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Episode 354: 'The Name of the Rose' by Umberto Eco
00:29:27
John J. Miller is joined by Andrew Hui of Yale-NUS College to discuss 'The Name of the Rose' by Umberto Eco.
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- [00:07]
John J. Miller
Hello and welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review, and you're listening to a production of National Review. Our guest is Andrew Hui, a professor of humanities at Yale NUS College in Singapore. He's the author of A Theory of the Aphorism From Confucius to Twitter and the Poetics of Ruins and Renaissance Literature. His latest book, just out from Princeton University Press, is the The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries. He joins us by Zoom as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan. Andrew, welcome to the Great Books Podcast.
- [00:49]
Andrew Hui
Thank you so much for having me on.
- [00:51]
John J. Miller
Why is the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco a great book?
- [00:56]
Andrew Hui
I think the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is a great book for primarily three reasons. Number one is that Mbuwerto Eko, who started out his life as a professor of semiotics and medieval studies, creates a complete cosmology. The novel is a encyclopedia of the Middle Ages in which you get to see everything from how a monastery works, its inner workings, the history and theory of libraries. You get theology, you get politics. You get the inner lives of the monks and their picadillos. You get the controversies between popes and emperors, between what the novel called simple people or the lay people and the learned or the people who know Latin, that is the clerics. So it's a world building that ecosummons number one. Number two is that it is a gripping page turner, which is a detective crime novel. There are seven deaths or murders that happens throughout the span of seven days, and there's a narrator that tells us in a very gripping fashion. Number three, since your show is called Great Books and I'm actually a product of the Great Book Great Books education, I graduated from St. John's College in Annapolis. I think it's a great book because it questions the perennial topics from Plato to contemporary authors, and that is the search for meaning, the search for signs and coherence and order in a world that is seemingly full of arbitrary signs and accidents and contingency is a work that makes us think about empiricism versus arguments from authority. And it's also a great book because of its literary craftsmanship. There are richly layered narrative, there are metafictional elements, and above all, it's a book that sparks human curiosity. It's a story that underscores the value of intellectual curiosity and the perils of the search for knowledge we are going.
- [03:15]
John J. Miller
To talk about all of that, the story and the characters, the medieval world in which it set its literary references and illusions, libraries, labyrinths, and a lot. We're gonna talk about all of that. Let's get started, though, with the fact that this is a book about books. Its epigraph is this quote, naturally, a manuscript, unquote, which is kind of a joke, right? Then there's a framing device in which Umberto Eco claims to have discovered a manuscript which has a prologue in which an older narrator says he's going to tell us a story from his early life. All sounds very complicated, but it goes down pretty easily. Then we finally get to our story, which begins with a couple of monks as they an abbey in Italy in 1327. Andrew, how does Umberto Eco get us started?
- [04:06]
Andrew Hui
How he gets us started is, as you said, there is Eco, the author. He discovers this medieval print, a French edition of a Latin manuscript, and then it's lost. But basically, this manuscript is written by a monk called Ezzo. Now, he is a old monk when he's writing this. He's 80 years old, but he's recounting events that happened when he was a novice at the tender age of 18. So it's happening in this great monastery in which it's renowned to have the greatest library in all of Christendom. And like all detective novels, mishap happens and we are led through, really, a labyrinth. Maz, the library is a labyrinth. And the novel itself is labyrinthine in its complexity, its erudition, its encyclopedic references and its intertextuality.
- [05:10]
John J. Miller
So Edso is our narrator. He takes us through this story. His companion, though, is really the protagonist, Brother William of Baskerville. He's a Franciscan.
- [05:21]
Andrew Hui
Wink, wink.
- [05:22]
John J. Miller
Yeah. So he's a Franciscan friar. And here's our first literary allusion. William of Baskerville. Who is this guy?
