Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose

Kitty Liu
Jun 16, 2020
9 min read

Updated: Apr 28, 2021

Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose : a book review : in which your humble host gets hung up on the concept of time, contemplates the activity of reading, questions the meaningfulness of signaries, sniffs out chronological snobbery, exults in her new-found hobby of creating marginalia, tries to adapt footnotes to a webpage format, and doesn’t spoil the murder mystery

The Name of the Rose is a murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery, but with so many other things added in that it’s almost not. The monastery contains a forbidden library, which may shed light on the murders, so our detective William naturally explores it in secret at night. At least as important as this main plot is the subplot, which consists of a concurrent theological debate on the poverty of Christ. There’s a papal inquisitor present, so we naturally expect collateral damage, and our narrator Adso watches helplessly as his love is implicated. There’s also a fair bit of architecture and long lists of imaginary beasts.

The book is framed as a manuscript written in the old age of one Adso of Melk, a Benedictine monk, who relates experiences from his youth, when he was a novice travelling with his master, the English Franciscan monk William of Baskerville. Adso writes like the medieval chronicler he is: he will stop the story to ponder the divine resonances of numbers, and he will say Hosanna or ‘may God forgive my words’ when the situation demands.

A lot of the book is very funny, in a dry, scholastic way. William makes some well-timed jibes at the Church; any conversation spirals into a debate on logic or theology; Adso makes a point of how everyone is confused by William’s sarcasm. With the suppression and distortion of sexuality a constant theme, many invocations of the erotic are also comical. Adso falls in love with a peasant girl, but cannot talk to her because they share no language. Adso can only think of her using Latin poetry and passages from the Bible, and the girl is repeatedly referred to as ‘the maiden beautiful and terrible as an army arrayed for battle’. (Footnote 1) Ubertino, an elderly Franciscan monk, insists on identifying erotic experiences of his earlier life with saintliness and mystic edification, and projects his repressed sexuality onto the young Adso. My favourite instance is when Ubertino takes Adso to look at a statue of Mary with the baby Jesus, where ‘the Child’s tiny hands fondled [Mary’s breast]’. There is no telling whether this is Ubertino’s impression or Adso’s, or the artist’s handiwork imposes the interpretation, but the end result is the same, that the Holy Infant was Oedipal.

Footnote 1: In the 2019 BBC miniseries adaptation of The Name of the Rose, the girl is given a back story as a displaced victim of war. This brings some nice perspective to Adso’s invocation of the Song of Solomon, though the trauma of war isn’t explicitly brought up in the book.

In essence, the book feels like a game that Eco plays with his reader. A game of collecting and piecing together allusions to what is potentially any and every piece of Western literature since Homer. To me the book felt interactive, like playing with an excavation kit. But everything I discover turns out to be a little Tlönian, since I only discovered them because I expected them to be there.

There are a lot of references in the narrative. Some of them from the contemporary 14th century and before, from Aristotle to early 14th-century Papal bulls to the snide comments scribes sometimes leave on medieval manuscripts. The rest of the references are to things well in the future for the characters: William speaks of how the existence of unicorns in our imaginations makes them somewhat real; in a dream Adso enters a woman’s womb through the vagina and finds a splendid garden; St Francis spoke to the people of the city and saw they didn’t understand him, so he preached to the birds. You can’t help but think of the logical positivists’ discourse on meaningful reality, Sigmund Freud, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra or whatever other relevant ideas from more recent history. The dynamic between Adso and William is itself a direct reference to that of Watson and Holmes.

I loved finding references. But then they started to kind of mess with my perception of time as a linear progression: all the words are supposedly Adso’s, but he references ideas that are in the far future for him. Reading them felt like time travel, because it felt like Adso’s narrative knew no chronological bounds.

I think it ‘messed with my experience of linear time’ because Eco successfully bends my suspension of disbelief: he makes impossible things so convincing that you believe in them despite knowing they are illogical. The references are never jarring, and very rarely explicitly impossible. (Footnote 2) The characters never name-drop people who have not yet been born, and allusions (like the ones to Nietzsche or Freud mentioned above) are mostly only invoked in passing. They are always historically plausible notions that fit the speaker’s state of mind, but they make sure you never forget that this manuscript supposedly originating from 14th-century Austria was really written by an Italian professor of semiotics in the late 1970s. The overall effect is that I still believed Adso was really writing, but he was making references to things in his future, therefore these things had already happened, hundreds of years before they actually did.

Footnote 2: The biggest discrepancy (that I bothered to find) occurs on the last page: the elderly Adso quotes successively from Thomas à Kempis (c.1380-1471) and Angelus Silesius (1624-1677). Since Adso is a youth in 1327 when the main story is set, it is improbable for him to have read à Kempis in his lifetime, let alone Silesius. It could be a mistake on Eco’s part. But then one could also read it as a merging of the the ostensible narrator Adso with the actual narrator Eco. Or Adso simply achieves incredible longevity. I personally prefer to think that it’s a magical realist twist: as Adso ponders the infinitude of God, his dying self disintegrates into the Nothingness that is the Great Primordial Chaos, thereby gaining omniscience enough to foretell those two men’s works.

Sometimes the allusions to literary criticism are so clear they practically break the fourth wall. ‘The abbey really is a microcosm,’ William says. And then a hundred pages later, ‘books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.’ The idea of allusion and reflection reaches its acme at the book’s end. As everything crashes and burns, you feel events also speak of events, and attitudes of attitudes. The narration’s diction becomes increasingly pagan as the monks’ Christian moral high ground proves illusory. The library itself, the finest in Christendom, feels like a reincarnation of the Library of Alexandria, especially when the chapter title includes the Stoic concept of ecpyrosis, the periodic burning of the cosmos.

