Missing Eco: On Reading "The Name of the Rose" as Library Criticism

Missing Eco: On Reading "The Name of the Rose" as Library CriticismAuthor(s): Jeffrey GarrettSource: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Oct., 1991), pp. 373-388Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4308639 .

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THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY Volume 61 OCTOBER 1991 Number 4

MISSING ECO: ON READING THE NAME OF THE ROSE AS LIBRARY CRITICISM

Jeffrey Garrett'

While many outside the library community have commented at length on the central role of the library in Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose (Milan, 1980; New York, 1983), librarians themselves have been notably silent. This reserve is surprising when one considers the vast and intricate library dystopia which Eco has created for his novel, the casting of a librarian as archvillain, and the use of a library book as this villain's principal murder weapon. Beyond these matters of setting and casting, however, close examination of Eco's imaginary library and its literary antecedents, but also of Eco's yet untranslated essay "De Bibliotheca" (1981), will reveal the author's use of the library metaphor to be anything but casual. It is instead an image charged with meaning, both within the context of postmodern literary theory and as an element of Eco's own agenda for real-existing libraries.

Eleven years have now passed since Umberto Eco's medieval mystery novel II nome della rosa made its appearance in Italy, eight since its publication in the United States as The Name of the Rose [ 1]. The work's obvious demands on readers-significant passages in Latin, French, and even Middle High German; allusions to a host of forgotten (and often fictitious) classical and medieval writers; long and tangled disputations on abstruse matters of church history-should have made it an unlikely candidate for the bestseller lists. And yet, The Name of the Rose soon vaulted the walls surrounding the literary ghettos of the world to achieve a remarkably democratic popularity. In the United States, it sold well over a million hardcover copies between 1983 and 1987. When the pa-

l. HSSE Library, Stewart Center, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907.

[Library Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 373-388] ? 1991 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

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374 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY

perback version was released in 1984, 800,000 copies sold within the first three months alone. The commercial success of Jean-Jacques An- naud's film version in 1986, with Sean Connery in the leading role, marked the elevation of this recondite novel, "one of the most popular non-popular books ever written" (Thomas Cahill), into the pantheon of Western popular culture [2, pp. 9-10]. Author Umberto Eco became an overnight pop hero, a "Superstar Professor" (3].

One aspect of this intelligent and remarkably successful mystery novel that has surely caught the attention of many readers in the library community but, surprisingly, received little or no attention in the literature of our profession is that Eco's The Name of the Rose is not only "a tale of books" (as it says of itself [1, p. 5]), but also of libraries, librarians, and library users. Let us look for a moment at the plot of Eco's work-this time from a librarian's perspective.

Within the confines of a great monastery on the slopes of the Apen- nines, a scholar-detective, the enlightened English cleric William of Bas- kerville, seeks to unravel a series of library-related murders. His quest for a forbidden book, which appears to hold the key to the case, requires that he first decipher a perplexing classification and shelving scheme. Failing again and again to crack this code, he concludes that the fault is not his own, that instead the knowledge of the all-powerful librarians has been used "to conceal, rather than to enlighten," that indeed "a perverse mind presides over the holy defense of the library" [1, p. 176]. In the central villain's role, Eco has cast just such a librarian, the aging monk Jorge of Burgos. As we ultimately learn, Jorge has poisoned the forbidden library book (significantly, Aristotle's legendary lost treatise on humor), using it as a weapon to bring an excruciatingly slow and painful death to monks who, in violation of library access restrictions, succeed in "getting their fingers" on it [1, p. 472; 4, p. 254]. The novel ends with Jorge maniacally devouring the book rather than handing it over, and his last patron, William, screaming helplessly: "But I want the book!" [ 1, p. 482]. In a spectacular finale, the magnificent library burns to the ground, set ablaze by none other than its supposed protector: Jorge the librarian.

