Intermittent Mechanism

By Sage

The Name of the Rose is incredibly frustrating. In the postscript, Umberto Eco discusses the problematics of the process of writing a novel, remarking of rules and speaking of the relationship between inspiration and necessity. There’s a whole lot of ‘well, I must include x’ and ‘because of y, then naturally also z.’ In this sense, the novel is not only the product of a system, but also an emblem of this system, a cog in the machinations of biopower. Such a novel is already difficult to read, let alone write about, and I could spend months and years trying to untangle my thoughts. Here is a beginning.

The Name of the Rose constructs a world according to a very carefully considered set of rules. Eco asks us to believe in this world and accept these rules even when they do not always align with what we know. Only by trusting the author and the world do we come to realize it is not in fact constructed, it is real in its own right, forcing us to rethink what we believed we knew about reality. It can only play fair if we do too, and that means agreeing to its rules.

But the rules are arbitrary, as is everything, they work because they work together as a set, not because the specific content of the set really matters – nor do they work because they have a specific end or goal in mind. The Name of the Rose is not necessarily a detective novel, nor are there necessarily murders, nor is there a true culprit although we can see an antagonist if we squint. We do get a Sherlock/Watson dichotomy with William and Adso but is this really enough?

Perhaps it does not matter whether The Name of the Rose is technically a detective novel. There is still much to be discovered in reading it; it is a work which carries detective-like experientiality. And it is still helpful to think about it as a detective novel or from a lens informed by the detective novel because biopower relies on categorization. It is the means but not the means to an end, biopower has no end, its purpose is to reify itself. And searching for the truth of a thing reifies that search. If you want the mechanisms – power – of the search to exist in perpetuity, you must believe that there is a fundamental truth, but there isn’t, there never is, because if there was it could be found and the search would end. Power sustains itself by disguising this absence of a profound reality. (As an aside, this is why the lack of a legitimate murderer, as well as the loss of the Finis Africae is particularly significant, but that will be discussed.)

And this is how the constructed world in The Name of the Rose can assume a (hyper)real status. There is such pleasure in the search, even if for naught, and to be engaged in the search is to access power. We see this on two levels. William is entrusted with power by the Abbott though he also goes beyond the Abbey’s structures, opting to empower himself with knowledge and to gain knowledge, and isn’t there such a perverse pleasure in this kind of pursuit? To disobey the mandates of Earthly religion, often both arbitrary and contentious, for the possibility of a deeper truth, a greater moral cause, one which God might forgive your sins for? Only to find nothing, really. William is never able to read the Finis Africae. There is no culprit. There’s hardly even an answer. Instead William becomes culpable for the destruction of the Library, a terrible conclusion, but it is also a symbol of knowledge and of secrecy and of greed and of desperation and of guilt and those too are all destroyed. But in this loss, pleasure is sustained through mystery, the search goes on, and it is thus especially poignant when Adso returns many years later to look for any salvageable books or pages or artifacts. The Abbey – with the library – remain a compelling force.

Pleasure is such an important theme within the book, very literally and perhaps a bit heavy-handedly with Adso’s Sin of fornication, but also with the intrigue and desire surrounding the library. Pleasure and desire cannot be separated; we understand pleasure as a supposed end of our desires. The desire to see inside the library, to access that which is forbidden, to wield all its secrets and knowledge – it is a desire for power, and its fulfillment is the greatest pleasure these Monks could truly fathom.

And thus, Jorge is evil. He has no right to that which is kept from all, but he has the audacity to guard it, to play God, to kill perhaps neither directly nor indiscriminately, but to be responsible for deaths nonetheless of those he deemed transgressive. Because daring to be curious supposedly constitutes a crime, but he at the same time jealously protects knowledge which he has no claim to. This is the epitome of hypocrisy, to punish those who desire the same thing you hold dear.

As Eco mentions, the debate about poverty was impossible to ignore and has to be discussed. So at this point I must also discuss poverty, specifically the poverty of Christ (and his followers), which is debated at great length between characters and becomes a significant subplot. Throughout time immemorial, wealth has often been tied to power – and class has been an axis of subjugation. So what does it mean to position Christ as poor? The Son of God, indeed, God himself incarnate on Earth – although the Protestant/Catholic schism comes many years after the setting of this book, and thus both inception and resolution of the Christ as God vs. Christ as Son of God debate – but all-powerful regardless, as lacking material possessions, material wealth, what we might understand today as an oppressed position without power?

God made us in his image, and He came to us in our image.