Hypotyposis and Aesthetic in Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Of intertextuality Eco has said that : "Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told." How is this view relevant to a reading of The Name of the Rose? Thirty spokes meet at a nave; Because of the hole we may use the wheel. Clay is moulded into a vessel; Because of the hollow we may use the cup. Walls are built around a hearth; Because of the doors we may use the house. Thus tools come from what exists, But use from what does not. - Lao Tze ... signs and the signs of signs are used only when we are lacking things ...1 The entirety of our human literary heritage of text can be reduced to the bare fact that it is one great list. An hypotyposis2 in sign, a register of concepts arranged in varying degrees of habitual ritualistic order. Once the ritual, or habit is recognised meaning can then be attributed, and, up to a point, a communication of ideas ensues. This particular bifurcation of a vast and growing register of concepts seeks to discuss in its reading the [textual] aesthetics of inversion in Umberto Eco's 1980 novel 'The Name of the Rose'; apocalypse and eschatology in its characterisation and its sociological representations, and to conclude with an appraisal of happy endings in a work that has been termed Eco's 'novelisation of theory'3. The intertextuality of 'Rose' almost renders it a prescriptive text. This would indeed emphasise the importance of 'books always speaking of other books', if it were not primarily an aesthetic text. With the admonition of In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro4 Eco overtly proposes that the novel can be read primarily as an aesthetic text, for those who are able to easily read Latin, more so for those who are familiar with the individuals or works quoted throughout, otherwise his preface presents the reader with the work's first linguistic challenge.
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1 2 3 4

Eco, 1980. First day, Terce: p28 Ibid. p73 Trifonas, 2007: p267 Eco, 1980: p5: I have sought tranquillity in everything, but found it nowhere except in a corner with a book : Trans. by Haft, White and White, 1999: p97

' Rose's' labyrinthine multilingual 'walls' of untranslated text are perhaps not such a problem for an educated European reader as they are a poorly educated, yet curious English-speaking reader who enjoys the challenge of a filtered version of the original, complete with susurrous semantics and semiotics rendering atmospheric impressions of mysterious significance and covert meaning. Obscure text becomes visual and decorative, symbol rather than sign. Such text bears contextual justification in the setting of the novel's drama in several ways: the theme of code, interpretation and abduction; the insula5 of its mediaeval monastic setting which evokes a certain culturally based quality of romantic sensuality; the descriptive recurrence of visionary or dream image drawn from apocalyptic texts, the language, and experience, of various characters; and an important 'marginalia' theme of interweaving and inverted visual significance connecting with a major thematic element of political debate between both the legates and that of the characters Brother William and Jorge. Of this obscuring of the textual message for aesthetic effect Peter Trifonas (2007: p268) says: Ambiguity of reference in the signification process of an aesthetic text encourages interpretative efforts
leading the reader to an awareness of the representational flexibility of language. Language as

communicant thus is not depended upon so much for meaning as the significance of language as a whole, a concept in itself as represented by the tension between the obscure and the transparent text. The reader for whom the text is not immediately accessible, their expectation subverted, is placed in an objective position in regards certain aspects of the integrity of the novel, and a subjective position in questioning the possibilities of the text. What replaces immediate understanding of the textual significance is an aesthetically based decision. Arguably this 'abandonment of sign' emphasises the poetic properties of the accessible language aligning with more atmospheric effects of the text as a whole. An atmospheric, transparent, fanciful passage like:
books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library was then a place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors
6

is brought into relief for its romance, poetic, properties and thematic harmonies. This is a central moment in the novel, it reduces the whole of literature to an inaccessible and opaque dialogue beyond the mortal limitations of the individual human intellect to participate in; yet this dialogue is dependent upon the contributions of those writers, or conveyors of truth in its multiplicity of representations, to exist in its integrity. The 'susurri di libri'7 is aesthetically sensual in its effect,
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5 island. 6 Eco, 1980. Fourth Day, Terce: p 286 7 'susurrations of books': Colletti, 1988. p17

