Or, It’s The Name of the Rose Boot Camp, baby!
Tonight is for anyone who feels a little intimidated by the size of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which we start in the Daily Kos Book Club next week. The novel deserves its reputation as a demanding and difficult read. Demanding, yes. Difficult...well, will you believe me if I tell you it gets easier as you go?
It does. And it’s rewarding. It’s like a well you can return to again and again, except that each time the water you bring up in the bucket is a little different. You’ll have to trust me on this. You can read it on different levels and they all work.
Tonight I want to introduce three different topics that will make your reading smoother — useful background information, if you will, on three subject areas: general introduction, sign theory, and eschatology. You don’t need this stuff but, depending on your familiarity with medieval culture, literary theory, and apocalypse, you may find something useful herein. So let’s get to it — (deep breath, jump!)
First the worst: Theory
No fear, we won’t look at all literary theory (#NotAllTheory). It’s not as difficult as has been advertised. No fear: eminent scholars more eminent than I will be here to help us. Anyway, as far as we need to go it’s not that hard; I’ve always found that most literary theory is intimidating but commonsensical at its foundations. Every profession has its jargon; get past the jargon and it’s surprisingly comprehensible. For example, you smash your thumb with a hammer. A doctor may say, “You have an impressive subungual hematoma,” which sounds terrifying, until you realize that what she’s really saying is that you’ve got a bruise under your fingernail. Jargon.
What I’m about to lay out might be insultingly simple but, again, it might not. It might be your first brush with theory. Maybe you had a bad first theoretical experience and want to go easy. Truth be told, Eco will embed everything you need to know about theory as he goes, but this might make it easier on a first read.
For most of his career, Eco was a semiotician first and a medievalist second. Both sides of his training inform The Name of the Rose. Semiotics incorporates the study of signs and their meanings, the very basics of communication. Robert Langdon of Dan Brown’s potboiler thrillers calls himself a “symbologist,” but he’s really a semiotician — someone who specializes in the interpretation of signs. (Yes, I went there. If you’ve followed Langdon’s adventures, you’ve seen semiotics in action. Sometimes too much action.)
We all interpret signs all the time. As grammar is to writing, semiotics are to communicating; they’re the tools we work with, so basic we don’t even think about them. When you’re driving and you see a rectangular bright yellow sign with a running stick figure on it, you know you’re near a school. Literally, a sign. Interpreting that sign, making the mental connection between what the sign actually signifies and what meaning you draw from it, that’s the work of semiotics (if you want to get your feet wet, semiotically-speaking, this link isn’t a bad first step into a deep rabbit hole, one that goes far afield of our needs.)
Take the famous image above, René Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images.” A symbol of a thing is not the thing itself, even though we can (and some of us are prone to) substitute the symbol for the thing. A painting of a pipe is not a pipe; it’s a signifier of a pipe. A picture of an American flag is not a flag, it’s a signifier of a flag. And the American flag is itself a signifier of the United States. We all probably know people who venerate the flag so much that they worship the symbol to the detriment of the nation — a theorist would say that those people have confused the signifier (the symbol) for the signified (the thing).
We interpret signs all the time and no, meanings are not universal, and they can change over time. They’re subject to manipulation; they can be subverted, used ironically — and this, too, is a common experience. Take, for example, this image that I swiped from Annette Müllender by way of Adam Zwicky:
Three years ago this image would have made no sense. In a few years, it’ll be historic reality, but right now it’s a political statement. Signs can change over time. But we get the joke at the same time as we catch the reference to Magritte’s insistence that the sign is not the object. The name is the not the rose. That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet….The rose that bloomed yesterday is gone today; all we have to hold on to is the name and the ideal that the name symbolizes.
Semiotics. Pretty cool. And not that difficult, once you get past the turnstile.
As I said, we interpret signs all the time, and our interpretations are grounded in our times, our culture, and our individual histories. Dominionist Christians want to promote Israeli policy because they believe the primacy of Israel is a necessary sign of the coming Apocalypse, and they’re doing everything they can to bring it on. We snicker at the Kushner’s unwise ownership of 666 5th Ave. — why? We see trios of enormous crosses on the sides of the interstate highways — signs that tell the Christian every journey ends at Calvary. We don’t expect to find a thirteenth floor in a hotel. The Trump campaign embedded six-pointed stars in an attack ad on Clinton in 2016 — call it a dogwhistle or a signifier, it’s the same thing: a certain group of people were meant to interpret that sign a certain way, a way that the rest of us were not meant to interpret.
