Missing Eco - On reading the name of the rose as library criticism - Jeffrey Garrett.pdf

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Missing Eco: On Reading "The Name of the Rose" as Library CriticismAuthor(s): Jeffrey GarrettSource: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Oct., 1991), pp. 373-388Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4308639.

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374 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLYperback version was released in 1984, 800,000 copies sold within thefirst three months alone. The commercial success of Jean-Jacques An-naud's film version in 1986, with Sean Connery in the leading role,marked the elevation of this recondite novel, "one of the most popularnon-popular books ever written" (Thomas Cahill), into the pantheon ofWestern popular culture [2, pp. 9-10]. Author Umberto Eco becamean overnight pop hero, a "Superstar Professor" (3].One aspect of this intelligent and remarkably successful mystery novelthat has surely caught the attention of many readers in the library com-munity but, surprisingly, received little or no attention in the literatureof our profession is that Eco's The Name of theRose is not only "a tale ofbooks" (as it says of itself [1, p. 5]), but also of libraries, librarians, andlibrary users. Let us look for a moment at the plot of Eco's work-thistime from a librarian's perspective.Within the confines of a great monastery on the slopes of the Apen-nines, a scholar-detective, the enlightened English cleric William of Bas-kerville, seeks to unravel a series of library-related murders. His questfor a forbidden book, which appears to hold the key to the case, requiresthat he first decipher a perplexing classification and shelving scheme.Failing again and again to crack this code, he concludes that the faultis not his own, that instead the knowledge of the all-powerful librarianshas been used "to conceal, rather than to enlighten," that indeed "aperverse mind presides over the holy defense of the library" [1, p. 176].In the central villain's role, Eco has cast just such a librarian, the agingmonk Jorge of Burgos. As we ultimately learn, Jorge has poisoned theforbidden library book (significantly, Aristotle's legendary lost treatiseon humor), using it as a weapon to bring an excruciatingly slow andpainful death to monks who, in violation of library access restrictions,succeed in "getting their fingers" on it [1, p. 472; 4, p. 254]. The novelends with Jorge maniacally devouring the book rather than handing itover, and his last patron, William, screaming helplessly: "But I want thebook " [1, p. 482]. In a spectacular finale, the magnificent library burnsto the ground, set ablaze by none other than its supposed protector:Jorge the librarian.At intervals during this richly allusive tug of war between scholar andlibrarian over a book, numerous questions of interest to modern-daylibrarians are mused over, discussed, and debated, always in a delightfultongue-in-cheek pseudo-medievalese. Among these are such issues ascensorship; the structure of public-access catalogs; the conflicting re-quirements of preservation versus access; the advent and implicationsof new end-user technologies (William's eyeglasses ); the utility of mne-monic versus non-mnemonic (or even anti-mnemonic) signage in librarystacks; the semiotics of library architecture; the education of librarians

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THE NAME OF THE ROSE 375and the epistemology of librarians' expertise [1, pp. 26, 37-38, 74-76,129-30, 183-85, 286, 310-21, et al.]. Last but not least, the novel putsin question the capacity of librarians for self-irony, that divine gift whichwould allow them to perceive the ambivalence inherent in their positionas mediators between books and readers. Recalling that it is a treatiseon humor that the librarian has chosen to poison, Eco seems to doubtthe ability of librarians to laugh at themselves, not to mention their(in)ability to tolerate the laughter of others.We might further consider what messages for librarians and theirpatrons are contained in the looming physical presence of the libraryitself. Repeatedly, Eco makes reference to its enormous "bulk," its "ex-ceptional size," its extraordinarily vast and rich collections [1, pp. 21,26, and passim]. Why is this library so much larger, grander, so muchmore modern than any library that existed at the time of Eco's story,namely, fourteenth-century Europe?2These issues have not gone unmentioned in the growing body ofexegetical literature surrounding The Name of theRose. Rolf Kohn, pro-fessor of medieval history at the Universitat Konstanz (Germany), hasexamined numerous details of Eco's fictional library, comparing andcontrasting them with the realities of libraries in the late Middle Ages[5]. Both his findings and his conclusions are notable. For example, ata time when the most important libraries in Europe, such as the Sor-bonne in Paris or the papal library of Avignon, could boast few morethan two thousand codices, the library of Eco's remote Benedictine ab-bey housed at least that number of Bibles alone [1, p. 35]. Its entireholdings appear to have surpassed by far the six thousand codices whichEco attributes to the Piedmontese monastery of Novalesa-which, asKohn points out, probably never had a significant library [5, p. 82].Equally fantastic (and thoroughly unmedieval) is the interior architec-ture of Eco's fictitious library. Its capacious scriptorium, for example,lets the sunshine in through "three enormous windows" and numeroussmaller ones, creating generous workspaces "suffused with the mostbeautiful light" [1, p. 71]. As anyone even touristically familiar withmedieval interiors knows, nothing approaching Eco's scriptorium wouldhave been imaginable in late medieval Europe [5, p. 90]. Again andagain, Kohn reveals how Eco's library represents an "architectural mon-ster" in a medieval context, "in many respects more similar to librariesof today than to those of the late Middle Ages" [5, pp. 84, 1 1].3 For2. My thanks to Professor David Kaser (Indiana University) for drawing my attention tothis question.3. Unless otherwise noted in the reference, translations of passages from foreign languageworks are my own and will not be individually attributed.



