I
Until then I had thought each book spoke
of things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books
speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library
seemed all the more disturbing to me. It
was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible
dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of
powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds,
surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.
(The Name of
the Rose, 286)
Comedy
affords us the opportunity to explore how the world might look and feel with
the dead weight of predominance and probability lifted from its shoulders. Whereas tragedy is preoccupied with the
annihilation of the potential by the actual, comedy is leveled at the
(pitifully) remote horizon of what could be, rather than absorbed in the immediate
oppression of what is. The primary focus
in comedy is to represent the surrender of the predominant to the possible, the
victory of human benevolence over the rigid stratifications of historical
actuality.
Comedy dramatizes the utopian within the historical. It allows us to dream of our release from
history’s constraints by providing us with provisional images, embedded in
easily identifiable and thus more persuasive forms, of what such a utopian
realization might feel and look like.
However, comedy never allows us to lose our grasp on the real world’s
intransigence; rather, as Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose takes pains
to caution us, the journey from the lives we tolerate to an ending of the dead
weight of historical prevalence has yet to be completed. Brother William of Baskervilles would agree
with all of this: indeed, his final words at the end of his first day at the
abbey form a sort of synopsis for the notion of the utopian locked inside the
confinements of historical actuality and authority. “Because,” he says to his sidekick Adso,
“learning does not consist only of knowing what we must or we can do, but also
of knowing what we could do and perhaps should not do” (97).
The Name of the Rose takes place in the Middle
Ages (1327, to be exact), a time when the Bible is thought to be the
quintessential, authoritative text – against whose word all writing, and its
relative quantity of truth, is measured.
This biblical authority is premised on the existence of an established,
divinely imparted meaning and the potential for a retrieval of that very
meaning. To people like William the
Franciscan ex-Inquisitor, and to someone such as Russian polymath Mikhail
Bakhtin, the dogmatic auctoritas pursued by absolutist interpreters of
the Scriptures suggests a closed and stratified ideology that bars freedom of
thought. In Rabelais and His World,
Bakhtin condemns the ideology behind religious absolutism by suggesting that it
is devoted only to “terror, dogmatism, reverence, and piety” (19). What he values instead is the Rabelaisian
carnivalization of literature: the sociolinguistic fun-fair where, as in the
medieval festival or carnival, a rigidly hierarchical social order which
ordinarily demands deference, sobriety, and strict obedience to authority
temporarily gives way to raucous rituals of inversion: young boys are crowned
for a day as bishops and carried through the streets in mock religious
processions; kings act like the populace; carnival “is revolution (or
revolution is carnival): kings are decapitated (that is, lowered, made inferior)
and the crowd is crowned.”[1]
This paper deals with the presence of comedy and the
carnivalesque in The Name of the Rose; it looks at four very important
figures, four men who all are deeply affected by the language and the structure
of comedy and by the presence of the carnivalesque in their lexicon, in their
epistemologies, and in their unconscious.
We will start with Salvatore, a Rabelaisian (or even Shakespearean)
fool, whose physical appearance and language are both carnivalesque; we will
find Brother William and his Moriarty-like opponent, Jorge of Burgos, in the
very lengthy middle section – where comedy will be, in a series of bitter
arguments, portrayed both as the ultimate subversive poison to the authority of
the Bible and as the utopian ideal locked within the bonds of history; finally,
we will talk with young Adso of Melk – or, more precisely, we will let him tell
us how the blank slate of his mind has been affected by the many words, sights,
smells, and sensations of his seven days at the monastery. If we are lucky, Adso will also share his
dreams with us: the carnival that is his unconscious is too overwhelming and
too full of signifiers for him to keep it a secret from us. We will see what happens when the authorized
and unauthorized transgressions of the norms are brought to a bloody and fiery
head after just one week at a northern Italian monastery.
II
(Salvatore)
We will then show how the ridiculousness
of speech is born from the misunderstandings of similar words for different
things and different words for similar things, from garrulity and repetition,
from play on words, from diminutives, from errors of pronunciation, and from
barbarisms.
