The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

She will become exactly as you say, mucus, blood, humors, and bile. But it will be men like us who dig from beneath her skin that which the Lord wanted to be protected and adorned by that skin.

Ethiops, their bodies all black, defending themselves against the fire of the sun by digging underground caverns;

The disfiguring of foreign and maargiknalized bodies as means of.expressing power

Cyclopes, each with a single eye the size of a shield; Scylla, with a girl’s head and bosom, a she-wolf’s belly, and a dolphin’s tail;

Odyssesy

the hairy men of India,

bearded women of Armenia; Pygmies; blemmyae, born headless, with mouths in their bellies and eyes on their shoulders; the monster women of the Red Sea, twelve feet tall, with hair to the ankles, a cow’s tail at the base of the spine,

monsters of the island of Circe,

William, whom I followed in order to take notes, placed me among the Minorites, where Michael sat with his followers and other Franciscans of the court of Avignon, for the meeting was not meant to seem a duel between Italians and French, but a debate between supporters of the Franciscan Rule and their critics, all united by sound, Catholic loyalty to the papal court.

Useful summary

(nor was it comprehensible, Bertrand remarked, with a thin smile, that the Emperor should acclaim so enthusiastically a poverty he did not practice in the least),

Trumpian sort of criticism

And ‘poor’ does not so much mean owning a palace or not; it means, rather, keeping or renouncing the right to legislate on earthly matters.” “Then this,” I said, “is why the Emperor is so interested in what the Minorites say about poverty.”

William had spoken in such a meek tone, he had expressed his certainties in such a hesitant way, that none of those present was able to stand up and rebut.

An archer picked the armillary sphere up from the floor and handed it to Bernard. The elegant architecture of brass and silver circles, held together by a stronger frame of bronze rings grasped by the stem of the tripod, had been brought down heavily on the victim’s skull, and at the impact many of the finer circles had shattered or bent to one side. This side was the one brought down on Severinus’s head, as was revealed by traces of blood and even tufts of hair and horrible gobbets of cerebral matter.

Dostoevskian violence

The poor man’s eyes, veiled by the streams of blood from his head, were fixed,

“No, that’s Arabic, idiot! Bacon was right: the scholar’s first duty is to learn languages!”

“The fifth trumpet also promises many other things,” William said. “From the pit will come the smoke of a great furnace, then locusts will come from it to torment mankind with a sting similar to a scorpion’s. And the shape of the locusts will resemble that of horses, with gold crowns on their heads and lions’ teeth. . . . Our man could have various means at his disposal to carry out the words of the book. . . . But we must not pursue fantasies.

you are trying to convince me you are not what you are not so I will not say you are what you are!

we were to hasten the descent of the angel of Philadelphia, when all would receive the grace of the Holy Spirit and the church would be renewed, and after the destruction of all the perverse, only the perfect would reign!”

“What terrifies you most in purity?” I asked. “Haste,” William answered.

Given leave, he spoke, but the words could hardly come from his mouth, and his speech was like a drunkard’s mumbling, and there was something obscene about it.

Grandmother at the emd of a good man is hbard to find

But when they tortured him he, too, cried, in pain, like a woman, like a calf, he was bleeding from all his wounds as they carried him from one corner to another, and they continued to wound him slightly, to show how long an emissary of the Devil could live, and he wanted to die, he asked them to finish him, but he died too late, after he reached the pyre and was only a mass of bleeding flesh.

Benno’s is merely insatiable curiosity, intellectual pride, another way for a monk to transform and allay the desires of his loins, or the ardor that makes another man a warrior of the faith or of heresy. There is lust not only of the flesh. Bernard Gui is lustful; his is a distorted lust for justice that becomes identified with a lust for power. Our holy and no longer Roman Pontiff lusts for riches. And the cellarer as a youth had a lust to testify and transform and do penance, and then a lust for death. And Benno’s lust is for books. Like all lusts, including that of Onan, who spilled his seed on the ground, it is sterile and has nothing to do with love, not even carnal love. . . .” “I know,” I murmured,

“True love wants the good of the beloved.”

Jorge climbed into the pulpit, with someone’s help. His face was illuminated by the tripod, which alone lighted the nave. The glow of the flame underlined the darkness shrouding his eyes, which seemed two black holes.

the perfection of the Word which expresses itself to itself.

It is said that an Oriental caliph one day set fire to the library of a famous and glorious and proud city, and that, as those thousands of volumes were burning, he said that they could and should disappear: either they were repeating what the Koran already said, and therefore they were useless, or else they contradicted that book sacred to the infidels, and therefore they were harmful.

