History, Memory, and Sign in The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose uses semiotics, narrative frames, and generification to create an "open text," or a text that resists stable interpretations or explanations. Through this text, Eco calls narrative authority and the scholarly re-construction of history into question. To do so, the Rose creates slippage between multiple layers of textual meaning which, like the labyrinthine library of its own Abbey, provides blind alleys, false codes, and locked doors. Shifting its focus, the cinematic version of The Name of the Rose falls into all of the semiotic dead-falls left by Eco in an effort to recreate only the superficial murder mystery that drives its narrative, presenting only the bare trappings of the novel's complex story. The film adaptation becomes a metaphor that describes the polar opposite of Eco's "ideal reader," a clean cut tale designed to thrill the audience and an ironic statement when compared with a novel intent on presenting the ambiguity of storytelling and the alterity of the medieval world.

In presenting an open, negotiable text, Eco does not simply provide an arcane novel about monks and murder. The Name of the Rose subversively outlines the possibilities for positionality in historical construction, about our tendency to map the present onto the past, the dangers of doing so, and the irresistibility of assigning stable interpretations to mutable signs. Using the early-modern world to do this works not despite our unfamiliarity with its signs and value structures, but because of our awareness of their alterity, their difference. The film represents a metaphor for those hazards, and for the way modern media distorts and corrupts the openness of signs.

Central to these conceptions, and to The Name of the Rose, is the concept of the "open work." The poetics of an open work can be defined in multiple terms. For one thing, an open text "seeks to offer an image of the ontological and existential situation of the contemporary world" that can be viewed from "different perspectives."¹ Or rather, it offers an assemblage of signs that make up a detailed world-picture, freed from a reader's strict interpretations, and inspiring ambiguity. For Eco, signs represent directional pointers, not static signifiers. Quoting Novalis, Eco notes also that the open work "offers a multitude of intentions, a plurality of meaning, and above all a wide variety of different ways of being understood and appreciated..."² Amongst various examples Eco presents of this phenomenon, his most instructive to the service of texts involves Kafka, whose work,

remains almost inexhaustible insofar as it is 'open,' because in it an ordered world based on universally acknowledged laws is being replaced by a world based on ambiguity, both in the negative sense that directional centers are missing, and in a positive sense because values and dogma are constantly being placed in question.³

Eco's 'open work' begins to reveal richly detailed textual worlds filled with partially constructed meanings designed to resist "rigidly preestablished and ordained interpretative solutions," such as those described as possible for texts in the early-modern world.⁴ Given this fact, it may seem incomprehensible to use the medieval world in order to create an 'open text,' but Eco uses it precisely for this reason. For the lay reader, who has only minimal access to medieval codes and theological texts, the medieval period holds little modern meaning, and so provides the modern reader with indeterminate symbols. Eco wears the medieval like a "mask" that hides his involvement, and keeps the reader from ascribing elements to his will over the text.⁵

The open text or work has an intimate connection with its reader, since Eco grants the reader enormous agency. For Eco, the 'open text' can and should be read by the 'ideal reader', who is:

able to master many different codes and eager to deal with the text as with a maze of many issues. But in the last analysis what matters is not the various issues in themselves but the mazelike structure of the text. You cannot use the text as you want, but only as the text wants you to use it....the reader is strictly defined by the lexical and syntactical organization organization of the text.⁶

The reader of the ideal text is an avid learner, but one also defined by the given text's parameters. The text fashions its own model reader, who in turn is also fashioning meanings from the symbolically relevant portions of the open text under consideration. What occurs, according to several generations of Eco's theoretical works, creates a recursive dialectic intent on meeting the reader with semiotic obstacles with which they will happily and fruitfully contend, while also taking obstacles away that might interfere with multiple hermeneutics.

