About
Content
Store
Forum

Rebirth of Reason
War
People
Archives
Objectivism

Post to this threadMark all messages in this thread as readMark all messages in this thread as unread


Post 0

Thursday, August 16, 2007 - 7:26amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
No, Ted, I haven't read it but your review certainly is a motivation to do so. Thanks for taking the time to prepare this.

Sam


Post 1

Thursday, August 16, 2007 - 11:14amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
One could also posit that The Name of the Rose is 'Sherlock Holmes in MedievalLand.'....;-)

Post 2

Thursday, August 16, 2007 - 1:03pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit

Carolus Linnaeus and Arthur Conan Doyle

Yes, I haven't ever read any Sherlock Holmes but the stories are so engrained in our culture that the resemblances are hard to miss. The most obvious being the method of story-telling with the wise and elder William explaining to his less insightful sidekick Adso his observations and his conclusions therefrom. Also, Brother William is William of Baskerville - an allusion hard to miss - although the only thing I know of that story (if I have the right one) is that the dogs didn't bark, and Baskerville was presumably the villain's estate.

I realized last night that one comment I made in my review was false. This was the first novel I read after Atlas Shrugged, I did not read it before Rand. I remember being struck at the time in reading the line "Then we are living in a place abandoned by God." That one line so struck me emotionally that I remembered it immediately after 23 years. Upon first reading, having recently become an explicit atheist, I felt it was both a strangely inappropriate thing for an author to say yet also a strangely appropriate comment on my own personal process of "losing my religion."

Also, as a biology student, I have noticed one glaring anachronism. In his discussions with the herbalist regarding the medicinal plants grown in the monastery's garden (there is suspicion of poisoning due to the signs that people have been hallucinating) the characters refer to the Mandrake root by its Linnaean binomial Mandragora officinalis and to Balsamodendron myrra, the source of the incense myrrh. The novel is set in the early 14th Century, just before the Black Death. It was mediaeval practice to refer to plants not in the genus and species nomenclature established by Linnaeus in the 18th century, but by names that might be anywhere from one word to a sentence long. I wonder if Eco made this error on purpose?

Finally, I have long maintained in my head a list of my top ten favorite works of fiction, from which I had excluded this title, although I highly valued it. Now that I am older and (?) wiser I think that I will have to revise that list and include this work in its ranks. I have also read and highly enjoyed Eco's Foucault's Pendulum which is also an excellent work, much like The Da Vinci Code in many ways, set in modern Europe and dealing with murder and secret societies, including the Knights Templar. I have not been able to enjoy Eco's other fiction, but I shall have to read that work again next.

Ted Keer

(Edited by Ted Keer on 8/16, 4:42pm)


Post 3

Friday, August 17, 2007 - 1:00pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Ted,

This is a very fine review. Very well done.

Jeff

Sanction: 5, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 5, No Sanction: 0
Post 4

Saturday, August 18, 2007 - 12:20pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Ted:

     Re the raves, if not for the book, then for your review (comprehensive 'summarizing'?) of it: ditto. I'd forgotten that the book did include so much of your spelled out territories.

     I first caught it when it became ppb, and, having no awareness then of Umberto, thought "The back page blurb sounds interesting, but, for  a novel this is a tome like TF or maybe AS." After I got through the 1st 2-hrs reading, I couldn't put it down, regardless its...density of content. (My familiarity with RC did help, though.) The motivation for the murders was itself...fascinating.

     Well worth reading.

LLAP
J:D


Sanction: 4, No Sanction: 0
Sanction: 4, No Sanction: 0
Post 5

Tuesday, August 21, 2007 - 5:25pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Ted, your review is very well written and encompassing.

At the risk of appearing to be a sorehead, I would like to relate my experience of several years ago when I read the book. I first saw the movie, which became one of my all-time favorites, because of its presentation of the theme of the fears of superstition versus the illuminating power of reason. Over 3 years, I saw the movie about 4 times.

When I received the book as a present, I was excited and pleased. But before I had read the first 20% of the book, I became annoyed and put off by the author's take on the subthemes and concepts that gave life to the story. The intellectual definitions and explanations were invariably those of a contemporary left-liberal or post modernist. It was as though this was the same story dramatized in the film, but told through the perspective of a commentator on National Public Radio. I had to struggle to get through the book.

