Who is now able to say whether Hector was right or Achilles, Agamemnon or Priam, in their war for the smile of that woman who is now the dust of ashes?
Every time I read reviews of "The Name of the Rose", I catch myself feeling that I have read (six or seven times, complete nonsense) some other book. The last time I even sniffed the pages - nothing helps. Lick (for well-known reasons) did not dare. May the spirit of Melk Abbey forgive me for, as always, reading the contents of my favorite book quite freely.
Umberto Eco was an Italian writer of fiction, essays, academic texts, and children's books. A professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, Eco’s brilliant fiction is known for its playful use of language and symbols, its astonishing array of allusions and references, and clever use of puzzles and narrative inventions. His perceptive essays on modern culture are filled with a delightful sense of humor and irony, and his ideas on semiotics, interpretation, and aesthetics have established his reputation as one of academia’s foremost thinkers.
So, before us is a novel about passion. A novel about passion that can become a source of incredible pleasure and inhuman torment, a passion that elevates to heaven and plunges into the abyss of hell, clarifying feelings and obscuring the mind. Passion for knowledge, truth, books, woman, power … Passion that should be, but is never ready to end in nothing.
Knowledge acting as an object of voluptuousness. Books that protect from others in order to enjoy them yourself. For a person suffering from indefatigable curiosity, “pride of the mind”, the most desirable knowledge is the forbidden, no matter what it consists of. A series of deaths, the destruction of the monastery and the library by fire are the sacrifices made by the “voluptuaries” not in order to acquire any specific knowledge (even dangerous), but for the very fact of possessing a forbidden book.
And here is the "perverted fornication of punishment and pardon" - the voluptuousness of the inquisitorial power. The lust of hoarding. "The voluptuousness of participation, transfiguration, repentance and death." All this is on the territory of the monastery - a place where, it would seem, human passions should not have a place. Passions destroy the monastery. Ubi sunt...
But before us is a novel about growing up - with its gains and losses, a novel about the value of a moment, due not only to its transience, but also to its eternity. Just as every brick in the foundation or vault of a temple is eternal, so is every moment that makes up the building of our life. A good coming-of-age novel is necessarily a transfer of experience novel. The pattern (matrix, genre canon) allows us to hope that the student will become equal to the teacher, or even surpass him. However, the result should wait. The transfer of experience in a medieval monastery implies smart conversations, and I, a sinner, love smart conversations, especially about the real and the probable:
“But what does this unicorn say to you if your mind does not believe in it?”
“He talks to me a lot. How much the traces of the body of Venantius in the snow say, where he was dragged to a vat of pig's blood. The unicorn described in the book is an imprint. If there is an imprint, then there is something that imprinted it.”
We are surrounded not only by objective things and subjective ideas, but also by their imprints in our brain - images and signs. What do these prints tell us? To each his own.
The structure of the point of view in The Name of the Rose resembles a mirror maze. The decrepit old man describes the events that he witnessed in his youth, contriving to combine his "current" point of view on himself then and his then point of view on the events taking place around him. The naive look of a Catholic nun at things that seem simple and unambiguous to him reveals the complexity of these things. Every time Adson begins to “not understand” or “condemn” his senior companion, we simultaneously see them both: the former inquisitor, who, at the cost of what he experienced and rethought, rose spiritually and intellectually much higher than the time described, and the gullible son of his age and his religion, ready to accept many things on faith and justify by faith. “The Quran, the bible of the wicked, the book of debauchery…” Adson recoils. "A book containing wisdom unlike ours," retorts Wilhelm.
Adson is perplexed by Wilhelm's statement "that there is almost no difference between his own, although mystical, but right faith and the criminal faith of heretics." Comparison of Wilhelm with the fanatic Ubertino, who is able to see the difference between himself and the heretics, is not in favor of Wilhelm. “... But if so, I said to myself, it means that Wilhelm was bypassed by the mercy and providence of the Lord, for the said providence not only teaches us to understand the differences between good and evil, but, one might say, gives his chosen ones the ability to judge.” It is in the ability to judge, to pass judgment on what is good, what is bad, what is sinful, what is righteous, according to Adson, holiness consists. However, a new doubt immediately creeps into his soul: “But why did the Lord deprive Wilhelm of this ability? After all, he had the sharpest insight, and in everything related to natural phenomena, he was able to notice the slightest dissimilarity and the most elusive affinity of things ... ”Adson is afraid to think this thought through to the end.
Throughout the novel, one would like to believe that from communication with Wilhelm Adson "will come to his senses." However, nothing of the kind happens. Paying tribute to his teacher, the student completes his path of growing up at a completely different point, much closer to Ubertino than to Wilhelm: “The older I get, the stronger I assert myself in my decrepitude ... the less respect I have for such qualities as intelligence, gravitating towards knowledge, and the will gravitating towards action; and more and more I bow with my soul, as to the only means of salvation, to faith, which waits patiently and does not raise unnecessary questions.
Wilhelm was defeated (period or question mark?) But is it possible to fail in achieving a goal that you did not set? His aged student writes down what happened in the monastery only as a detective story, as something most interesting that happened to him in his youth (period or question mark) Ubi sunt? Ashes to ashes? Why, then, did Adson go to the ruins of the monastery and carefully collect half-rotted scraps of old books, burnt pieces of parchment, on which nothing remained but the ghost of one or two words? This is the most touching and sublime scene in the novel. In terms of spiritual concentration, none of the many scenes of Catholic worship in it can be compared with it.
