The Center Would Be Lost

Last week I (finally!) read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. After the jump, I discuss a key theme of the text, a discussion that necessarily requires major plot spoilers.  So, caveat lector!

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At its heart (or is it only at its periphery?), Eco’s novel is a detective story, a murder mystery set in a Benedictine abbey in Italy in the 14^th century.  Instead of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, we have William of Baskerville and his young assistant Adso, the novel’s narrator.  William, who has arrived at the abbey to represent the interests of the emperor in a theological debate with members of a papal legation, is enlisted by the abbot to solve the mystery of one poor monk’s death.  Soon that mysterious death is compounded by another, and another; monks young and old are dropping like flies.  William realizes rather quickly that all these deaths are connected to some awful secret that lies within the monastery’s magnificent, forbidding (or, at least, forbidden), labyrinthine library. The story follows William and Adso as they solve the mystery of the library and so at last capture the culprit.

The villain is Jorge of Burgos, a malevolent old monk who is not just humorless but absolutely hostile to humor, to laughter, to the subversive liberating power of the comedic.  Jorge has been hiding a secret in the secret chamber at the heart of the library’s labyrinth:  a codex containing the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, in which the Philosopher expounds his theory of comedy.

When it became clear to Jorge that some of the young scholars in the monastery’s scriptorium were not just in “danger” of affirming the desacralizing power of laughter but were also on the trail of Aristotle’s treatise itself, he turned the book into a booby trap, coating its paper pages (and the paper itself was a wonder and rarity, since the other texts bound within that book, as well as the other books in the library, were written on vellum) with a deadly poison.  Thus those few monks who managed to get their hands on this long-concealed codex — the only known (if hidden) copy of Aristotle’s lost book in all the world — did not hold onto it, or onto life, for very long.  As they licked their fingers to turn the book’s pages, eagerly devouring Aristotle’s words, they unknowingly devoured Jorge’s poison.

During the climactic confrontation between William of Baskerville and Jorge of Burgos, in the secret chamber of the labyrinth at the center of the monastery’s library, Jorge explains why he was determined to keep Aristotle’s famous and long-sought work a secret. He says indignantly to William,

Look at the young monks who shamelessly read the parodizing buffoonery of the Coena Cypriani. What a diabolical transfiguration of the Holy Scripture! And yet as they read it they know it is evil. But on the day when the Philosopher’s word would justify the marginal jests of the debauched imagination, or when what has been marginal would leap to the center, every trace of the center would be lost….The prudence of our fathers made its choice: if laughter is the delight of the plebeians, the license of the plebeians must be restrained and humiliated, and intimidated by sternness (475).

Jorge feared that Aristotle’s great authority – he was the Philosopher for the Arab scholars and the Scholastic theologians alike – would “justify” the embrace of the comedic mode.  Aristotle’s authority would topple the authority of the gatekeepers – ecclesial, imperial, theological, epistemological — whose power could endure only as long as other, “lesser” men believed they must take the gatekeepers as seriously as they took themselves. The great Aristotle would grant common men permission to laugh at the great, and so bring an end to greatness.

I am both enchanted and intrigued, to say the least, that the climactic resolution of Eco’s bestselling novel, the reward for the curiosity of Baskerville and thus for the page-turning readers looking over the detective’s shoulder, entails an argument about the subversive potential of a lost treatise of Aristotle.  I don’t mean that I’m surprised that the resolution of the mystery/plot would entail such a thing, for the whole book is as much “about” Scholasticism, or 14^th century ecclesial politics, or monastic traditions, or the 12^th century renaissance, or Realism and Nominalism, as it is “about” a detective story (or, for that matter, semiotic theory).

The novel is not exactly light reading, and the reader who persisted in turning the pages would be expecting…something like this. But I’m curious about the effects of such ends and such endings on the novel’s doubtless many non-“model readers” (among whom I, with my minimal and very rusty Latin and my non-existent German, my scant reading of Borges, etc., etc., most surely belong).  What, I wonder (and am working on figuring out), did the hundreds and hundreds and thousands of readers who bought this novel in Italian, in French, in English, in all the other languages into which it was translated straightaway – what did they make of these heavy doses of philosophy, of theology, of intellectual history?  Many things, I am sure, depending on the reader – as Eco’s novel itself argues (or/and also dramatizes).

In his delightful, rich review essay of Eco’s novel, Walter E. Stephens observes, “Eco, who made Jorge the Minotaur of a bibliomorphic labyrinth, wrote his Rosa for what must be acknowledged as an elitist implied reader, but his perspective on popular literature is not exclusively elitist: Superman and James Bond have attended classes at Bologna, and the alter eco has mimicked his own Guglielmo by writing a hand-book on dissertation-writing for the vast despised vulgus of Italian students…Infinite semiosis destroys any idea, theocratic or political, of an ‘elect.'”[1]

Jorge, hidden within the mirror of Eco’s 1980s fiction, worried that the unassailable authority of Aristotle – an authority long established by the hierarchies of the erudite – would unseat all authority, including erudition, knowledge, truth itself.  On the other side of the mirror – the “history” side, I suppose – some cultural critics in the 1980s worried that the unseating of Aristotle (or Plato, or Shakespeare) from the curriculum would not just upend cultural hierarchies and canons of taste, but would also imperil erudition, knowledge, truth itself.   If universities began to teach Toni Morrison’s Beloved alongside (or, heaven forbid, instead of) Augustine’s Confessions, then the end would be upon them – upon us.

That was the apocalyptic vision – a bit exaggerated, perhaps, a bit alarmist.  And yet perhaps not alarmist enough.  But a proximate danger awaits, on either side of the mirror:  the menace of those who, finding themselves no longer at the center, resolve to burn it all down.

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[1] Walter E. Stephens, “Ec[h]o in Fabula,” Diacritics 13, No. 2 (Summer 1983), 64.