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376 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLYEco, whose credentials as a medievalist are impeccable [cf. 6, p. 11],these inaccuracies can only have been intentional, leading the medieval-ist Kohn to argue for an "allegorical reading of Eco's novel, for a transla-tion of the historical sujet into the present day of the author and hisreaders." Quite apart from any literary agenda being pursued, The Nameof the Rose can also be read, Kohn feels, as "a parable for the situationof the modern researcher and library user" [5, pp. 109-10].We must naturally exercise some caution at this point, since the alle-gorical complexity of the library as "the novel's presiding symbol" (The-resa Coletti in [6, p. 38]) clearly forbids a reductionist interpretation ofEco's The Name of the Rose as "library fiction," however grandiose. Butjust as undeniably, Eco has drawn liberally and with gusto on his ownexperiences with modern research libraries in creating the library of hisnovel and has made these experiences and the (real) libraries in whichhe has had them a subject of his literary reflection.If any further proof for this contention were necessary-and it appar-ently is, since even such recent commentators as Deborah Parker con-tinue to refer to libraries as "literary commodities" that Eco has ex-ploited solely to "add zest to his story," much like the Victorian settingof the classic English detective story [7, p. 844]-this is provided by Ecohimself, in an address which he delivered in Milan on March 10, 1981,just six months after the publication of The Name of the Rose. Eco hadbeen invited to speak at an event commemorating the twenty-fifth anni-versary of the Milan Public Library, held in the Palazzo Sormani. Pub-lished in Italy in 1983 under the Latin title "De Bibliotheca," Eco'sremarks have, to my knowledge, yet to be translated into English [8,pp. 237-50].Eco's speech was probably not what the organizers of the event hadin mind when they invited the distinguished Bologna professor of semi-otics to speak to them, for it is one long philippic against libraries hehas known. With no apologies to his hosts and, at least in the publishedversion, not even nodding mention of the positive achievements of thepublic library movement in Italy, Eco conjures up, in nineteen num-bered points, an "immense nightmare" of a library, a projection of allthe irritations he has experienced in a lifetime as a library user, both inhis country and in others [8, p. 240]. Eco's complaints range from thepeevish to the profound, from the sometimes impossible length of callnumbers and the absence or inaccessibility of library photocopiers tothe latent hostility he perceives in librarians towards the patron ("anidler and potential thief"), or the fact that librarians and not actualusers determine subject headings under which ultimately the user, oftenan expert in the field, must search for books [8, pp. 240-42]. As one



