The Name of the Rose

The novel dramatizes Eco's semiotic principles from The Role of the Reader and A Theory of Semiotics. William of Baskerville reads the abbey's signs—coded manuscripts, cryptic deaths, architectural clues—through a method of abductive inference rather than fixed deduction. The lost Aristotle volume on comedy represents the threat of multiple, uncontrollable meanings: laughter opens interpretive possibilities that dogma cannot contain. Jorge's destruction of the book enacts what Eco theorized as the tyranny of the 'closed text,' while William's investigative method embodies the 'open text' that invites the reader's active construction of meaning [citation:14].

The poisoned book is the novel's central symbol and murder weapon. Aristotle's Poetics on comedy—the second book, now lost—would have argued for the positive value of laughter and joy. Jorge of Burgos, the blind librarian, considers this argument so dangerous that he laces the manuscript's pages with poison, killing any monk who reads it. His fear is theological and political: if laughter is good, the Church's absolute authority over human meaning collapses. Eco uses this fictional lost text to stage a confrontation between medieval dogmatism and the liberating power of comedy and interpretation [citation:9].

Eco stated that 'the detective novel asks the central question of philosophy—who dunnit?' [citation:2]. He had long been interested in popular culture and narrative theory, and the mystery genre offered a structure for exploring how readers construct meaning from clues and signs. The novel is also a homage to Jorge Luis Borges, whose labyrinthine fictions and blind librarian figure directly inspired the abbey's library and its keeper. For Eco, the mystery form was not a concession to popular taste but a machine for generating interpretations, a laboratory for his theoretical concerns about reading, inference, and the plurality of meaning.

Despite being a work of fiction, the novel received a surprisingly positive response from medievalists and historians for its detailed and accurate reconstruction of 14th-century monastic life, theological debates, and political conflicts [citation:14]. Eco's academic training in medieval aesthetics and philosophy gave the novel an unusual depth of historical texture. Reviewers noted that through fiction Eco reached a wider audience—and in many ways a more responsive one—than his structuralist semiotics could achieve. The novel won the Premio Strega in 1981 and was ranked 14th on Le Monde's list of the 100 best books of the twentieth century [citation:3][citation:7].

Some readers assume The Name of the Rose is a direct allegory about fascism, but its engagement with authoritarianism is structural and philosophical rather than allegorical. The novel was published in 1980, fifteen years before Eco's essay 'Ur-Fascism.' Its concern is with the mechanisms of dogmatic power—the suppression of laughter, the control of interpretation, the fear of ambiguity—that Eco would later identify as features of fascist ideology. The abbey's inquisitorial logic and Jorge's enforcement of a single truth anticipate Eco's lifelong critique of rigid ideological systems, but the novel operates at the level of semiotic theory rather than political commentary.

William practices what Eco, following Charles Sanders Peirce, called abduction: inference to the best explanation rather than deduction from fixed premises. He reads signs probabilistically, adjusting hypotheses as new evidence emerges, and acknowledges that his conclusions are provisional. This contrasts with the inquisitor Bernard Gui, who begins with a conclusion (heresy) and reads all evidence to confirm it—a closed system of interpretation that Eco associates with tyranny. William's method embodies semiotic openness; Bernard's embodies the dogmatic closure that the novel ultimately shows to be destructive.