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William’s Glasses
Although William of Baskerville describes the abbey’s library as the “greatest in Christendom,” its thousands of books are all destroyed in a raging fire at the end of Adso of Melk’s narration. Decades later, an older Adso returns the site in northern Italy where the abbey had once stood. He patiently gathers up a few tattered remains of the library: “scraps of parchment,” “intact bindings,” a few rotten pages where he can sometimes see a “title,” or “an image’s shadow” or “the ghost of one or more words.” These fragments of books symbolize the larger whole of the lost library and its vast body of knowledge. As Adso puts it, this “lesser library” is a “symbol of the greater, vanished one.” Over the succeeding years, he collects copies of books that he had seen at the abbey and tries to use these incomplete pages to imaginatively reconstruct the library. This endeavor is related to Umberto Eco’s own literary project in The Name of the Rose. Like Adso, Eco imagines a book that had once existed (the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics) but is now lost. Nevertheless, he uses the available evidence to create a plausible reconstruction of what Aristotle might have written on comedy. The notion of a fragment that can stand in for a lost whole is thus central to the novel. Adso uses the metaphor of a dismembered body in writing about the library’s fragmented and burnt remains, which he describes as “membra” and “amputated stumps of books.” By imagining these scattered parts as a symbol of the vanished body, Adso hopes that through these “fragments, quotations, and unfinished sentences…a message might reach [him]”. He devotes an entire day to a seemingly fruitless task—collecting pages of books that can no longer be read—because he believes that those fragments have a greater symbolic meaning.
The Fragments of the Library Quotes in The Name of the Rose
The The Name of the Rose quotes below all refer to the symbol of The Fragments of the Library. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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"Naturally, A Manuscript" and Prologue Quotes
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.
Related Characters:
Unnamed Narrator (speaker), Adso of Melk
Related Symbols:
The Fragments of the Library
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4
Explanation and Analysis:
The history of Adso’s manuscript is long and convoluted. The original fourteenth-century manuscript has been lost. The narrator transcribed Adso’s memoirs from a “neo-Gothic French version” by the “Abbé Vallet” at the “Abbaye de la Source,” but lost his copy of the book. Perplexingly, the narrator later learns that no Abbé Vallet ever published books in the nineteenth century on the presses of the “Abbaye de la Source.” He would have thought it was a forgery had he not also found quotations from Adso’s memoirs in a seventeenth-century Latin work by Father Athanasius Kircher. All these details give the impression that the reader is very far removed from Adso’s original text (if it ever existed at all). The Name of the Rose is an Italian version of a French version of a Latin version of a lost fourteenth-century manuscript, and so the narrator sees “few reasons” for publishing a text that may not even be authentic, because the original text has vanished.
By making it clear that the reader can ever only know Adso’s memoirs secondhand, Eco foregrounds the postmodern idea that “books always speak of other books” (as William of Baskerville later puts it). The “Abbaye de la Source” is a pun on the word “source,” meaning the original text. Although the source of Adso’s memoirs is lost, traces of his manuscript can be found in references in other texts. This is a fitting beginning, since the plot of the novel turns on the search for the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics. This lost book similarly leaves traces behind in other books, although the original source is nowhere to be found.
Last Page Quotes
Mine was a poor harvest, but I spent a whole day reaping it, as if from those disiecta membra of the library a message might reach me. […] At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books.
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Explanation and Analysis:
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The Fragments of the Library Symbol Timeline in The Name of the Rose
The timeline below shows where the symbol The Fragments of the Library appears in The Name of the Rose. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Last Page
...a bookcase, largely rotted by termites but containing a few pages. He salvages these few fragments of the library, hoping to reconstruct what had once been the greatest collection of books...
(full context)
Over the years, he writes, he has read and re-read these fragments, as if a message from the library might reach him. He is increasingly convinced that...
(full context)