formally central, and thematically succinct: tripartate aesthetics, yet another trinity woven throughout the artistry of the novel. Entwining the art of inversion overtly through the text and context, 'Rose' mentions often the illuminated marginalia of the both the ancient and newly scripted texts in the Aedificium and the Scriptorium. The first death we are made aware of is an infamously comic illuminator of the Abbey's order whose miniature art is intensely lifelike and carnevalesque, the description of such is reminiscent of Heironymous Bosch in their surreal figurative exaggeration8. The colour and novelty of this meticulous art combined with the light, and intellectual air, of the Scriptorium offset the gothic extremes of all else in the novel. Comparable only with the sacridity and harmony of choir and service as experienced through the transports of Adso, the community in the scriptorium presents a central romance of 'Rose's' setting, atmosphere, and epistemology. It is here that the learned monks dynamically interact between each other and the texts they handle. It is here that, by their art and industry, the volumes survive and their materiality preserved, it is here that irreverent parodies of the world are set in the margins of most revered texts. 'Rose' makes a critical aesthetic point regarding inversion and reality in detailing these images, such that the reader who misses the novel's philosophical references, or who vaguely absorbs their complexity has these underlying illustrations for visually based emphasis.

Inasmuch as 'Rose' is a self conscious appeal to the aesthetics of popular culture it cannot be represented singularly as such without debasing its effect as a unified piece of literary art. The self admitted 'palimpsest' of the novel, the film of the same name9, is an example of what happens to the significance of the text when its purely aesthetically oriented particulars are isolated and represented for their sake alone. The film is entertaining but fragile in terms of its encapsulation of the concerns of the novel. If anything it is an inversion of the aesthetics of the novel that those thematic elements of code and discourse which make it into the film are sketchily included, more for purposes of effect and atmosphere than not, as a foil to more sensational aspects of the novel's dramatic machinery. The catharses achieved are thus not entirely in alignment. This is not to deny the film its own unity as a piece of art for it contains excellent moments of light, characterisation and atmosphere that succeed aesthetically as well as thematically in accordance with the novel. What the film cannot do as a medium is delve into depths of the novel's particular discursive tracks without compromising its aesthetic, whereas the novel cannot but do so without becoming an absolute clich as it is a skilfully rendered collation of generically popular cultural clichs in its formulation10.
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8 Eco, 1980. First Day, After Nones. pp76-78 9 Annaud, 1986. 10 Eg: Eco,1994;Carroll,1984; Capozzi,1998;Rosenblum,1992; Sebeok,1991; Haft, White & White, 1999. p181.

Characterisation is a field where filmic palimpsest and original novel can share signification. One of the most striking examples of art and intertextuality in harmony between the two representations and their intentions in their representation of the character of Salvatore. His dramatic introduction into both texts immediately follows a detailed description of the Church where:
the silent speech of the carved stone, accessible as it immediately was to the gaze and the imagination of anyone (for images are the literature of the layman), dazzled my eyes and plunged me into a vision that even today my tongue can hardly describe.11

In the midst of this vision, ambiguously presented in both texts as to whether it is an objective or subjective one on the part of the imaginative Adso, Salvatore emerges from the Apocalypse images of the carvings and vision as if he were part thereof and frightens Adso who believes the apparition is a devil. Simpleton Salvatore is a gothic clich. He is a jumble of gargoyle-like proportions and as such is exemplary of Eco's formulaic style of characterisation: When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two cliches
make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime 12

Salvatore is a dual sacrificial lamb to both the drama and philosophical theme of the story. He is Quasimodo in juxtaposition with a beautiful peasant girl he is captured with, while courting, in his own inimitable way, her sexual favours. His story has been told before and he is doomed, damned even, from the very first. Salvatore meets his end at the hands of the novel's Moriarty figure, Bernard Gui who drags away the disfigured simpleton, the beautiful girl and the heretic cellarer into hell and flames in the name of papal rule. This is a symbolic representation of spiritual eschatology, upheld by the church. It is this same nihilistic force which drives the novel's micro-apocalypse into execution. Jorge, Brother William's Moriarty and 'the monk who Eco poisons'13, is poisoned by this 'Spanish nihilism' as much as by the material manifestation of his affliction: the vial he baits the Aristotle with. The postscript in 'The Key to the Name of the Rose' points out the fact that the Secretum, supposed to be 'a secluded room for reading the bible', was Jorge's caching place for his hated 'forbidden works of the infidels'14. Thus the locked room in the labyrinth was representative of utmost repression in the guise of pious asceticism: all the most challenging ideas in Jorge's cosmology were housed here. There is an imagistic parallel for this situation in one of Adso's dream
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11 12 13 14

