Missing Eco - On Reading The Name of The Rose As Library Criticism - Jeffrey Garrett PDF

Missing Eco: On Reading "The Name of the Rose" as Library Criticism
Author(s): Jeffrey Garrett

Source: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Oct., 1991), pp. 373-388
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY
Volume 61 OCTOBER 1991 Number 4
MISSING ECO: ON READING THE NAME OF THE ROSE AS

LIBRARY CRITICISM
Jeffrey Garrett'
While many outside the library community have commented at length on the
central role of the library in Umberto Eco's novel TheNameof theRose (Milan,
1980; New York, 1983), librarians themselves have been notably silent. This
reserve is surprising when one considers the vast and intricatelibrarydystopia
which Eco has created for his novel, the casting of a librarianas archvillain,and
the use of a librarybook as this villain'sprincipalmurder weapon. Beyond these
matters of setting and casting, however, close examination of Eco's imaginary
libraryand its literary antecedents, but also of Eco's yet untranslatedessay "De
Bibliotheca"(1981), will reveal the author's use of the library metaphor to be
anything but casual. It is instead an image charged with meaning, both within
the context of postmodern literary theory and as an element of Eco's own
agenda for real-existing libraries.
Eleven years have now passed since Umberto Eco's medieval mystery
novel II nome della rosa made its appearance in Italy, eight since its publi-
cation in the United States as The Name of theRose [ 1]. The work's obvious
demands on readers-significant passages in Latin, French, and even
Middle High German; allusions to a host of forgotten (and often ficti-
tious) classical and medieval writers; long and tangled disputations on
abstruse matters of church history-should have made it an unlikely
candidate for the bestseller lists. And yet, The Name of the Rose soon
vaulted the walls surrounding the literary ghettos of the world to achieve
a remarkably democratic popularity. In the United States, it sold well
over a million hardcover copies between 1983 and 1987. When the pa-
l. HSSE Library, Stewart Center, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907.
[LibraryQuarterly, vol. 61, no. 4, pp. 373-388]

? 1991 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0024-2519/91/61 04-0002$0 1.00
373

374 THE LIBRARY QUARTERLY
perback version was released in 1984, 800,000 copies sold within the
first 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 popular
non-popular books ever written" (Thomas Cahill), into the pantheon of
Western popular culture [2, pp. 9-10]. Author Umberto Eco became
an overnight pop hero, a "Superstar Professor" (3].
One aspect of this intelligent and remarkably successful mystery novel
that has surely caught the attention of many readers in the library com-
munity but, surprisingly, received little or no attention in the literature
of our profession is that Eco's The Name of the Rose is not only "a tale of
books" (as it says of itself [1, p. 5]), but also of libraries, librarians, and
library users. Let us look for a moment at the plot of Eco's work-this
time 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 quest
for a forbidden book, which appears to hold the key to the case, requires
that he first decipher a perplexing classification and shelving scheme.
Failing again and again to crack this code, he concludes that the fault
is not his own, that instead the knowledge of the all-powerful librarians
has been used "to conceal, rather than to enlighten," that indeed "a
perverse 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 aging
monk Jorge of Burgos. As we ultimately learn, Jorge has poisoned the
forbidden library book (significantly, Aristotle's legendary lost treatise
on humor), using it as a weapon to bring an excruciatingly slow and
painful death to monks who, in violation of library access restrictions,
succeed in "getting their fingers" on it [1, p. 472; 4, p. 254]. The novel
ends with Jorge maniacally devouring the book rather than handing it
over, and his last patron, William, screaming helplessly: "But I want the
book!" [ 1, p. 482]. In a spectacular finale, the magnificent library burns
to 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 and
librarian over a book, numerous questions of interest to modern-day
librarians are mused over, discussed, and debated, always in a delightful
tongue-in-cheek pseudo-medievalese. Among these are such issues as
censorship; the structure of public-access catalogs; the conflicting re-
quirements of preservation versus access; the advent and implications
of new end-user technologies (William's eyeglasses!); the utility of mne-
monic versus non-mnemonic (or even anti-mnemonic) signage in library
stacks; the semiotics of library architecture; the education of librarians

