The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

And she displayed to me, God have mercy on me, her vulva, into which I entered, and I found myself in a beautiful cave, which seemed the happy valley of the golden age, dewy with waters and fruits and trees that bore cheeses in batter.

being dragged off, far away and forever.

Coena Cypriani.”

Like the entertainers joke

Bakhtin to a T Slaughter of tthe woman mirrors 20th century massacres by soviet union

But I believe that your sleeping soul understood more things than I have in six days, and awake. . . .” “Truly?” “I find your dream revealing because it coincides with one of my hypotheses. Thank you.”

“It had another sense like all dreams. It must be read as an allegory, or an analogy. . . .” “Like Scripture?” “A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.”

Italy is a land of conspiracies: they poison popes here, so just imagine a poor boy like me. . . .

temporize,

These crimes do not stem from a brawl or from some vendetta among the monks, but from deeds that, in their turn, originate in the remote history of the abbey. . . .”

Crimes.which were repurposed by the powerful tonsuit their ends; as a book might

in my curiosity I crouched outside the door of the hall, which I left ajar, so that I could follow the dialogue.

Sneak

It seems to me that more plots have been imagined than really exist. . . .”

! Fantastic—based on the quotes, images, and your creative framing (especially the monastic, literary, and metaphysical climax of The Name of the Rose), here’s a complete audience profile and storytelling strategy using Lisa Cron’s “Story or Die” template, with inspiration from Sebastian De Grazia and Umberto Eco: ⸻ 🎯 Target Audience Profile for The Name of the Rose (Book) ✨ This is what matters most to my audience right now: Reclaiming the sacred experience of thought in a distracted, commodified world. This audience feels increasingly alienated by algorithmic culture, clickbait, and the loss of sustained attention. They seek resonance, not reaction. They want time to contemplate mortality, truth, and authority without being interrupted by notifications. Think: someone who posts about “Slow Reading,” photographs marginalia, and tweets excerpts from Walter Benjamin or Monastic Rule. ⸻ 🌀 This is what my audience most desires in order to become their most authentic self: To become a kind of “lay monk” of intellect and discernment. They aspire to live meaningfully in ambiguity, to surround themselves with books, candlelight, mystery, and language. Not for escape, but for ethical and epistemological grounding. They are drawn to the idea of mystical literacy—to know something not just because it’s written, but because it echoes through history and paradox. “They want to know how to live when the library burns, and still leave behind a page that glows.” ⸻ 😨 This is what my audience most fears: That they’ll never recover the ability to think slowly, or that the truth has become too fragile to matter. They fear not only the rise of lies and noise but their own internal erosion—of not being able to hold complexity. They fear their attention has been permanently fractured, and that they will be forgotten by the very traditions that once formed them. Think: late-night Googling “best translations of Aquinas,” but still scrolling Instagram ten minutes later. ⸻ 🔁 This is what my audience is doing now instead of the ultimate thing I want them to do: Consuming YouTube explainers, spiritual podcasts, and TikTok book talk instead of committing to difficult, cloistered books. They long for immersive worlds like Eco’s but instead reach for shallow approximations. They might romanticize medieval imagery or follow “aesthetic Catholicism” trends online, yet avoid the rigor of engaging with actual texts like The Name of the Rose. They are playing at wisdom rather than risking despair to discover it. ⸻ 🧠 Call to Action: “Read this book not to solve the mystery, but to live in it.” ⸻ ✅ How will my call to action benefit my audience based on their specific worldview? It will reintegrate their craving for beauty, truth, and mystery with the patient, sacred labor of thinking. The Name of the Rose gives them the language of gems, the thrill of semiotic puzzles, and the ache of moral ambiguity—all inside a story that invites contemplation, not content. ⸻ ⚔️ What beliefs do they have that I’ll be butting up against? • That truth must be either fully knowable or not worth the effort. • That beauty is ornamental, not epistemological. • That reading slowly is a luxury they no longer have time for. • That history is inaccessible unless packaged for them. ⸻ 💎 Based on their worldview, how will the change I want them to make help them become their most authentic self? It will affirm their suspicion that meaning takes time, and that the very act of enduring through the book’s slow, echoing labyrinth is a form of resistance to modern intellectual erosion. By choosing to remain with the monk’s last words, with William’s failed optimism, and with Adso’s luminous regret, they fulfill their longing to belong to a sacred lineage of seekers—not by blood, but by curiosity, humility, and doubt. ⸻ ✍️ Summary Sentence (Audience POV): “I want to be the kind of person who reads slowly enough to grieve a burned library and still trust in the unfinished work of ideas.” ⸻ Would you like a one-page poster-style persona based on this? I can create a character profile (“Wanda for Monastic Maximalists”) or write a promotional epigraphic blurb in Eco’s voice.

But you understood; I believed at the outset that it involved a violation of the vow of chastity, and I wanted someone else to tell me what I had heard in confession. Well, now you have told me.

“No one ever obliges us to know, Adso. We must, that is all, even if we comprehend imperfectly.”

“It is late,” William said, “and when a man has little time, he must take care to maintain his calm. We must act as if we had eternity before us.

The more relaxed his body, the more ebullient his mind.

“So, then . . . I conceived a false pattern to interpret the moves of the guilty man, and the guilty man fell in with it. And it was this same false pattern that put me on your trail.