The book was given to me by a left-liberal I know very well, who is no defender of reason or objectivity. When he presented it to me, I launched into an enthusiastic and excited desription of the theme of the movie, which I assumed to be the theme of the book as well. I explained that the book contrasted the superstition and intellectual stagnation of the Medievil Church with the rise of reason associated with the dawning of the Enlightenment. The Church was organzied around the idea of faith and superstition, which supported a corrupt church bureacracy; ideas that withered when confronted by the light and power of logical integration.

I was surprised that he reacted as though he were vaguely annoyed and confused; he conceded my points rather reluctantly. This surprised me. He had read this great book, but he didn't like my ideas about all this. After I read the book, I understood why he had enjoyed it. It was written by another who shared his world view, not mine.

I'm sorry I can't substantiate my criticism with explicit references from the book; too many years have floated by for me to recall anything specific, except my overall experience.


Sanction: 2, No Sanction: 0
Post 6

Saturday, August 25, 2007 - 6:07pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit


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)


Post 7

Sunday, September 2, 2007 - 12:20pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
     I must admit that Eco's later FOUCALT'S PENDULUM was a tome and a half which only those into conspiracy groups could really appreciate. Indeed, it got me interested in them, from the Rosicrucians and Masons on; but, at the time, the book was a slog-fest for me. Still, the 'computer' and the history of secret groups was fascinating, though apparently tangential...'till the ending got going showing that the protagonists were a catalyst in their (vanity?) publishings for present day secret groups to coalesce. --- Really, a thought-provoking idea for a 'plot.'

LLAP
J:D

(Edited by John Dailey on 9/02, 12:21pm)


Post 8

Sunday, September 2, 2007 - 12:32pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
     As far as Eco's THE ISLAND OF THE DAY BEFORE, seemingly centering (plot-wise, inadvertantly) around how to determine, in the seas, the longtitudinal International Date Line, it was coherent and interesting for a while, but, I got totally lost in this, as some argue, 'post-modernist' style (not that I'd recognize such.) Too bad. I had the impression that the book's purpose was really some kind of experiment in a literary style, and, I did not appreciate it. Hadn't read another book by him since.

LLAP
J:D

PS: Wiki has some interesting background on this scholarly writer.

(Edited by John Dailey on 9/02, 12:33pm)


Post 9

Sunday, September 2, 2007 - 2:33pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
     For those interested in 'deep' analysis (semiotic or whatever) of NOTR, regarding Aristotle, his lost book on comedy, and its relevence to the 'non-pattern' of the murders, check out
http://www.csuohio.edu/english/nr463.html

LLAP
J:D

PS: It was weird finding out the 'real' (ahem...) meaning of the title!


Post 10

Sunday, July 6, 2008 - 2:12pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit

"Whatever their disagreements, even the pope and the m^slim must agree that Superman is Clark Kent."

Eco asserts that while the Pythagorean theorem must have been true for all time, narratives are not "true" until they are written. But once written, they are indisputable in a way that the mere "facts of reality" are not. (Consider Peikoff's claim in the The Early Ayn Rand that Howard Roark's affair with Vesta Dunning is "not real.") Watch Umberto Eco speak on the nature of narrative (he describes deconstruction as an American disease licensed from France) at Cooper Union Hall in NYC, May 2008. One Hour.

Post 11

Monday, September 1, 2008 - 8:11pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
Sam, have you read this?

John, can you find the text to which your link used to point?

Post 12

Tuesday, September 2, 2008 - 6:16amSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit
I've ordered it from Amazon just now. If it's like Borges I'm sure I'll like it.

Sam


Post 13

Tuesday, September 2, 2008 - 3:27pmSanction this postReply
Bookmark
Link
Edit

Look out Oprah!

Yeah, it's better than Borges, and Burgess while we're at it. You may want to convert to pre-Vatican II Catholicism, or, if it's more convenient, have google available to translate certain terms - although most can be gotten from context.

Post to this thread


User ID Password or create a free account.