(Aristotle, [from the missing] 2nd
Book of the Poetics, also p. 468 in The Name of the Rose)
The first physical description that we get of Salvatore is
also the description of his peculiar “language”: his “speech was somehow like
his face, put together with pieces from other people’s faces, or like some
precious reliquaries I have seen….fabricated from the shards of other holy
objects” (47). In many ways, Salvatore
foregrounds the vision of the novel that houses him. Certainly he is a curiously amphibious creature,
dwelling in a borderland between the world of the story and yet outside of it,
too. He is not attached to any
particular identity, mode of language, or point of view. If he is a fool-like figure, by his very
presence in the text (in Bakhtin’s words) “ he makes strange the world of
social conventionality.” For, he is
invested with “the right to be ‘other’ in this world, the right not to make
common cause with any single one of the existing categories that life makes
available.”[2] Admittedly, Bakhtin is talking about the role
of a Shakespearean fool, here; clearly, he has very little “right” to be
“other” or “different” in The Name of the Rose. But Salvatore is important to us precisely
because he is not important to anyone in the
novel. He is written off, at a stroke,
as a vulgar, leering, winking, lubricious grotesque – the vulgar cellarer’s
(Remigio di Varagine) lackey and purveyor of tricks and charms! He is important, though, because his
gratuitous flights of verbal bricolage and manic-digressive equivocations expose the fluid, unfixable nature
of language, and therefore the instability of the structures of meaning which
encode and stand in for the conventions of contemporary life.
At the end of his
conversation with Ubertino, William seems slightly perturbed by the fact that
Salvatore often mutters the word “Penitenziagite” (64). A hybridization of Latin, Spanish, and
Italian, Salvatore’s word is, we are told, probably a subconscious formation in
his mind. William is automatically
suspicious (and later on, his suspicions are proven to be somewhat correct –
Salvatore is guiltily referring to his master and soon-to-be denounced heretic,
Remigio); but Ubertino undercuts William’s suspicions when he says that “the
sickness of the abbey is something else: seek it among those who know too much,
not in those who know nothing. Don’t
build a castle of suspicions on one word” (64).
Later on, Severinus eerily echoes Ubertino’s advice when he remarks,
“the line between poison and medicine is very fine; the Greeks used the word
‘pharmacon’ for both” (108). This
equivocal image neatly and subtly foregrounds the comedy debate that will soak
through the remaining pages of the novel: comedy seems to be a cure for some
and a poison for others in The Name of the Rose.
In his very
well-written Umberto Eco and the Open Text, Peter Bondanella points out
that
William’s mistakes and his failure to
understand the events in the monastery are based
upon a misconception about language. Language does not necessarily refer to
something
in the outside world, something concrete that stands in
a one-to-one relationship to the
word which is a sign; language may be metareferential
and refer to itself, just as Eco’s
The Name of the Rose is both a novel and a book that refers to
and is made up of many
other novels. (119)
Later on, Bondanella points
out that Eco “had come to realize that the semiotic principle of unlimited
semiosis can also imply an expansion of human liberty” (125). And to the last critical reference (for now),
Eco – in Carnival! – says that “humor is always, if not metalinguistic,
metasemiotic: through verbal language or some other sign system it casts in
doubt other cultural codes” (8).
Salvatore’s language, and the way its authority is
undermined, is a necessary beginning to a paper that discusses the subversive
effect that comedy has in “making the truth laugh” (491). Because human experience is linguistically
structured, yet the various structures of language possess no logical
connection with any independent reality, the human mind can never claim
authority over any reality other than that determined by its local form of
life. Salvatore’s lexicon, like
carnival, resists order, closure and the sacrosanct. But it (and he) is important. When Salvatore generously offers Adso an oil
lamp to take to William, Adso enquires why Salvatore would proffer such a gift
to him; Salvatore responds, in his heteroglossic way, “Sais pas, moi….Peut-etre
your magister wants to go in dark place esta noche” (220). Because we laugh a little bit as he speaks,
we perhaps forget that Salvatore is well aware of the snooping that William and
Adso are about to do; Salvatore is a little too big for the world of this
novel, particularly because his unauthorized language amuses us so much that we
question the authority of words (the Word) at the same time as we laugh at the
truths he conceals and unravels.
III
(William and Jorge)
Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a
rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead
of them. Jorge did a diabolical thing
because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy
falsehood. Jorge feared the second book
of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every
truth, so that we could not become slaves of our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind
is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh,
because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion
for the truth.
