Melissa Remulla-Briones, 33, recently graduated from the UP College of Law. She writes for Asia, the Journal of Culture in Commerce, a newspaper for the Filipino and Asian communities in San Diego, California. She was formerly an executive producer for ABS-CBN’s Star Magic (formerly Talent Center) and was a legal researcher for ABS-CBN’s News and Current Affairs.
Jesus never laughed…so goes a proposition weaved into the storyline of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, part history lesson, part exposition on laughter. It discusses how such a diversion (laughter) can be a powerful weapon that must never be given to the masses lest it free the villein (no misspelling here, the author meant the masses, or more particularly the serf tied to the land in the feudal system) from fear of the devil, because in the feast of fools, the devil also appears poor and foolish, and therefore controllable (implying that the church controls the masses through fear and if that fear dissipates, so does the influence of the church). A book on laughter is thus hidden, and a mystery unfolds in which the reader is reeled in, page after page after page.
Thus is the trademark of Umberto Eco, whom I first met in college through Foucalt’s Pendulum. Then (especially then), even with a bit of university education (read: Philosophy 101) and an acquaintance (albeit passing and unimpressive) with some of the classics (Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, Greek tragedies, The Song of Songs), I found him a hard read. According to Eco, books are made only from other books and around other books.
There is a certain cadence, a certain rhythm in his style, and a sense that he is trying to send a message, so that one can forgive his display of hubris (perhaps well-meaning and unintended), which sometimes makes the reader feel like he is the "lobotomized mass-media illiterate" referred to in one of his books.
I was to renew my acquaintance with Umberto Eco a decade after, when the Dan Brown novels and The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason hit the bestseller lists. I just had to read what was touted as the "Mother-of-all-mystery-novels-with-religious-undertones," the precursor of the great mystery books of our time that got people reading again. It was this book.
The Name of the Rose starts with a narrative by Adso of Melk, a monk writing in the present tense about the 13th century. It is a story of, naturally, a manuscript – a book that would spawn stories (and expositions) about other books. A murder is committed, compounded by other apocryphal murders, to hide a book on laughter (allegedly an interpretation or transcription of the Coena Cypriani and Aristotle’s Second Book of Poetics, his treatise on comedy, which was lost to the world). Thus started a quest to find a book and discover its hidden secrets, a quest for knowledge, which prompted the monks to take lives (their own and others’) within the sepulchral sanctity of an indoor labyrinth.
If the reader was keen (or desperate), he would see a fine line in spite of (and perhaps because of) the dissertations on matters of great concern during the period: the proliferation of heretics and their burning, a pope by the name of John performing duties which were both ecclesiastic and secular (unheard of in light of today’s separation of church and state), the Fraticelli and the other sects that practiced poverty (which further fueled the discussion about whether Jesus was poor and how this was totally antithetical to the accumulation of great wealth by the church), discussed interestingly but ambiguously through didactic passages, elaborate arias and long recitatives so that the reader is left to decide for himself the messages of Jesus (or the author)
However, once the reader sees what he thinks is the plot, he loses it yet again. One of the characters explain the phenomenon: "I behaved stubbornly, pursing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe…the order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward, you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless."
Eco indeed speaks a foreign language: mysterious, mystical, true. One must deduce the meaning of his meanings, quite an enviable trait especially when it lures the reader into passing over the lines, once, twice, thrice until the meaning (real or imagined) is digested and understood.
Another mystery to be solved in this book is the title. Umberto Eco thankfully explains in his postscript that it is a misnomer; that it had no relation to the story whatsoever, except that his novel needed to have a title, which made me laugh. He explains that he liked the use of the word "rose" because the rose is a symbolic figure, so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning at all. He further adds, by way of explanation, that Abelard (dialectician, philosopher, and theologian who died in 1142) used the example of the sentence Nulla rosa est to demonstrate how language can speak of both the non-existent and the destroyed – that everything disappears into the void – truly a key to the interpretation and a clue to the masterful and fiery end of the characters in The Name of the Rose.
Umberto Eco tickles the imagination, spurs the reader to study, to arrive at an interpretation of his Latin maxims or his seemingly obscure books and authors. He is readable and endearing because he writes with a purpose – that in reading, the reader should somehow have understood something more, become another person; that, in amusing himself, somehow, he has learned.