Books That Speak of Books

This is the second installment in Emma Garman's series about found documents, fiction, and history. Read the first installment here.

In Umberto Eco’s erudite murder mystery The Name of the Rose, set in an Italian abbey in 1327, a monk admits he would “sin in order to procure a rare book.” The narrator clarifies: “He was not lying and not joking … what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.” According to detective fiction through the ages, the likeliest reasons for murder are indeed sex and money. With The Name of the Rose, published in Italy in 1980 and in William Weaver’s English translation in 1983, Eco launched a subgenre whose psychological currents instead swirl around the third temptation: bibliophilism. Rather than cherchez la femme, the imperative is cherchez le texte, as the literary device of sought-after documents sparks an investigative plot and readerly engagement, our curiosity piqued by tales within tales. Our satisfaction is deepened by the guise of a composed account, as opposed to the artifice of a narration that simply exists: in what feels like multiple layers of creation, the author has disappeared behind the character who “wrote” the story, who is — like us! — looking for answers in the pages of a book.

This highlighting of writerly composition forms part of the meta-commentary on history and history-making embedded in these novels. Historians, who are never insulated from the worldview of their own era, cannot avoid using the novelist’s creative techniques — a point emphatically made by the historiographer Hayden White, who called historical narratives “manifestly ... verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found.” For the characters in bibliophilic murder mysteries, the reliability and authenticity of the documents they seek is neither taken for granted, nor seen as their only source of value. Eco, himself a rare book collector, was fascinated by the cultural impact of fake or fallacious knowledge. He liked to claim his library included Ptolemy, who believed the earth was the center of the universe, but not Galileo, who knew it wasn’t. Eco’s 2013 coffee table book, The Book of Legendary Lands, looks at the real-world historical influence of mythical places. As he once quipped of The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown: “He and I read the same books; only he believed them.”

The Name of the Rose has a straightforward enough premise. Brothers at a Benedictine monastery keep getting killed and our protagonist-detectives, visiting Franciscan monk William of Baskerville and his teenaged novice, Adso of Melk, can only crack the case by locating an illicit book belonging to the restricted-access spooky library. Yet bibliophilism is not merely the theme: it is the principle guiding every facet of the novel’s execution. The main story is a twice-found document, the foreword explains, a 14th century manuscript discovered in the 19th century, translated from Latin into French, then acquired in 1968 by the present author-translator, much to his “intellectual excitement.” Although the superstition-steeped medieval setting is meticulously accurate in its rendering, Eco’s countless literary allusions are untethered to history. Jorge of Burgos, the blind librarian character, is a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges: pioneer of magical realism, director of the Argentine National Library, and sufferer of hereditary retinal disease. William of Baskerville’s name evokes Sherlock Holmes, whose sleuthing skills he shares, and Adso is a play on Watson. William even recites an aphorism written by, he tells the Austrian Adso, a “mystic from your land” — in other words, the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

By Eco’s own admission, these winks at the reader highlight his work’s fictionality, inviting us to enjoy the spectacle of literary construction, of brazen intertextuality — a readerly pleasure germane, in varying degrees, to the appeal of historical fiction as a broader genre. Historical novelists, by sacrificing pure verisimilitude to an implicit (or not so implicit) dialogue between “then” and “now,” and between competing interpretations of the past, engage readers in a kind of game. Pat Barker’s 1991 anti-war masterpiece Regeneration, set in 1917, contains no anachronisms yet conveys, unmistakably, the author’s modern understanding of PTSD — newly part of the psychiatric lexicon at the time of writing. In Rose Tremain’s 1989 novel Restoration, the decadent court of King Charles II is meant to highlight, Tremain explained, “the moral consequences of Britain’s plunge into Thatcherite materialism.” A writer, to quote Hilary Mantel, “occupies both past and present and she is never absent from the story. Every mark she leaves on the page shows her thumbprint, behind the text like a watermark.” Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy rubs up, of course, against countless other versions of the bloody court of Henry VIII. Books “always speak of other books,” Eco wrote in a 1983 postscript to The Name of the Rose, “and every story tells a story that has already been told.” 

In its usual form, the “found documents” trope — be it a frame tale explaining the provenance of the main story, or documents as artifacts within the fictional world — playacts as a mark of authenticity that, hopefully, eases the suspension of disbelief. The bibliophilic postmodern novel seeks a different sort of emotional engagement by refusing, in effect, to bestow a superior authority on the “real world.” In Eco’s academic specialty of semiotics and post-structural literary theory — he wrote The Name of the Rose, his debut novel, while Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna and a visiting professor at Yale and Columbia — the world is a collection of signs whose meaning is unfixed, just as a text is open to different readers’ interpretation. Adso, narrating from the vantage point of decades later, had believed “each book spoke of the things, human and divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.”

