#code books

The protagonist of the book is called Guglielmo/William of Baskerville. The names are important, and this is a lesson that the Moffits have learned well. Stat rosa pristina nomina, nomina nuda tenemus. We may never come to know the true essence of things, the truth maybe  is unknowable, but at least we have the names and possess their knowledge. William  (don’t ring a bell?) as  William of Ockham . There's a lot of Ockham in Holmes's method. Occam's Razor for which for the solution of a problem the simplest solution must be applied among the existing ones, it is easily applicable to the Holmesian method. Once the impossible has been eliminated (cut off like a razor) the improbable (the complicated, implausible and unlikely solutions), even if unlikely, what remains, must be the truth. And the search of truth is a constant throughout the book, the truth about the crimes of the Abbey, but above all about the Truth as an absolute concept. A truth that, as William says, is liberty (THOB), but which escapes to the point at the end we/Adso/William are doubting its existence as an absolute concept. The William in the book is blatantly Sherlockian. English in the first place, higher than the norm, but which appears even higher as he’s very thin. He has a sharp and slightly hooked nose, his face is elongated with an expression that is both acute and alert. Very agile, endowed with inexhaustible energy in moments of activity, which alternated with others of complete immobility. We see him several times completely lost in his thoughts, with his eyes closed and his mouth following inaudible speeches. He is described  as being able to remain completely still on his bed, with vacant and silent eyes for long periods. Who describes him to us wonders if by chance it was not possible that this state was induced by mysterious substances, and at least once we see Guglielmo chewing mysterious leaves that help him to think. Easily inclined to give up sleep and food if the case dictates.

He has an extraordinary delicacy of touch if necessary. He is a man capable of fantasizing about a future in which boats will be faster and will go without the strength of men or sailing, a world in which flying and submarine vehicles will exist, because the things that are not there yet are not said not there will be. I would venture, not even that much, and call him a man out of his time. 

A normally mild man, he can become brusque and often, to bring an interrogation to a successful end, he takes advantage of a moment of weakness for the interrogated. This is one of those traits that I don't remember being canonical but that we certainly see in Sherlock BBC.

At talking about him is his young disciple, his blogger scribe. All we know of William and the affairs of the Abbey we know thanks to a manuscript that speaks of a manuscript which is then the manuscript of William's disciple. How many holmesian pastiche use the expedient of the rediscovered manuscript? I lost the calculation. This young disciple is called wADSOn, he looks to his teacher with affection and unspeakable wonder, and with his observations that seem irrelevant leads  Guglielmo on the way to solution (light conductor). He admits that once his master gives an explanation of his deductions, everything seems so clear that he regrets not having understud it alone. The function of Aso from the poetic point of view is to put a distance between the author and what is narrated. It is not the author who writes the story, but a young Benedictine from the 1300s. The narrator is young and still unaware and amazed at the things of the world, so when he tells about them he doesn't do it in a didactic tone, but as if it were something new for he as it is for us. Adso records events without completely understanding them, and this helps the less educated reader (I believe 98%) to navigate between these complex pages. If there is something he doesn't understand, it is probably something that Adso did not understud before him. This kind of trick is the same one used by Doyle that through Watson allows us to understand how the mind of Holmes works, step by step. This does not mean that wADSOn is stupid, on the contrary, only that he is learning. It doesn't even seem a coincidence that William is a monk. A man who has chosen to dedicate himself to the intellect, repressing and suppressing everything that is carnal. Adso is young, still impulsive and inexperienced, and will yield to the temptations of the flesh (once only).

A curious feature of Guglielmo is that, having now at least fifty years and presumably being presbyopic, he uses glasses, an unusual object for the time. It could be nothing but I like to read it a reference to Doyle as an ophtalmologist. And in a narrative space  the glasses are lost and the monk finds himself unable to read. We can say that this is a moment in which he sees, but can't observe. William reads the signs of reality to look for possible truths. In the first moment when we meet him he deduces the existence of a horse from simple signs left in the woods, he is actually a detective. But in his life he was also an Inquisitor, a position he left. We see him in the book confronting an inquisitor Bernardo Gui and we see the difference in attitude. The inquisitor is more interested in punishing the defendants, while Guglielmo wants to discover the culprits, "unraveling a beautiful and tangled skein". The same attitude that we see in Holmes that always looks a little beyond what the police do  and absolute justice does has more value than secular justice. In his search for truth, Guglielmo says that no hypothesis, even if extraordinary, should be overlooked. He himself tells that he aligns many elements that apparently have no connection and makes assumptions about them. But to arrive at a solution, he has to pretend many hypotheses, some so absurd that he is ashamed to tell them. The elimination of the impossible by staging. This sounds a lot like MInd Theater, doesn't it? Among the other references to the Canon, the most obvious is the use of a burned plant that creates visions. There is also a moment in which Guglielmo states that God must be good if he generated nature. Holmes will instead say that nature, its beauty (a rose!) Is proof of the existence of God (BRUC). The story of the novel unfolds inside an Abbey on the top of a hill. Inside the walls, barely contained, overlooking the rocks there is a construction called the Aedificium. It is divided into three parts. There is the Kitchen, the Scriptorium and the Library. An absolutely symbolic place. The kitchen is the body, it satisfies the needs, it prepares food but it is also the place where a carnal congress is consumed (food / sex metaphor). The Scriptorium is the space of intellect, of knowledge. The Library instead is conceived as a labyrinth, a place where knowledge is kept, but at the same time it is made inaccessible. Something very similar to the unconscious, which in the BBC Sherlock we see buried under the ground, while here it stands out against the sky (like a plane maybe). The curious thing is the shape of the building, built on a rigid symbolic and mathematical basis, it looks like this:

We find a similar shape both in the Mind Palace (Moriarty's cell and probably operating theater) and in Baskerville.

