Showing papers in "Substance in 1985"

Gaudy Rose: Eco and Narcissism*

Abstract: What's in a name? asks Juliet, who is a woman and knows the tide, the ebb and flow, the pull of the real. Eco answers her question simply, yet implicating the whole of philosophy and the vicissitudes of Western epistemology: everything and nothing. Stat rosa pristina nomine. Nomina nuda tenemus. 1 But Juliet's, of course, was a rhetorical question, and Eco's answer is not what she wants. We leave Juliet at the balcony unfulfilled, as she must be, and go on to scene two.

The Invisible Worm: Ancients and Moderns in The Name of the Rose

Abstract: It is a curious but incontrovertible fact of cultural history, common to other cultures as well as our own, that when human groups reach a new level of development, they find it necessary to distort and magnify the shortcomings of their previous mode of existence. The formation of what Thomas Kuhn has called new "paradigms" does not come cheap: it rises from revolutions that involve the denigration and destruction of the previous order. 1 As Rend Girard has argued in great detail, we rely on scapegoating to overcome the periodic cultural crises that mark our history.2 The immediate past is not merely a rose that has lost its bloom; it is a dark flower, a poisonous growth that will kill us unless we manage to destroy it first. The previous order must be characterized as absolutely evil, the very cause of all our present difficulties, the quintessential obstacle to our survival and progress. Girard takes pains to demonstrate that the scapegoat mechanism is intellectually dishonest and extremely dangerous. It is at most a provisional means for temporarily tricking ourselves out of a crisis; but crisis will come again, and we seem constrained to repeat

The "Model Reader" and the Thermodynamic Model

Abstract: The identity of the "model reader" Umberto Eco had in mind for The Name of the Rose is known with certainty only to himself. But it is clear from the medium, the substance, and the form of the novel that he intended to produce an "open text" allowing for multiple interpretations.' Thus, although I approached the novel with an analytical frame he may not have expected, it is obvious that my reading of the text forecloses no others. The Name of the Rose can be read on so many levels, in fact, it is like a masterfully crafted Chinese box. As a parody of the Sherlock Holmes mystery story, for instance, the novel is a sort of literary version of a Lichtenstein paintinga significant inquiry into the very nature of art. Beyond that, The Name of the Rose is an explanation of semiotic theory, a history of the fourteenth century, a critique of medieval culture, and a probing of the sources of contemporary radicalism. The text can also be used anthropologically, however, as a deep, if playful, analysis of the general processes of cultural transition. Obviously it is medieval culture whose transition is examined. But because Eco's analysis is concerned with large and broad issues, he could not have meant us to restrict the examination to a handful of lives in the fourteenth century. Rather, he has invited us to explore the reasons for cultural change, the variety of human responses to it, and the strategies for surviving it. The particular form of my reading of The Name of the Rose was determined by Ilya Prigogine's thermodynamics, the most effective technique for modeling change available.2 It applies to both the cultural and natural worlds, but humanists have been slow to see its advantages. We have remained skeptical of all efforts to describe human behavior scientifically. This is because, says Prigogine, the science previously available to us was fundamentally dehumanizing. Its materialistic metaphysics depended upon a radical idealization of nature which began by denying the reality of much that is basic to the human condition-our sense of value, our experience of beauty, color, and taste. As

Fear of Writing, or Adso and the Poisoned Text

Abstract: Over the course of two decades, beginning with an essay on Ian Fleming's James Bond books (1965) and continuing through the introduction to his more recent collection of writings, The Role of the Reader (1979), Umberto Eco has added consistently to what we know about the structural imperatives of what we might call the modern heroic narrative. In this vein, he has written on Superman and on the detective story, describing their cultural functions and their implications for a socio-literary theory of culture. 1 Given Eco's demonstrated long-term interest in such matters, it is hardly surprising that his first novel should be a work of this kind, related to and in many ways dependent upon examples of the past for conventions of plot, effect, and even character. (For we ought not to miss the subtle reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes and Watson in Eco's William of Baskerville and Adso or Adson of Melk, whose names, as well as their habits and roles, give away their antecedents.) Eco's aesthetic criticism, indeed, provides an interesting point of departure for considering his novel. It helps us to see what he achieved in The Name of the Rose, and perhaps to understand as well what, for various reasons, he left untouched. As mystery novels go at least if we use as models those which Eco has himself discussed critically The Name of the Rose is strangely unsatisfying. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which I hope to be able to suggest. But before turning to the explanation, let us note that particularly in such fiction a failure to be satisfying is currently, for us, problematic and dark. In his examination of Superman, Eco has pointed out the reason when he contrasts the constant shocks and withheld gratifications of the roman-feuilleton ("the preferred fare of a society that lived in the midst of messages loaded with redundance . . . the valid rules of proper comportment in the environment of eighteenth-century bourgeois society") with Superman comics and, by extrapolation, detective mysteries (Role of the Reader, p. 121). These latter, comic books and mysteries, are the castings of"our contemporary industrial society," Eco states, where "the alternation of standards, the dissolution of tradition, social mobility, the fact that models