Possible criticisms of this ideal reader abound, especially when taking into consideration the tools necessary for the ideal reader of a text as complexly encoded as The Name of the Rose. However, Eco does not presuppose the gifts of the reader, maintaining that each reading is "only one among the possible," and focusing his criticism on texts that "obsessively aim at arousing a precise response on the part of more or less precise empirical readers."⁷ Eco posits further that "an open text outlines a 'closed' project of its Model Reader as a component of its structural strategy."⁸ On the one hand, Eco recognizes the appeal of texts that intentionally guide the reader on a path of predetermined responses, much like the film of his novel. However, at the same time, open texts (not authors) hail to readers in ways that delimit possible modes of readership. Put another way, a reader hailed by the signs of a text, and whose willingness to grapple with the multiple possibilities of the texts, will have a certain style of joy and interpretative voice in reading such a text not felt by those reading a 'closed' or precise text. While this may be true, it implies a bias against closed or 'precise' texts designed for those without the analytical or critical tools necessary for grappling with Eco's own novels. Yet, the problematics of Eco's own positionality aside, his theories of 'open' and 'ideal' take on the deeper problems of interpreting the dialectic between readers and texts, signs and interpretations, in a manner that grapples with the ways popular textual forms and works limit the bounds of readerly agency. In a sense, the ambiguity of signs in Rose increase their subversive potential despite the limited potential of readership they hail.

As an example of this, Eco uses the title of his own book, The Name of the Rose. According to Eco's postscript, he "liked it [the title] because the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meaning that by now it hardly has any meaning left...a title must muddle the reader's ideas, not regiment them."⁹ For Rose, the title becomes the first of many signs that refuse signification and that stands as a metaphor for the process of interpreting the sum total of the novel's signs. Somewhat contradictory to the unified medieval structures noted in The Open Work, The Limits of Interpretation speaks of the complications of "unlimited semiosis" in medieval theological work. Partially, this contradiction is key to the reason why the novel functions well in the Middle Ages. The ordered nature of medieval theology, its intertextuality and reflective qualities, inspire the entry of instability into their signs. The recursion of the reflective medieval text inspires multiple interpretations within a supposedly static order. In a world where signs (most prominently in this case, books) have been overdetermined, their open interpretation becomes not just possible, but inevitable.

This process adds a secondary layer to the title, which already refers back to the medieval text de contemptu mundi, and that reinscribes a process of textual orientation and interpretation. before the reader (ideal or otherwise) reads the first page, the intertextuality of Eco's novel has already generated a recursive system built upon the labyrinthine structure of medieval/modern textual possibilities. However, and it should be noted clearly, that the ideal reader has already become aware, by the act of reading the title, of these semiotic processes and systems Eco deploys. Others may only understand the title to be a part of the mystery's 'whodunit" qualities, and not part of a deeper authorial act. This illustrates a weakness and limitation of Eco's work, however open it may or may not seem to be.

As a result, Eco's semiosis in the novel becomes intimately connected with its construction of narrative authority, genre, and history. In terms of narrative authority especially, the text delimits a reader's ability to create significant boundaries for interpretation, while at the same time creating them everywhere. For example, the novel begins with an explanation from the supposed reader of a "found" medieval text who describes how that text (which he purports to present "as if it were authentic"¹⁰) has already been translated from the original Latin into "Neo-Gothic French," and which is actually a description from "Adso of Melk" of events that occurred on or about 1322, and which he himself recalls from memory.¹¹ As with the title itself, the first four pages begin by providing a bewildering and overwhelming web of events and signification. From the first instance of this account of certain events the reader has no idea whom to believe. Do we believe the Abbot's tale, which promises to be only a translation of a memorial reconstruction? Do we believe Adso, who writes decades after the fact to begin with? Do we believe the unadulterated account of the womanizing but unknown scholar of the first few pages? Each sphere of narrative authority brings the reader alternately closer or further away from an original source text. Yet, even this latter statement reveals a site of contestation, since the reader can never be certain what account would bring them closer to what events. Narrative authority itself might be construed as its own sign, a kind of meta-textual problem.

Faced with so many "what if's" the narrator provides significant temporal divisions designed to increase our distance from the text further. The hours of the Benedictine monastic order brackets the text, increasing modern perceptions of the alterity of the medieval world. Eco emphasizes that this past has become virtually inaccessible, a time divided by prayers and seasons, not rigidly defined by modern appointments and work schedules.

