The Name of the Rose

"On sober reflection, I find few reasons for publishing my Italian version of an obscure, neo-Gothic French version of a seventeenth-century Latin edition of a work written in Latin by a German monk toward the end of the fourteenth century." 

The unknown narrator, whom many readers speculate is Eco himself, speaks here about his motivations for publishing his “manuscript,” which exists at several removes from the present-day audience, both chronologically and linguistically. This distancing effect is heightened by the repetition in this passage, where the phrase “of a/n” is used three times. In highlighting the disadvantage of the work’s obscurity, the narrator appears to cast doubt on the text’s capacity to transmit truth, or any meaning whatsoever. As a semiotician, Umberto Eco is engaged—as a professor, author, and philosopher—in an extended exploration of meaning-making, and an interrogation of the methods of signification available to human beings.

“The truth, before it is revealed to all, face to face, we see in fragments (alas, how illegible) in the error of the world, so we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us.” 

In the Prologue, Adso of Melk, writing as an old man, introduces his manuscript and his intentions in sharing it with his unknown readers. This passage reflects the novel’s participation in postmodernism, a broad movement that developed in the mid- to late-twentieth century across philosophy, the arts, and architecture. While the movement encompasses a broad range of ideas, it can be typically defined by a rejection of universal truths and ideologies, and asserts that any claims to knowledge and truth are really only products of social, historical, and political circumstances.