Comedy is born from the komai—that is, from the peasant villages—as a joyous celebration after a meal or a feast. Comedy does not tell of famous and powerful men, but of base and ridiculous creatures, though not wicked; and it does not end with the death of the protagonists. It achieves the effect of the ridiculous by showing the defects and vices of ordinary men. Here Aristotle sees the tendency to laughter as a force for good, which can also have an instructive value: through witty riddles and unexpected metaphors, though it tells us things differently from the way they are, as if it were lying, it actually obliges us to examine them more closely, and it makes us say: Ah, this is just how things are, and I didn’t know it. Truth reached by depicting men and the world as worse than they are or than we believe them to be, worse in any case than the epics, the tragedies, lives of the saints have shown them to us. Is that it?” “Fairly close. You reconstructed it by reading other books?” “Many of which

Bakhtin's carnivalesque

the Philosopher.

The fathers had said everything that needed to be known about the power of the Word, but then Boethius had only to gloss the Philosopher and the divine mystery of the Word was transformed into a human parody of categories and syllogism.

We knew everything about the divine names, and the Dominican buried by Abo—seduced by the Philosopher—renamed them, following the proud paths of natural reason.

the cosmos, which for the Areopagite revealed itself to those who knew how to look up at the luminous cascade of the exemplary first cause, has become a preserve of terrestrial evidence for which they refer to an abstract agent. Before, we used to look to heaven, deigning only a frowning glance at the mire of matter; now we look at the earth, and we believe in the heavens because of earthly testimony. Every word of the Philosopher, by whom now even saints and prophets swear, has overturned the image of the world. But he had not succeeded in overturning the image of God. If this book were to become an object for open interpretation, we would have crossed the last boundary.”

“No, to be sure. But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh. It is the peasant’s entertainment, the drunkard’s license; even the church in her wisdom has granted the moment of feast, carnival, fair, this diurnal pollution that releases humors and distracts from other desires and other ambitions. . . .

Communists

Postmodernism

The prudence of our fathers made its choice: if laughter is the delight of the plebeians, the license of the plebeians must be restrained and humiliated, and intimidated by sternness. And the plebeians have no weapons for refining their laughter until they have made it an instrument against the seriousness of the spiritual shepherds who must lead them to eternal life and rescue them from the seductions of belly, pudenda, food, their sordid desires.

if the rhetoric of conviction were replaced by the rhetoric of mockery, if the topics of the patient construction of the images of redemption were to be replaced by the topics of the impatient dismantling and upsetting of every holy and venerable image—oh, that day even you, William, and all your knowledge, would be swept away!”

“Why? I would match my wit with the wit of others. It would be a better world than the one where the fire and red-hot iron of Bernard Gui humiliate the fire and red-hot iron of Dolcino.” “You yourself would

An advocate for.the markwtplace of ideas

arrogantly carrying to its zenith the will to die that is born from their own nadir.

their sin prompts our virtue, their cursing encourages our hymn of praise, their undisciplined penance regulates our taste for sacrifice, their impiety makes our piety shine, just as the Prince of Darkness was necessary, with his rebellion and his desperation, to make the glory of God shine more radiantly, the beginning and end of all hope.

those that are affirmed in the fart and the belch, and the fart and the belch would claim the right that is only of the spirit, to breathe where they list!”

“Lycurgus had a statue erected to laughter.”

Spartan politician

“Illness is not exorcised. It is destroyed.” “With the body of the sick man.” “If necessary.” “You are the Devil,” William said then.

The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt.

Fire and truth

And now I say to you that, in the infinite whirl of possible things, God allows you also to imagine a world where the presumed interpreter of the truth is nothing but a clumsy raven, who repeats words learned long ago.”

“That is how Francis taught people to look at things from another direction.” “But we have disciplined them. You saw them yesterday, your brothers. They have rejoined our ranks, they no longer speak like the simple. The simple must not speak. This book would have justified the idea that the tongue of the simple is the vehicle of wisdom.

“The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.”

Jorge smiled, baring his bloodless gums, as a yellowish slime trickled from his pale lips over the sparse white hairs on his chin.

The library had been doomed by its own impenetrability, by the mystery that protected it, by its few entrances. The

And so the cries of regret for the many riches burned were now joined by the cries of pain at seared faces, crushed limbs, bodies buried under a sudden collapse of the high vaults.

The wind had become furious again, and more furiously helped spread the fire. Immediately after the church, the barns and stables caught fire. The terrified animals broke their halters, kicked down the doors, scattered over the grounds, neighing, mooing, bleating, grunting horribly. Sparks caught the manes of many horses, and there were infernal creatures racing across the grass, flaming steeds that trampled everything in their path, without goal or respite. I saw old Alinardo wandering around, not understanding what was happening, knocked down by the magnificent Brunellus, haloed by fire; the old man was dragged in the dust, then abandoned there, a poor shapeless object. But I had neither means nor time to succor him, or to bemoan his end, because similar scenes were taking place everywhere. The horses in flames had carried the fire to places where the wind had not yet brought it: now the forges were burning, and the novices’ house.

Meta and earned

Rosa que al prado, encarnada, te ostentas presuntüosa de grana y carmín bañada: campa lozana y gustosa; pero no, que siendo hermosa tambien serás desdichada.

written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

Dante’s mystic rose,

Man is a storytelling animal by nature.

had returned to the medieval tradition in 1962 for my work on Joyce;

refreshing study of the enlightened monk Bede, rational comforts sought in Occam, to understand the mystery of the Sign where Saussure is still obscure.

books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told. Homer knew this, and Ariosto knew this, not to mention Rabelais and Cervantes.

Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).