Additionally, the novel's structure of seven days emphasizes the biblical concept of time, thoughtfully imposing divine order upon a text with many extra-textual elements, including a "Prologue," "Last Page," and "Postscript." These extra-textual elements become palimpsests in the medieval tradition, a mimicry of the medieval practice of the marginal interpretation of texts. These temporal structures and their attendant marginalia metaphorically illustrate the overdetermination of medieval texts, showing how the orders of medieval reading open conversations about significance and defy our ability to create clean meanings.

Adso begins his problematic narrative by playing upon its very lack of clear origins with "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God..."¹² Followed by "now we see through a glass darkly" which outlines the very predicament of the reader. Adso seeks to orient our reading yet again to a comforting set of 14th century facts whose purpose lulls the text's ideal reader, however briefly, into a sense of narrative security. The modern reader would usually be familiar with historical facts, but coming from Adso the 'facts' of context come with clear biases that originate somewhere along the possible lineage of the account. For example, the reader might expect an account of the same events from a member of the papal delegation in the novel to have immense differences with Adso's account of the Abbey's murders. Even Adso's so-called facts come with a grain of salt, a grain that directly calls other historical accounts into question. After all, if Adso's account holds such clear biases, then what inoculates other texts from the same phenomenon?

Eco uses the novel to illustrate the praxis of his theories of open text, ideal readers, and multiply significant signs. As observed in the temporal and historical contexts of the medieval, medieval semiotics causes disorientation for modern readers through its recursive system of intertextuality. The dissemination of the text's ontology between narrators distanced from each other by hundreds of years denies the authority of any one reading of the events themselves, and finally the medieval context denies our familiarity with the codes for reading the signs. In the medieval, the reader finds an alterity that forces the reader into a position of agency, or rather in a position of being able to construct an interpretation of signs not provided by Eco, or any of the novel's narrators.

In part, this supposed alterity includes a re-invigoration of genre as the carrier of agency, and as a bridge for the aesthetic relevance and pleasures of medieval text for present-day readers. This latter option recognizes most helpfully for the Rose's text that "the experiential horizon of the medieval life-world... is only still available for us if it is reconstructed,"¹³ which is exactly what Eco attempts to do. For Hans Jauss, the very alterity of the medieval world serves as the ultimate temporal context because of its distanced state. This framing creates "surprise through alterity" partially because of the lack of aural learning with which the medieval mind would have no choice but to contend,¹⁴ and provides a means of reading not unlike, the experience of "the modern reader of detective novels as it was to the medieval hearer of chansons de geste."¹⁵ The alterity of the medieval world is bound up in the familiar genre Eco uses to create the novel. Put differently, this is a mystery inspired by familiar modern tropes, but using a temporal vessel of almost total unfamiliarity with which to do it.

Our ability to recognize the familiar within the mystery adds modern aesthetic pleasure, but also provides a distraction for the reader to grapple with. The mystery genre engages the reader in much the same manner that medieval readers responded to the familiar tropes of their own texts. For Jauss, the purpose of strictly defined genres in the medieval involves a specific mindset that takes joy in the very order and predictability of texts that Eco seeks both to create through the use of the medieval in order to facilitate its deconstruction.¹⁶ For Eco, the mystery represents a necessary entry point, but by no means does it centrally concern him:

It is no accident that the book starts out as a mystery (and continues to deceive the ingenuous reader until the end, so the ingenuous reader may not even realize that this is a mystery in which very little is discovered and the detective is defeated).¹⁷

The genre frames the alterity of medieval pleasure in a package acceptable to a modern reader with few bearings to decode the positionality of aural texts. Yet, it also distracts incessantly from the openness of the work. Just as with the problems inherent in Rose's narrative authority, the mystery genre cloaks, with its predictability, the unpredictable nature of the signs involved. In a sense, every conceivably 'reliable' entry point for the reader includes in its very nature an unstable element. Each aspect of familiarity the reader attempts to cling to becomes a siren song that eventually undermines stable interpretations.

