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.