Unlimited Semiosis, Intertexuality and Ex-Centricity in Umberto

Dicle Erbay AKE 612/712 Assist. Prof. Dr. Bilge Mutluay UNLIMITED SEMIOSIS, INTERTEXUALITY AND EX-CENTRICITY IN UMBERTO ECOS THE NAME OF THE ROSE The act of The identify of the roseate suggests slicey a nonher(prenominal) descriptions ab away the thick ledger at offshoot glance. Umberto Eco talks about this first of all conceit and why he chose this epithet for his go for in his instructive article he published in Alphabeta called Postille (after). He places that the base for the title was coincidental and he correspondingd it at the first thought because the rosebush is such a inwardnessful and emblematical object that it actually disjointed its original meaning- having al closely no meaning.After giving many references of the rose (The state of war of the arises, The flushncrantz Cult, Gertrude Steins poem Sacred Emily), Eco let offs that a potential ref would be confused by such a title as it both meant everyaffair and n intity at the same time. It woul d be im realistic for him/her to reach up to a cursorily conclusion in fact, that conclusion is never to come. The title of a oblige, he concludes, should stumble up ideas, non put them in order. This bill actually is a small proto graphic symbol of the entire countersign in terms of its meaning and conclusion.The comprise of the Rose is a hold back that has a multiplicity of meanings, an inexhaustible inter school moderateual matteruality, and an important theme of ex-centricity. However hitherto this explicit announcement make for the title does non satisfy around result-obsessed people who continually pick out Eco why he has chosen that title upon which he answers in his article Reading My Readers Because Pinocchio and Snow White were already copyrighted (Eco 819). He seems to afford become overwhelmed scarce his answer is non that silly either. He continues My simplistic answer concealed the fact that authors do not tattle in the void and argon determined- and tied(p) ensured- by previous schoolbookual matters. Even such debate over the title save captures the importance of inter textbookuality for both Eco and his book. In this sense, The Name of the Rose is a book all about other books. In the same article, Eco goes on to explain how to interpret a text with neither consulting the author nor falling for quick conclusions. The text is there. Narrators, as well as poets, should never be equal to provide interpretations of their suffer work. A text is a machine conceived for eliciting interpretations. When one has a text to interrogative sentence, it is inappropriate to question the author (Eco 820).Still, Eco must necessitate felt to bring few clarifications upon some academics that had fallen into the pit of symbolical explanations for Ecos work. Some wrong interpretations included fishing for ultraviolet analogies by a paranoid reader. What he did was to code a series of characters in one of his Foucaults Pendulum according t o their initial letters Abulafia, Belbo, Casaubon, and Diotallevi, devising a pattern of ABCD. Another social function he tried to do was to charge J&B label to Jacopo Belbo as he is a heavy whiskey drinker.Umberto Ecos answer to these cryptograms (which he sees as instructive waste) are surprisingly patient The alphabetical series ABCD is textually irrelevant if the names of the other characters do not bring it to X, Y, and Z and Belbo drinks martinis and furthermore his mild addiction to alcohol is not the just about relevant of his features(Eco 824). Although Eco high animateds intertextuality and symbolic references, he is never too simple to connect them to trivial pursuits. Thus, he obviously needed to describe a model reader for his whole kit and boodle to be understood accordingly A text is a ruse conceived in order to produce its illustration Reader.Such a reader is not the one who makes the scarcely right conjecture. A text slew picture a Model Reader entitl ed to try infinite conjectures (Eco 821). Therefore, the readers of The Name of the Rose, instead of toilsome to achieve one single meaning, should be outdoors to a multiple and diverse of meanings so that the text can be achieved. The author should too be aware of this fact when he writes a book and publishes it, it will be frank to anyone who reads it and it will be open to interpretations not according to the authors intentions however by a complex strategy of interactions.Applying the Model Reader to The Name of the Rose, Eco says in Postille that he lacks an accomplice for his game. While he was writing, he wanted to be whole specific to the sum Ages and he wanted to live in the Middle Ages as if it were his avouch age (and vice versa). Simultaneously he wished for a reader who would fall victim to him, or rather his book and would want nothing more than the book presents him. Then he directly speaks to the reader In go around, I will present you so much of Latin, few women, abundant theology, litres of blood as in Grand Guignol that you will say alone this is wrongI am out There, at that piece you will belong to me and you will feel the shiver of the eternal almightiness of matinee idol who baffles the order of the world. Then, if you are smart, you will realize how I have entrapped you, because in the long run I have been recogniseing you this with each tempo I have been warning you well about the fact that I have been dragging you into resultant up in hell. Yet the crush thing about the