By the same token, Eco sees the perspective provided by the medieval era to be all-important. From the mouth of one of the novel's possible protagonists, William of Baskerville, signs only reveal truth "when you are at the proper distance," ¹⁸which can be taken as an indication of the reader's position. The question Eco asks in his use of the medieval thus becomes about perspective, and how distance both clears and distorts circumstances.

In the same neighborhood as this passage, the futility of building constructions of cause and effect comes to our attention when William says that "reasoning about causes and effects is a very difficult thing, and I believe the only judge of that can be God...to trace sometimes endless chains of causes and effects seems to me as foolish as trying to build a tower that will touch the sky."¹⁹ In this speech, William undermines the intertextual nature of texts that seem, in the medieval practice, to inevitably build on each other through their self-same dialogue.

Using William to speak this speech is sly, since it comments specifically upon the use of medieval signs to describe medieval events. As such, it continues to highlight, through a kind of meta-textual practice, ways that the reader should not proceed, and that continues to reify the alterity of the medieval world. The reader takes joy in the mystery, but cannot proceed in the same ways as the characters or the genre might traditionally encourage. The ideal reader here must adapt their own interpretative practices.

With each facet of The Name of the Rose recessing inexhaustibly into itself, the novel draws a metaphor about post-modern entrapment and positionality through the concept of the labyrinth. With disorientation always in play through narration, temporal distance, and even genre, the reader might hope for the plot to generate the unraveling of signs with some familiar or comforting tropes. Instead, Eco provides a library where the plot literally gets 'lost' and that provides a mystery that surrounds a text known to have (perhaps) existed, but only through other texts: Aristotle's book concerning comedy, a book whose secrets unravels the very authority of signs through its ability to mock and parody them.

This non-existent text creates the novel's ultimate sign, as well as the ultimate proof of textual openness. Since the book has no existence, it can carry any symbolic baggage the reader wishes to map onto it, and so possesses no ultimate significance outside the reader at all. This denatured meaning, or lack of meaning, replicates a kind of symbolic maze that replicates the library, the mystery, and the book itself. Or, put differently:

Then there is the mannerist maze: if you unravel it, you find in your hands a kind of tree, a structure with roots, with many blind alleys. There is only one exit, but you can get it wrong. You need an Ariadne's thread to keep from getting lost. This labyrinth is a model of the trial-and-error process.

And finally there is the net, or, rather, what Deleuze and and Guattari call 'rhizome.' The rhizome is so constructed that every path can be connected with every other one. It has no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially infinite...that is, it can be structured but is never structured definitively.²⁰

As William notes when lost in the library, the knowledge of which the library is made up "is used to conceal, rather than to enlighten."²¹ The library, in all ways symbolic, and with a multiplicity of signs traceable to the number and shape of its very walls, reproduces the narrative of the mystery itself. William responds to the experience of being lost with a formula remembered by rote from an ancient text on the subject of finding one's way out of labyrinths. This commentary in itself retreats back to the conversation between books that talk of other books. This is a rhizomatic labyrinth, a labyrinth of which Aristotle's book is simply a symptom of the reader's own entropy.

The labyrinth's mystery consists in misdirections, in mirrors, herbs, and arcane symbols designed specifically to confuse the reader. Like a sleight of hand trick that works only through the infinite possibility of our distraction, the labyrinth concentrates attention through our own need to find a way through it. In the end, the labyrinth of the library itself becomes as hollow as the vessel of the mystery genre it is embedded within.

In order to find a sort of truth in The Name of the Rose, the labyrinth itself and all of its symbologies must be discarded in favor of the final paradox: Aristotle's book that poisons all of the abbey's monks. Not surprisingly, the entire mystery hinges on a book talked about only by other books, and whose final existence can only be posited. Interestingly, this book of Aristotle's also becomes a sign that undermines the authority of other signs through a study of comedy as a source for good. William himself, who until the very last fails to "look at things from another direction"²² manages to reconstruct the aforementioned book through all of the other books he has knowledge of, but which we have lost. Eco's narrative provides the reader with signs and sings of signs only, from which we can gather some manner of data about a book that does not exist from other books which no longer exist.