(The
Name of the Rose, 491)
If The Name of the Rose
exploits the special freedom associated with comedy to turn the Medieval world
upside down, it does so only to reinforce the rationale for keeping it the
right way up. Similarly, the presence of
the carnivalesque (in dreams, in texts, in language), the saturnalian reversal
of social roles, does not have to threaten the social order in any way; in
fact, the temporary overturning of authority can in fact serve to consolidate
the social order. This seems to be a
very abridged synopsis of William’s feelings about the effect that comedy can
have in the clerical realm. But Jorge
would disagree: he would agree that, yes – at the close of the “Carnival,”
kings remain kings and clowns clowns; however, what is dramatically
altered is our perception of the stratified structure of society. But that is precisely the point that William
seeks to illuminate for the blind Jorge: comedy should not overturn, upset,
destroy the social and religious order; but it definitely should make us
question that authority, because that empowers the individual and because –
actually – it makes us appreciate the need for (at the very least) a certain
kind of authority. Moreover “books,”
says William, “are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask
ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept that the commentators of
the holy books had very clearly in mind” (316).
In her very interesting article on sexuality and the
plurality of meaning in Shakespearean comedy, Catherine Belsey discusses the
necessary freedom to enter and yet exit logic (as well):
To fix meaning,
to arrest its process and deny its plurality, is in effect to confine what is
possible to what is. Conversely, to disrupt this fixity is to
glimpse alternative possibilities….New meanings release the possibility of new
practices.[3]
Soon after he and William
have seen the tongue-blackened corpse of Berengar, Adso begins to discover the
truth behind such a (Belsey’s) remark.
He notes:
I had always
believed logic was a universal weapon, and now I realized how its validity
depended
upon the way it was employed. Further,
since I had been with my master I had
become
aware, and was to become even more aware in the days that followed, that logic
could
be especially useful when you entered it but then left it.
(262)
But certainly the most important part of this discussion
on William and Jorge must necessarily center around three texts: the Coena
Cypriani, and Aristotle’s second book in the Poetics, and on The
Revelation to John in the New Testament.
Jorge is deeply threatened by the first two, and endlessly quotes the
latter throughout the novel, first as a warning, then ultimately as a
weapon. The Coena Cypriani is a
burlesque representation based upon the subversion of topical situations of the
Scriptures; however, it can only be enjoyed as a comic transgression if
one takes the Scriptures seriously.
Jorge’s fear that the monks may discover the Coena remains a
puzzling mystery, long after one has finished reading the novel. Naturally, we understand – on the surface –
why Jorge fears the subversion of comedy.
But seeing comedy in, and the carnivalization of, the Scriptural
writings is an authorized transgression of the norms: in this sense,
comedy and carnival represent paramount examples of law enforcement – they
remind us of the existence of the rule.
In Umberto Eco and the Open Text, Bondanella
brilliantly points out that
…because The
Name of the Rose is ultimately about freedom, about tolerance, and about
respect
for difference, it is appropriate that the lost book William seeks and Jorge
conceals
is Aristotle’s treatise on comedy.
Comedy, as Jorge of Burgos quite rightly
understands,
is always….a subversive force undermining authority and customs. It is
mankind’s
best and sometimes only protection against fanaticism of all sorts.
(125)
William acknowledges that our perception
of reality changes from moment to moment; Jorge, on the other hand, stresses
the priority of fixed abstract principles over concrete experience, and he is
convinced that the single a priori thought system that is biblical authority
should govern both belief and investigation of belief. As the novel progresses, Adso’s ideology
makes a significant shift when he realizes that one is always and necessarily
engaged in reality, thereby at once transforming it while being transformed
oneself. He is, in fact, already
grasping this truth early on in the novel when he describes William as a man
“moved…solely by the desire for the truth, and by the suspicion…that the truth
was not what was appearing to him at any given moment” (14). Later, William rightly points out that
“Aristotle himself had spoken of witticisms and plays on words as instruments
better to reveal the truth, and hence laughter could not be such a bad thing if
it could become a vehicle for the truth” (111).
