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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realised that not infrequently books speak of other 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 a place of a long centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing…
Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose
at ego tibi sermone isto Milesio uarias fabulas conseram auresque tuas beniuolas lepido susurro permulceam… (But I would join together a variety of tales for you in that Milesian mode, and I would enchant your kindly ears with a charming murmur…)
The speaking book? Apuleius Metamorphoses
In the chapter called ‘Terce’ of the Second Day, the Franciscan monk William of Baskerville and his young apprentice Adso visit the scriptorium of an abbey in northern Italy, and discover, among the papers of the murdered Greek translator Venantius, a surprising text:
Another Greek book was open on the lectern, the work on which Venantius had been exercising his skill as translator in the past days. At that time I knew no Greek, but my master read the title and said this was by a certain Lucian and was the story of a man turned into an ass. I recalled then a similar fable by Apuleius, which, as a rule, novices were strongly advised against reading.
(Eco, The Name of the Rose, 128)
1. 286. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations of The Name of the Rose are from Eco, U., The Name of the Rose, tr. W. Weaver (London 1984; orig. publ. as Il nome della rosa, Milan 1980Google Scholar), with spelling anglicised. Translations of Greek and Latin texts throughout this article are my own.
2. Met. 1.1. For discussion of the enigmatic identity of the speaker in Apuleius’ prologue, see Kahane, A. and Laird, A. (eds.), A Companion to the Prologue of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (Oxford and New York 2001Google Scholar). Harrison, S.J., ‘The Speaking Book: The Prologue to Apuleius’ Metamorphoses’, CQ n.s. 40 (1990), 507–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar, identifies the voice as that of the book.
3. The popular handbook, Haft, AJ., White, J.G., and White, R.J., The Key to “The Name of the Rose” (Ann Arbor 1999), 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar, describes the ass-novel as follows: ‘Apuleius’ most famous work… both a wonderful picaresque novel and a compelling spiritual autobiography. The Golden Ass is the story of Lucius of Thessaly, a young dabbler in magic who accidentally turns himself into an ass. After countless adventures, Lucius is finally restored to his human form by the Egyptian goddess Isis, whose priest he becomes. The Golden Ass resembles a short extant Greek work called Lucius, or the Ass by the Greek rhetorician and satirist Lucian of Samosata…’
4. As William soon suggests however, Apuleius’ novel, at least, is recuperable as a devout read; for modern interpretations of the Met. as a narrative of spiritual conversion, see Shumate, N., Crisis and Conversion in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (Ann Arbor 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and more recently Smith, Warren S., ‘Apuleius and the New Testament: Lucius’ Conversion Experience’, AncNarr 7 (2009), 51–73Google Scholar.
5. The theory that epistemophilic desire is a sublimation of sexual curiosity is Freudian; for discussion of this nexus of desire and narrative, see Brooks, P., Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge MA 1993Google Scholar), at 1–27 and 88–122.
6. I borrow this phrase from Tim Whitmarsh, ‘A Nabokov of the Ancient World’, review of George Economou, Ananios of Kleitor, TLS 24 July 2009.
7. William expresses this idea more than once: ‘This place of forbidden knowledge is guarded by many and most cunning devices. Knowledge is used to conceal, rather than to enlighten… A perverse mind presides over the holy defence of the library’ (176); ‘This library was perhaps born to save the books it houses, but now it lives to bury them’ (396). Adso perceives that ‘[f]or these men devoted to writing, the library was at once the celestial Jerusalem and an underground world on the border between terra incognita and Hades’ (184, my emphasis). Beyond metaphor, the library is in fact a quasi-underworld, accessed by katabasis through a subterranean ossarium which is strewn by the bones of long-buried monks dropped from the graveyard above. Believed to be haunted by evil spirits and the ghosts of dead librarians, the library is a dark, labyrinthine world, ruled by Jorge, keeper of books and biblioclast, who is identified with the Devil (477 and 491). For the library as a ‘deadend in the process of signification,’ see Stephens, W.E., ‘Ec[h]o in Fabula’, Diacritics 13.2 (1983), 51–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 57–59.
8. William’s allegorical defence of the ass-novel against Jorge’s censure pre-empts the historical confrontation between humanists and the Church over the value of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses in the later fourteenth century (e.g. the correspondence between Stefano Colonna and Simone da Brossano, Archbishop of Milan, between ca. 1371–1375): see Carver, R.H.F., The Protean Ass: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Oxford 2007), 141–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9. William also defends the didactic value of Adelmo’s comical, metamorphic illuminations in the debate in the scriptorium (76–82). Jorge’s assertion that ‘Laughter shakes the body, distorts the features of the face, makes man similar to the monkey’ (131) highlights the bestialising effect which comical texts have upon the reader.