However, while all of these signs seem already signified through Eco's labyrinth with no-exit, thus making every sign of the novel immanently unstable, it does provide us with one half-truth: Aristotle's book, if it "had become an object for open interpretation...would have crossed the last boundary" that would have "overturned the image of God"²³- This according to Jorge who fears it. Why does he fear the book? Jorge fears the book because, by its very nature, it tampers with the order of the medieval world that Eco takes such pains to reconstruct and deconstruct, because of the very openness it it delimits.

As Jorge says "Rather than rebel against God's established order, laugh and enjoy your foul parodies of order...this book could teach that the freeing oneself of the fear of the Devil is wisdom..."²⁴ So, the book seeks to abolish those orders of sign by which the reader seems to have gotten to the end of the novel.

Signs, like books, speak of other signs until all their talking ceases to mean anything at all, and their ordering inspires laughter. Cloaked (like Aristotle's text itself) within the comforting company of other texts from long ago, The Name of the Rose reaches deeply towards a prime subversion of order that seeks ultimately to undermine normative authority. Without the orders of signs consigned to the control of unquestioned authorities, or rather if "one day somebody, brandishing the words of the Philosopher...were to raise the weapon of laughter to the condition of subtle weapon...that day even you, William, and all your knowledge, would be swept away!"²⁵

In other words, with laughter raised to the level of philosophical and theological discourse, no sign, order of signs, or earthly authority, could survive. This latter account amounts to a view of the post-modern, which in some sense amounts to a laughing at signs, and with signs- a knowing and self-conscious joke that means everything and nothing- all at the same time.

Eco, by creating such a recursive text replete with paradoxes and historical superstructure, calls into question the very nature of all those structures. Who decides which history gets told, and to whom? Whose history? Can it possibly be reliable, when all we have are the signs and shadows of signs, much as William only has intertextuality? Why do we take the these structures for granted in the modern world? Perhaps the most telling answer to this question is William's comment about his own process of looking:

"What you say Adso is very fine, and I thank you. 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.²⁶

In other words, as in other meta-textual passages in the novel, the reader's position can be partially explained. Founded upon the ladder of interpretation of the novel's signs, the temptation is to draw meaningful conclusions. However, in reflecting on the hollowness of these signs, and perhaps on William's personal failure to decode the mystery in time to save some of the monks, the reader realizes that they never left the labyrinth. As William says, "signs are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world," but "What I did not understand was the relation among signs."²⁷ The novel discusses post-modern positionality in a world seemingly bereft of greater significance.

Ironically then, the film proceeds from the premise that the most important aspect of the novel is the murder mystery. Eco discuses the model or ideal reader of a novel, a reader equipped and willing to do battle in the field of signs. In some sense then, the film represents the antithesis of that reader. This is not to say that the film required a sense of fidelity to the book. Instead, in reading Eco against his own theory, The Name of the Rose provides an exciting opportunity for reading the film against Eco's novel and theory together, in some sense illustrating the perversity of its sense of genre as a means of selling the film to a broad audience.

In the same way that Eco provides interesting ways of talking about the open work or ideal reader, Laura Mulvey's thoughts help to frame a discussion of the film. In opposition to Eco's view of textual relations, Mulvey views spectatorship in film as "The idea that a cinematic narrative can be more influential in structuring the spectator's viewing experience than the discourses the spectator brings to the text."²⁸ As has been discussed, The Name of the Rose seeks to do precisely the opposite. The novel seeks, at least according to Eco, for the reader to exert agency over a work that merely hails certain types of reader. Mulvey conceives the notion of involvement as of being overwhelmed by cinematic representation. For Mulvey, film is a closed work.

The transference of the novel's signs to film concretizes notions left up to the imagination when Eco describes them in the novel, and strengthens the veracity Mulvey's response to cinema. As director Jean Jacques Annaud says in a German documentary, Eco "writes like an author" and Annaud wants to know "what material" such mundane things as a robe are made of. In creating concrete signifiers for Eco's signs, the purposeful ambiguity of the author's readership becomes undermined. Interestingly, the dynamic of the medieval that Eco deconstructs- that of overdetermining signs until they are meaningless, is the same process by which the film has to proceed. This illustrates a limitation of the cinematic medium, not just of this particular film.