I suppose all this intertextuality taps into the postmodernism that Eco and other learned men have attributed to the book. As I understand it, a postmodern work should simultaneously achieve the aims the premodern and the modern: (Footnote 3) in this case, it must tell a story and deconstruct it at the same time. Eco successfully tells a story, but he never stops drawing the reader’s attention to the story’s being a text, written by a person with biases and influences. This is the effect of juxtaposing the realism of Adso’s chronicler style with the surrealism of the time travel-esque intertextuality. Though Adso is mostly an observer of events, he is in this sense the main character. Eco fully thought so: he wanted to title the book Adso of Melk, but the publisher opposed it. (Footnote 4)

Footnote 3: This is derived from Eco’s own Postscript to the book, so I take no credit if my understanding is wrong.

Footnote 4: Also from Postscript.

One can go so far as to say that the book’s rampant intertextuality deconstructs the activity of reading. For a start, it’s perfectly possible to deny that The Name of the Rose references anything impossible for its 14th-century setting: futuristic allusions are never explicit (see Footnote 2), and in a historical novel it makes more sense for the characters not to reference future literature.Then why do I seek out impossible allusions? Because I’ve been taught to? Because I can’t help but draw the links? Either way, as the reader, I have brought the allusions to the text: I can only spot a reference when I know the thing being referenced, and I can’t un-see a reference when I have seen a connection. Then you take a further step back, and contemplate the notion that the reader brings the meaning to any text, as the text only has meaning because the reader knows how to read.

The sleuth himself, William of Baskerville, a philosophically-inclined incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, (Footnote 5) who is a proud pupil of Francis Bacon and friends with William of Occam. Next to the the other monks’ parochial dogma, William’s open-mindedness and his belief in scientific progress make him almost whimsical. It also makes him incontrovertibly transgressive - if not to the reader, definitely to the monks. Even Adso, who admires him for his wisdom and compassion, is rather troubled by his ‘intellectual pride’ and irreverence.

Footnote 5: As far as I can ascertain, Baskerville is not an actual place, but only exists in Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles.

William rejects the commonplace black-and-white worldview of good vs heresy. Rather he tries to assert that the world is far more complex than that, and knowledge is elucidating rather than corrupting: no-one fully gets him, because they all fail or refuse to recognise the false dichotomy. Here is where Adso falls short of Holmes’ Watson: while Adso sometimes gets the logic of deduction (unlike Watson), he mostly fails to comprehend William’s humanitarianism.

William’s mildness and his rejection of clear-cut religious morality allow him to make some rather open-ended insights, such as how in some situations there is no single truth, while an unknown truth sits alongside a plethora of equally possible alternative ones. Yet for all his cynicism in God’s Church, William’s faith and moral compass are never in doubt. Despite the fragmentary and uncertain nature of truth, William trusts that the diversification of human knowledge will reconcile them a little bit more to God’s ultimate goodness.

I suppose one could say William was ahead of his time: his is a quintessentially Enlightenment attitude, and there is also an argument to be made perhaps, looking at William as the educated 21st century citizen trying to navigate a post-truth sociopolitical landscape. But what does it even mean to call someone ahead of their time? William lived in his time, the 14th century, and was influenced by his contemporaries including Bacon and Occam, so how is he ‘ahead’ of it?

To commentators in the future, William was ahead, but to William’s contemporaries, he was just odd. Calling William ‘ahead’ reprimands his contemporaries for not appreciating him, but it’s not like this gesture compensates for or adds value to his under-appreciated lifetime. Really we are just reclaiming history’s oddballs, but only those whose sensibilities agree with ours, and indulging in the self-congratulatory notion that we now have better taste than our forefathers. Calling William ‘ahead’ sounds like we are passing judgement on his native 14th century, but perhaps the notion says just as much about ourselves.

Earlier I likened this book to an interactive excavation toy. This sentiment is one that accompanies a good detective novel. I found it so intriguing that partway through the book, I took up a pencil to underline certain words and passages, and to comment in the margins. This was rather a big step for me as I previously identified marking up a book as some form of bibliophilic sin. But the book even makes mention of marginalia made by medieval scribes, and the nature of the book rather demands it: since it’s a book about the interaction of books with men and ideas and other books, writing in the margins of my personal copy is only fitting.

I found that letting myself desecrate the book margins made for a better hands-on experience. When William deduces the layout of the library, I drew the floor plan just as Adso did. Amusing lines drew my :D’s, while in other sections :(’s signalled my distress. The line under a single word documents a chain of my thought process and emotions. I also felt encouraged to reflect on what I was reading and to make my responses coherent ideas, because then I could note them down in the margin: how William of Baskerville and the inquisitor Bernard Gui both have names that continue a canine motif, reflecting that they are both following trails and acting as agents of temporal power; how the library’s yonic portrayal practically proclaims itself from the rooftops; how I felt compelled to illustrate the beast that is the ‘ass centaur’… (Footnote 6)

Footnote 6: Adso says it’s a man’s torso on a donkey’s body, but that’s a boring interpretation of the name.

But most importantly perhaps, margin notes are a little pat-on-the-back, because writing them feels like sharing my discoveries, even though it’s literally with me myself the book whence they came from. (Footnote 7) This was certainly the first time in forever that I enjoyed a book so much I didn’t care how many pages I had left.

Footnote 7: I was quite proud of this one, as the debate on the poverty of Christ begins: imagine being a New Age religion enthusiast in the 30s CE, but after your death, centuries and millennia on, people carve you in every solid material imaginable, put you over doors, and hold conferences on the liquidation of your assets.