Eco, 1980. First Day, Sext. pp41-47 corresponding with Annuad, 1986 (see Bibliography and References). Eco, 1994. Eco, 2011.p16 Haft, White & White, 1999. p181.

visions where he dreams his personal version of Coena Cypriani and at the punctilio of the dream's catharsis of fear and confusion there sits the horror of his id:
...inside .. a great womb, mucous and viscid, .. in the centre an animal black as a raven and with a thousand hands was chained to a huge grate ...15

which he identifies as both Salvatore and a good devil. As these two figures are the absolute inversion of his personal reality Adso is a purifying force in the novel: he identifies the function of the duality between beauty and the grotesque, between good and evil; he recognises on a subconscious level that the real danger lay in imbalance between the two. His character's youth endows him with empathy by contrast to the cynicism and comparable dryness of the older characters: he alone absolves William of all mistakes; he is anguished, when Jorge takes himself out of the Secretum rabidly ingesting the 'poisonous pages' of the Aristotle, for the sake of the old man's life. This is humourously held up to William's anguish for the preservation of the book and its representative moral victory over the Abbey's microcosmic 'Antichrist' figure of Jorge's unbalanced intellect16. This moment is a wonderful example of comic relief within a tense crisis point of narrative. William finds hope for humanity and learning in the pagan works, the Aristotle in particular, but fails to convince the already damned Jorge of its value. William cannot right the wrong, it had gone beyond laughable, and Jorge has his last bitter laugh at the paradox of his victory.

A habit of eschatological thinking ingrained in many aspects of ecclesiastic ritual, fired by the millennialism which bridges the world of the novel and its author as, is the crux of the novel's concerns:
Millenarian beliefs tend to blossom when the world is undergoing turbulence and fragmentation the world is currently undergoing significant social and political changes which indicate that we may be living in a new world disorder. Does this mean that we are close to the end time spoken about in many of the eschatological teaching of the world religions ...? Our current period is reminiscent of the turbulence and chaos that accompanied the transition from the feudal world order to the early Modern Period (pre-Westphalian Europe). Indeed this observation has led some scholars to remark that we are moving back-to-thefuture; towards a new medievalism.17

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15 Eco, 1980. Sixth Day, Terce. p434. 16 Ibid. p482. 17 Knight, W Andy. 2010. p4

The visions of Ubertino and his preoccupations, if not sensual, are apocalyptic. William is their novice, both Jorge's and Ubertino's, and, as he is coming through the last stage of his 'noontime devil'18 , the novel takes place within a time of crisis in William's life, both natural and posttraumatic. The old men are absorbed in the ritual of contemplating an inevitable end, as elders do, their lifestyle has certainly trained them to it: Jorge has fixed his ideas and concreted his will where Ubertino gives over to the transportations of the visionary mind, they are as two bifurcations of the church: these eschatological dreamers, in their quest to usher in a new world
order, may in fact be bringing about the very nightmare they fearthe total destruction of the world as we know it19

William, who stands for the sanity of balance and the people, with his eyeglasses may not fall into this abyss of the intellect in stagnation but what of the simple folk whose creative faculties are the very vehicle of their repression and oppression by church and state? It is left to the native grace of that faculty of inverse individualism and communal unification through humour to engender its own resilience without the aid of Aristotle's second book of Poetics. It is given to Adso to be the gatherer of fragments of burnt learned letters and reconstruct what hope there is of an afterlife beyond the micro-apocalypse of the abbey. He finds no one answer at the end of the novel, he finds in fact that words can die the death that he is not in fear of: the death without trumpets and hellfire, 'an ineffable union', egoless nothingness without significance:
The more I read and reread this list the more I am convinced that it contains no message... what I have written on these pages is only a cento, a figured hymn, an immense acrostic that says and repeats nothing... nor do I know whether ...i have been speaking of them or if they have spoken through my mouth.20