- [05:28]
Andrew Hui
So William of Baskerville, he's very learned. He is the senior monk to Edso, who is basically his apprentice or novice. And William of Baskerville, he studies in the great universities of Oxford and Paris. And his teachers were William of Ockham as well as Roger Bacon. And so already you have two clues of what kind of man he is. Now, Roger Bacon was famous for his empirical methods that. That emphasize on observation, right? And so this aligns closely with William of Baskerville's investigative approach. He's a detective, so William uses detective reasoning. And Occam is famous for the concept of Occam's razor, which is basically the Principle of simplicity in explanations. And that resonates with William's approach to solving these series of deaths. And so already in Roger Bacon and Occam, you have this sense which is kind of really leading us to a proto Renaissance, a proto modern approach which favors. Which has a preference towards empiricism, scientific reasoning over arguments from authority or scripture or allegory.
- [06:53]
John J. Miller
And the name Baskerville, of course, means a wink, wink. Right, yeah. So what is Sherlock Holmes? Sherlock Holmes. So what.
- [07:01]
Andrew Hui
What is Sherlock Holmes?
- [07:02]
John J. Miller
That's the Hound of the Baskervilles. Right.
- [07:03]
Andrew Hui
So this is Hound of the Baskerville. Right.
- [07:05]
John J. Miller
So this is Umberto Echo telling us here we have a Sherlock Holmes character. He's with his novice Adso, whose name is very close to Watson.
- [07:16]
Andrew Hui
Oh, I hadn't realized that. But yeah, so that's a good catch.
- [07:19]
John J. Miller
So they're approaching this unnamed abbey in Italy in 1327. Why are they going there?
- [07:26]
Andrew Hui
They're going there because it is the setting for a great debate between the contingent, a delegation that's sent by the Holy Roman Emperor, and the Pope. And at this time, the Pope was actually not in Rome, but in this period of great turmoil and inner fractionalism. And they're basically camped out in Avignon, which is in southern France. And so. So they are therefore a big debate over the status of the Franciscans.
- [08:01]
John J. Miller
And the fundamental question they're going to debate. And we'll get to the murders in a moment, but the fundamental question they're going to debate is the question of Jesus and the apostles and their poverty. Did they own property? Which is, I guess, an interesting theological question. Why did it matter so much to them in the story, but also in reality?
- [08:22]
Andrew Hui
What we have to understand is the historical context, right? So this takes place in November, so winter of 1327. And this was the period of the feudal decline and the rise of monarchy. So the feudal system was beginning to erode. And this is a time of just lots of wars between England, France, what is now Germany, as well as Italy. And the papacy, as I said, had relocated to Avignon, France, about two decades before. And so there is a lot of tensions between the Church and secular rulers. So basically, the debate of poverty is a debate about power, secular power versus spiritual power, and who gets. And so property is inherently a earthly, material things. And the Franciscans, they took a vow of simplicity and poverty. The Church wanted to become powerful, and they needed property and things and armies and soldiers. And so in this weird kind of realpolitik, the emperor sided with the Franciscans whereas the Pope's and the Pope's representative were really against the Franciscans and the imperial machinations.
- [09:44]
John J. Miller
So we have this rich historical and political and religious and theological context. But the Name of the Rose, really at its heart in a certain way, is a murder mystery.
- [09:58]
Andrew Hui
It's a murder mystery.
- [09:59]
John J. Miller
How do the murders get going? What happens in the Name of the Rose?
- [10:04]
Andrew Hui
So the book takes place in seven days, and this is just a sign of the supreme exquisite craftsmanship of Eco as an author. So seven days, and it happens chronologically. And the seven days is indexed by what is known as the divine offices, this series of prayers like prim, terse, sex nonus, vespers and compline that all monks. This is the order of hours that regulate the daily rhythm of the monk's life. And every day there is a murder. And so the abbey is a state of turmoil and crisis. And so the abbot ask William of Baskerville to investigate these crimes and basically solve the mystery.
- [10:57]
John J. Miller
It's handy having a Sherlock Holmes figure around when there are these murders, but these monks.
- [11:01]
Andrew Hui
Yeah, exactly.