THE NAME OF THE ROSE 375
and 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 puts
in question the capacity of librarians for self-irony, that divine gift which
would allow them to perceive the ambivalence inherent in their position
as mediators between books and readers. Recalling that it is a treatise
on humor that the librarian has chosen to poison, Eco seems to doubt
the 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 their
patrons are contained in the looming physical presence of the library
itself. 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 much
more modern than any library that existed at the time of Eco's story,
namely, fourteenth-century Europe?2
These issues have not gone unmentioned in the growing body of
exegetical literature surrounding The Name of the Rose. Rolf Kohn, pro-
fessor of medieval history at the Universitat Konstanz (Germany), has
examined numerous details of Eco's fictional library, comparing and
contrasting them with the realities of libraries in the late Middle Ages
[5]. Both his findings and his conclusions are notable. For example, at
a time when the most important libraries in Europe, such as the Sor-
bonne in Paris or the papal library of Avignon, could boast few more
than two thousand codices, the library of Eco's remote Benedictine ab-
bey housed at least that number of Bibles alone [1, p. 35]. Its entire
holdings appear to have surpassed by far the six thousand codices which
Eco attributes to the Piedmontese monastery of Novalesa-which, as
Kohn 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 numerous
smaller ones, creating generous workspaces "suffused with the most
beautiful light" [1, p. 71]. As anyone even touristically familiar with
medieval interiors knows, nothing approaching Eco's scriptorium would
have been imaginable in late medieval Europe [5, p. 90]. Again and
again, Kohn reveals how Eco's library represents an "architectural mon-
ster" in a medieval context, "in many respects more similar to libraries
of today than to those of the late Middle Ages" [5, pp. 84, 1 1].3 For
2. My thanks to Professor David Kaser (Indiana University) for drawing my attention to

this question.
3. Unless otherwise noted in the reference, translations of passages from foreign language
works are my own and will not be individually attributed.

Eco, 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 his
readers." Quite apart from any literary agenda being pursued, TheName
of the Rose can also be read, Kohn feels, as "a parable for the situation
of 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 of
Eco's The Name of the Rose as "library fiction," however grandiose. But
just as undeniably, Eco has drawn liberally and with gusto on his own
experiences with modern research libraries in creating the library of his
novel and has made these experiences and the (real) libraries in which
he 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 setting
of the classic English detective story [7, p. 844]-this is provided by Eco
himself, 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 had
been 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's
remarks 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 had
in mind when they invited the distinguished Bologna professor of semi-
otics to speak to them, for it is one long philippic against libraries he
has known. With no apologies to his hosts and, at least in the published
version, not even nodding mention of the positive achievements of the
public library movement in Italy, Eco conjures up, in nineteen num-
bered points, an "immense nightmare" of a library, a projection of all
the irritations he has experienced in a lifetime as a library user, both in
his country and in others [8, p. 240]. Eco's complaints range from the
peevish to the profound, from the sometimes impossible length of call
numbers and the absence or inaccessibility of library photocopiers to
the latent hostility he perceives in librarians towards the patron ("an
idler and potential thief"), or the fact that librarians and not actual
users determine subject headings under which ultimately the user, often
an expert in the field, must search for books [8, pp. 240-42]. As one