Adso has formed a cosmology regarding his death where origin is joined to the final. Adso, through this dramatic baptism of fire, found purpose, something toward which to dedicate his time and lifestyle, something which, for the time spent, gave him love and meaning. He leaves the manuscript to be reinvented by someone else, it has no meaning for him when he is not going to read it again. If the manuscript is Cluny's rose21 then the various processes by which it came into being for Adso was its bud and blooming and blowing: what he leaves cannot be relived, but it will bloom again in another significance: the acrostic, the word, the list will spark its especial hypotyposis upon the flint of other minds and the lantern will be lit in the library again.

18 19 20 21

Mid-life crisis. Knight, W Andy. 2010. p19 Eco. 1980. Last Page. p501. Haft, White & White. 1999. pp175-176.

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Bibliography and References (in order of appearance)

Lao Tse. The Tao Te Ching. Based on the translations of Robert G. Henricks, Lin Yutang, D.C. Lau, Ch'u Ta-Kao, Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English, Richard Wilhelm and Aleister Crowley. Accessed 08/2011 from http://www.chinapage.com/gnl.html#11

Eco, Umberto.1980. The Name of the Rose. Vintage, London (pub1998).

Trifonas, Peter.P. 2007. 'The aesthetics of textual production: reading and writing with Umberto Eco', Studies in Philosophy and Education,Volume 26, Issue 3, pp. 267 277. Accessed 08/2011 From http://www.springerlink.com.ezproxy.une.edu.au/content/0238l080n858x4lr/

Haft,A., White, J.& White, R. 1999, 'Notes on the Text of The Name of the Rose', in The Key to the Name of the Rose, The University of Michigan Press.

Film: The Name of the Rose (original title, Der Name der Rose), 1986. Germany. Prod. Bernd Eichinger, Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Eco,Umberto. 1994. Casablanca, or,The Clichs are Having a Ball, Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers, Eds: Maasik,S and Solomon, J. Bedford Books: Boston. pp.260- 264.

Michael P. Carroll.1984. Untitled review of 'The Name of the Rose', American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 86, No. 2 (Jun., 1984), pp. 432-434. Pub.: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Accessed 08/2011 from http://www.jstor.org/stable/678991

Capozzi, R. 1998. Ch 6: 'Libraries, Encyclopedias, and Rhizomes: Popularizing Culture in Eco's 'Superfictions'', Umberto Eco's Alternative, The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretation. Eds.:Norma Bouchard & Veronica Pravadelli. pub.:Peter Lang, New York.

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Bibliography and References (cont')

Rosenblum, J.1992. Essay on 'The Name of the Rose'.World Fiction Series (CD-ROM). Salem Press, Inc. Accessed 08/2011 from http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_rose_essay.html

Sebeok, Thomas A. 1991. Give Me Another Horse*, The American Journal of Semiotics, Vol. 8,Issue 4, p41-52. Pub. Semiotic Society of America: Kent, United States. Accessed 08/2011 from http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.une.edu.au/docview/213747517?accountid=17227

Annaud, 1986 . The Name of the Rose, (Part 4). Accessed 08/2011 from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WpO5WBpUVQ&feature=related Scene in question depicted from 0:33sec 2:15sec of excerpt.

Eco, Umberto, 2011. Seminal Ideas, 'Writing from Left to Right', Confessions of a Young Novelist. Harvard University Press. Accessed 08/2011 from: http://books.google.com.au/books?id=NNlJASq78kC&pg=PA16&lpg#v=onepage&q&f=false

Knight, W Andy. 2010. Eschatology, Religion and World Order, Religious Studies and Theology, Vol 29, Issue 1. Accessed 08/2011 from: http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.une.edu.au/docview/850462641