Nothing I’ve written here, except a couple of technical terms, is anything you don’t already know. And now you know as much theory as you need to be in good with Eco.
Medieval Culture
Another enormous topic to be dispensed with in a few paragraphs. Let it not be said that I fear overgeneralization.
It’s About the Church
Eco’s novel is set in the year 1327, a particular positioning in time. The High Middle Ages have already passed, nations complete with parliamentary systems have developed, trade has revived, and Europe is beginning its slow drift toward Reformation and the breaking of Church authority. Thomas Aquinas has already been made a saint (in 1323), and his Summa Theologica (All Theology) is so influential that it rivals Aristotle as the primary model for education and thought, which struggle we see enacted in The Name of the Rose. Since Aquinas has provided the answer to every theological question, the Church is becoming intellectually morbid and sluggish, and all the energy toward purification and reform has gone outside the Church proper — right into midst of the heretics. Which is a big issue in this novel.
Another struggle that rises in the fourteenth century is the tension, not just between Heads of State and the Church (Louis IV versus Pope John XXII), but also between the monastery as a center of learning versus town and city. Universities produce better scholars than monasteries; the universities are making better books; the guilds and secular authorities of the cities rival the Church in temporal power; the days of the Church’s primacy in all things are numbered, and the Church views these developments with great anxiety.
For average people, though, “the simple,” as Brother William calls them, life is primarily a preparation for Eternity, and you definitely want to be on the right side when the roll is called Up Yonder. If you were a person living in the Middle Ages in Europe (and you were not Jewish, confined to a ghetto, strictly limited in your career options and exempt from the protections afforded to most subjects of whatever ruler you lived under) — in short, if you were a Christian, you had one aim in life: to save your soul while enduring all the hardships and resisting all the temptations this world placed in your way. That’s it. One job: salvation. If you could manage salvation and either save others by your pious example or improve the lives of your people, so much the better. But individual salvation is the entire point of life. And in 1327, salvation is still mediated through the Church; therefore, the Church still holds tremendous power, and the Church is jealous of that power.
It’s About the People
One of the things that makes the Medieval period so interesting is that it’s so foreign to the modern world. The people who lived at the time are separated from us by culture, language, worldview — they’re alien, in many ways. Totally different.
And yet, totally the same. Whether it’s the scatologic humor in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or the scatologic humor in Old English riddles (the Anglo-Saxons loved them some dirty jokes, very much the way we love them)...well, scatologic humor is eternal, I guess. Omnis sua propria odor pedit amat.
In other words, scatology aside, human nature is constant, and it’s with a faint surprise that we recognize medieval people through the veil of archaic language and the long lens of time. Whether it’s the Wife of Bath checking out the legs of the man who will be her fifth husband while he’s carrying the casket of her fourth to the cemetery, or a miller who cheats his customers, or a lovesick teenager caterwauling in the streets, we can know these people when we meet them in the moderating media of literature and history.
There are profound differences, of course, differences greater than language or the passage of time. We have scientific method, knowledge of germs, chemistry — they had Empedocles and alchemy. Although they knew the earth is round,to believe in a heliocentric solar system meant being arrested as a heretic, because the Church taught that the Earth was the center of all creation, and Jerusalem was the center of the earth. Average people in the fourteenth century had more theological knowledge than many Christian ministers do today, which is entirely reasonable given that, where we have existential doubts, they had the mission to save their own souls. Salvation today is, theologically speaking, determined by a personal relationship between the believer and God and subject to membership in a veritable buffet of theology all under the umbrella of Christianity. Before the Reformation, there was only One Church, and it mediated the relationship between God and God’s people. One narrow path to heaven, and the Church set all the rules, exacted all penalties for sin.
A short primer on sin: in the Medieval period there are two kinds of sin — venial and mortal. Venial sins are the sins you can’t spend a day without committing, being as we are fallen and imperfect creatures. Venial sins, unconfessed and unabsolved, get you time in pergatory, but won’t condemn you to hell. Hell is for mortal sins: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, Lust.
Notice that there are no acts that are by definition mortal sins. The degree of a sin’s seriousness has to do with the intention behind the act. Envy, wrath, laziness, greed and lust are pretty self-explanatory. If you kill someone in an act of road rage, for instance, it’s a mortal sin. Ordering a soldier to certain death in battle just to get close to that soldier’s spouse (as David did to Uriah in order to get with Bathsheba) is a mortal sin.