reads "De Bibliotheca," it is easy to imagine Eco, standing impatiently

in some long line at the library circulation desk, brooding darkly over
the details of the library dystopia ("a good library in the sense of a bad
library") that we finally meet full blown in The Name of the Rose [8, p.
240].
As negative as "De Bibliotheca" may seem and in tenor certainly is,
venting his spleen was not Eco's entire purpose in coming to Milan. For
one can, as Eco carefully points out at the outset of his speech, very well
"speak of the present or future of existing libraries by creating purely
fantastic models" [8, p. 238]. Eco's belief in the heuristic value of seem-
ingly frivolous fictional models, "gloriously lacking in any relevance for
our day" [1, p. 5], to illuminate the contours of real problems, point
toward possible solutions, and then, like a finished paperback, be dis-
carded, is also a frequent subject of learned discourse in The Name of the
Rose. Early in the novel, for example, the learned monk Venantius
speaks of the power of "metaphors and puns and riddles," which "seem
conceived by poets for sheer pleasure, . . . to lead us to speculate on
things in a new and surprising way" [1, p. 82]. Then, near the end of
the novel, in his final debate with Jorge, William repeats almost exactly
Venantius's argument, "how through witty riddles and unexpected met-
aphors," by "depicting men and the world as worse than they are or
than we believe them to be," we can be brought to examine things more
closely [1, p. 472]. This and other repetitions of the point suggest how
Eco would like his readers to "use" his own novel [cf. also 1, p. 492; 9;
10, pp. 48-49].
This being said, however, we are still left with the daunting task of
sorting out just what messages Eco intended to convey to us by invoking
the library metaphor and what his agenda for real-existing libraries
might have been in writing The Name of the Rose. We will have to keep
in mind, as we now approach this task of interpretation, that Eco the
author is a peculiarly bipartite spirit. A notorious literary gourmand, he
is also a leading world expert in the study of literary gourmandise [1 1,
pp. 325-26]. A novelist with (now) two best-sellers to his credit, he
doubles as a prolific literary critic who has written on topics as disparate
as James Joyce and James Bond [12, 13]. And so, both humanist and
social scientist, both a writer and consumer of prose, Eco naturally re-
gards the library on two distinct but interrelated cultural planes. On the
first level, it is one of the great commonplaces of Western literature, an
"intertextual archetype" representing at one and the same time both the
grandeur and the ultimate vanity of all human intellectual striving. At
the same time, Eco also regards libraries in their reality, as institutions
still clinging to an outdated, quasi-sacred mission, urgently in need of

secularizing reform. Both of these levels find literary expression in

The Name of the Rose. Let us turn first to the library as Library,as literary
topos.
For Eco, the postmodern man of letters, conscious of the weight of
the textual past pressing down upon any late twentieth-century writer
of fiction, there would have been no point in striving to be original in
developing the Library as a literary theme. Indeed, this would have
been futile, for everything has already been said on this and on every
other subject, and a writer can only quote from the trove of the past
every time pen is put to paper: it is, as Eco writes in his Postscriptto "The
Name of the Rose," "no longer possible to speak innocently" [14, p. 67].
Eco has therefore chosen to appropriate consciously the ways in which
libraries 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 literarily
significant role [15]. Despite these sheer numbers, there are discernible
consistencies in these works that allowed the author of the study to work
out a typology of meanings associated with libraries. Just such a typology
seems to have been at work in Eco's imagination while writing The Name
of the Rose.
In the Western literary tradition, the Library at its most positive has
been 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 approached
and entered with the reverence due a site of great holiness.4 For other
authors, however, it is the remoteness of this world of order and mean-
ing from the real world that sets the tenor. The library then becomes
a kind of redoubt that "has solidified and closed around us," in which
"classificatory systems serve as a kind of map to keep the confusion at
bay" [16, p. 14].
In a final, grim permutation, the Library of literature, in its "vast,
inhuman impersonality," dessicates and ultimately destroys its human
creators [16, pp. 114-15]. It then becomes "the ferocious library" [17,
p. 55], "ruthless in its fetishization of the ordering process," inducer of
a "madness-or perhaps intolerable sanity" that is inimical to life [16,
pp. 3, 13]. The literary apotheosis of the library as the impassive bringer
of madness and death is to be found in the stories and poetry of Jorge
4. The German study noted above documents the use of sacral imagery in connection
with 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].

Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer whose oeuvre is intertextually