- [11:01]
John J. Miller
These monks start dropping dead and William starts to investigate with the assistance of our narrator. And so, but. But it's really William going to work here. We soon learn that the library is a place of great interest. What is the library at this abbey?
- [11:20]
Andrew Hui
So the library at this abbey is called the edificium, and it's basically, you know, the medieval version of a citadel or the skyscraper, right? So the library is set on the top of a hill or a mountain, and it's renowned to have the greatest collection of manuscript in all of Christendom. And all the monks who start dropping dead are by some association and affiliation linked to the library. One is a illuminator, one is the assistant librarian, one works in the infirmary. He's an herbalist, but he's also dealing with herbariums or books about herbs. And there's Malachi, who is the head librarian and so forth.
- [12:10]
John J. Miller
We think of libraries as places where you can go and check out books and their repositories of knowledge. But this is a place of real secrecy.
- [12:18]
Andrew Hui
That's right. So we usually think of libraries as nexus points that are about not only the preservation of knowledge, but also its circulation. Right. Because what is the good of a book if it is never read? Now, what's interesting about this particular medieval library, it's that it is a closed stacks, right? It's a closed, secretive system in which basically the only person who could have access to the books themselves is the head librarian. There are his assistants, and they're his kind of delegates. And they work in the scriptorium in which they copy and commentate on texts, but they don't have access to the bibliotheca. And so this then becomes a great structuring principle in that the library is a place of order, but once you have a closed system, it causes all sorts of confusion, and there's an asphyxiation of knowledge itself, Right? So knowledge is suffocated, and it spoils.
- [13:31]
John J. Miller
Nothing to say that, of course, we're eventually going to get to go to this place and visit the library, which is closed off to so many of the monks we do get to visit. And when we go there, we learn that it is, in fact, there are lots of books, ancient ones and so forth. But it's also a labyrinth.
- [13:48]
Andrew Hui
It's also a labyrinth. The architectural plan of the library is a labyrinth. And this is where Jorge Luis Borges comes in, the great Argentinian writer who also writes lots of texts about texts, books about books. So this is deeply intertextual, and he is in the figure of this very old monk called Jorge of Borgos. And so there is a secret book, and all these monks who are killed are in one way or another associated with the search of this book, which nobody is supposed to read.
- [14:27]
John J. Miller
So his character, Jorge of Burgos, is blind. He's fiery, he's combative. He's a really entertaining character in a lot of. Great character in a lot of ways. Also an allusion to the Argentinian writer, another illusion of echoes. One of the fascinating things about the Name of the Rose is Eco wrote it in 1980. It was translated into English by William Weaver in 1983. It became this massive and astonishing bestseller. Everybody was commenting, this book is so learned, how come it's selling so well? And part of the answer is it actually is a great murder mystery. But it is so learned. I wonder, is it learned to a fault? Andrew, it's full of Latin phrases that are untranslated.
- [15:17]
Andrew Hui
Untranslated, exactly.
- [15:18]
John J. Miller
It drops a lot of names. We get into these heady debates about did the apostles own anything? And so on. Is it learned to a fault? Does that get in the way of the joy of reading it?
- [15:32]
Andrew Hui
That's a great question. And I think I have to insert a little biographical anecdote, which is to say that I discovered the name of the Rose, really half a lifetime ago, when as a teenager, I grew up in Garland, Texas, as an Asian American. And I discovered Umberto Eco in one of these discount bins of half price books or goodwill. And something about this book spoke deeply to me. And it's precisely because I was so bewildered, I was so perplexed by this flux, this catalog of lists and descriptions of medieval allegory and myths, mysticism and dream visions and reliquaries and the significance of herbs and the typological functions of gems and minerals and lapidaries that this inspired me to really go into humanities. And I am a literature professor today because in a way, I've been trying to decipher what the heck this book is about, which is why I've worked a lot on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
- [16:44]
John J. Miller
I first read it myself, probably late 80s, early 90s. It was a well known book at the time because commercially it had been so successful. And I've now read it three times. And on this latest reading, this latest rereading, I used a text called the Key to the Name of the Rose, which has all the Latin phrases and then the translations, which was really helpful. But it is a kind of problem for the book. There are sections, I think, certainly on your first reading, you just kind of had to push your way through.
