy in the listing of these kinds of reading, the most approved being the last.11 A fully appreciative reading of the novel must, however, combine all three.
The first kind of reading responds to the novel primarily as a story of crime and detection, in which the chief narr
ative question is ‘Whodunnit?’ A crime is committed, or a series of linked crimes, and the reader is involved in the quest to find the culprit, perhaps pitting his own wits against those of the detective in the interpretation of clues. This undoubtedly is the prime source of interest for many readers of The Name of the Rose, the lure which more than any other factor impels them to go on turning the pages. But such a reader could hardly fail to notice that the medieval Franciscan detective is a literary reincarnation (or historically a pre-incarnation) of Sherlock Holmes. William’s place of origin alludes to one of the most famous Sherlock Holmes stories, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, and William’s companion Adso has many of the character traits, and the same narrator-function, as Holmes’s faithful sidekick, Dr Watson. In the very first chapter William demonstrates his powers of deduction to the admiring Adso, extrapolating from a few hoof-prints in the snow a circumstantially accurate account of how a particular horse has escaped from the abbey, an almost parodic reprise of many similar scenes in the Sherlock Holmes stories. The abbey is often swathed in fog at crucial moments, a favourite meteorological device of Conan Doyle’s to heighten mystery and suspense; and when William finally confronts the villain of the story there is the same mutual respect between them as between Holmes and Moriarty. In short, it is hardly possible to be a reader in Eco’s first category without enjoying some of the intertextual pleasures that are relished by his third category.
The Name of the Rose conforms in several respects to the structure of the classic detective story as elegantly analysed by the narratologist Tzvetan Todorov.12 He points out that it actually consists of two stories: the story of the crime, which the detective is trying to reconstruct from the available evidence, working from effect to cause, and the story of the investigation itself, which proceeds from cause to effect (the ultimate effect being the unmasking of the culprit). The second story is often reported by a friend of the detective (e.g. Watson) who acknowledges that he is writing it, while the story of the crime never admits its literariness. The Name of the Rose conforms to this pattern. Many modern detective stories take place in an enclosed setting – for instance, a country house – which limits the number of possible suspects and creates interesting relationships between them; Eco’s abbey and its community provide a perfect medieval equivalent. The form tends towards a ‘geometric structure’ – Todorov cites the example of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, which contains, between a prologue and epilogue, twelve chapters, twelve suspects and twelve interrogations. The action of The Name of the Rose is divided into seven days, like God’s creation of the world in Genesis, on each of which a murder occurs. In the classic whodunnit, Todorov observes, even one in which a serial murderer is at large, ‘a rule of the genre postulates the detective’s immunity’. This is true of The Name of the Rose: William and Adso never seem to fear for their own lives as the corpses pile up, and what most disturbs the former is the threat that he may be banished from the abbey before he has completed his investigative task. Although the murderer makes a cunning attempt to kill William in the denouement it is foiled before we know it has been attempted.
In spite of all these correspondences, however, The Name of the Rose deviates from the formula of the Sherlock Holmes stories and their successors in several crucial respects. The classic detective story affirms the victory of good over evil, reason over passion, law and order over anarchy; a state of harmony and civility which was ruptured by a violent act is healed and restored to normality by the skill and dedication of the detective-hero. The Name of the Rose has no such consoling conclusion. Although William unmasks the man behind the deaths, the old blind monk Jorge, the latter is not surprised, but sets up their final confrontation in a way that enables him to escape arrest. Furthermore William’s intervention brings about the destruction of one of the greatest libraries in Christendom, including a unique work of Aristotle’s long assumed to have been lost, a catastrophe that causes the scholarly William to weep. And when Adso tries to console him by saying that he has defeated Jorge ‘because you exposed his plot’, William replies, ‘There was no plot . . . and I discovered it by mistake.’ He had supposed there was one murderer, when in fact each crime was committed by a different person, albeit manipulated by Jorge; he had formed the theory that the murderer was consciously imitating the prophecies of the Last Days in the Apocalypse, whereas Jorge actually derived this idea from William himself and then used it to justify his own actions. ‘Where is all my wisdom, then?’ asks William. ‘I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.’ This is a conclusion that is as heretical in the world of the detective story as it would have been in a medieval monastery.