At intervals during this richly allusive tug of war between scholar and librarian over a book, numerous questions of interest to modern-day librarians are mused over, discussed, and debated, always in a delightful tongue-in-cheek pseudo-medievalese. Among these are such issues as censorship; the structure of public-access catalogs; the conflicting re- quirements of preservation versus access; the advent and implications of new end-user technologies (William's eyeglasses!); the utility of mnemonic versus non-mnemonic (or even anti-mnemonic) signage in library stacks; the semiotics of library architecture; the education of librarians



THE NAME OF THE ROSE 375

and the epistemology of librarians' expertise [1, pp. 26, 37-38, 74-76, 129-30, 183-85, 286, 310-21, et al.]. Last but not least, the novel puts in question the capacity of librarians for self-irony, that divine gift which would allow them to perceive the ambivalence inherent in their position as mediators between books and readers. Recalling that it is a treatise on humor that the librarian has chosen to poison, Eco seems to doubt the ability of librarians to laugh at themselves, not to mention their (in)ability to tolerate the laughter of others.

We might further consider what messages for librarians and their patrons are contained in the looming physical presence of the library itself. Repeatedly, Eco makes reference to its enormous "bulk," its "ex- ceptional size," its extraordinarily vast and rich collections [1, pp. 21, 26, and passim]. Why is this library so much larger, grander, so much more modern than any library that existed at the time of Eco's story, namely, fourteenth-century Europe?2

These issues have not gone unmentioned in the growing body of exegetical literature surrounding The Name of the Rose. Rolf Kohn, professor of medieval history at the Universitat Konstanz (Germany), has examined numerous details of Eco's fictional library, comparing and contrasting them with the realities of libraries in the late Middle Ages [5]. Both his findings and his conclusions are notable. For example, at a time when the most important libraries in Europe, such as the Sor- bonne in Paris or the papal library of Avignon, could boast few more than two thousand codices, the library of Eco's remote Benedictine ab- bey housed at least that number of Bibles alone [1, p. 35]. Its entire holdings appear to have surpassed by far the six thousand codices which Eco attributes to the Piedmontese monastery of Novalesa-which, as Kohn points out, probably never had a significant library [5, p. 82]. Equally fantastic (and thoroughly unmedieval) is the interior architecture of Eco's fictitious library. Its capacious scriptorium, for example, lets the sunshine in through "three enormous windows" and numerous smaller ones, creating generous workspaces "suffused with the most beautiful light" [1, p. 71]. As anyone even touristically familiar with medieval interiors knows, nothing approaching Eco's scriptorium would have been imaginable in late medieval Europe [5, p. 90]. Again and again, Kohn reveals how Eco's library represents an "architectural mon- ster" in a medieval context, "in many respects more similar to libraries of today than to those of the late Middle Ages" [5, pp. 84, 1 1].3 For

2. My thanks to Professor David Kaser (Indiana University) for drawing my attention to this question.

3. Unless otherwise noted in the reference, translations of passages from foreign language works are my own and will not be individually attributed.




Eco, whose credentials as a medievalist are impeccable [cf. 6, p. 11], these inaccuracies can only have been intentional, leading the medievalist Kohn to argue for an "allegorical reading of Eco's novel, for a transla- tion of the historical sujet into the present day of the author and his readers." Quite apart from any literary agenda being pursued, The Name of the Rose can also be read, Kohn feels, as "a parable for the situation of the modern researcher and library user" [5, pp. 109-10].

We must naturally exercise some caution at this point, since the allegorical complexity of the library as "the novel's presiding symbol" (The- resa Coletti in [6, p. 38]) clearly forbids a reductionist interpretation of Eco's The Name of the Rose as "library fiction," however grandiose. But just as undeniably, Eco has drawn liberally and with gusto on his own experiences with modern research libraries in creating the library of his novel and has made these experiences and the (real) libraries in which he has had them a subject of his literary reflection.

If any further proof for this contention were necessary-and it appar- ently is, since even such recent commentators as Deborah Parker con- tinue to refer to libraries as "literary commodities" that Eco has ex- ploited solely to "add zest to his story," much like the Victorian setting of the classic English detective story [7, p. 844]-this is provided by Eco himself, in an address which he delivered in Milan on March 10, 1981, just six months after the publication of The Name of the Rose. Eco had been invited to speak at an event commemorating the twenty-fifth anni- versary of the Milan Public Library, held in the Palazzo Sormani. Pub- lished in Italy in 1983 under the Latin title "De Bibliotheca," Eco's remarks have, to my knowledge, yet to be translated into English [8, pp. 237-50].