The Name of the Book

Abstract: It would astonish the scholarly world if I were to announce that I had located the Latin manuscript by Adso of Melk that lies at the putative origin of The Name of the Rose. But if I were to do that, I should not have pretended to make a false beginning. Anyone who claims to have discovered a true origin these days is automatically suspect, and the child who knows his own father is too wise for his own good. However, errant sheep are occasionally found, and now and then a lost penny is swept up in the housecleaning. What I shall propose, therefore, is not a symptom of madness but only a piece of presumption. It is said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn't. But a name by any other rose? What would that smell like? Would it smell at all? The real thing is not forthcoming: neither a real origin nor a real lie. Certainly not a real rose. Not even a dried flower in a book, but only the name of the flower in the name of a book. "Naturally, a manuscript." The Name of the Rose is more than moderately difficult to track down. We have a twentieth-century English text purportedly produced by Mr. William Weaver. Weaver, however, only translates (faithfully, we shall assume) an Italian text, also of the twentieth century. The author of the Italian text is unknown he does not sign his prefatory remarks and it would be dangerous to assume that he is identical with Umberto Eco. A semiotician who says that a sign is anything you can use to tell a lie is not to be taken at his word.2 Written in the summer of 1968 and offered to the public in 1980, I1 nome della rosa claims to be the translation of yet another text: this one, by Abbe Vallet, is written in French and published in Paris in 1842. The Italian translator tells us that Abb6 Vallet's book was "handed" to him by someone he does not identify. Pestered by doubts about Vallet's tampering with his original, about the propriety of his own rendition and its pretension to authenticityhe is nonetheless consoled by the thought that his book, dealing as it does with matters remote in time and written out of the pure love of writing, has absolutely no relevance for the present age.

The Joycean Gaze: Lucia in the I of the Father

Abstract: When Joyce began writing Finnegans Wake his daughter Lucia was seventeen. She was a pretty girl, more like her father than her mother, with delicate features that were marred by crossed eyes. Sixteen years later, the text was finished and Lucia had been in and out of several maisons de santS. Joyce seemed finally resigned to his daughter's illness. Compounding his sorrow, Finnegans Wake failed to excite the enthusiasm that Ulysses had. Less than two years later Joyce was dead, his daughter was institutionalized, and the Wake languished, unread and uncelebrated, in the midst of the world war that Joyce claimed he had prophesied in his unreadable book. The affinities between the text and the daughter are alluring, urging me to attempt a reading of text and woman in terms of a common language of schizophrenia. Gilles Deleuze offers this description:

The Curious Case of Pharaoh's Polyp, And Related Matters

Abstract: To begin with: it is probably just an octopus. Simply a cephalopod (genus Mollusca), and not a hydrozoon, scyphozoon, or anthozoon (genus Coelenterata), which is to say, not a polyp at all. Poor Adso is working his way through enough codes, juggling the systematized detritus of an entire civilization, without our imposing a Linnaean grid on top. And still less can we infer or deduce that the Ruler of the Egypts had had to do with an obstructional growth in one of his regal cavities. No: the context and the Latin lying behind the Italian text - Faraone [si divorava] un polipo - clearly point to octopus, and Weaver was certainly right so to translate it: "Pharaoh [devoured] an octopus."' Pharaoh's Octopus, and nothing more. Or rather, considerably more. But to explain the question, or even formulate it, there is a certain amount of preliminary material to be got through. Pharaoh's Octopus may occupy only an exiguous stretch of that great apocalyptic vision, Adso's Dream, but it is bound up quite intimately with its workings and, indeed, its genetics. The Dream, like other set-pieces in The Name of the Rose, is by no means freestanding;2 it operates in extreme tension with a number of other texts, on which it depends for its meaning. William of Baskerville sets our problem in his explication of the Dream to Adso: But do you know that to a great extent what you tell me has already been written? You have added people and events of these past few days to a picture already familiar to you. . . . It is the Coena Cypriani. (437)

Gay Theories of Gender Role Deviance

Abstract: People whose sexuality is predominantly expressed in fantasy and/or behavior towards same sex objects are categorized as homosexuals. People who have built a positive identity around that categorical designation, on the other hand, are gay men or lesbian women. That gay and lesbian theorists should articulate major analytic critiques of gender socialization is not surprising for, on three levels at least, they have almost without exception experienced the gender norms, and social sanctions which enforce those norms, from an "outside" and victimized status.

An Ethics of Significance

Abstract: Ecce Eco! And with a resonant flourish! One of the fathers of contemporary semiotics has written a novel, and thereby entered popular culture with a currency and name recognition that few academics, except economists and political scientists hired as government consultants, can hope to achieve.1 For it is not just a novel, but an expansive, exhilarating, best-selling, 500-page thriller. For all thatas anyone who has pursued the name of the rose to the end of Africa knows -it remains enviably true to the academic expectations of Eco's cloistered colleagues: all the intertextual-allegorical allusiveness one would expect from a Joyce scholar; a veritable library of quotations from the fathers that would quicken the pace of any medievalist's heart; enough unabashed homage of Borges to delight the postmodernist; and an indebtedness to Conan Doyle so transparent that it should assuage the guilt of the guardians of high culture concerning their furtive reading habits. Not, of course, that the event has no precedents. Intellectuals from Friedrich Schlegel to Sartre have produced fiction, and in each case the space between their discursive, apodictic prose and their aesthetic, figurative productions has been filled in by shelves of tertiary literature. What I would like to do here is not so much conduct an inventory of how much semiotics one can find in the novel, or how much of the scholar can be recognized in the novelist (in both cases, I am sure, a very good deal); nor even, for that matter, to elaborate on the (possible) grounds of a distinction between discursive and figural language. What I would