The second kind of reader described by Eco in his jacket note is ‘impassioned by the debate of ideas, and will attempt to establish connections . . . with the present’. True to this prediction, when the novel first appeared it was seen, especially in his native Italy, as referring obliquely to the troubled political and ideological climate of the 1960s and ’70s. The mixture of utopianism, anarchism and violence in the behaviour of the groups who broke away from the Franciscan Order in the Middle Ages to form their own communities, sometimes practising a kind of primitive communism which included sexual promiscuity, foreshadowed the development of extreme Protestant sects during the Reformation; but these communities also offer parallels to the activities of various revolutionary cells in modern Europe like the Baader–Meinhof gang or the Italian Red Brigades, and countless radical guerrilla-style movements in North and South America; while the ruthless and cruel methods of the medieval Inquisition which sought to stamp out any threat to the Church’s authority can be compared to the actions of repressive governments and secret neo-fascist groups to stamp out radical dissent in the late twentieth century. This dimension of the novel becomes most evident in the trial of Remigio the cellarer, when the conflict between William and the Inquisitor Bernard Gui comes to a head. It transpires that before he joined the Benedictine community of the abbey, Remigio was a member of the schismatic Franciscan sect led by Fra Dolcino, who under the banner of ‘poverty’ lived a semi-bandit-like existence, defying all the laws of Church and state. Remigio admits to having been a Dolcinian, and his confession evokes the attitudes of modern ideologically inspired terrorists:
‘. . . we burned and looted because we had proclaimed poverty the universal law, and we had the right to appropriate the illegitimate riches of others, and we wanted to strike at the heart of the network of greed that extended from parish to parish, but we never looted in order to possess, or killed in order to loot. We killed in order to punish, to purify the impure through blood. Perhaps we were driven by an overweening desire for justice: a man can sin through overweening love of God, through superabundance of perfection. We were the true spiritual congregation sent by the Lord and destined for the glory of the last days: we sought our reward in paradise, hastening the time of your destruction.’
In his journalistic articles in the ’70s Eco drew comparisons between medieval millennial sects and modern far left groups, and in the course of researching his novel he discovered that Dolcino came from Trento, as did Renato Curcio, founder of the Red Brigades, and that Italian anarchists still made an annual pilgrimage to the site of Dolcino’s fortified camp.13 The experience of living through a violent period in Italian political history, in which colleagues and students of his died, obviously provided some of the imaginative energy that fuelled The Name of the Rose. But in the quarter of a century since it was published the novel has acquired a new topicality. There are uncanny echoes in Remigio’s words of threats from Islamist groups like Al-Qaeda and the pronouncements of their counterparts in fundamentalist Christian sects: the note of arrogant intolerance, and callous indifference to the lives of those who do not share your world-view.
Remigio admits to complicity in the excesses of the Dolcinians, but swears he is innocent of the murders in the abbey. B
ernard, however, is eager to pin the crimes on Remigio, in order to demonstrate that the Franciscan cult of ‘poverty’ leads eventually and inevitably to heresy and abomination. Taking advantage of some circumstantial evidence, he threatens to extort a confession from Remigio by means of torture, upon which the wretched man capitulates and says he will confess to any and all of the murders as well as heresy, preferring to go straight to the stake and die from suffocation than to be tortured. This travesty of justice, which has numerous parallels in twentieth-century history, gains an element of pathos (for Remigio himself is not a very endearing character) from the circumstance that the girl with whom Adso has experienced the ecstasy of erotic and romantic love is unluckily implicated and condemned as a witch.