Eco's speech was probably not what the organizers of the event had in mind when they invited the distinguished Bologna professor of semiotics to speak to them, for it is one long philippic against libraries he has known. With no apologies to his hosts and, at least in the published version, not even nodding mention of the positive achievements of the public library movement in Italy, Eco conjures up, in nineteen num- bered points, an "immense nightmare" of a library, a projection of all the irritations he has experienced in a lifetime as a library user, both in his country and in others [8, p. 240]. Eco's complaints range from the peevish to the profound, from the sometimes impossible length of call numbers and the absence or inaccessibility of library photocopiers to the latent hostility he perceives in librarians towards the patron ("an idler and potential thief"), or the fact that librarians and not actual users determine subject headings under which ultimately the user, often an expert in the field, must search for books [8, pp. 240-42]. As one




reads "De Bibliotheca," it is easy to imagine Eco, standing impatiently in some long line at the library circulation desk, brooding darkly over the details of the library dystopia ("a good library in the sense of a bad library") that we finally meet full blown in The Name of the Rose [8, p. 240].

As negative as "De Bibliotheca" may seem and in tenor certainly is, venting his spleen was not Eco's entire purpose in coming to Milan. For one can, as Eco carefully points out at the outset of his speech, very well "speak of the present or future of existing libraries by creating purely fantastic models" [8, p. 238]. Eco's belief in the heuristic value of seem- ingly frivolous fictional models, "gloriously lacking in any relevance for our day" [1, p. 5], to illuminate the contours of real problems, point toward possible solutions, and then, like a finished paperback, be dis- carded, is also a frequent subject of learned discourse in The Name of the Rose. Early in the novel, for example, the learned monk Venantius speaks of the power of "metaphors and puns and riddles," which "seem conceived by poets for sheer pleasure, . . . to lead us to speculate on things in a new and surprising way" [1, p. 82]. Then, near the end of the novel, in his final debate with Jorge, William repeats almost exactly Venantius's argument, "how through witty riddles and unexpected metaphors," by "depicting men and the world as worse than they are or than we believe them to be," we can be brought to examine things more closely [1, p. 472]. This and other repetitions of the point suggest how Eco would like his readers to "use" his own novel [cf. also 1, p. 492; 9; 10, pp. 48-49].

This being said, however, we are still left with the daunting task of sorting out just what messages Eco intended to convey to us by invoking the library metaphor and what his agenda for real-existing libraries might have been in writing The Name of the Rose. We will have to keep in mind, as we now approach this task of interpretation, that Eco the author is a peculiarly bipartite spirit. A notorious literary gourmand, he is also a leading world expert in the study of literary gourmandise [1 1, pp. 325-26]. A novelist with (now) two best-sellers to his credit, he doubles as a prolific literary critic who has written on topics as disparate as James Joyce and James Bond [12, 13]. And so, both humanist and social scientist, both a writer and consumer of prose, Eco naturally regards the library on two distinct but interrelated cultural planes. On the first level, it is one of the great commonplaces of Western literature, an "intertextual archetype" representing at one and the same time both the grandeur and the ultimate vanity of all human intellectual striving. At the same time, Eco also regards libraries in their reality, as institutions still clinging to an outdated, quasi-sacred mission, urgently in need of




secularizing reform. Both of these levels find literary expression in The Name of the Rose. Let us turn first to the library as Library, as literary topos.

For Eco, the postmodern man of letters, conscious of the weight of the textual past pressing down upon any late twentieth-century writer of fiction, there would have been no point in striving to be original in developing the Library as a literary theme. Indeed, this would have been futile, for everything has already been said on this and on every other subject, and a writer can only quote from the trove of the past every time pen is put to paper: it is, as Eco writes in his Postscript to "The Name of the Rose," "no longer possible to speak innocently" [14, p. 67]. Eco has therefore chosen to appropriate consciously the ways in which libraries have figured in the works of writers who have gone before him. Of these there are very many. A 1982 study published in Germany (which incidentally raised no claim to exhaustiveness) analyzed 267 fictional works in which libraries or librarians have played some literarily significant role [15]. Despite these sheer numbers, there are discernible consistencies in these works that allowed the author of the study to work out a typology of meanings associated with libraries. Just such a typology seems to have been at work in Eco's imagination while writing The Name of the Rose.