The discussion on William and Jorge is not complete
without a brief word or two about how the detective and the murderer both use
false systems of reasoning to arrive at the truth. Much of this essay is devoted to pointing out
the many false systems of reasoning that dominate Jorge’s ideology. But interestingly, William – too – arrives at
his “truth” (for the detective, obviously, this means the solution of the
crime) through a system of faulty reasoning.
When William is propounding his solution to the crime (Poirot-like) to
Jorge, he says: “I conceived a false pattern to interpret the moves of the
guilty man, and the guilty man fell in with it.
And it was this same false pattern that put me on your trail”
(470). On the next page, Jorge rebuts:
“I cannot follow you….You are proud to show me how, following the dictates of
your reason, you arrived at me, and yet you have shown me you arrived here by
following a false reasoning. What do you
mean to tell me?” (471).
What William is truly demonstrating is that life is not
patterned after the logical rules of detective fiction; and, by admitting that
he has been an utter failure as the “master detective,” William is clearly
underlining how dangerous it is to interpret the order of the cosmos in a
certain way. In the same way that
Plato’s allegory of the Cave represents the search for the highest Truth, the
journey to the world of seeing and of light in no way represents the Truth
itself. Of course, this is not just a
discussion about truth itself; it serves as a subtle metaphor for comedy as
well. The structure of comedy is closely
akin to a search for truth: comedy deflates the hegemonical structure(s) of
epistemology and reasoning only to demonstrate, however, that the structure is
necessary though flawed. Jorge cannot
see this; indeed, William asks him why he is frightened by laughter: “You
cannot eliminate laughter by eliminating the book” (473), William correctly
observes. But Jorge has two gnawing
fears: first, he says, “laughter frees the villein from fear of the Devil,
because in the feast of fools the Devil also appears poor and foolish, and
therefore controllable. But this book
could teach that freeing oneself of the fear of the Devil is wisdom” (474);
then, he anticipates Jacques Derrida by several centuries when he voices his
second major fear. “On the day when the
Philosopher’s word would justify the marginal jests of the debauched
imagination,” Jorge hisses, “or when what has been marginal would leap to the
center, every trace of the center would be lost” (475).
The best and last word on these two goes to Eco, himself,
who – in his essay entitled “The Myth of Superman,” captures the essence of all
of this: truth, our expectations of the truth, the deflation of reality, and
the pleasure derived from upholding a traditionally-received point of
view. (Try to picture Jorge consuming
the book at the end of the novel, and you will have it):
The device of
iteration is one on which certain escape mechanisms are founded,
particularly
the types realized in television commercials: one distractedly watches
the
playing out of a sketch, then focuses one’s attention on the punch line that
reappears
at
the end of the episode. It is precisely
on this foreseen and awaited reappearance that
our
modest but irrefutable pleasure is based.
This
attitude does not belong only to the television spectator. The reader of detective
stories
can easily make an honest self-analysis to establish the modalities that
explain his
“consuming”
them. First, from the beginning the
reading of a traditional detective story
presumes
the enjoyment of following a scheme: from the crime to the discovery and the
resolution
through a chain of deductions.
(873)
IV
(Adso)
And this morning, in your sleeping mind, there returned the memory of a
kind of comedy in which, albeit with other intentions, the world is described
upside down. You inserted into that work
your most recent memories, your anxieties, your fears. From the marginalia of Adelmo you went on to
relive a great carnival where everything seems to proceed in the wrong
direction, and yet, as in the Coena, each does what he really did in
life. And finally you asked yourself, in
the dream, which world is the false one, and what it means to walk head
down. Your dream no longer distinguished
what is down and what is up, where life is and where death. Your dream cast doubt on the teachings you
have received.
(The Name of
the Rose, 437-8)
We will finally focus on the great
dream that Adso has after Terce on his sixth day at the abbey. In his dream, he cannot understand whether he
is “in hell or in such a paradise as Salvatore might have conceived” (427); in
his dream, Jorge laughs uproariously (428), the abbot reminds Adso of the
riddle over the door to the Finis Africae (“Age primum et septimum de quatuor”)
(429), Jesus has blackened fingers as he hands out pages of books (431); the
abbot pouts because nobody has brought him any gifts (431), but then is kicked
and battered about by his monks (434), and so on.
