2023-08-29 08:39:10
“I wrote a novel because I wanted to. I think that is reason enough to start counting. Man is by nature a fabulating animal. I started writing in March 1978, prompted by a seminal idea. He wanted to poison a monk,” he clarified. Umberto Eco, in ‘Apostillas a ‘The name of the rose”. She published them in 1985, five years after her fictional debut, a referential historical detective novel for which he shuffled the title of ‘The crime abbey’, began an undeniable journey of success. Awarded with the Witch and el Medicisis today a fundamental work of 20th century literature and a ‘long-seller’ with 60 million copies sold in 50 languages.
Umberto Eco (1932-2016), respected Italian semiologist, philosopher, humanist and essayist, set the scene for ‘The Name of the Rose’ in the fourteenth century, for seven days in 1327, in a Benedictine abbey in the mountains of northern Italy, architecturally inspired by the Sacra di San Michele, in which the mysterious and violent deaths of monks take place, in an environment impregnated with heresy and the blood shed by the Inquisition. “He made history with his medieval ‘thriller.’ Pierre Lemaitre in his ‘Passionate Dictionary of Black Novels’.
Into this scenario, which Eco chose for being a “closed place, a concentration universe”, a character arrives who acts as an accidental detective. He needed him, he noted, “endowed with a great sense of observation and a special sensitivity for the interpretation of indications. Qualities that were only found within the Franciscan sphere.” And he created the friar of English origin William of Baskerville, a kind of medieval Sherlock Holmes (through whose name the writer evokes ‘The Baskerville Hound’, the most famous adventure of the detective created by Arthur Conan Doyle). They even resemble each other in the description: “His height of him was greater than that of a normal man and, as he was very skinny, he seemed even taller. His gaze was sharp and penetrating; the sharp and slightly hooked nose infused his face with a watchful expression.”
However, his appearance in the novel differed from the film face to which he remained forever attached, embodied by Sean Connery in the 1986 version of Jean Jacques Annauda film with excellent reception but that knew little before the magnitude of the book.
He dazzled readers with “Latin, and few women, and lots of theology, and gallons of blood.”
Eco was about to let the detective be the real character of the Franciscan William of Ockham, but he resigned: he “disliked” him. But he did reflect the struggles between religious orders around poverty or opulence and possession of goods by the Church, a topic that is debated in the abbey. And he faced the hatred of the fearsome royal inquisitor Bernardo Gui.
Together with Connery, a very young Christian Slater in the role of the ‘watson’ who accompanies Guillermo de Baskerville, the Benedictine novice Adso de Melk, who will experience his sexual initiation that week, and to whom he transfers, the writer admits, many of his “adolescent terrors and palpitations of love”, but also his terrors “before unknown languages, before the difficulties of thought, before the mysteries of political life”.
Adso is the narrator, who in a manuscript “tells at the age of 80 something he saw at the age of 18.” “He records all the events with the photographic fidelity of a teenager, but he doesn’t understand them,” says Eco, who with this formula manages to make “ordinary readers identify with the narrator’s innocence and feel justified even though sometimes they don’t understand everything “. It is a key piece in the success of ‘The name of the rose’, where the author of ‘Apocalyptic and integrated‘ masterfully merged popular and scholarly culture between which he always built bridges. Thus he reached the entire spectrum of readers, skilfully pouring between crime and crime a paragon of demanding expressions in Latin and cultured quotes and theological, philosophical or literary references, from Wittgenstein a Victor Hugo oa ‘The Library of Babel’, by Jorge Luis Borgeswhich he evokes through the feared character of George Burgosblind monk who jealously guards the famous and labyrinthine library of the abbey.
“I wanted the reader to have fun. At least as much fun as I was having,” he wrote. Hence the choice of a detective novel, “the most metaphysical and philosophical of intrigue models”, because “deep down, the fundamental question of philosophy (as well as that of psychoanalysis) coincides with that of the detective novel: does Who is guilty?”. The author of ‘The Prague Cemetery’ he was looking for an “accomplice” reader, who would enter his game after being “capable of overcoming the penitential stumbling block of the first hundred pages”. It was not a question of giving the public what he asked for but of “revealing to him what he should want, even if he does not know it.” And he gave her, and dazzled her, with “Latin, and few women, and lots of theology, and liters of blood”.
It was not a question of giving the public what they asked for but of “revealing to them what they should want, even if they don’t know it”
Since he prepared his doctoral thesis on Saint Thomas of AquinoEco was a great connoisseur of the Middle Ages, his “everyday imaginary”. And he decided to tell it “by the mouth of a chronicler of the time [Adso]”, because he himself was a “beginner narrator”, he admits in the ‘Apostilles’. He rummaged through his “medievalist files in hibernation” accumulated since 1952 to display his knowledge about aesthetics, art and architecture (he even calculated the steps of a spiral staircase to establish the time of the dialogues of the characters who pass through the abbey), the production of parchments or that of wine and olive oil or the slaughter of the pig… But he stopped writing for a year, because before that he had to “build a world as furnished as possible, down to the last details”. Then “the words will come almost by themselves. ‘You grasp, the words will follow'”.
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