- [17:15]
Andrew Hui
Yeah, I mean, he really gets deep into the weeds of Franciscan lives and the conventuals and fraldochinos and heretics and inquisitions and so forth. But Umberto Eco published this short text which is called the Postscript to the Name the Rose. And he describes this as the suspension of narrative, of the action of the plot into these very long descriptions, and he calls them arias of medieval heresies and tortures burning at stakes. And this list of names and these catalogs of very obscure books and so forth and different apocalyptic visions. And so in a way, I think that's why it was a surprise bestseller. But then again, I think people in the west, whether it's Europe or North America, have always, you know, there's always been this fascination of the Middle Ages, From Tolkien to C.S. lewis, a generation before Eco and after Eco, the Dan Brown phenomenon. And there are also, lots of, you might want to say, neo medievalism in Harry Potter. Right. And so I think that's how I would really situate the status of Umberto Eco. It's a learned man's version of Dan Brown and subsequently Umberto Eco became very interested in conspiracy theories, Freemasons and his other novels kind of talk about that.
- [18:52]
John J. Miller
His next novel is Foucault's Pendulum, which I like. I don't like it as well as I like the Name of the Rose, but it's Also a deeply learned book. It's confusing at certain points and so forth. Anyway, the Name of the Rose, though, really, I recommend it. It does. It has a propulsive kind of narrative, but it does have these sections where it can challenge. It can challenge a reader, that's for sure. One of the points of interest with the Name of the Rose, when it was such a successful bestseller in the 1980s, people would say, how in the world did this Italian professor of semiotics write this book that is so successful? And that raises the question of semiotics. What are semiotics? What's the definition of this term and area of study? And then what role does it play in the novel?
- [19:41]
Andrew Hui
Umberto Eco was a professor of semiotics, and semiotics is basically the Greek word for sign, semion, at the University of Bologna. And he turned a novelist when he was in his 40s, but before that, he wrote on the aesthetics of Aquinas. He wrote on art and beauty in the Middle Ages, and he wrote a series of books, A Theory of Semiotics, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Basically, it's a study of signs and a study of meanings. And there are signs everywhere in the world. And so in the Middle Ages, theologians conceived of the universe as a book which was written with the finger of God. And so there is an allegorical correspondence to everything, right? The stars up in the heavens correspond to the zodiac and the celestial spheres and the constellations and the things in nature, the herbs and the grasses and trees and the animals provide food and nourishment for humans. And each organ of the human body corresponds to something in nature up above and below. And so semiotics, then, in the modern sense, is a decipherment of these signs in the world and how we make meaning out of it. And in particular, Eco's great predecessors are the French linguist Socieur, or Swiss, actually, and The American Pierce. C.S. pierce.
- [21:22]
John J. Miller
What is this book ultimately about, do you think? It's got a good plot and the resolution is ingenious, but there's a lot going on in here about questions about, you know, did Jesus laugh? Did you know, was he. Did he own the cloak he wore? Stuff like that. It also gets into questions about what is the purpose of a library, what are the purpose of books? And so on. What do you think this book is ultimately about?