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378 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLYsecularizing reform. Both of these levels find literary expression inThe Name of the Rose. Let us turn first to the library as Library,as literarytopos.For Eco, the postmodern man of letters, conscious of the weight ofthe textual past pressing down upon any late twentieth-century writerof fiction, there would have been no point in striving to be original indeveloping the Library as a literary theme. Indeed, this would havebeen futile, for everything has already been said on this and on everyother subject, and a writer can only quote from the trove of the pastevery time pen is put to paper: it is, as Eco writes in his Postscript o "TheName of the Rose," "no longer possible to speak innocently" [14, p. 67].Eco has therefore chosen to appropriate consciously the ways in whichlibraries have figured in the works of writers who have gone before him.Of these there are very many. A 1982 study published in Germany(which incidentally raised no claim to exhaustiveness) analyzed 267 fic-tional works in which libraries or librarians have played some literarilysignificant role [15]. Despite these sheer numbers, there are discernibleconsistencies in these works that allowed the author of the study to workout a typology of meanings associated with libraries. Just such a typologyseems to have been at work in Eco's imagination while writing The Nameof the Rose.In the Western literary tradition, the Library at its most positive hasbeen represented as a temple of wisdom, the home of a sacred order,comforting proof of man's dominance over nature, or, in Debra A.Castillo's words, "the reconstructed tower [of Babel]" [16, p. 3]. In this,what we might call its sacral manifestation, the library is approachedand entered with the reverence due a site of great holiness.4 For otherauthors, however, it is the remoteness of this world of order and mean-ing from the real world that sets the tenor. The library then becomesa kind of redoubt that "has solidified and closed around us," in which"classificatory systems serve as a kind of map to keep the confusion atbay" [16, p. 14].In a final, grim permutation, the Library of literature, in its "vast,inhuman impersonality," dessicates and ultimately destroys its humancreators [16, pp. 114-15]. It then becomes "the ferocious library" [17,p. 55], "ruthless in its fetishization of the ordering process," inducer ofa "madness-or perhaps intolerable sanity" that is inimical to life [16,pp. 3, 13]. The literary apotheosis of the library as the impassive bringerof madness and death is to be found in the stories and poetry of Jorge4. The German study noted above documents the use of sacral imagery in connectionwith libraries in works of writers as diverse as C. S. Lewis, James Joyce, Henry Miller,Richard Brautigan, Henry James, and William Saroyan [15, pp. 15-17].



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THE NAME OF THE ROSE 379Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer whose oeuvre is intertextuallyomnipresent in Eco's novel [7, 18]. In Borges's nightmarish "Library ofBabel," for example, death comes to the library's users, who spend theirlives lost and perplexed in its vastness, as one might expect, through"suicide and pulmonary diseases," whereupon their bodies are thrownover the railing to decompose as they fall, eternally, past the library'sinfinite layers of tiers [19, p. 54].If the name Borges seems to resonate throughout The Name of theRose, it is surely no coincidence, if for no other reason than for theanagrammatic similarity that Eco has constructed between Borges'sname and that of his fictional librarian, Jorge of Burgos [14, pp. 27-28].It is Borges, of all writers who have speculated upon libraries real andmetaphysical, to whom Eco obviously feels the closest affinity and owesthe greatest debt.5 Both writers display the same encyclopedic urge, thesame longing to pull together all the disparate images to which theLibrary has lent itself throughout world literature into a single, all-encompassing one, which can then stand as a cipher for the whole un-comprehended universe of human experience. As Eco puts it in TheName of the Rose: "For these men devoted to writing, the library was atonce the celestial Jerusalem and an underground world on the borderbetween terra incognita and Hades. They were dominated by the li-brary, by its promises and by its prohibitions" [1, p. 184]. Eco has an-chored the two ends of the semantic spectrum that Library has tradition-ally connoted in literature-the positive and the negative, Heaven andHell, light and fire-at the beginning and the end of his novel, respec-tively. On the very first page of his story, he lets William's scribe Adsoexpress wonderment and awe at the "perfect form" that the libraryturns to the world, expressive of the "sturdiness and impregnability ofthe City of God" [1, p. 21]. William, too, in his first meeting with theabbot, bestows profuse and sincere praise on the library, "spoken ofwith admiration in all the abbeys of Christendom" [1, p. 35]. In time,however, cracks in the library's glorious facade become evident, thenhorrible gaping fissures. Yet neither William nor his creator Eco canever bring themselves to cast final, condemnatory judgment on the li-brary or on its librarians. Even as it burns to the ground, taking hisarchenemy Jorge with it, William is so overcome by grief at his loss thathe collapses in tears [1, p. 487]. The analysis of critic Robert F. Yeagersuggests that some of these tears might even have been spent on Jorgethe librarian, with whom William is linked in a strange love-hate, evenhomoerotic relationship [20, pp. 44-45].5. In fact, Eco began his Milan address by reading aloud a long passage from Borges's"Library of Babel," referring to it as "scripture" and ending his reading with a hearty"Amen " [8, pp. 237, 238].