In the Western literary tradition, the Library at its most positive has been represented as a temple of wisdom, the home of a sacred order, comforting proof of man's dominance over nature, or, in Debra A. Castillo's words, "the reconstructed tower [of Babel]" [16, p. 3]. In this, what we might call its sacral manifestation, the library is approached and entered with the reverence due a site of great holiness.4 For other authors, however, it is the remoteness of this world of order and meaning from the real world that sets the tenor. The library then becomes a kind of redoubt that "has solidified and closed around us," in which "classificatory systems serve as a kind of map to keep the confusion at bay" [16, p. 14].

In a final, grim permutation, the Library of literature, in its "vast, inhuman impersonality," dessicates and ultimately destroys its human creators [16, pp. 114-15]. It then becomes "the ferocious library" [17, p. 55], "ruthless in its fetishization of the ordering process," inducer of a "madness-or perhaps intolerable sanity" that is inimical to life [16, pp. 3, 13]. The literary apotheosis of the library as the impassive bringer of madness and death is to be found in the stories and poetry of Jorge

4. The German study noted above documents the use of sacral imagery in connection with libraries in works of writers as diverse as C. S. Lewis, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Richard Brautigan, Henry James, and William Saroyan [15, pp. 15-17].




Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer whose oeuvre is intertextually omnipresent in Eco's novel [7, 18]. In Borges's nightmarish "Library of Babel," for example, death comes to the library's users, who spend their lives lost and perplexed in its vastness, as one might expect, through "suicide and pulmonary diseases," whereupon their bodies are thrown over the railing to decompose as they fall, eternally, past the library's infinite layers of tiers [19, p. 54].

If the name Borges seems to resonate throughout The Name of the Rose, it is surely no coincidence, if for no other reason than for the anagrammatic similarity that Eco has constructed between Borges's name and that of his fictional librarian, Jorge of Burgos [14, pp. 27-28]. It is Borges, of all writers who have speculated upon libraries real and metaphysical, to whom Eco obviously feels the closest affinity and owes the greatest debt.5 Both writers display the same encyclopedic urge, the same longing to pull together all the disparate images to which the Library has lent itself throughout world literature into a single, all- encompassing one, which can then stand as a cipher for the whole un- comprehended universe of human experience. As Eco puts it in The Name of the Rose: "For these men devoted to writing, the library was at once the celestial Jerusalem and an underground world on the border between terra incognita and Hades. They were dominated by the library, by its promises and by its prohibitions" [1, p. 184]. Eco has an- chored the two ends of the semantic spectrum that Library has traditionally connoted in literature-the positive and the negative, Heaven and Hell, light and fire-at the beginning and the end of his novel, respec- tively. On the very first page of his story, he lets William's scribe Adso express wonderment and awe at the "perfect form" that the library turns to the world, expressive of the "sturdiness and impregnability of the City of God" [1, p. 21]. William, too, in his first meeting with the abbot, bestows profuse and sincere praise on the library, "spoken of with admiration in all the abbeys of Christendom" [1, p. 35]. In time, however, cracks in the library's glorious facade become evident, then horrible gaping fissures. Yet neither William nor his creator Eco can ever bring themselves to cast final, condemnatory judgment on the library or on its librarians. Even as it burns to the ground, taking his archenemy Jorge with it, William is so overcome by grief at his loss that he collapses in tears [1, p. 487]. The analysis of critic Robert F. Yeager suggests that some of these tears might even have been spent on Jorge the librarian, with whom William is linked in a strange love-hate, even homoerotic relationship [20, pp. 44-45].

5. In fact, Eco began his Milan address by reading aloud a long passage from Borges's "Library of Babel," referring to it as "scripture" and ending his reading with a hearty "Amen!" [8, pp. 237, 238].




