“I wrote a novel because I wanted to. I think that is reason enough to start counting. Man is by nature a fabulating animal. I started writing in March 1978, prompted by a seminal idea. He wanted to poison a monk, ”Umberto Eco clarified, in“ Apostilles to The Name of the Rose ”. He published them in 1985, five years after his debut in fiction, a referential historical crime novel for which he considered the title “The Abbey of Crime”, began an undeniable success story. Awarded the Strega and the Medicis, it is today a fundamental work of 20th century literature and a long-seller with 60 million copies sold in 50 languages.
Umberto Eco (1932-2016), respected Italian semiologist, philosopher, humanist and essayist, set “The Name of the Rose” in the 14th century, for seven days in 1327, in a Benedictine abbey in the mountains of northern Italy, inspired by architecturally in the Sacra di San Michele, where the mysterious and violent deaths of monks take place, in an environment impregnated with heresy and the blood spilled by the Inquisition. “He made history with his medieval thriller. His book is a plea against obscurantism in the form of a monastic detective novel ”, summarized the novelist Pierre Lemaitre in his Passionate Dictionary of Crime Novels.
A character who acts as an accidental detective arrives at this scenario, which Eco chose for being a “closed place, a concentration universe”. He needed him, he pointed out, “endowed with a great sense of observation and a special sensitivity for the interpretation of indications. Qualities that were only found within the Franciscan sphere.” And he created the English-born friar William of Baskerville, a kind of medieval Sherlock Holmes (through whose name the writer evokes “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” the most famous adventure of the detective created by Arthur Conan Doyle). They even resemble each other in the description: “His height of him was higher than that of a normal man and since he was very skinny, he seemed even taller. His gaze was sharp and penetrating; the sharp and slightly hooked nose gave his face a watchful expression ”.
However, his appearance in the novel differed from the film face to which he remained forever attached, embodied by Sean Connery in the 1986 version of Jean-Jacques Annaud, a film with excellent reception but that tasted little in the face of the magnitude of the book. .
Eco was about to let the detective be the real character of the Franciscan William of Ockham, but he resigned: he “disliked” him. But he did reflect the struggles between religious orders around poverty or opulence and possession of goods by the Church, a topic that is debated in the abbey. And he faced the hatred of the fearsome royal inquisitor Bernardo Gui.
Along with Connery, a very young Christian Slater in the role of Watson who accompanies Guillermo de Baskerville, the Benedictine novice Adso de Melk, who will experience his sexual initiation that week, and to whom he transfers, the writer admits, many of his “terrors as an adolescent and his palpitations of love”, but also his terrors “before unknown languages, before the difficulties of thought, before the mysteries of political life”.
Adso is the narrator, who in a manuscript “tells at the age of 80 something he saw at 18”. “He records all the events with the photographic fidelity of a teenager, but he doesn’t understand them,” says Eco, who with this formula manages to make “ordinary readers identify with the narrator’s innocence and feel justified even though sometimes they don’t understand everything.” ”. He is a key piece in the success of “The Name of the Rose”, where the author of Apocalyptic and Integrated masterfully merged popular and scholarly culture between which he always built bridges. Thus he reached the entire spectrum of readers, skillfully pouring between crime and crime a paragon of demanding expressions in Latin and cultured quotes and theological, philosophical or literary references, from Wittgenstein to Victor Hugo or “The Library of Babel”, by Jorge Luis Borges. , which he evokes through the feared character of Jorge de Burgos, a blind monk who jealously guards the famous and labyrinthine library of the abbey.
“I wanted the reader to have fun. At least as much fun as I was having,” she wrote. Hence the choice of a detective novel, “the most metaphysical and philosophical of intrigue models”, because “deep down, the fundamental question of philosophy (as well as that of psychoanalysis) coincides with that of the detective novel: does Who is guilty?”. The author of “The Prague Cemetery” was looking for an “accomplice” reader, who would enter his game after being “capable of overcoming the penitential stumbling block of the first hundred pages.” It was not a question of giving the public what he asked for but of “revealing to him what he should want, even if he does not know it.” And he gave her, and dazzled her, with “Latin, and few women, and lots of theology, and liters of blood.”
Ever since he prepared his doctoral thesis on Saint Thomas Aquinas, Eco was a great connoisseur of the Middle Ages. And he decided to tell it “by the mouth of a chronicler of the time [Adso]”, because he himself was a “beginning storyteller”, he acknowledges in the Apostilles. He rummaged through his “hibernating medievalist archives” accumulated since 1952 to display his knowledge about aesthetics, art and architecture (he even calculated the steps of a spiral staircase to establish the time of the dialogues of the characters who pass through the abbey), the production of parchments or that of wine and olive oil or the slaughter of the pig… But he stopped writing for a year, because before that he had to “build a world as furnished as possible, down to the last details”. Then, “the words will come almost by themselves. Rem tene, verba sequentur”.
2023-08-30 04:49:39
#Erudition #abbey #crime