omnipresent in Eco's novel [7, 18]. In Borges's nightmarish "Library of
Babel," for example, death comes to the library's users, who spend their
lives lost and perplexed in its vastness, as one might expect, through
"suicide and pulmonary diseases," whereupon their bodies are thrown
over the railing to decompose as they fall, eternally, past the library's
infinite layers of tiers [19, p. 54].
If the name Borges seems to resonate throughout The Name of the
Rose, it is surely no coincidence, if for no other reason than for the
anagrammatic similarity that Eco has constructed between Borges's
name 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 and
metaphysical, to whom Eco obviously feels the closest affinity and owes
the greatest debt.5 Both writers display the same encyclopedic urge, the
same longing to pull together all the disparate images to which the
Library 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 The
Name of the Rose: "For 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. 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 and
Hell, 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 Adso
express wonderment and awe at the "perfect form" that the library
turns to the world, expressive of the "sturdiness and impregnability of
the City of God" [1, p. 21]. William, too, in his first meeting with the
abbot, bestows profuse and sincere praise on the library, "spoken of
with admiration in all the abbeys of Christendom" [1, p. 35]. In time,
however, cracks in the library's glorious facade become evident, then
horrible gaping fissures. Yet neither William nor his creator Eco can
ever bring themselves to cast final, condemnatory judgment on the li-
brary or on its librarians. Even as it burns to the ground, taking his
archenemy Jorge with it, William is so overcome by grief at his loss that
he collapses in tears [1, p. 487]. The analysis of critic Robert F. Yeager
suggests that some of these tears might even have been spent on Jorge
the librarian, with whom William is linked in a strange love-hate, even
homoerotic 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].

Apart from Jorge's name, the most obvious evidence of Eco's debt to
Borges is the architecture of the library, which in its size, geometric
regularity, and labyrinthine structure is a direct descendant of Borges's
"Library of Babel" [2, p. 28]. In postmodernist thought, the literary text,
the library, the labyrinth-each often serves as a complex sign for the
other, just as each stands for and thus interprets the world and the
human condition.6 Each shares what in Eco's semiotic theory can be
referred to as a common morphology, in Eco's words that of a "large
labyrinthine garden," permitting the "detective metaphysic" in his quest
to "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 is
for 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, quite
simply: a book, the book, "the formula and perfect compendium of all
the rest" (Borges in [19, pp. 56-57]).
At this point we need to consider Eco's views on the labyrinth in
somewhat greater detail, not only since the library-labyrinth topos is so
constitutive of The Name of the Rose,7 but also because the idea of the
labyrinth 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 labyrinth
at Knossos is the classic example. For all its circuitousness, the unicursal
labyrinth 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 find
their way in labyrinths of far greater complexity: the "mannerist" or
multicursal maze, a model of the trial-and-error process, in which paths
branch off at every intersection; or even more likely, in what Eco refers
to as the "rhizome" maze of criss-crossing paths, in which the boundaries
themselves shift from one moment to the next [14, pp. 57-58]. The old
positivist techniques do not get you very far in the rhizome labyrinth.
In fact, trusting too much in the inevitability of reaching one's goal by
methodically following the prescribed twists and turns of a "search" is
either grossly naive or an act of grave hubris. As detective Lonnrot must
6. Compare the words of the monk Alinardo of Grottaferrata: "The library is a great
labyrinth, 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).

learn in "Death and the Compass," another Borges tale that inspired
Eco 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 image
with which we may seek to capture, at least conjecturally, the "funda-
mental shift in information-seeking behavior" (Deanna Marcum) which
modern 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, libraries
directed their readers to literature that had "stood the test of time," to
an accepted canon of authors who provided proven answers to questions
both practical and spiritual. As author Elizabeth Yates's librarian Miss
Patch regularly advised her patrons in Nearby (1947), the traditional
library seemed to say to its users: "When a new book comes out, read
an old one!" [25, p. 116].
Modern library searches do not lead from point A (the catalog, the
reference desk) to point B (the book, the answer, the truth), but instead
invite their computer-literate users to explore on their own the many
recesses of a multicursal maze, placing them again and again in decision
situations, at forks or nodes where multiple paths lead down through
the hierarchies of subject headings, on their way to what may or may
not be a useful or even existing document. Indeed, through the extraor-
dinary versatility of keyword and Boolean searching, the modern library
environment actually begins to approximate Eco's rhizome labyrinth, in
which "every path can be connected with every other one," in which
there 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 his
or her own ad hoc library of five, fifty, or five thousand book and journal
citations, cut out from that great "virtual" library that is the universe
of all accessible books, all stored information. If the user is unlucky,
this personal library may have thousands of books, but provide no
answers-and have no exit. Our (post)modern library, like the ouevre
of Jorge Luis Borges (in the words of Gerard Genette), "does not have
a 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 revelation
that 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 to
proper procedures" but "a permanent state" [20, p. 48]. There is no
longer a canon to turn to and to master. Everything is potentially valu-
able or worthless, depending on its position in the temporary contexts
that we create for our library searches, what we then make of it, and at