Adso’s dream turns upside down the hierarchies of social
and religious power: all fixed positions and settled assumptions are
destabilized and laid open to dispute.
Adso’s experience of assimilating a discordant plurality of positions in
his dream actually fosters a leveling mode of perception for him. He reacts to his dream by remarking that “one
can also dream of books, and therefore dream of dreams” (437). This partially echoes and answers an earlier,
astute remark that Adso makes about William: “I had the impression that William
was not at all interested in the truth, which is nothing but the adjustment
between the thing and the intellect. On
the contrary, he amused himself by imagining how many possibilities were
possible” (306) (William later says “All is possible” [456]). Eco’s multivocal carnivalesque cuts across
all lived divisions of class and gender, breaking down the barriers of language
and ideology which protract their dominion.
The escalating confusions of Adso’s dream suggest that the identities of
those in power are more plural, discontinuous and volatile than the official
definitions and approved models can afford to admit. Indeed, by means of the many tropes present
in Adso’s dreams, this particular version of comedy undoubtedly undermines the
fixed assumptions that Adso had previously held about apostolic and all other
forms of authority.
There can be no doubt that Adso’s dream is a direct
reproduction of the many images that his impressionable mind has half-digested
in such a short time. There can be
possibly no more influential a series of pictures than those contained in
Adelmo’s psalter. Here, in full, is
Adso’s reaction reproduced. The most
fascinating part of his reaction is italicized (italics mine), demonstrating
that his subconscious is already forming a polemic, a subversive truth that he
will painfully uncover over the next six days and sixty or seventy years of his
life:
This was a
psalter in whose margins was delineated a world reversed with respect to the
one
to which our senses have accustomed us. As
if at the border of a discourse that is by
definition
the discourse of truth, there proceeded, closely linked to it, through
wondrous
allusions
in aenigmate, a discourse of falsehood on a topsy-turvy universe, in which dogs
flee
before the hare, and deer hunt the lion. (76)
V
The good of a book lies in its being
read. A book is made up of signs that
speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains
signs that produce no concepts: therefore it is dumb. This library was perhaps born to save the
books it houses, but now it lives to bury them.
This is why it has become a sink of iniquity. The cellarer says he betrayed. So has Benno.
He has betrayed.
(The Name of
the Rose, 396)
The Book of Revelation was later
assumed to be a prophecy of the future troubles of the Church, which left
commentators on it free to identify its sinister images of Antichrist and Great
Whore with whatever they were most afraid of in their day.[4] Jorge of Burgos is deeply afraid of humor
(far more than he is of carnival, even), because humor provides us with a
picture of the utopian within the historical; it undermines limits from the
outside; most important, rather than promising us liberation, humor actually
reminds us of the presence of “the laws” that we feel we have very little
reason to obey.
Carnival, too, is able to demystify the dominant
ideology, but always within the context of being allowed and authorized to do
so by the dominant authority of the time.
Perhaps William of Baskervilles is a sort of postmodern detective: an
interpreter of signs, signifiers, and signifieds, trapped inside the habit of a
Franciscan monk. The Name of the Rose
is variously described as a postmodern text, precisely because it is “all
about” patterns of meaning where truth is encoded in between the lines (the
subtext) of hegemonical, clerical authority.
The monks die because they want access to the particular truth that is
comedy; Salvatore is exiled from the world of the novel before he has even
entered: but this is only because he is polysemantic and therefore a threat –
he, more than anyone, if at all, is the embodiment of the word made flesh. William and Jorge try to murder each other
over words; powerful words, but merely words, all the same. Adso knows, in old age, that there is no
postmodern world view, nor the possibility of one. The postmodern paradigm is ironically subversive
of all paradigms, because it knows that reality – as we conceive it – is fluid,
temporal, local, and without foundation.
The only power we have is to laugh at the instability of the world, and
of the world and word meanings, and to find solace in the fact that we can name
all the roses in the gardens of our everyday world.
[2] Both from Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, Texas and London, 1981), pp.404,
162.
[3] Catherine Belsey, “Disrupting sexual difference: meaning and gender
in the comedies”, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London, 1985), pp.166-7.
[4] I borrow this appropriate formulation from Northrop Frye in his Great
Code.
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