Apart from Jorge's name, the most obvious evidence of Eco's debt to Borges is the architecture of the library, which in its size, geometric regularity, and labyrinthine structure is a direct descendant of Borges's "Library of Babel" [2, p. 28]. In postmodernist thought, the literary text, the library, the labyrinth-each often serves as a complex sign for the other, just as each stands for and thus interprets the world and the human condition.6 Each shares what in Eco's semiotic theory can be referred to as a common morphology, in Eco's words that of a "large labyrinthine garden," permitting the "detective metaphysic" in his quest to "take many different routes, whose number is increased by the criss- cross of its paths" [14, p. 54; 21, p. 275]. The goal of this "quest"? It is for William in The Name of the Rose, for Borges's librarian-scholars in "The Library of Babel," and for the archetypal library user as well, quite simply: a book, the book, "the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest" (Borges in [19, pp. 56-57]).

At this point we need to consider Eco's views on the labyrinth in somewhat greater detail, not only since the library-labyrinth topos is so constitutive of The Name of the Rose,7 but also because the idea of the labyrinth has broad applications as "an abstract model of conjecturality" (Eco in the Postscript [14, p. 57]) of potential value in library contexts, which we will consider shortly.

As Eco elaborates in the Postscript, there are three kinds of labyrinth. The first is that of the ancient Greeks, of which the Minoan labyrinth at Knossos is the classic example. For all its circuitousness, the unicursal labyrinth of antiquity always led to the center or "goal"-and then, hopefully, to the exit. "This is why in the center there is the Minotaur," Eco explains, for "if he were not there .. . it would be a mere stroll" [14, p. 57; cf. now also 22].

Modern maze-treaders, on the other hand, must be prepared to find their way in labyrinths of far greater complexity: the "mannerist" or multicursal maze, a model of the trial-and-error process, in which paths branch off at every intersection; or even more likely, in what Eco refers to as the "rhizome" maze of criss-crossing paths, in which the boundaries themselves shift from one moment to the next [14, pp. 57-58]. The old positivist techniques do not get you very far in the rhizome labyrinth. In fact, trusting too much in the inevitability of reaching one's goal by methodically following the prescribed twists and turns of a "search" is either grossly naive or an act of grave hubris. As detective Lonnrot must

6. Compare the words of the monk Alinardo of Grottaferrata: "The library is a great labyrinth, sign of the labyrinth of the world" [1, p. 1581.

7. The floorplan of the library-labyrinth is in fact the novel's only illustration [1, p. 321] (D. Kaser, personal communication).




learn in "Death and the Compass," another Borges tale that inspired Eco while writing The Name of the Rose, it can cost you both your quest- and your life [23, p. 87; 18, pp. 797-803].

Eco's linkage of libraries and labyrinths suggests an interesting image with which we may seek to capture, at least conjecturally, the "fundamental shift in information-seeking behavior" (Deanna Marcum) which modern libraries are currently both promoting and responding to [24]. Consider first the manifest evolution of the modern library from a "classical," unicursal labyrinth to a multicursal one. Traditionally, libraries directed their readers to literature that had "stood the test of time," to an accepted canon of authors who provided proven answers to questions both practical and spiritual. As author Elizabeth Yates's librarian Miss Patch regularly advised her patrons in Nearby (1947), the traditional library seemed to say to its users: "When a new book comes out, read an old one!" [25, p. 116].

Modern library searches do not lead from point A (the catalog, the reference desk) to point B (the book, the answer, the truth), but instead invite their computer-literate users to explore on their own the many recesses of a multicursal maze, placing them again and again in decision situations, at forks or nodes where multiple paths lead down through the hierarchies of subject headings, on their way to what may or may not be a useful or even existing document. Indeed, through the extraor- dinary versatility of keyword and Boolean searching, the modern library environment actually begins to approximate Eco's rhizome labyrinth, in which "every path can be connected with every other one," in which there is "no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially infinite" [14, p. 57]. In effect, the library user creates with every search his or her own ad hoc library of five, fifty, or five thousand book and journal citations, cut out from that great "virtual" library that is the universe of all accessible books, all stored information. If the user is unlucky, this personal library may have thousands of books, but provide no answers-and have no exit. Our (post)modern library, like the ouevre of Jorge Luis Borges (in the words of Gerard Genette), "does not have a ready-made sense, a revelation to which we must submit: it is a reser- voir of forms which await their meaning, it is the imminence of a revelation that does not take place, and which everyone must produce for himself" [26, p. 327; emphasis in original].