Did Adson gather scraps of the past to ask about the presence of a pattern? It would be too easy. He really does not know what is more correct (true): to assume that the "stumps" of the books that he managed to collect are accidental or to subtract a mystical message from them? Ages were middle...
The Name of the Rose is a novel about the spirit and letter of the Middle Ages. To understand - take the table of contents of Huizinga's "Autumn of the Middle Ages" and project it onto Eco's text (keeping in mind, of course, that Huizinga has France, Burgundy and the Netherlands). The Middle Ages, passed through a labyrinth of reflections.
Crazy scene - the capture of the "witch", where four positions collide within one page:
the cold-blooded, unquestioning Inquisitor Bernard;
Adson, who seems to be full of love languor, but his pity for the girl is the pity of a person for an animal, at the same time he is able to rationalize (And she cried, fought and whined like an animal that is being driven under the knife. But not a single person "Neither Bernard, nor the men at arms, nor even I, understood what she was shouting out there in her village dialect. Although she spoke, she was like a mute to us. Some words give people power, others make them even more defenseless." These are precisely the dark speeches of the simple, whom the Lord did not allow to science to express their thoughts in the universal language of education and power);
Wilhelm's position (The girl is missing. Burnt meat)
and the semi-mad fanatic Ubertino (The beauty of the body is entirely limited to the skin. If people saw what is under the skin ... they would shudder at the sight of the female body. All this charm actually consists of mucus and blood, animal phlegm and bile. If you remember that contained in the nostrils, throat and intestines - you will understand that the body is full of impurities. But you do not want to touch mucus or droppings even with your finger. Where does the desire to hug a bag filled with manure come from?)
Umberto Eco is a master of irony. Such a master that while reading and admiring, no, no, yes, you squint your eyes in the mirror with suspicion: did he hang donkey ears or a tail on you too. "Labyrinth of reflections" he manages to put in one sentence in the most excellent way. Here is a description of the face of one of the monks: “He seemed to be unable to marvel at the absurdity of the human race, without being too upset, however, because of this truly cosmic catastrophe.” What "as if", what "however"! I love it: "He thought that I thought that he thought that I thought..."
Finally, Eco is aphoristic. You can pick up great quotes - both from the narrator's speech and from Wilhelm's conversations. I really like this human characteristic: “He has a bookshelf instead of a head. Bitten by a bug." Or: "The library contains everything - both reality and whim." The following dialogue is my favorite, and I'm not going to submit it to Citations, even if no one reads this multi-volume review:
“So,” I dared to ask, “are you still far from a decision?”
“I am very close to a solution,” Wilhelm replied. “I just don’t know which one.”
“So when you solve questions, you don’t come up with a single correct answer?”
“Adson,” said Wilhelm, “if I came to him, I would have been teaching theology in Paris long ago.”
“Do they always find the right answer in Paris?”
"Never," Wilhelm said. “But they hold on tight to their mistakes.”
“And you,” I insisted with youthful stubbornness, “don’t you make mistakes?”
“All around,” he replied. “However, I try to have several of them at once, otherwise you become a slave to the one and only.”
Finally, we have a novel about disappearance - as Umberto Eco himself admits, one of the endless variations on the theme ubi sunt (a line from Gaudeamus: Where are those who lived before Us in the world?). A novel that the beauty of the beautiful and the magnificence of the magnificent do not at all guarantee their eternity. The fact that many of the achievements of mankind were destined and will be destined to crumble into dust, as well as the hopes and dreams of an individual. This meaning of the novel was barbarously corrupted in the Russian translation (which I read) by the transmission of the last quotation: Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus as "Rose with the same name - with naked names we henceforth." The fact that the translator was tempted to check at least with other European broadcasts is unforgivable. So the English have Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names or And what is left of the rose is only its name..., the Spaniards have De la primitiva rosa sólo nos queda el nombre, conservamos nombres desnudos [o sin realidad] or De la rosa nos queda únicamente el nombre, among the Italians... among the French... And we have the ravings of a madman. The separate translation of the 1140 verse is no better. "Empty Names"
As always with Eco, the structure is open. One can read from this quote, which gave the novel its title, different layers of meaning.
First: words, images, memories, associations - in general, ideal objects, capable of surviving the material objects that give rise to them, capable of being (in many senses of the word) stronger than them.
Second: everything that we store in memory and books is only a faint shadow, an uncertain echo of real impressions, objects, events that can only be preserved in the form of impotent names. The rose withered, but her name remained - a naked (naked) name, like all the names that we are forced to use. The third ... and so on, almost ad infinitum.
Or you can read nothing at all, but shout “Deception! Fake! in one of the lists of the medieval original, not Rosa, but Roma. With all the consequences. I love Umberto Eco, like any author who illustrates himself. "I repeat nothing-nothing-repeat twice-twice." Naked names can be swapped, and readers will play them as they are told, firmly believing in their role in interpreting the text. "Funny birds!" Here I got the feeling that Wilhelm Umberto Eco is not at all interested in truth, which always consists in the only identity between the object and the concept. He wanted to have fun by imagining as many possibilities as possible.
The Name of the Rose is a book about the absence of pattern. By the way, the real name of "Gaudeamus" ("So let's have fun ...") - "De brevitate vitae" ("On the transience of life").
This article was sponsored by Robert Bachhuber
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