Adding another dizzying dimension to Eco’s cosmology, The Name of the Rose — praised as “ageneric” by the literary theorist Frank Kermode in a contemporary review — wound up in conversation with the niche of novels it inspired. The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez Reverte, published in Spanish in 1993 and in an English translation by Sonia Soto in 1996, is among the most notable of its literary offspring. (Others include The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón (2001) and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (2005), both mega-best sellers with era-crossing plots spurred by documents found in a library.) The Club Dumas is a breakneck-pace caper, dense with metafictional flourishes, driven by two objects of literary desire: a supposed chapter from the 19th century manuscript of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and a 17th century guide to conjuring the devil. “Everything is dependent on everything else,” the narrator says of the unfolding knotty mystery, “and one thing is superimposed on top of another. It all ends up as a complicated intertextual game, like a hall of mirrors or those Russian dolls.”

Life itself, in this context, cannot be cordoned off from literature, from a matrix of interdependent narrative versions. Life imitating art, art imitating life, who can tell the difference? The Club Dumas’ central protagonist, a blasé rare book hunter named Lucas Corso, repeatedly alludes — his tongue not entirely in his cheek — to being in a story. “Listen, idiot,” he tells a fellow bibliophile. “In mystery stories the friend always dies. Don’t you see? This is a mystery story and you’re my friend.” After dodging death himself, Corso remarks: “I’m just trying to work out the serial that somebody’s writing at my expense.” Adso, seeing visual echoes of the abbey’s labyrinthine library on one of its illuminated manuscripts, becomes convinced “that each of those books was telling, through mysterious cachinnations, my present story. And I wondered if those pages did not already contain the story of future events in store for me.” 

Writing’s preeminence over life, and the obsession with history made eternal via its recording — the past will always be with us, after all, if preserved between book covers and kept safe in a library — is given literal manifestation in books that connect the living and the dead. The primary McGuffin of The Club Dumas is a banned book, The Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows, that provides a code to summon the devil, while in The Name of the Rose a “secret part” of the library, William and Adso are told, contains “books on necromancy.” In turn, an apt emblem — a parody, even — of texts’ supernatural facility is the stylistic contrivance that the story we’re reading, which dramatizes this very facility, is a text other than the novel authored in reality. The Club Dumas is presented as an account written by a critic and translator, Boris Balkan, who says at the denouement that Corso had misinterpreted the clues in the “serial” of his life thanks to his “excessive intertextual reading and linking of literary references.” Reading the world like a book can be misleading. Contrary to William’s assumption, the abbey murders weren’t carried out according to a scriptural design, as he ultimately learns. The main murder weapon, poisoned pages, is equally a metaphor for the dangerous power of books and a joke at the reader’s expense: the answer was not in the text, but smeared on it. 

The Name of the Rose is one of the best-selling books ever written, with global sales surpassing 10 million copies. Eco, who died in 2016 at age 84, was more surprised by this than anyone. He thought the initial print run of 30,000 optimistic, while his advance for the U.S. hardback edition was just $4,000. The lightning-in-a-bottle quality of a breakout literary hit is not easy to analyze, but several factors seemed to work in Eco’s favor. The 1970s and 1980s were the heyday of literary postmodernism, when authors such as Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon, and Milan Kundera somehow made best sellers out of highbrow, “difficult” books. According to a prevalent but unprovable theory, this was the also era of novels as fashion accessories, when certain titles were more often bought than read. In 1984 the New York Times reported “a widespread belief in publishing circles that Professor Eco’s lavishly praised novel was one of the great unread best sellers of recent years.” More quantifiably, Medievalism Studies had launched as an academic field, reflecting the wider Western world’s preoccupation with medieval imagery, as seen in hippie culture and heavy metal music, the ubiquity of Tudor Revival architecture in new-build homes, and the first The Lord of the Rings film, which came out in 1978. “The Middle Ages are a mirror for the present,” Eco wrote in 2000. “We find there the roots of our problems, of our anguish, of our crises.” 

And yet judging by the wild success of novels that followed Eco’s general blueprint, but whose stories dip into various centuries, readers are less seduced by any specific historical setting than by the narrative engine of bibliophilic desire. As William cries out in frustration, as his tale nears its end: “But I want the book!” Perhaps such plots tap into something archetypal in the human psyche, appealing to our ingrained perception of written records and physically archived knowledge as the key to civilization’s flourishing — or its ruin. The critic Mark Lawson has wondered if the theme of “suppressed knowledge” was “informed, consciously or not, by the rise of the internet and of digital storage, and consequent concerns about retrieval, deletion and falsification of data.” To quote The Dumas Club’s Boris: “all I know is that I know nothing. And when I want to know something, I look it up in books — their memory never fails.” Fair enough. Except the elegant logic of a written narrative is subverted by this brand of bibliophilic detective story, which fails to offer a solution foreseeable by the attentive reader — an essential feature of Agatha Christie-esque tales. The Name of the Rose, its author stated, “is a mystery in which very little is discovered and the detective is defeated.” Or as Corso reflects while trying to make sense of a mess of clues: “He’d have given a rare incunabulum — in good condition — to punch the face of whoever was writing this ridiculous script.”

Read the first piece in this series on found documents, fiction, and history here.