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380 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLYApart from Jorge's name, the most obvious evidence of Eco's debt toBorges is the architecture of the library, which in its size, geometricregularity, and labyrinthine structure is a direct descendant of Borges's"Libraryof Babel" [2, p. 28]. In postmodernist thought, the literary text,the library, the labyrinth-each often serves as a complex sign for theother, just as each stands for and thus interprets the world and thehuman condition.6 Each shares what in Eco's semiotic theory can bereferred to as a common morphology, in Eco's words that of a "largelabyrinthine garden," permitting the "detective metaphysic" in his questto "take many different routes, whose number is increased by the criss-cross of its paths" [14, p. 54; 21, p. 275]. The goal of this "quest"?It isfor William in The Name of the Rose, for Borges's librarian-scholars in"The Library of Babel," and for the archetypal library user as well, quitesimply: a book, the book, "the formula and perfect compendium of allthe rest" (Borges in [19, pp. 56-57]).At this point we need to consider Eco's views on the labyrinth insomewhat greater detail, not only since the library-labyrinth topos is soconstitutive of The Name of the Rose,7 but also because the idea of thelabyrinth has broad applications as "an abstract model of conjecturality"

(Eco in the Postscript [14, p. 57]) of potential value in library contexts,which we will consider shortly.As Eco elaborates in the Postscript,there are three kinds of labyrinth.The first is that of the ancient Greeks, of which the Minoan labyrinthat Knossos is the classic example. For all its circuitousness, the unicursallabyrinth of antiquity always led to the center or "goal"-and then,hopefully, to the exit. "This is why in the center there is the Minotaur,"Eco explains, for "if he were not there .. . it would be a mere stroll"[14, p. 57; cf. now also 22].Modern maze-treaders, on the other hand, must be prepared to findtheir way in labyrinths of far greater complexity: the "mannerist" ormulticursal maze, a model of the trial-and-error process, in which pathsbranch off at every intersection; or even more likely, in what Eco refersto as the "rhizome" maze of criss-crossing paths, in which the boundariesthemselves shift from one moment to the next [14, pp. 57-58]. The oldpositivist techniques do not get you very far in the rhizome labyrinth.In fact, trusting too much in the inevitability of reaching one's goal bymethodically following the prescribed twists and turns of a "search" iseither grossly naive or an act of grave hubris. As detective Lonnrot must6. Compare the words of the monk Alinardo of Grottaferrata: "The library is a greatlabyrinth, sign of the labyrinth of the world" [1, p. 1581.7. The floorplan of the library-labyrinth is in fact the novel's only illustration [1, p. 321](D. Kaser, personal communication).



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THE NAME OF THE ROSE 381learn in "Death and the Compass," another Borges tale that inspiredEco while writing The Name of the Rose, it can cost you both your quest-and your life [23, p. 87; 18, pp. 797-803].Eco's linkage of libraries and labyrinths suggests an interesting imagewith which we may seek to capture, at least conjecturally, the "funda-mental shift in information-seeking behavior" (Deanna Marcum) whichmodern libraries are currently both promoting and responding to [24].Consider first the manifest evolution of the modern library from a "clas-sical," unicursal labyrinth to a multicursal one. Traditionally, librariesdirected their readers to literature that had "stood the test of time," toan accepted canon of authors who provided proven answers to questionsboth practical and spiritual. As author Elizabeth Yates's librarian MissPatch regularly advised her patrons in Nearby (1947), the traditionallibrary seemed to say to its users: "When a new book comes out, readan old one " [25, p. 116].Modern library searches do not lead from point A (the catalog, thereference desk) to point B (the book, the answer, the truth), but insteadinvite their computer-literate users to explore on their own the manyrecesses of a multicursal maze, placing them again and again in decisionsituations, at forks or nodes where multiple paths lead down throughthe hierarchies of subject headings, on their way to what may or maynot be a useful or even existing document. Indeed, through the extraor-dinary versatility of keyword and Boolean searching, the modern libraryenvironment actually begins to approximate Eco's rhizome labyrinth, inwhich "every path can be connected with every other one," in whichthere is "no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially infi-nite" [14, p. 57]. In effect, the library user creates with every search hisor her own ad hoc library of five, fifty, or five thousand book and journalcitations, cut out from that great "virtual" library that is the universeof all accessible books, all stored information. If the user is unlucky,this personal library may have thousands of books, but provide noanswers-and have no exit. Our (post)modern library, like the ouevreof Jorge Luis Borges (in the words of Gerard Genette), "does not havea ready-made sense, a revelation to which we must submit: it is a reser-voir of forms which await their meaning, it is the imminenceof a revelationthat does not take place, and which everyone must produce for himself"[26, p. 327; emphasis in original]."Revelation" must then, if at all, be forthcoming from the searcher,for whom ambiguity is not just "short-lived and ultimately yielding toproper procedures" but "a permanent state" [20, p. 48]. There is nolonger a canon to turn to and to master. Everything is potentially valu-able or worthless, depending on its position in the temporary contextsthat we create for our library searches, what we then make of it, and at