"Revelation" must then, if at all, be forthcoming from the searcher, for whom ambiguity is not just "short-lived and ultimately yielding to proper procedures" but "a permanent state" [20, p. 48]. There is no longer a canon to turn to and to master. Everything is potentially valu- able or worthless, depending on its position in the temporary contexts that we create for our library searches, what we then make of it, and at




what point in our search we move which way. We are, to use another metaphor, lost at sea, and, to use a term now common in computer science, must "navigate" our way through layers of menu screens and catalogs of search variants, through an ocean of books and articles without end. This is also the world in which William of Baskerville, representing the modern library user, ultimately realizes he is living: "I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was the relation among signs.... I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe" [1, p. 492]. It can only be mentioned in passing that Eco's radical relativism has implications far beyond the library environment, especially for our collective belief, unchallenged until recently, in the existence of a scientifically derived and classifiable body of knowledge. We cannot examine these implications here, except to observe that the Library, in both its "spiritual" and "terrestrial" manifestations, is one of the most visible and important temples that society has erected to this belief. Instead of pursuing this interesting philosophical tangent, let us return once again to The Name of the Rose as literature, to consider now for a moment Eco's treatment of librarians.

Exactly paralleling the broad and contradictory associations stored in the literary image of the Library is the ambivalence of the ancestral intertextual tradition toward the guild of librarians. At his (or, less fre- quently, her) best, the librarian of literature has figured as "the virgin priest of knowledge" (thus R. L. Stevenson in Prince Otto [27, p. 57]), keeper of a sacred trust to protect and administer society's "guilty knowledge": that Pandora's box of society's accumulated experience and wisdom which, in the wrong hands, would lead to moral decay and revolu- tion [28, p. 5; 15, pp. 68-69].

It was this same quasi-sacerdotal "reading" of librarianship that in- formed Jose Ortega y Gasset's 1934 address "The Mission of the Librar- ian," in which Ortega speaks with great respect of the "hermetic mysteries" of the librarian's profession, bestowing upon the initiate powers to work to society's good in ways analogous to the physician, the judge, and the soldier. For Ortega, the librarian's mission was to protect society from "ideas received in inertia" and even "pseudo-ideas," making the librarian, in Ortega's view, society's appointed "doctor and hygienist of reading" [29, pp. 133, 154].

As revealed in the following passage, spoken by the abbot of the novel's great monastery, Eco is obviously very familiar with this kind of imagery. Indeed, The Name of the Rose's monastic setting lends itself well to the "vestal" interpretation of librarianship we have seen represented above:




The library was laid out on a plan which has remained obscure to all over the centuries, and which none of the monks is called upon to know. Only the librarian has received the secret, from the librarian who preceded him, and he com- municates it, while still alive, to the assistant librarian, so that death will not take him by surprise and rob the community of that knowledge. And the secret seals the lips of both men. Only the librarian has, in addition to that knowledge, the right to move through the labyrinth of the books, he alone knows where to find them and where to replace them, he alone is responsible for their safekeeping. The other monks work in the scriptorium and may know the list of the volumes that the library houses. But a list of titles often tells very little; only the librarian knows, from the collocation of the volume, from its degree of inaccessibility, what secrets, what truths or falsehood, the volume contains. Only he decides how, when, and whether to give it to the monk who requests it. [1, p. 37]

The subtle auctorial irony evident in this passage, which naturally occurs early on in the book, already suggests that alternative images of, the librarian's mission are to come. And indeed, here again Eco draws on Borges as his encyclopedist and processor of literary images, this time in regard to librarians. As we might expect, the Borgesian archetypes are significantly darker than those propagated by Stevenson, Ortega, or by Eco's fictional abbot. Recall first Borges's "Library of Babel," in which the figure of the librarian is that of a lost and desperate searcher in the labyrinth of a limitless library [19, p. 52]. In a closely related image, in Borges's poem "The Keeper of the Books" (1968), the librarian is por- trayed as a degenerate epigone protecting a hoard of books he himself cannot read:

In the faltering dawn my father's father saved the books. Here they are in this tower where I lie calling back days that belonged to others, distant days, the days of the past.