contracts do with Satan is that peoples wittingly menageing it with whom they are doing business. Otherwise what is the deal about hell and honour anyway? my trans variationation 655) What he is doing here is to p recumb with the conventions of the novel, which would normally and readily accept any eager reader submerging oneself in the book, resting peace dependabley in between its orderly pages without any threat or trap, and ending smoothly in the bliss of closure. He is questioning and playing with those conventions by threatening his readers and proving his postmodern attitudes towards his act of writing as well as his readers. In order to reach a full dread of a text, Eco has his theoretical explanations about signs that constitute texts.The Name of the Rose will shit itself more in his article The Theory of Signs and the Role of the Reader. He talks about the freedom of use of a text and goes on to say A text is not a clear crystal-clear structure explainable in a single way on the contrary, a text is a lazy machinery which forces its possible readers to do a part of its textual work, just now the modalities of the interpretive operations-albeit multiple, and possibly infinite-are by no means equivocal and must be recognized as imposed by the semiotical strategies displayed by the text. 36) We are again made aware of the plurality of meanings of a text and its certain(prenominal) boundaries made out of semiotics. Every single sign works with its context and they help us in the process of understanding what we are reading (or seeing). If signs were not endowed with a certain text-oriented meaning metaphors would not work, and every metaphor would alone say that a thing is a thing (37).Therefore we need the theory of signs for a clean interpretation In order to understand, then, how a text can be not completely generated exclude in like manner interpreted, one needs a circumstances of semantico-pragmatic rules, organized by an encyclopedia-like semantic representation, which establish how and under which conditions the addressee of a precondition text is entitled to collaborate in order to actualize what the text actually says. (43) The Name of the Rose is a huge pool of signs and unlimited semiosis from which the reader is challenged to absorb every meaning and not to choose and one out of all those choices.It is such a thin aviation between coming to an understanding of a whole set of meanings at the same time without feeling overwhelmed and drowning in the ocean of signs in strip of attempting to pin them all. Rather than coming to a conclusion, the book has infinite layers of a rose, from which the reader cannot reach a concluding meaning. The point is to derive pleasance from the process of meaning, not its closure. Adso also is a naive reader who should mark off this notion without the book.One critic named Rocco Capozzi interprets Adsos development under the light of Peircean ideas On his journey-and it is virtually appropriate that a novice, in his gradual formation, should check into through and through the experience of a journey (one of the important, and most obvious, over coded symbols of The Rose) Adso learns from William that the record of books is similar to the nature of signs. As he loses more and more of his naivete, and as he acquires more and more what Peirce calls logica docens, Adso learns to accept that when speaking of signs, he can ever and only speak of something that speaks . . of something else perhaps without ever arriving at the final something-at the true one. This is only one of the many clear traces of Peirces ruler of unlimited semiosis in The Rose. (416) Adso questions Williams method of logic in trying to disclose the murders in the monastery as the latter seems to delay the solutions rather than hit to them. He addresses Adso Solving the mystery is not the same as deducing from first principles. Nor does it amount simply to collecting a number of particular entropy from which to infer a ecumenic law.It means, rather, facing one or twain or three particular data apparently with nothing in common, and trying to imagine whether they could represent so many instances of a general law you dont yet know, and which perhaps has never been pronounced. . . . In the face of some inexplicable facts you must try to imagine many general laws, whose connection with your facts escapes you. Then suddenl y, in the unexpected connection of a result, a specific situation, and one of those laws, you perceive a song of cogitate that seems more convincing than the others.You try applying it to all similar cases, to use it for making predictions, and you discover that your intuition was right. But until you reach the end you will never know which predicates to introduce into your reasoning and which to omit. And this is what I am doing now. I line up so many disjointed elements and I venture some hypothesis. I have to venture many, and many of them are so sozzled that I would be ashamed to tell them to you. (295-296) William is the critical or the Model reader that Eco yearns for. While reading the book, the readers attitude toward it should be like Williams method.Adso, on the other hand is the naive reader who cares more about a single truth rather than enjoying the process. Adso wants to sample about the truth in vain But then you are still far from the solution. I am very close to one, but I dont know which. Therefore you dont have a single answer to your questions? Adso, if I did I