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382 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLYwhat point in our search we move which way. We are, to use anothermetaphor, lost at sea, and, to use a term now common in computerscience, must "navigate" our way through layers of menu screens andcatalogs of search variants, through an ocean of books and articles with-out end. This is also the world in which William of Baskerville, repre-senting the modern library user, ultimately realizes he is living: "I havenever doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things manhas with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understandwas the relation among signs.... I behaved stubbornly, pursuing asemblance of order, when I should have known well that there is noorder in the universe" [1, p. 492]. It can only be mentioned in passingthat Eco's radical relativism has implications far beyond the library envi-ronment, especially for our collective belief, unchallenged until recently,in the existence of a scientifically derived and classifiable body of knowl-edge. We cannot examine these implications here, except to observethat the Library, in both its "spiritual" and "terrestrial" manifestations,is one of the most visible and important temples that society has erectedto this belief. Instead of pursuing this interesting philosophical tangent,let us return once again to The Name of theRoseas literature, to considernow for a moment Eco's treatment of librarians.Exactly paralleling the broad and contradictory associations stored inthe literary image of the Library is the ambivalence of the ancestralintertextual tradition toward the guild of librarians. At his (or, less fre-quently, her) best, the librarian of literature has figured as "the virginpriest of knowledge" (thus R. L. Stevenson in Prince Otto [27, p. 57]),keeper of a sacred trust to protect and administer society's "guilty knowl-edge": that Pandora's box of society's accumulated experience and wis-dom which, in the wrong hands, would lead to moral decay and revolu-tion [28, p. 5; 15, pp. 68-69].

It was this same quasi-sacerdotal "reading" of librarianship that in-formed Jose Ortega y Gasset's 1934 address "The Mission of the Librar-ian," in which Ortega speaks with great respect of the "hermetic myster-ies" of the librarian's profession, bestowing upon the initiate powers towork to society's good in ways analogous to the physician, the judge,and the soldier. For Ortega, the librarian's mission was to protect societyfrom "ideas received in inertia" and even "pseudo-ideas," making thelibrarian, in Ortega's view, society's appointed "doctor and hygienist ofreading" [29, pp. 133, 154].As revealed in the following passage, spoken by the abbot of thenovel's great monastery, Eco is obviously very familiar with this kind ofimagery. Indeed, TheName of the Rose'smonastic setting lends itself wellto the "vestal" interpretation of librarianship we have seen representedabove:



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THE NAME OF THE ROSE 383The librarywas laid out on a plan which has remainedobscureto all over thecenturies,and which none of the monksis called upon to know.Only the librar-ian has received the secret, from the librarianwho preceded him, and he com-municates t, while still alive,to the assistant ibrarian, o thatdeathwill not takehim by surpriseand rob the communityof thatknowledge.And the secretsealsthe lips of both men. Only the librarianhas, in additionto that knowledge,therightto move through the labyrinthof the books,he alone knows where to findthem and where to replacethem, he alone is responsiblefor their safekeeping.The other monks work in the scriptoriumand mayknow the listof the volumesthatthe libraryhouses. But a list of titlesoften tells very little;only the librarianknows, from the collocationof the volume, from its degree of inaccessibility,what secrets, what truths or falsehood, the volume contains.Only he decideshow, when, and whether to give it to the monk who requests it. [1, p. 37]The subtle auctorial irony evident in this passage, which naturally occursearly on in the book, already suggests that alternative images of, thelibrarian's mission are to come. And indeed, here again Eco draws onBorges as his encyclopedist and processor of literary images, this timein regard to librarians. As we might expect, the Borgesian archetypesare significantly darker than those propagated by Stevenson, Ortega, orby Eco's fictional abbot. Recall first Borges's "Libraryof Babel," in whichthe figure of the librarian is that of a lost and desperate searcher in thelabyrinth of a limitless library [19, p. 52]. In a closely related image, inBorges's poem "The Keeper of the Books" (1968), the librarian is por-trayed as a degenerate epigone protecting a hoard of books he himselfcannot read:

In the faltering dawnmy father's father saved the books.Here they are in this tower where I liecalling back days that belonged to others,distant days, the days of the past.[30, pp. 73, 75]

Eco's The Name of the Rose plays upon these and other, often contradic-tory, literary affects associated with librarians, and the two main adver-saries of his book, Jorge and William, each subsume parts of this tradi-tion. For his villain, Eco has borrowed the image of the librarian aspriest of the book, merging it with the Borgesian image of the librarianas an uncomprehending book-"keeper" fighting a rear-guard actionagainst a new age. No doubt, Jorge would have also felt quite comfort-able in the role of an Ortegan "doctor and hygienist of reading" anddoes in fact use medical imagery to describe his understanding of hisoffice. In discussing the treatment of library patrons "infected" withidle or wrong thoughts (Ortega's "ideas received in inertia"), Jorge isuncompromising:



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384 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY"Illnessis not exorcised. It is destroyed."[William:]"With the body of the sick man[?]""If necessary." 1, p. 477]In a further, startlingly apt image for both professional skill and profes-sional egotism, Jorge is blind, but in the confines and the darkness ofthe library, where only librarians are allowed and only librarians knowthe way, his "magic sensibility" allows him to "see" better than anyoneelse [ 1, p. 483]. Jorge, in sum, is a frightening amalgam of the Orteganand Borgesian visions of the librarian.

What now of Eco's protagonist, William of Baskerville? Other writerson William's literary antecedents-especially S. Tani, W. D. Spencer,and D. McGrady-have shown how William, like Jorge, is a compositefigure [31, pp. 68-75; 17, pp. 43-59; 18]. They reveal how Eco hastaken the Borgesian image of man the "imperfect librarian"-a des-perate, relentless, tragically unsuccessful searcher for knowledge-enriched it with obvious borrowings from Conan Doyle and less obviousones from the modern genre of the antidetective genre, in order tocreate the (anti)hero of the story.But let us look at the figure of William from a library perspective. Hisstance in favor of freedom and facility of access is clearly that of themodern academic user. Consider this exchange between William andthe librarian Malachi as the two stand before the library catalog:

"But in what order are the books recorded in this list?"Williamasked. "Notby subject, it seems to me.". . ."The librarydates back to the earliest times,"Malachisaid, "andthe booksare registered in order of their acquisition,donation, or entrance within ourwalls.""They are difficult to find, then,"William observed."It is enough for the librarian to know them by heart and know wheneach book came here. As for the other monks, they can rely on his memory."[1, p. 75].William's growing skepticism toward the librarians as aids to his re-searches turns out to be vital to his progress in solving the case. Ratherthan place himself in their professional care, he prefers to be left to hisown "devices": "it was a forked pin, so constructed that it could stay ona man's nose . . . as a rider remains astride his horse or as a bird clingsto its perch. And, one on either side of the fork, before the eyes, therewere two ovals of metal, which held two almonds of glass"[1, p. 74]. Theobject of such wonderment is, of course, William's pair of eyeglasses,introduced in Italy just decades before and seen in the monasterial li-brary now for the first time: "The other monks looked at William withgreat curiosity but did not dare ask him questions. And I noticed that,even in a place so zealously and proudly dedicated to reading and writ-