Gluttony and pride are harder to parse, until you remember two things. For gluttony, medieval Europe was a place and time where there generally wasn’t enough food for everyone, and it was common to have people starve to death in the streets. If you were prosperous, or even just getting by, whatever was left of your meal was supposed to be given to the poor, specifically to the beggars who sat outside your door. If you ate more than you needed to survive, you were literally taking food from someone else’s mouth, and condemning that person to starve. It comes down to the intention behind the act of eating.
And then there’s pride. In the Middle Ages, pride was not satisfaction in a job well-done; it was the belief that you could exist without God. Pride is the sin of Lucifer, the rejection of God and God’s might. Acting in the belief that you don’t need God is a mortal sin.
One more thing: mortal sins, like venial ones, can be forgiven, if the sinner confesses them and does penance. Indulgences were “Get Out of Hell and Purgatory Free” cards (not really, but that’s how they were regarded) distributed by the Church in return for good works and participation in Crusades and, sometimes, sold outright. (Like human nature and scatologic humor, graft is an eternal condition.) The abuse of Indulgences, along with the ostentatious wealth of the Church were forces that drove attempts to reform or purify the faith.
Finally, Appeals to Authority
The way to win a debate in the medieval period was to load up your argument with the best quotes from “auctorites” that you can find. You’ll notice in The Name of the Rose that learned debates don’t turn on original thought, but on appeals to the Greatest Thinkers of All Time. It’s a common condition; everyone was doing it. You just have to roll with it. ‘Nuff said — you’ll see what I mean
Moving on to Eschatology, or
It’s the End of the World as We Know It
You probably remember the old bumper sticker “Jesus is coming. Look busy.” Well, that impulse is also eternal. From the time apocalyptic early Christian cults burned Rome and pinned the blame on Nero, believers have been playing the part of the wise virgins of Matthew 25: 1-13 (For the record, whenever I cite Christian scripture, I’m going to use the Douay-Rheims version, which is a close translation of the Latin Vulgate and therefore closest to the texts that Adso and William would have known), a fair percentage of Christian believers have been keeping the place spiffy for the Lord’s return.
Which will come anytime soon.
When the calendar turned over in the first millennium, vast numbers of people were absolutely sure that the Apocalypse was at hand. Of course, when the world didn’t end and Jesus was a no-show, some were disappointed, some relieved, some embarrassed (they slunk off back to their monastic cells and sulked) and some just shrugged and figured there was something wrong with the math. Optimists.
We’ve all seen this happen: the Millerites of the 1840’s, the adherents of the Mayan calendar, and hundreds of other sadder, more tragic eschatological movements in between. Apocalypse fever has always been around, but it was particularly pronounced in the later Middle Ages. Even before the Black Death carved a chunk out of the population starting in 1347, other plagues decimated the people. Famine and flood were both common conditions; diseases like pox and leprosy were also common. The Age of Gold was long over, the world had grown old, and the End of the World was at hand — all three catchphrases were popular maxims at the time, and you’ll meet them all repeatedly in The Name of the Rose.
That’s one more thing we have uniquely in common with medieval people: we can envision the end of the world. For us, it appeared at Los Alamos; for them, it was the condition of a fallen and precarious world. After the Black Death failed to destroy the world, apocalypse fever faded for a while; between established trade routes and contact with other cultures and the recognition that disease wasn’t likely to kill everybody, folks realized that end of the world — the physical destruction of the world — was unlikely….until 1945. The existential worry that nags us is the same as nagged them, with about six centuries of relatively blissful unawareness between.
In Conclusion
That’s enough to get going on with. If you want a recommendation for what you should read before you start The Name of the Rose, there is one text that would be immensely valuable, and I can’t believe I’m recommending it because I’ve always likened it to chugging blackstrap molasses from a tap, but there’s no way around it. The Book of Revelations. The text and imagery are central to The Name of the Rose and I can’t stress their importance enough. The novel is a novel about apocalypse, and it draws heavily from that well.
And, if you’re ambitious and want something in a darker vein (as if anything can be darker than the Book of Revelations), two short stories of Jorge Luis Borges: “The Library of Babel” and “Death and the Compass.” Borges is one of the guiding figures in The Name of the Rose. I’m assuming you’ve already read your Sherlock Holmes — Holmes as detective is the other figure who casts a long shadow in the monastery.
Meet me back here next Monday night for the start of The Name of the Rose. It’s going to be fun, it’s going to be profound, it’s going to be a challenge. It’ll be a blast. We’ll see signs, and signs of signs, and wonders extraordinary. And books. Lots of books, a slice of medieval life, and a bevy of dead monks. What’s not to love?