In the Library the books that are the sum of human, licit and illicit knowledge are jealously guarded, in fact the librarian reserves the right to keep some of them hidden. A structure that seems very similar to the human psyche, to the eternal struggle between conscious and unconscious thought, between memories and removed that in BBC Sherlock seems to be recurrent. The relationship between master and disciple is among the most platonic and there seems to be no doubt in this regard. Adso loves Guglielmo, loves his intellect but also his features, he argues in the purest way (not that the admiration imbued with sexuality cannot be pure, this is a heavy Catholic heritage from which we have not yet freed ourselves, but it is a meta for another time), but also he need to clarify unnecessarily  the concept and in later life he will confess to let the gaze linger longer on the young novices.

Guglielmo on his part is never if not paternal regard to Adso. Their relationship, however, seems weaker than that between the two original characters that inspired them, but that was probably not the point of the novel. This doesn't mean that the issue of homosexuality is not treated. If we want we can also say that all the dead involved had had homosexual relations and all had somehow had had to do with a forbidden book. The story takes place inside a convent, the characters involved are all men, apart from an external exception, feminine, which will seduce Adso, even if this fact is susceptible to interpretative doubts. Being a faithful chronicle of the times, homosexual relations are doomed, but after all even heterosexual ones it's just condoned. We are talking about friars. But if heterosexual relations are tolerated, they are part of heterodoxy, homosexual ones are decidedly condemned, like heretics. It is no wonder that in so many heresies sodomy is an integral part. It falls within the fear and condemnation of the different, the different is a heretic, the homosexual is different, homosexuality is heresy. An easy syllogism. In the name of the Rose the feminine is ephemeral. There is this unique beautiful girl with whom Adso will be joining the same night he had previously had an apparently innocent encounter with a friar. We see she only for a fleeting moment. The feminine seems to be an allegory of all that is seductive. Devilishly seductive because we are among men for whom the pleasures of the flesh are a weakness. 

Friar Ubertino, the one with whom Adso meets before giving in to the girl's flattery, speaks with desire of the forms of the virgin Mary, but he does so by holding the young Adso to himself. Every time a friar, which will then be indulged in homosexual pleasures, is described to us,  a feminine characteristic is added to him. The feminine is not something that exists in this context, but desire, love, jealousy, in its best and worst aspects, yes. And all this is represented, but only allegorically by the feminine. Besides, Adso will tell about the girl that he didn't even know her name. One wonders if he didn't know it or maybe he just didn't dare to name it. The debate between orthodoxy and heresy runs through the whole book. It is a mainstay. And if under a pure textual meaning we can read an other, political, one (the Italian Brigate Rosse as heretics) a further level of reading is possible, halfway between the subtext and the surface. Then again the relationship between homosexuality and heresy. And heretics were burned. Adso tells that he experienced a state similar to ecstasy in witnessing the burning of an heretic, an ecstasy that reminds him the fleshly one that he will then experience firsthand. A connection that amazes the friar himself, but that tells us a lot about the real nature of what he lived.

Guglielmo's antagonist is an old blind man who will eventually lead to the destruction of the Library. Their relationship is love and hate, admiration and repulsion. Difficult not to see the Moriaty / Holmes relationship. Towards the end we see the same old man in the middle of the Library which is actually a labyrinth, a labyrinth that is described as a web. Throughout the book the two tease, provoke themselves, do a dance that has a lot of seduction. All caused by a book that the old man wanted to keep secret and when this was no longer possible the Library ended up on fire before the water managed to extinguish its flames. "Guglielmo wept". (water/emotions). The theme of the book is the  laughter. It refers to a hypothetical lost Aristotle's book concerning the Comedy. In short the meaning of the book is that laughter has its own dignity, its cognitive value. Comedy, the comedian, saying things differently, ridiculing them, forces us to look at them more carefully, and we end up seeing the hidden truth. At the same time, even the most fearful things, when turned into comedy, lose their terrifying power. Laughter free from fear (and it is the main reason why it is feared) The thought is immediately at every moment when John and Sherlock are represented as homosexuals in BBC Sherlock. These are always jokes, ridiculous moments. But as we are told in the fictitious book in The Name of the Rose, laughter conceals the truth. A book in a book that talks about books, because, it is repeated several times, all books speak of other books, each book is a reference to a previous book and from obvious books it is possible to arrive at occult books. As if to say that to understand a book it is enough to have another one. London AZ for Sherlock and our still unknown book. Unknown probably because not unique. A set of books (code booKs), but just because Sherlock Holmes has left the sphere of books and has expanded himself into other media. The Name of the Rose is a book about books, a complex labyrinth of intertextual quotations, but also a use manual of books. The books are something that involves the author and the text in the first place, but once it's finished,  the relationship is the one that is established between the reader and the text. And the texts are meant to be interpreted. "Books are not meant to be believed but to be subjected to investigation. In front of a book we must not ask ourselves what it says, but what it means ... the letter must be discussed even if the supersense remains good. " *I humbly apologize but I don't have a reference text in English, so this is a horrid, as usual for me, translation of the perfect Eco's Italian  (sooner or later I will learn English .... maybe when I won't lose so much time on a certain author ;-P) A licence for those like us who want to go beyond the visible, the admission that a text is more of what appears, which is susceptible to generate always different readings without ever running itself out completely. And this is true for some books more than for others, because in some the subtext presses towards the surface, barely contained by metaphors, mirrors and allegories. Since ancient times methods for expressing truth. Metaphors, puzzles, word games, which sometimes seem put in a text out of pure delight, often hide truths that want to be kept silent, for various reasons, to most people. A book on books that talk about books hidden in books, books that hide the truth under layers of words. A book about a medieval Sherlock Holmes and rarely the universe is so lazy.