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THE NAME OF THE ROSE 385ing, that wondrous instrument had not yet arrived" [1, p. 74]. RobertArtigiani, professor of the history of science at the U.S. Naval Academy,has trenchantly commented upon the struggle between Jorge and Wil-liam as a "confrontation between the blind man and the bespectacledone" [32, p. 70]. By depriving William of his eyeglasses (which he steals),Jorge is able to prolong, at least temporarily, his monopoly of access tolibrary information. Teresa de Lauretis sees in Jorge's efforts on behalfof "his" library "a conservative, misconceived, even pathetic, last-ditchattempt to salvage the status quo" [33, p. 27].Eco's "medieval" novel reveals itself in this light as a very topical con-tribution to the discussion of the roots of the librarian's profession andthe exercise of that profession from the perspective of the modern user.Eco obviously thinks little of the historical "moral" mission of librariansand argues that the librarian is quite capable of abusing his knowledgenot only to protect ethical values that are not those of everyone in thecommunity at large but also for making himself, to the detriment ofunhindered bibliographic access, indispensable to anyone wishing to usethe library. Although (at least in this country) we may hope to havetranscended the role of our librarian predecessors as moral gatekeepers,may we not be suspected as a guild (Eco might ask) of at times clutchingour "hermetic mysteries" to our bosoms for the purpose of protectingour "professional interests"?What if our greatest service to our users (Eco might appear to suggest)would be, as in Lenin's theory of the state, to perfect our technologiesto such an extent that we make ourselves superfluous and, as a profes-sion, just "wither away"? It is interesting to note that in "De Bibliotheca,"the only two libraries singled out for praise-Yale's Sterling Library andthe library of the University of Toronto-seem to function in Eco'sperception supremely well without a single professional librarian ap-pearing at the user/library interface. One only sees the occasional "em-ployee who rather absentmindedly casts a glance into your bag as yougo out," or the young student who scans the books at the circulationdesk with an electronic wand: "All this means that in these libraries thereare very few supervisors and very many employees, more accurately akind of functionary, half librarian and half assistant, usually a studentwho in this way, full-time or half-time, earns his or her way throughschool" [8, p. 244]. Another quite different reading of Eco's descriptionof libraries also offers itself, however, one that contains the germof a far more optimistic perspective on the future of professional li-brarianship. This would involve a revival of the old Port-Royal imageof God the Master Clockmaker. According to this notion popular inseventeenth-century France, after creating and "winding" the mecha-nism of Creation, the Master Clockmaker then sits back to observe and



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386 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLYmonitor the proper functioning of his work. This being the real world,however, and technological advance, unlike a Pascalian clock, being farfrom an epiphany, our master clockmaker-the professional library ad-ministrator of the future-would certainly not be able to avoid interven-ing to make corrections and adjustments to the workings of the clock-work. Nonetheless, his or her principal function in this scheme wouldbe, in concert with the users and other stakeholders of the library, tocontemplate, plan, and then implement improvements to the granddesign-and otherwise not be too much in evidence.In closing, let us not overlook the very fundamental moral messagethat The Name of the Rose contains for us in the profession. Eco, in theinterpretation presented here, confronts librarianship not as some dis-embodied notion of "service,"not as an ideal that we all believe ourselvesstriving for, but as an assemblage of real persons performing real workin real institutions, all of which acquire through time an inertia of theirown. Eco's book contains a warning as to where this inertia may lead:to habits of mind and of action quite different from and of a tendencydiametrically opposed to the ideals we so vociferously uphold. In a rap-idly changing world, Eco seems to suggest, we may increasingly find theghost of Jorge of Burgos insinuating himself into our professionalmidst, whispering in our ears, informing many of our thoughts andactions when it comes to matters of "the survival of the profession."Librarians, Eco is telling us, may fall victim to the same temptations thatother mortals might. They may attempt to hide behind their profes-sional credentials. They may seek to create a mystery about themselvesto put the performance of their duties beyond question to outsiders.They may react in fear and destructively in times of change. And, aboveall, they themselves may not perceive the contradiction of their ways.As Carl Rubino writes, "This book brings us face to face with our ghastlymedieval enemies, who turn out, of course, to be ourselves" [34, p. 56].

REFERENCES1. Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Har-court Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Originally published as I1nomedella rosa. Milan: Bompi-ani, 1980.2. Haft, Adele J.; White, Jane G.; and White, Robert J. TheKeyto "TheName of theRose."With a foreword by Thomas Cahill. Harrington Park, N.J.: Ampersand Associates,1987.3. Sullivan, Scott. "Superstar Professor." Newsweek(September 29, 1986), pp. 62-63.4. Hohoff, Curt. "Umberto Eco: Author of the Postmodern." Translated by J. Koeppel.Communio: International Catholic Review 15 (Summer 1988): 253-61.5. Kohn, Rolf. " 'Unsere Bibliothek ist nicht wie die anderen . . .': Historisches, Anach-



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THE NAME OF THE ROSE 387ronistisches und Fiktives in einer imaginaren Bucherwelt." In ". . . Eine finstere undfast unglaubliche Geschichte"?MediavistischeNotizen zu UmbertoEcos Monchsroman"DerName der Rose." 3d ed., edited by Max Kerner. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchge-sellschaft, 1988.