Library at alexandria?

I will say this name in a loud voice so that your viscera may twist in fright and your teeth chatter and cut off your tongue, and the chill that forms in your blood make a dark veil descend over your eyes. . . . He is the foul beast, he is the Antichrist!”

He paused for a long time. The listeners seemed dead. The only moving thing in the whole church was the flame in the tripod, but even the shadows it formed seemed to have frozen. The only sound, faint, was Jorge’s gasping, as he wiped the sweat from his brow.

the just will bear witness to injustice.

Talk about your "deep story" (Hoschild)

On the fifth day at the sixth hour the powers of light and the wheel of the sun will be destroyed, and there will be darkness over the earth till evening, and the stars and the moon will cease their office.

all together they will rejoice because the destruction of this world will have been consummated! But this is not to make us rejoice proudly this evening!

New Atheists would.be disgusted

I formed a mouth for you to glorify God, and you used it for the lies of poets and the riddles of buffoons!

“So the cellarer was right: the simple folk always pay for all, even for those who speak in their favor, even for those like Ubertino and Michael, who with their words of penance have driven the simple to rebel!”

one day the big dogs, the Pope and the Emperor, in order to make peace, will pass over the corpses of the smaller dogs who bit one another in their service. And Michael or Ubertino will be treated as your girl is being treated today.”

The librarian had always been Italian—there is no scarcity of great minds in this land.

And phials with dark powders, one of which, I learned, contained the charred remains of the city of Sodom, and another some mortar from the walls of Jericho.

have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord’s torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.”

“The other skull must be in another treasury,” William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting. In my country, when you joke you say something and then you laugh very noisily, so everyone shares in the joke. But William laughed only when he said serious things, and remained very serious when he was presumably joking.

The chanting affected me like a narcotic.

exhausted, agitated doze, bent double, like an infant still in its mother’s womb. And in that fog of the soul, finding myself as if in a region not of this world, I had a vision, or dream, if you prefer to call it that.

Dostoevskian and Lacanian/liminal

faithful or the celebration of the glories of kings. They seemed inspired, on the contrary, by Adelmo’s marginalia, and they reproduced his less awful and more comical images: hares dancing around the tree of plenty, rivers filled with fish that flung themselves spontaneously into frying pans held out by monkeys dressed as cook-bishops, monsters with fat bellies skipping around steaming kettles.

At a merry signal from the abbot, the procession of virgins entered. It was a radiant line of richly dressed females, in whose midst I thought at first I could discern my mother; then I realized my error, because it was certainly the maiden terrible as an army with banners. Except that she wore a crown of white pearls on her head, a double strand, and two cascades of pearls fell on either side of her face, mingling with two other rows which hung on her bosom, and from each pearl hung a diamond as big as a plum. Further, from both ears descended rows of blue pearls, which joined to become a choker at the base of her neck, white and erect as a tower of Lebanon. The cloak was murex-colored, and in her hand she had a diamond-studded golden goblet in which I knew, I cannot say how, was contained the lethal unguent one day stolen from Severinus.

Freud ANn Lacan

fair as the dawn,

Homeric

Jephtha

Murders sacrifices daughter

Fra Dolcino, with his plumed hat, brought the water, then opened his garment, snickering, and displayed his pudenda red with blood, while Cain taunted him and embraced the beautiful Margaret of Trent: and Dolcino fell to weeping and went to rest his head on the shoulder of Bernard Gui, calling him Angelic Pope, Ubertino consoled him with a tree of life, Michael of Cesena with a gold purse, the Marys sprinkled him with unguents, and Adam convinced him to bite into a freshly plucked apple.

Definitely worth unpacking at moderate lengtb

Berengar pulled up everyone’s habit, man and woman, kissing them all on the anus.

Whoa!

each the diaphanous synecdoche of itself,

!!!!

the intense and mucous ruby of the heart,

bidden to death by this macrobody divided among glass cases and reliquaries and yet reconstructed in its vast and irrational whole,

saved from corruption through the triumph of corruption,

afraid of, my little master? Here is the cheese in batter!” And suddenly the crypt was bright with reddish flashes and it was again the kitchen, but not so much a kitchen as the inside of a great womb, mucous and viscid, and in the center an animal black as a raven and with a thousand hands was chained to a huge grate, and it extended those limbs to snatch everybody around it, and as the peasant when thirsty squeezes a bunch of grapes, so that great beast squeezed those it had snatched so that its hands broke them all, the legs of some, the heads of others, and then it sated itself, belching a fire that seemed to stink more than sulphur.

Freudian/Lacanian