Whereas Eco seeks on opening of interpretations, the film narrows possible interpretations by a process of additions designed to create generic coherence. For example, the film creates a kind of love story from the novel's description of Adso's one-time sex with a peasant girl. Adso encounters the girl in the film's first scenes, which does not occur in the novel, as a means of connecting them together in some way and providing a kind of emotional continuity for the viewer. The spontaneous sexual relationship between Adso and the unnamed peasant girl includes graphic sexual imagery meant, in some part, to take the place of the erotic references to The Song of Solomon present in the novel. In the novel, these references point towards the thematics of intertextuality, and the reader gets some sense (albeit, a textual one) of how a monk might experience a sexual relationship- in terms of the only language a monk might surely have -that of the divine. Instead, the carnal relationship provides an odd sub-story that centers around transgression, not the divine.

Later, the film attempts to pin down the title of the novel with this same peasant girl, a title left intentionally open-ended by Eco, but which in the film refers to the girl's beauty as that of a rose. Taking this concept still further, the film's romantic notions attempt to neatly tie up the film's conclusion by saving the peasant girl from the flames of the Inquisition and inexplicably placing her by the roadside as William and Adso make their way away from the Abbey's smoldering debris. This 'moment' of film tugs at the heartstrings and effectively concludes the perceived love relationship. The open-ended nature of Adso's love-making mystifies the reader, who attempts to build such an expected narrative into the story, but who in the end becomes frustrated by its inability to close off the significance of the signs. In the film, the reader gets their cake and disappointingly eats it too, by having the relationship concluded neatly and effectively.

Interestingly this kind of love story succeeds in following Mulvey's conception of cinema as having "certain 'erotic' scenes...that do not move the actual plot along, so much as provide many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia."²⁹ The peasant girl who never talks and whose name we never know becomes the ultimate icon of desire for the monks and for the viewer. In fact, she becomes one of the only signs in the film that remain unsignified. Hoping to provide a love plot from the fragments Eco provides, Annaud instead gives the viewer a powerful example of cinematic oppression. The naked and oppressed peasant girl has a double oppression as a subject of desire for the male gaze. The difference here, in my mind, is such that instead of looking through Adso's eyes, who in the novel is at least surrounded by the narrative reframing already described above, the peasant girl in the film can be viewed within a world of oppression that colludes with a prospective viewer in subjecting her.

Outside of this constructed romantic story, the genre of the mystery itself begs the attention of the film's visual language. As Annaud states himself, he sees the story as a "thrilling" murder mystery with a visual language ripe for the screen. As a result, the film focuses the camera intently on filming corpses and death. Instead of attempting to create moments in the visual language that view the mystery tale indecisively or ambiguously, the film presents an example of the 'closed' and precise texts that circumscribe and bound the signs. Positioned behind the grotesqueness of death and dying, the film thrills without relying on the viewer's agency to interpret the same signs that William interprets.

Berengar, and Severinus's death provide perfect examples of this phenomenon. While in the novel their deaths can be imagined and the signs described by Adso allow the reader to interpret those signs in tandem with William, William instead takes on the very role, in both instances, that Eco intends for the reader. More of a Sherlock Holmes character than in the novel, the viewer knows only so much as William can at any one time. The camera insists on describing deaths before their occurrence in the world of the monastery, and thus focuses on death as a primary action of the film. This is contrasted with the novel's position that the deaths represent an effect of Williams', or the readers', inability to 'figure out' who has done the deed.

This process of addition refocuses the camera towards conclusions, not towards the lack thereof. The mystery genre demands answers and demands that events be logically described. As seen, the film's addition of romance and of death scenes tends to unabashedly provide meanings for signs in the same manner that Eco's book decisively takes it away, or at least views them cynically.

However, the film also works subtractively, seeking to remove elements extraneous to the plot so that the narrative can 'move' in ways unknown and unmotivated by facets of the novel. In doing so, the film again attracts the viewer towards the concept of mystery genre, a concept that again should be reiterated in its status as an entry point for the novel's aesthetic pleasure. To do this, the novel creates moments designed to envelope the reader in the medieval world.