- [21:48]
Andrew Hui
So I'm going to quote two passages, and I think the book ultimately is what you said at the beginning of our conversation is that it is a book about books, right? So this is Edso speaking, right. He says often books speak about other books. Often the harmless book is like a seed that will blossom into a dangerous book, or it is the other way around. It is a sweet fruit of a bitter stem. And then later he says, true. I said, amazed. Until then, I had thought of each book, spoke of the things human or divine that lie outside books. Now, I realize, not infrequently, books speak of books. It is as if they spoke among themselves. And this is a really beautiful line here. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was a place of a long, centuries old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another. A living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind. The treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors. So this is books as a dialogue between traditions. This is books as reflection, cultivation, and the great magisterium of history. Now, the contrary of that is Jorge's vision of books. What he thinks is that, okay, well, to be a Benedictine monk, your life is bound by the observation of the rule. All you do is prayer and work. But the work of this particular monastery is the preservation of knowledge. Right? But he has a completely ultra conservative view, which is to say that in the beginning, the perfection of the word was already achieved. And he says books and the search for knowledge is actually all about preservation, he says, not search, because it is a property of knowledge as a human thing, that it has been defined and completed over the course of centuries, from the preaching of the prophets to the interpretations of the fathers of the Church. And this is the most important line. There is no progress, no revolution of ages in the history of knowledge, but at most a continuous and sublime recapitulation. Right? So the only thing that the monks have to do is to continue meditation, to gloss and to preserve. There is no new knowledge. And so the ultimate, I think, meaning of this book is this battle, this dialectic between new forms of knowledge of which William of Baskerville and Occam and Roger Bacon exemplify in this older conservative and preservative way of keeping books as only learned people can get. It's secret, it's cryptic, and only certain people have access to it.
- [24:54]
John J. Miller
So it's one of the key tensions, maybe the key tension of the story.
- [24:59]
Andrew Hui
The library as an open or a closed system.
- [25:02]
John J. Miller
Andrew, your new book is about libraries. It's called the the Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries. And The Name of the Rose takes place in a medieval world, but it's also kind of a proto Renaissance world. We're starting to see the Renaissance in the Name of the Rose, but can connect the Name of the Rose in Umberto Eco and the great library he imagines in his novel with what you write about in the study. What draws you to this topic of Renaissance libraries and what do you want us to know about them?
- [25:37]
Andrew Hui
My book really departs from a generation after the Name of the Rose. And so my great hero and I begin the book by thinking about Francesco Petrarch. He lived actually very close to Avignon. And. And whereas Umberto Eco's biblioteca library is an institutional one, it's a monastic one. In the study I focus on the private individual library, or what in Italian is called the studiolo. And Petrarch for me represents really early humanism, early Renaissance, in that he was the first independent scholar. His study, his library was detached, was unaffiliated with. That's outside of the institutional apparatus of the monastery, the university, the cathedral, the court. And so this is really the birth of the library as a private space. And my inspiration for writing this book was really during the pandemic. So back in 2020, we were all locked up in our homes and. And the question I had is, so what did people do when they were by themselves without any social interactions? We did a lot of different exercises of self care, whether it's yoga, whether it's whatever, baking, whatever binging on Netflix. In the pre digital world, what people did was to turn to books and there were particular rooms that are dedicated to reading, studying and writing and that. And my book traces the genesis of the study.
- [27:23]
John J. Miller
So, Andrew, as we wrap up, what's the case for our listeners to put a copy of the Name of the Rose in their own personal studies, their own personal libraries, and then also pull it out and read it. What's the case for reading this novel today?
- [27:39]
Andrew Hui
I think this, like any great book, it could be read today, tomorrow or yesterday. Right? My case for reading this novel, I think it's a great genre bending fusion, this brilliant masterpiece of historical mystery and a detective novel that presents real philosophical and theological themes. As we've talked about, there's plenty of intellectual challenge that encompasses medieval philosophy, semiotics and the cultural struggles of the Middle Ages. And finally, it has some really universal themes about the search for order in an apparently disordered world. The signs that we see, how do we interpret the world? Is it just composed of accidents or is there a larger allegorical meaning for it. And there is also this metafictional element as a book about books. And so we read it today because it's an immersive recreation of a medieval world that is at once deeply alien, but also startlingly familiar.
- [28:58]
John J. Miller
Andrew Hui, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about the Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.
- [29:03]
Andrew Hui
Thank you. It's been a great pleasure to be here. Thank you, John.
- [29:06]
John J. Miller
John, you just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Send me your ideas for future episodes. You can reach me through our website@heymiller.com on Twitter. My handle is heymiller. Last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of the Great Books Podcast.