10. William’s assertion that ‘[b]ooks are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry’ (316) is close to Eco’s assertion that a novel is ‘a machine for generating interpretations’: Eco, U., Reflections on The Name of the Rose, tr. W. Weaver (London 1994), 2Google Scholar.
11. Eco, U., Il nome della rosa (Milan 1980), 289Google Scholar; Apuleius Met. 1.1. Both are quoted in the epigraph to this article.
12. Adso quotes Horace Satires 1.1.69f., a poem on the topic of avarice which relates the cautionary tale of Tantalus, then asks: quid rides? mutato nomine de telfabula narratur (‘Why do you laugh? Change the name, and the story is about you.’) This idea is reworked in one of Lucius’ more egregious failures as a reader in the Metamorphoses, when he does not recognise that the myth portrayed in the Diana-Actaeon statue group in Byrrhena’s atrium—a myth about illicit viewing punished with animal-metamorphosis—is a fabula de se, in spite of Byrrhena’s hint (Met. 2.5): tua sunt…cuncta quae uides (‘Everything you see is yours’—but also ‘i.v about you’).
13. In a radical challenge to the view of the Onos as ‘paraliterary fluff’, T. Whitmarsh, ‘The Metamorphoses of the Ass’, in F. Mestre and P. Gómez (eds.), Lucian of Samosata, Greek Writer and Roman Citizen (Barcelona forthcoming), 73–81, examines the text’s central engagement with questions of the stability of cultural, literary and personal identity, and makes a case for Lucianic authorship.
14. Winkler, J.J., Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1985), 124Google Scholar.
15. T. Whitmarsh, ‘Belief in Fiction: Construing the Divine in Imperial Greece’, in J.R. Morgan and I. Repath (eds.), Where the Truth Lies: Lies and Metafiction in Ancient Narrative (Ancient Narrative Supplementum: Groningen forthcoming).
16. Adso acknowledges that ‘what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks’ (183). William defines Benno’s desire in sexual terms: ‘Benno’s is merely insatiable curiosity, intellectual pride, another way for a monk to transform and allay the desires of his loins… There is lust not only of the flesh…. Benno’s lust is for books. Like all lusts, including that of Onan, who spilled his seed on the ground, it is sterile…’ (395f.).
17. Freud theorises the equation between castration and blindness in two essays: ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) and ‘Medusa’s Head’ (1922).
18. Onos 4; Met. 2.2. The verbal echo with cruciatus uoluptatis eximiae (‘the torment of intense pleasure’, Met. 2.10) connects Lucius’ desire to see magic with his sexual desire for Photis. For the connection between knowledge and sex in Apuleius’ Met., see DeFilippo, J., ‘Curiositas and the Platonism of Apuleius’ Golden Ass’, in S.J. Harrison (ed.), Oxford Readings in the Roman Novel (Oxford 1999), 269–89Google Scholar.
19. Aulus Gellius (NA 9.4) reports how he bought and annotated Greek paradoxographical texts, which included stories of magic and metamorphosis, but was subsequently overwhelmed with disgust for this sort of writing: tenuit nos non idoneae scripturae taedium nihil ad ornandum iuuandumque usum uitae pertinentis (‘I was gripped by disgust for worthless writing which made no useful contribution to life, practical or aesthetic’, NA 9.4.12). Tychiades in Lucian’s Philopseudes is overtly contemptuous of the tales of magic so eagerly relished by venerable philosophers, but finds himself intoxicated by them nonetheless—a lecteur malgré lui-même. For both novelist and novel-reader theorised in terms of curiosity (polupragmosunē), see Hunter, R., ‘The Curious Incident…: polypragmosyne and the Ancient Novel’, in M. Paschalis, S. Panayotakis and G. Schmeling (eds.), Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel (Ancient Narrative Supplementum 12: Groningen 2009), 51–63Google Scholar.
20. Ancient critics regarded desire as an especially powerful factor for sustaining fictive illusion: see Feeney, D.C., ‘Epilogue: Towards an Account of the Ancient World’s Concept of Fictive Belief’, in C. Gill and T.P. Wiseman (eds.), Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World (Exeter 1993), 230–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 235f.
21. Laird, A., ‘Fiction, Bewitchment and Story Worlds: The Implications of Claims to Truth in Apuleius’, in C. Gill and T.P. Wiseman (eds.), Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World (Exeter 1993), 147–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 167–73, reads the corresponding episode in Met. 3.21–22 (Lucius’ spying on Pamphile’s transformation), especially Lucius’ intoxication and confusion about the reality of what he has seen, as a conceptualisation of fiction.