would thatched roof theology in Paris. In Paris do they always have the true answer? Never, but they are very sure of their errors. (297) It is also possible to see William here as a different type of monk- he questions everything even Gods word, yet not so openly.Still, his novice loses some of his respect towards him upon hearing there is not a single truth. He is worried about the murders and impatient to solve it immediately. He thinks that William is wasting time and disregarding the horrible events in the monastery I had the impression that William was not at all interested in the truth, which is nothing but the adjustment between the thing and the intellect. On the contrary, he amused himself by imagining how many possibilities were possible. At that moment, I confess, I despaired of my master and caught myself thinking, Good thing the inquisitor has come. I was on the side of that thirst for truth that shake Bernard Gui. (297) While we are enjoying the process of reading The Name of the Rose, we are presented with unmeasured references from various writers, thinkers, poets, and so on. These references are not directly there in front of our eyes but the competent reader is quick to kidnapping the source of the references he has known. They are so absorbed in the text that only what the reader knows is available to him/her. Capozzi defines The Name of the Rose as a mosaic of books- as a novel of books within books, and of signs and a scheme of signs within other systems (417).Intertextuality is some other important aspect of The Name of the Rose which adds to the multiplicity of meanings. In fact, Ecos novel is a perfect example of assured (and unconscious) hybridization it is a text in which many other texts merge, fuse, collide, intersect, speak to, and illuminate, one another-each with its own language and ideologue. The Rose, succinc tly put, is a skillful (con)structure of an designedly ambiguous, polyvalent, and self-reflexive novel in-tended to generate multiple meanings.Moreover, it is a novel which wishes to be an merchandise of textual traces and textures a discourse with many texts and a literary text generated through the end-less process of writing and reading, re-writing and re-reading, etc. Looking for the sources of these references, however, is a abortive journey in reading the book. If overemphasized this practice undermines the whole strategy of overtly using quotations and intertextuality as a foreseen textual strategy for generating other texts (Capozzi 414).It also overlooks Ecos way of literary journey through encyclopedia of lit in the act of writing and ignores the re-writing and re-reading other texts as a text or an interrelationship of different discourses and meanings. Many critics has found in The Name of the Rose references from several writers such as William of Occam, Roger Bacon , Alessandro Manzoni, Jorge L. Borges, Conan Doyle, Michail Bakhtin, Charles S. Peirce, Jury Lotman, Roland Barthes, Maria Corti, Ecos own theoretical and journalistic writings, and so on.The ultimate reference seems to be to the parole as the books starts like Genesis and ends in an Apocalypse, adding the seven-day creation in the recitalline by giving the account of the events in a week. It is also possible to see Bakhtin in Adsos carnivalesque dream and the side ornaments that Adelmo draws on books. But the most significant of the references is undoubtedly to Borges as the book is so full of Borgesian elements like labyrinth, library, books about books and mirror that in fact some critics even claim that the true author of The Name of the Rose is Borges- not Eco.The most striking reference to Borges seems to be the name of the murderer Jorge de Burgos. Eco personally answers to those who ask why the characters name evokes the writer and why he is such a bad figure I do not kno w it myself, either. I was in need of a blind man in charge of the library (that seemed to be a good idea to me) and a blind library only begets Borges because everything has a price (my translation 644). It is also a revelation of his debts to Borges. In fact not only more than a few elements in the book are Borgesian but also Ecos interpretation of a text finds its roots in the writer.Borges is known to see a book as a dialogue in which it engages with the reader and he does not accept it as an spaced entity. Moreover, Borges uses a painstaking description of characters, dates, recondite historical facts, erudite philosophic debates, and detailed bibliographical references, each of which serves to blur the border between honesty and imagination (all of which is visible in The Name of the Rose) in the beginning paragraphs of many of his short stories (Corry 428).By such a detailed introduction, the reader is invited not to question the reality of the reported facts. Furthermore, the profusion of characters, the scholarly questions, and the endless references to books and writers also tell us that we are surrounded by a Borgesian jungle. Many short stories of Borges are also alluded to in the book. A library representing the universe, its structure of a complicated and large labyrinth, the possibility of knowing the secrets of the world, all move us The Library of Babel.Williams role as a researcher trying to decipher the secret interior of the library only through examination of its exterior and with the help of mathematics is similar to the detective Eric Lonnrot in Death and the Compass (Corry 428-429). The