Borges And The Name Of The Rose

Borges and The Name of the Rose

Of the great contemporary novelists, Pynchon, Rushdie, GarcÐ"­a MÐ"ÐŽrquez, and so on, each considers the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) a great influence. No exception is Umberto Eco, whose laudatory blurb on the recently published Collected Fictions of Borges reads, "Though so different in style, two writers have offered us an image for the next millennium: Joyce and Borges. The first designed with words what the second designed with ideas: the original, the one and only World Wide Web. The Real Thing. The rest will remain simply virtual." These are traditions Eco hopes to follow, as he stated in a 1989 interview, "I would like to do with ideas what Finnegans Wake does with words." The present study examines Borges' considerable influence on Eco's The Name of the Rose, specifically through "The Library of Babel," "The Secret Miracle," and "The Garden of Forking Paths."

There is, first and foremost, "The Library of Babel," written by Borges in 1941, whose very first line sets off alarms to a reader of Eco: "The universe (which other call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings." (79) Firstly, and most obviously, the library is certainly the world of Eco and Borges, two titans of learning whose lives are devoted to books. At the time "The Library of Babel" was written, Borges had spent years as First Assistant in the Miguel CanÐ"© branch of the Municipal Library, a menial job. Later in life, however, he assumed the post of director of the National Library of Argentina (resigning in 1973 when PerÐ"Ñ-n returned to the Presidential office). Not only is the library the world of Eco and Borges, but also their characters. William of Baskerville, Adso, and the other monks often express themselves by unconsciously quoting books, not only because the entirety of human knowledge was kept in the monastic libraries, but because the monks were men who denied bodily desires and isolated themselves within walled microcosms (although, granted, more for Adso's Benedictines than William's Franciscans). Many human experiences were only to be gained from reading, secluded as the monks were. Borges' main characters are also overwhelmingly men of books and erudition, as will be shown.

The Aedificium library is obviously of similar construction to Borges' Library, with hexagonal rooms and ventilation shafts. The rooms of Borges have a set numbers of shelves and books, each gallery "identical to the first and all the others," (79) recalling why William and Adso became lost during their first exploration of the library. Spiral staircases are mentioned, but this is probably not significant, given the conventions of monastic building. In each "entrance way hangs a mirror," recalling the device that inspired fear in Adso, also another common symbol in the work of Borges. The Library is peopled by librarians who are born, work, and die among the stacks.

"The Library is a sphere whose consummate center is any hexagon, and whose circumference is inaccessible." (80) The fixed point symbol is central to Foucault's Pendulum, which questions the possibility of ever having just one. The Island of the Day Before similarly investigates the notion through the measure of longitude, demonstrating that any Prime Meridian is a purely arbitrary construct. Coupled with the infinite is the notion of infinite order, which in "The Library of Babel" leads to the divine: "Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the work of chance or of malevolent demiurges; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatic volumes, of indefatigable ladders for the voyager, and of privies for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god." (81) The narrator, a librarian, then examines the apparent chaos of the books themselves, in which "as is well known: for one reasonable line or one straightforward note there are leagues of insensate cacophony, of verbal farragoes and incoherencies." (81) He then relates that many of the Library believe that the books mean nothing, and that to seek order in them is folly. The Library, it is eventually concluded, is composed of every possible book that can exist through the permutation all letters within a set number of pages.

Given this revelation, the Library people, whose history of centuries is narrated, faced the problem of finding order in their universe. The vocabulary of religion is used repeatedly. as groups of librarians tried to arrive at a system of order or conclusive disorder. The "Purifiers" went about destroying books that seemed meaningless. Another

blasphemous sect suggested that all searches be given up and that men everywhere shuffle letters and symbols until they succeeded in composing, by means of an improbable stroke of luck, the canonical books. The authorities found themselves obliged to issue severe orders. The sect disappeared, but in my childhood I still saw old men who would hide out in the privies for long periods of time. (84)

This passage first suggests the Jewish mysticism of Kabbala, which Borges and Eco write of considerably. More importantly, it raises the question of heresy posed in The Name of the Rose: are individuals allowed to interpret for themselves, or must they accept the bulls of authority? This sect and the Purifiers recall the librarians in Rose, who select which knowledge may be learned. Another group in the Library were believers in "the Man of the Book," who reasoned that "there must exist a book which is the cipher and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has perused it, and it is analogous to a god." (85) The narrator, an old, disillusioned librarian, by story's end announces his own hope for universal order: that the Library is infinite but periodic -- that the limited number of books are repeatedly scattered throughout the endless galleries, in a sort of sine wave.

Now this is a monumentous literary precedent for Rose, which also examines how men invent or discover (as the case may be) ordered systems to explain their surroundings. Eco acknowledges the influence of "The Library of Babel" in many ways. The Aedificium library (hereafter "library," uncapitalized) is a universe in its plan, its parts corresponding in orientation and literary content to the known world map, its rooms identical to the ingenuous. It is interesting that the library's secret is solved in Eco, but not conclusively in Borges. The method William used to divine the library map is a great