Among moments apparently judged to be extraneous to the novel, the moment when Adso has his frightening experience with the carved sculptures at the door of the cathedral, the moment that Adso reflects on the symbology in medieval texts as a response to his transgression with the peasant girl, and those moments discussing the status and history of various heretical organizations, include a few. These indulgent moments create the rich textual universe that Eco requires of the open work in order to provide tools for interpreting that world. In the film, the alterity of the medieval world seems exoticised by the camera, not familiarized. In other words, the focus on genre, death, and dying becomes so exacting that the signs cannot be interpreted with agency by the viewer. A single scene before Adso enters the passage into the library provides an example. Here, Adso imagines the sculptures to move, and they frighten him. In the novel, this same sort of scene is treated earlier, but the reader receives enormous amounts of information that frame Adso's interpretation. Instead of simply being frightening figures of monsters only (which they are, nonetheless), the text uses that same syntactical organization that hails the reader to describe the power and character of these sculptures. Therefore, it is up to the reader to decide how these visions or interpretations of sculpture, or iconography, or death, or genre serve the "ladder" of our interpretation.

In the final, but perhaps most telling example of the film as closed text, the exclusion of narrative frames together with their appropriation as a device of genre describes the narrowing of the text's possible openness. Stripped of the multitude of other voices present in the novel's framing of the text, Adso's voice becomes authoritative. This stripping down of framing implements, of bracketing, makes Adso's voice the only reliable voice of the film. Not only that, but his voice-overs bookend the film to create the neat and generic package of resolution required by the film's mystery. Yet again, the generic function of the novel, and its ability to powerfully envelope the reader within a temporally disparate system of signs, along with the purposeful agency of its descriptions, get sidelined in favor of clean narrative lines and clearly discernible structures. With all of these additions and subtractions of aesthetics in play, the film necessarily defies Eco's theoretical ideals to create the antithesis of the model reader. The authority of the camera and genre displace that of the individual interpreter in a move that seems contrived to misrepresent Eco's text. However, as Eco says in the same German documentary in which Annaud mentions the thrill of the novel's mystery, the very purpose of a text is to serve the needs of multiple interpretations. In that sense, Eco may agree and encourage the novel's sheer variety of interpretations by readers and filmmakers, while his theory decidedly does not.

Eco's grappling with the reader/work dialectic mirrors similar critical battles in post-modern theory to date that include Mulvey and many others. While any conclusive theoretical model may never be achieved, the interpretive struggles readers (ideal or otherwise) experience in the novel do ask questions about our personal positionality in a world determined by closed and open signs. These signs hope to manipulate their ultimate significance and possibly close off our agency to interpret them. The labyrinth confuses and disorients, inspiring Adso to say that "I leave this manuscript, I do not know for whom; I no longer know what it is about."³⁰ We, as educated post-modernists, do not know either. However, as The Name of the Rose continually reminds us, true subversions of historiography lie in recognizing the labyrinth and laughing at it. Undercutting the production of knowledge/authority, that laughter gives us the strength to go on and the agency to re-create signs against seemingly impossible odds.

1Eco, Umberto. The Open Work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 10.

2Eco, 8.

3Eco, 9.

4Eco, Umberto. The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

5" ". Postscript to the Name of the Rose (Florida: Harcourt Brace, 1983). 19.

6Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979). 10.

7Eco, 8.

8Eco, 9.

9Eco, 3.

10Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt, Inc, 1983). 5.

11Eco, 4-5.

12Eco, 11.

13Jauss, Hans Robert. "The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature" (New Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 2, Winter, 1979). 185.

14Jauss, 188.

15Jauss, 189. This is a specific genre of medieval tale.

16Jauss, 188.

17Eco, 56.

18Eco, 28.

19Eco, 30.

20Eco, 57-8.

21Eco, 176.

22Eco, 478.

23Eco, 473.

24Eco, 474.

25Eco, 476.

26Eco, 492.

27Eco, 492.

28Burston, Paul and Colin Richardson eds. A Queer Romance (New York: Routledge, 1995). 21.

29Burston, 22.

30Eco, 502.

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