22. Whitmarsh (n.13 above), 76, with further references, reads it as ‘an empirical experiment in the nature of identity’.
23. Newsom, R., A Likely Story: Probability and Play in Fiction (New Brunswick 1988Google Scholar), at 134f.
24. On the initiatory nature of Lucius’ encounter with Photis in the Met., see A. Wlosok, ‘On the Unity of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses’, in Harrison (n.18 above), 142–56, at 151–53.
25. Compare the novelistic sphragides at Chariton 8.8.16 and Heliodorus 10.41.15, and the quasi-sphragistic ending of Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe.
26. As Cannon rightly points out, William’s (and Eco’s) pessimism is not nihilism: ‘Despite William’s pronouncements regarding the lack of order in the universe, finally he (and Eco) do not renounce ordering systems…. Although Eco shares the poststructuralists’ scorn for absolutes, he avoids the extreme philosophic skepticism that would deconstruct any discourse that purports to make sense’ (Cannon, J., Postmodern Italian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia, Malerba [Rutherford NJ 1989], 90 and 94Google Scholar). However, Cannon’s translation of William’s question ‘How can a learned man go on communicating his learning if he answered yes to your question?’ (ibid. 91, my emphasis), by replacing the original subjunctive (potrebbe) with an indicative, elides the arch suggestiveness of William’s evasion.
27. In his reflections on the ending of the novel, Eco (n.10 above, 80f.) mentions the idea of a book in which the reader is the murderer. ‘Moral: there exist obsessive ideas, they are never personal; books talk among themselves, and any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party.’
28. On the Borgesian affinity of these metaphors, see Stephens (n.7 above), 54f, and de Lailhacar, C., ‘The Mirror and Encyclopedia: Borgesian Codes in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose’, in M. Gane and N. Gane (eds.), Umberto Eco, Vol. 2 (London 2005), 357–78Google Scholar.
29. Salvatore is ‘an organic representation of confusion and discord’: Stephens (n.7 above), 56.
30. On the theme of blindness, see Yeager, R.F., ‘Fear of Writing, or Adso and the Poisoned Text’, Substance 14.2 (1985), 40–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 47.
31. Stephens (n.7 above), 63f., interprets Adso’s epilogal disavowal as a failure to locate himself as author in a project of infinite semiosis, and Eco’s prefatorial fiction as an attempt to avoid appropriating the novel. Eco himself (n.10 above, 19f. and 32f.) describes his encasement of narrative points of view as an act of concealment, a ‘mask’.
32. See Eco (n.10 above), 1–3, for discussion of the choice of title: ‘A title must muddle the reader’s ideas, not regiment them’ (3). The title of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses also puzzles the reader; for various interpretations, see Harrison, S J., Apuleius: A Latin Sophist (Oxford 2000), 210Google Scholar n.l.
33. König, J., ‘Body and Text’, in T. Whitmarsh (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel (Cambridge 2008), 127–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 135f. and 142–44.
34. For discussion of these questions, see the essays in Kahane and Laird (n.2 above).
35. For a useful summary of interpretations of this controversial passage see Harrison (n.32 above), 228–32.
36. ‘A text is meant to be an experience of transformation for its reader’: Eco (n.10 above), 53. See also Richter, D.H., ‘The Mirrored World: Form and Ideology in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose’, in R. Caprozzi (ed.), Reading Eco: An Anthology (Bloomington 1997), 256–75Google Scholar, at 258: ‘…the reader seems to be reading two novels at once: a classic detective story, and a detective story in quotation-marks—the latter a post-modern fiction which calls attention to is very fictionality.’
37. Shumate (n.4 above) argues that the novel’s structure is designed to reflect the subjective experience of religious conversion. On the problems of interpreting Book 11, see Winkler (n.14 above), 204–47 and Harrison (n.32 above), 238–52.
38. Winkler (n.14 above), 221f.; Harrison (n.32 above), 245–48.
39. Holquist, M., ‘Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction’, in G. Most and W. Stowe (eds.), The Poetics of Murder (New York 1983), 149–74Google Scholar, at 173.
40. See Penwill, J.L., ‘Ambages reciprocae: Reviewing Apuleius’ Metamorphoses’, in A.J. Boyle (ed.), The Imperial Muse: Flavian Epicist to Claudian (Bendigo 1990), 211–35Google Scholar, at 226, with n. 82.
41. Seep.111 above.
42. My warmest thanks to John Penwill, whose encouragement helped me to overcome several crises of Adso-like doubt, and to give shape to the ideas in this article, and to Stephen Harrison and Tim Whitmarsh for their insightful comments, and for permitting me to read various articles in advance of publication.