[30, pp. 73, 75]

Eco's The Name of the Rose plays upon these and other, often contradictory, literary affects associated with librarians, and the two main adver- saries of his book, Jorge and William, each subsume parts of this tradition. For his villain, Eco has borrowed the image of the librarian as priest of the book, merging it with the Borgesian image of the librarian as an uncomprehending book-"keeper" fighting a rear-guard action against a new age. No doubt, Jorge would have also felt quite comfort- able in the role of an Ortegan "doctor and hygienist of reading" and does in fact use medical imagery to describe his understanding of his office. In discussing the treatment of library patrons "infected" with idle or wrong thoughts (Ortega's "ideas received in inertia"), Jorge is uncompromising:




"Illness is not exorcised. It is destroyed." [William:] "With the body of the sick man[?]" "If necessary." [1, p. 477]

In a further, startlingly apt image for both professional skill and professional egotism, Jorge is blind, but in the confines and the darkness of the library, where only librarians are allowed and only librarians know the way, his "magic sensibility" allows him to "see" better than anyone else [ 1, p. 483]. Jorge, in sum, is a frightening amalgam of the Ortegan and Borgesian visions of the librarian.

What now of Eco's protagonist, William of Baskerville? Other writers on William's literary antecedents-especially S. Tani, W. D. Spencer, and D. McGrady-have shown how William, like Jorge, is a composite figure [31, pp. 68-75; 17, pp. 43-59; 18]. They reveal how Eco has taken the Borgesian image of man the "imperfect librarian"-a desperate, relentless, tragically unsuccessful searcher for knowledge- enriched it with obvious borrowings from Conan Doyle and less obvious ones from the modern genre of the antidetective genre, in order to create the (anti)hero of the story.

But let us look at the figure of William from a library perspective. His stance in favor of freedom and facility of access is clearly that of the modern academic user. Consider this exchange between William and the librarian Malachi as the two stand before the library catalog:

"But in what order are the books recorded in this list?" William asked. "Not by subject, it seems to me.". . .

"The library dates back to the earliest times," Malachi said, "and the books are registered in order of their acquisition, donation, or entrance within our walls."

"They are difficult to find, then," William observed. "It is enough for the librarian to know them by heart and know when

each book came here. As for the other monks, they can rely on his memory." [1, p. 75].

William's growing skepticism toward the librarians as aids to his re- searches turns out to be vital to his progress in solving the case. Rather than place himself in their professional care, he prefers to be left to his own "devices": "it was a forked pin, so constructed that it could stay on a man's nose . . . as a rider remains astride his horse or as a bird clings to its perch. And, one on either side of the fork, before the eyes, there were two ovals of metal, which held two almonds of glass" [ 1, p. 74]. The object of such wonderment is, of course, William's pair of eyeglasses, introduced in Italy just decades before and seen in the monasterial library now for the first time: "The other monks looked at William with great curiosity but did not dare ask him questions. And I noticed that, even in a place so zealously and proudly dedicated to reading and writ-




ing, that wondrous instrument had not yet arrived" [1, p. 74]. Robert Artigiani, professor of the history of science at the U.S. Naval Academy, has trenchantly commented upon the struggle between Jorge and Wil- liam as a "confrontation between the blind man and the bespectacled one" [32, p. 70]. By depriving William of his eyeglasses (which he steals), Jorge is able to prolong, at least temporarily, his monopoly of access to library information. Teresa de Lauretis sees in Jorge's efforts on behalf of "his" library "a conservative, misconceived, even pathetic, last-ditch attempt to salvage the status quo" [33, p. 27].