6. Coletti, Theresa. Naming the Rose:Eco, MedievalSigns, and ModernTheory.Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1988.7. Parker, Deborah. "The Literature of Appropriation: Eco's Use of Borges in II nomedella rosa." Modern Language Review 85 (October 1990): 842-49.8. Eco, Umberto. Sette anni di desiderio.Milan: Bompiani, 1983.9. Churchill, John. "Wittgenstein's Ladder." AmericanNotes and Queries23 (September-October 1984): 21-22.10. Hullen, Werner. "Semiotics Narrated: Umberto Eco's The Name of theRose."Semiotica64 (1987): 4 1-57.11. Noth, Winfried. Handbookof Semiotics.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.12. Eco, Umberto. LepoetichediJoycedalla "Summa" l "FinnegansWake."Milan: Bompiani,1966.13. Eco, Umberto. "Le strutture narrative in Fleming." In I1casoBond, edited by Orestedel Buono and Umberto Eco. Milan: Bompiani, 1965.14. Eco, Umberto. Postscript o "TheName of the Rose."Translated by William Weaver. NewYork: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.15. Dohmer, Klaus. MerkwurdigeLeute: Bibliothekund Bibliothekar n der Schonen Literatur.Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1982.16. Castillo, Debra A. The Translated World: A Postmodern Tour of Libraries in Literature.

Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1985.17. Spencer, William David. Mystenrum nd Mystery:The ClericalCrime Novel. Ann Arbor:UMI Research Press, 1989.18. McGrady, Donald. "Sobre la influencia de Borges en II nomedella rosa,de Eco." RevistaIberoamericana53 (October-December 1987): 787-806.19. Borges, Jorge Luis. "The Library of Babel." Translated by John M. Fein. In Labynnths:Selected Storiesand OtherWritings,edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. NewYork: New Directions, 1964.20. Yeager, Robert F. "Fear of Writing, or Adso and the Poisoned Text." SubStance47(1985): 40-53.21. Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics.Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.22. Doob, Penelope Reed. TheIdea of theLabyrinthrom ClassicalAntiquity hroughtheMiddleAges. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.23. Borges, Jorge Luis. "Death and the Compass." Translated by Donald A. Yates. InLabyrinths:SelectedStoriesand OtherWritings, edited by Donald A. Yates and James E.Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.24. Marcum, Deanna B. "For University Librarians of the Future, the Degree in LibraryScience, by Itself, Will Not Be Sufficient." Chronicleof Higher Education (August 1,1990).25. Yates, Elizabeth. Nearby:A Novel. New York: Coward-McCann, 1947.26. Genette, G6rard. "La litt6rature selon Borges." In Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Domi-nique de Roux and Jean de Milleret. Paris: L'Herne, 1964.27. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Prince Otto: A Romance. New York: Scribner's, 1905.28. Dingwall, Robert. "Introduction." In The Sociology of the Professions: Lauyers, Doctors,and Others,edited by Robert Dingwall and Phillip Lewis. London: Macmillan, 1983.29. Ortega y Gasset, Jos&."The Mission of the Librarian." Translated by James Lewis andRay Carpenter. Antioch Review 21 (Summer 1961): 133-54.30. Borges, Jorge Luis. "El guardiin de los libros"/"The Keeper of the Books." In



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388 THE LIBRARYQUARTERLYIn Praise of Darkness:A Bilingual Edition.Translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni.New York: Dutton, 1974.

31. Tani, Stefano. TheDoomedDetective: The Contribution f the DetectiveNovel toPostmodernAmerican nd ItalianFiction.Carbondale:Southern Illinois UniversityPress, 1984.32. Artigiani,Robert."The 'Model Reader'and the ThermodynamicModel."SubStance47 (1985): 64-73.33. de Lauretis,Teresa. "GaudyRose: Eco and Narcissism." ubStance7 (1985): 13-29.34. Rubino,CarlA. "The InvisibleWorm:Ancientsand Moderns n TheNameoftheRose."SubStance7 (1985): 54-63.

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Missing Eco - On reading the name of the rose as library criticism - Jeffrey Garrett.pdf