similarities are so many to count but Ecos debt to Borges is undeniably great. The final significant feature of The Name of the Rose that I am going to mention is its central theme of ex-centricity. It is the story of those who are driven away from the centre, the system and it is mostly used in historiograpic metafiction.The characters in the book a re continuously struggling in and out of the centre. William and Adso are trying to record the center of the library, Franciscans are trying to enter the center of the Church by making Avignon accept Jesus christs poverty and Jorge is trying to keep his central position by protecting library at the cost of his and anybody elses life. However, the ex-centrics in the book are mostly seen to establish their own meta-narrative and thus creating their own circle. The most striking example is of the lepers.They are misshapen, their flesh is decaying and all whitish, they are hobbling on their crutches, with egotistic eyelids, bleeding eyes. They do not speak or shout they chirrup like mice (192). William explains their ex-centricity For the Christian people they are others, those who remain on the knock of the flock. The flock hates them, they hate the flock, who wish all lepers like them would die. The flock is like a series of concentric circles, from the broadest range of the flo ck to its immediate surroundings.The lepers are a sign of exclusion in general (197-198). But the main point is revealed when William talks about the circles and their surroundings in general through the lepers exclusion as heretics This is the illusion of heresy. Everyone is heretical, everyone is orthodox. The faith of a movement proclaims doesnt count what counts is the hope it offers. All the heresies are the banner of a reality, an exclusion. prize the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only this to keep the leper as he is (194).The point is not to find a compromise or a remedy for the outsiders in all author relations but to keep them where they are. The Franciscans are also mostly coveted to be excluded rather than to be listened and be given some credit. sort of of sharing an ocean of knowledge with the rest of the world, Jorge prefers keeping it all to himself for his own interpretation of order and submission and even kills himself by eating the poisoned pages of the book and burns the library. The meta-narrative, the center of the circle is so strong that its total expiry is more acceptable than its break.The argument of under which category The Name of the Rose is heated. It was labeled by many critics as metaphysical, mystery, detective or anti-detective story, post-modern, historical, bildungsroman, Gothic or essay novel, and so on. My impression is that the book might be all of this and none of this at the same time. Linda Hutcheon puts it under tha category of historiographic metafiction the description of which is in the follows Historiographic metafiction works to situate itself within historical discourse without surrendering its indecorum as fiction.And it is a kind of seriously ironic charade that effect both aims the intertexts of history and fiction take on parallel (though not equal) status in the parodic reworking of the textual past of both the world and literature. The textual incorporation of these intertextual past(s) as a constitutive structural element of postmodern fiction functions as a formal marking of historicity-both literary and worldly. At first glance it would appear that it is only its constant ironic intercommunicate of difference at the very heart of similarity that distinguishes postmodern parody from medieval and Renaissance imitation (see Greene 17). Nevertheless, a distinction should be made Traditionally, stories were stolen, as Chaucer stole his or they were felt to be the common space of a culture or community These notable happenings, imagined or real, lay outside language the way history itself is supposed to, in a condition of pure occurrence (Gass 147). The intertextual parody of historiographic metafiction enacts, in a way, the views of certain contemporary historiographers (see Canary and Kozicki) it offers a sense of the presence of the past, but this is a past that can only be known from its texts, its traces-be they literary or historical.We are welcomed by Ecos efforts to legalize the reality of his book the book we are holding in our hands is actually a junto and edited version of many other writers other than Adso. The book is preserve by an Abbe named Vallet and it is the French translated manuscript of Dom J. Mabillons print, the author of which is Dom Adso of Melk. The book is made out of scattered notes, edited many times and travelled the most challenging journey- yet we have it in full and large form as it is. The suspense is there what to believe in and what not to is always a mystery. The author as lost his authority by distancing himself from the origins of the book so far away that the reader does not give himself only to what he has to say- there is a continuous and ongoing questioning. The intertextuality of the book is another marking of both literary and worldly historicity as Hutcheon says. It is a monitor lizard of the past that we can never be sure to refer except from textual rema ining. As the last line of the book suggests Stat rosa immemorial nomine, nomina nuda tenemus. 1 &8212&8212&8212&8212&8212&8212&8212 1 Once a rose exists with its name, in our hands only names remain (my translation).