what point in our search we move which way. We are, to use another
metaphor, lost at sea, and, to use a term now common in computer
science, must "navigate" our way through layers of menu screens and
catalogs 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 have
never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man
has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand
was the relation among signs.... I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a
semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no
order in the universe" [1, p. 492]. It can only be mentioned in passing
that 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 observe
that the Library, in both its "spiritual" and "terrestrial" manifestations,
is one of the most visible and important temples that society has erected
to this belief. Instead of pursuing this interesting philosophical tangent,
let us return once again to The Name of the Rose as literature, to consider
now for a moment Eco's treatment of librarians.
Exactly paralleling the broad and contradictory associations stored in
the literary image of the Library is the ambivalence of the ancestral
intertextual tradition toward the guild of librarians. At his (or, less fre-
quently, her) best, the librarian of literature has figured as "the virgin
priest 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 to
work to society's good in ways analogous to the physician, the judge,
and the soldier. For Ortega, the librarian's mission was to protect society
from "ideas received in inertia" and even "pseudo-ideas," making the
librarian, in Ortega's view, society's appointed "doctor and hygienist of
reading" [29, pp. 133, 154].
As revealed in the following passage, spoken by the abbot of the
novel's great monastery, Eco is obviously very familiar with this kind of
imagery. Indeed, The Name of the Rose's monastic setting lends itself well
to the "vestal" interpretation of librarianship we have seen represented
above:

The librarywas laid out on a plan which has remained obscure to all over the
centuries, and which none of the monks is called upon to know. Only the librar-
ian has received the secret, from the librarianwho preceded him, and he com-
municatesit, while still alive, to the assistantlibrarian,so that death will not take
him by surprise and rob the community of that knowledge. And the secret seals
the lips of both men. Only the librarianhas, in addition to that knowledge, the
right to move through the labyrinthof the books, he alone knows where to find
them and where to replace them, he alone is responsiblefor their safekeeping.
The other monks work in the scriptoriumand may know the list of the volumes
that the libraryhouses. But a list of titles often tells very little;only the librarian
knows, from the collocation of the volume, from its degree of inaccessibility,
what secrets, what truths or falsehood, the volume contains. Only he decides
how, 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 occurs
early on in the book, already suggests that alternative images of, the
librarian's mission are to come. And indeed, here again Eco draws on
Borges as his encyclopedist and processor of literary images, this time
in regard to librarians. As we might expect, the Borgesian archetypes
are significantly darker than those propagated by Stevenson, Ortega, or
by Eco's fictional abbot. Recall first Borges's "Library of Babel," in which
the figure of the librarian is that of a lost and desperate searcher in the
labyrinth of a limitless library [19, p. 52]. In a closely related image, in
Borges's poem "The Keeper of the Books" (1968), the librarian is por-
trayed as a degenerate epigone protecting a hoard of books he himself
cannot read:
In the faltering dawn

my father's father saved the books.
Here they are in this tower where I lie
calling 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 as
priest of the book, merging it with the Borgesian image of the librarian
as an uncomprehending book-"keeper" fighting a rear-guard action
against a new age. No doubt, Jorge would have also felt quite comfort-
able in the role of an Ortegan "doctor and hygienist of reading" and
does in fact use medical imagery to describe his understanding of his
office. In discussing the treatment of library patrons "infected" with
idle or wrong thoughts (Ortega's "ideas received in inertia"), Jorge is
uncompromising:

"Illness is 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 of
the library, where only librarians are allowed and only librarians know
the way, his "magic sensibility" allows him to "see" better than anyone
else [ 1, p. 483]. Jorge, in sum, is a frightening amalgam of the Ortegan
and Borgesian visions of the librarian.
What now of Eco's protagonist, William of Baskerville? Other writers
on William's literary antecedents-especially S. Tani, W. D. Spencer,
and D. McGrady-have shown how William, like Jorge, is a composite
figure [31, pp. 68-75; 17, pp. 43-59; 18]. They reveal how Eco has
taken 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 obvious
ones from the modern genre of the antidetective genre, in order to
create the (anti)hero of the story.
But let us look at the figure of William from a library perspective. His
stance in favor of freedom and facility of access is clearly that of the
modern academic user. Consider this exchange between William and
the librarian Malachi as the two stand before the library catalog:
"But in what order are the books recorded in this list?"Williamasked. "Not
by subject, it seems to me.". . .
"The library dates back to the earliest times," Malachisaid, "and the books
are registered in order of their acquisition,donation, or entrance within our
walls."
"They are difficult to find, then," Williamobserved.
"It is enough for the librarian to know them by heart and know when
each 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. Rather
than place himself in their professional care, he prefers to be left to his
own "devices": "it was a forked pin, so constructed that it could stay on
a man's nose . . . as a rider remains astride his horse or as a bird clings
to its perch. And, one on either side of the fork, before the eyes, there
were two ovals of metal, which held two almonds of glass" [ 1, p. 74]. The
object 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 with
great 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-

ing, that wondrous instrument had not yet arrived" [1, p. 74]. Robert
Artigiani, 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 bespectacled
one" [32, p. 70]. By depriving William of his eyeglasses (which he steals),
Jorge is able to prolong, at least temporarily, his monopoly of access to
library information. Teresa de Lauretis sees in Jorge's efforts on behalf
of "his" library "a conservative, misconceived, even pathetic, last-ditch
attempt 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 and
the exercise of that profession from the perspective of the modern user.
Eco obviously thinks little of the historical "moral" mission of librarians
and argues that the librarian is quite capable of abusing his knowledge
not only to protect ethical values that are not those of everyone in the
community at large but also for making himself, to the detriment of
unhindered bibliographic access, indispensable to anyone wishing to use
the library. Although (at least in this country) we may hope to have
transcended the role of our librarian predecessors as moral gatekeepers,
may we not be suspected as a guild (Eco might ask) of at times clutching
our "hermetic mysteries" to our bosoms for the purpose of protecting
our "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 technologies
to 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 and
the library of the University of Toronto-seem to function in Eco's
perception 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 you
go out," or the young student who scans the books at the circulation
desk with an electronic wand: "All this means that in these libraries there
are very few supervisors and very many employees, more accurately a
kind of functionary, half librarian and half assistant, usually a student
who in this way, full-time or half-time, earns his or her way through
school" [8, p. 244]. Another quite different reading of Eco's description
of libraries also offers itself, however, one that contains the germ
of a far more optimistic perspective on the future of professional li-
brarianship. This would involve a revival of the old Port-Royal image
of God the Master Clockmaker. According to this notion popular in
seventeenth-century France, after creating and "winding" the mecha-
nism of Creation, the Master Clockmaker then sits back to observe and

monitor the proper functioning of his work. This being the real world,
however, and technological advance, unlike a Pascalian clock, being far
from 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 would
be, in concert with the users and other stakeholders of the library, to
contemplate, plan, and then implement improvements to the grand
design-and otherwise not be too much in evidence.
In closing, let us not overlook the very fundamental moral message
that The Name of the Rose contains for us in the profession. Eco, in the
interpretation presented here, confronts librarianship not as some dis-
embodied notion of "service," not as an ideal that we all believe ourselves
striving for, but as an assemblage of real persons performing real work
in real institutions, all of which acquire through time an inertia of their
own. 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 tendency
diametrically opposed to the ideals we so vociferously uphold. In a rap-
idly changing world, Eco seems to suggest, we may increasingly find the
ghost of Jorge of Burgos insinuating himself into our professional
midst, whispering in our ears, informing many of our thoughts and
actions when it comes to matters of "the survival of the profession."
Librarians, Eco is telling us, may fall victim to the same temptations that
other mortals might. They may attempt to hide behind their profes-
sional credentials. They may seek to create a mystery about themselves
to put the performance of their duties beyond question to outsiders.
They may react in fear and destructively in times of change. And, above
all, they themselves may not perceive the contradiction of their ways.
As Carl Rubino writes, "This book brings us face to face with our ghastly
medieval enemies, who turn out, of course, to be ourselves" [34, p. 56].
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