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A Model of Objectivity
Umberto Eco's work is uneven, I have found his Baudolino and Island of Yesterdays unreadable, and they do smack of post-modernism. Yet how this criticism might apply to the Name of the Rose I cannot guess.
The novel makes no flights of fancy about alternative realities or moral or epistemological relativism. Reality is portrayed as objective reality, facts do not switch based upon perspective. Of course, every character of this story is a Christian believer in some way or another, if he is a zealot, a freethinker, a heretic or believes in the black arts. But the novel is set in a Piedmontane monastery of the 1320's, so the fact that even the hero, William of Baskerville, is a believer is not problematic.
As for Brother William, his first act upon approaching the monastery during a snowstorm to which he has been summoned to investigate a death is to use logic and keen observation to tell frantic monks descending from the mountain stronghold that they will find the escaped horse they seek by following the left trail. How does he know they seek an escaped horse, where it has gone, and even what its name is, all without having seen or been told anything? Well, I won't ruin the story - but the answer is very un-post-modern.
Adso, the monk who recounts the tale many years later, is a more mystically religious and very much less learned man than William, but he does not color the story with his own reality. Rather, the story is told quite objectively. Sometimes Adso waxes lyrical about lists of things; gemstones, herbs, mythical creatures, saints, heresies, foodstuffs, and so forth. Adso's mind is full of lists, not hierarchically-arranged well-defined concepts. This is a typical mediaeval mindset though, a view of his "mental bestiary" which concerns itself with the things a monk would find important - primarily food and matters religious. Typically, if he starts going on about lists of semi-precious stones one can skip to the end of the paragraph without missing much.
Likewise, William does sometimes withhold judgement - at least out loud - and always on matters where he has either not enough factual evidence to make a judgement about concrete events or about matters of theological doctrine where he is unwilling to make pronouncements of faith. He has had heretics turned over to the secular forces to be burned at the stake - but only when he knows them to be guilty of real crimes such as rapine and murder.
I am not quite sure how one can apply the modern categories of right versus left to this novel. One of the subtexts is a debate between various powers and monastic orders and sectarians over the rectitude of either Christians in general or monastics or the Church in particular of owning property. This debate was very real, and anyone familiar with the Albigensian Crusade or Savonarola (from a slightly later era) will know this. The author, as a scholar, acknowledges that debate, but takes no stand other than to show the utter futility and injustice of killing men merely for their beliefs. This is not postmodernism or agnosticism, it is merely a recognition of each person's right to think for himself and of the virtue of intellectual toleration.
Ted Keer
(The illustrated text is a page from Augustine's City of God at Marquette University.)
[Upon editing this post, it does strike me that if one were to read only the (author's) "editor's" introduction where he discusses the provenance of the work, one certainly could detect a certain contemporary post-modern European flavor. The "editor" discusses such things as the difficulties of reconstructing a text from memory and what sort of literary "voice" is appropriate. This could have been left out, it amounts to some five pages, and in no way affects the body of the novel itself. Also, if we are to expect that the novel truly is a reconstructed text published by an Italian in 1980, it would be strange if the editor's remarks didn't have any hint of leftist post-modernism to them.
Finally, there is some side discussion of the nature of concepts and mention of words as being the signs of signs of things. This was perhaps the greatest of the Mediaeval Scholastic debates, in which were involved such names as Occam, Abelard, Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. The doctrine propounded by William of Baskerville himself is quite reasonable.]
(Edited by Ted Keer on 8/25, 8:06pm)
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