Eco's "medieval" novel reveals itself in this light as a very topical contribution to the discussion of the roots of the librarian's profession and the exercise of that profession from the perspective of the modern user. Eco obviously thinks little of the historical "moral" mission of librarians and argues that the librarian is quite capable of abusing his knowledge not only to protect ethical values that are not those of everyone in the community at large but also for making himself, to the detriment of unhindered bibliographic access, indispensable to anyone wishing to use the library. Although (at least in this country) we may hope to have transcended the role of our librarian predecessors as moral gatekeepers, may we not be suspected as a guild (Eco might ask) of at times clutching our "hermetic mysteries" to our bosoms for the purpose of protecting our "professional interests"?

What if our greatest service to our users (Eco might appear to suggest) would be, as in Lenin's theory of the state, to perfect our technologies to such an extent that we make ourselves superfluous and, as a profession, just "wither away"? It is interesting to note that in "De Bibliotheca," the only two libraries singled out for praise-Yale's Sterling Library and the library of the University of Toronto-seem to function in Eco's perception supremely well without a single professional librarian ap- pearing at the user/library interface. One only sees the occasional "em- ployee who rather absentmindedly casts a glance into your bag as you go out," or the young student who scans the books at the circulation desk with an electronic wand: "All this means that in these libraries there are very few supervisors and very many employees, more accurately a kind of functionary, half librarian and half assistant, usually a student who in this way, full-time or half-time, earns his or her way through school" [8, p. 244]. Another quite different reading of Eco's description of libraries also offers itself, however, one that contains the germ of a far more optimistic perspective on the future of professional librarianship. This would involve a revival of the old Port-Royal image of God the Master Clockmaker. According to this notion popular in seventeenth-century France, after creating and "winding" the mecha- nism of Creation, the Master Clockmaker then sits back to observe and




monitor the proper functioning of his work. This being the real world, however, and technological advance, unlike a Pascalian clock, being far from an epiphany, our master clockmaker-the professional library ad- ministrator of the future-would certainly not be able to avoid interven- ing to make corrections and adjustments to the workings of the clock- work. Nonetheless, his or her principal function in this scheme would be, in concert with the users and other stakeholders of the library, to contemplate, plan, and then implement improvements to the grand design-and otherwise not be too much in evidence.

In closing, let us not overlook the very fundamental moral message that The Name of the Rose contains for us in the profession. Eco, in the interpretation presented here, confronts librarianship not as some dis- embodied notion of "service," not as an ideal that we all believe ourselves striving for, but as an assemblage of real persons performing real work in real institutions, all of which acquire through time an inertia of their own. Eco's book contains a warning as to where this inertia may lead: to habits of mind and of action quite different from and of a tendency diametrically opposed to the ideals we so vociferously uphold. In a rap- idly changing world, Eco seems to suggest, we may increasingly find the ghost of Jorge of Burgos insinuating himself into our professional midst, whispering in our ears, informing many of our thoughts and actions when it comes to matters of "the survival of the profession." Librarians, Eco is telling us, may fall victim to the same temptations that other mortals might. They may attempt to hide behind their professional credentials. They may seek to create a mystery about themselves to put the performance of their duties beyond question to outsiders. They may react in fear and destructively in times of change. And, above all, they themselves may not perceive the contradiction of their ways. As Carl Rubino writes, "This book brings us face to face with our ghastly medieval enemies, who turn out, of course, to be ourselves" [34, p. 56].

REFERENCES

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2. Haft, Adele J.; White, Jane G.; and White, Robert J. The Key to "The Name of the Rose." With a foreword by Thomas Cahill. Harrington Park, N.J.: Ampersand Associates, 1987.

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20. Yeager, Robert F. "Fear of Writing, or Adso and the Poisoned Text." SubStance 47 (1985): 40-53.

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31. Tani, Stefano. The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

32. Artigiani, Robert. "The 'Model Reader' and the Thermodynamic Model." SubStance 47 (1985): 64-73.

33. de Lauretis, Teresa. "Gaudy Rose: Eco and Narcissism." SubStance 47 (1985): 13-29. 34. Rubino, Carl A. "The Invisible Worm: Ancients and Moderns in The Name of the Rose."

SubStance 47 (1985): 54-63.



Documents

Missing Eco: On Reading "The Name of the Rose" as Library Criticism