Fear of Writing, or Adso and the Poisoned Text
1985; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3685050
ISSN1527-2095
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoOver course of two decades, beginning with an essay on Ian Fleming's James Bond books (1965) and continuing through introduction to his more recent collection of writings, The Role of Reader (1979), Umberto Eco has added consistently to what we know about structural imperatives of what we might call modern heroic narrative. In this vein, he has written on Superman and on detective story, describing their cultural functions and their implications for a socio-literary theory of culture. 1 Given Eco's demonstrated long-term interest in such matters, it is hardly surprising that his first novel should be a work of this kind, related to and in many ways dependent upon examples of past for conventions of plot, effect, and even character. (For we ought not to miss subtle reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes and Watson in Eco's William of Baskerville and Adso or Adson of Melk, whose names, as well as their habits and roles, give away their antecedents.) Eco's aesthetic criticism, indeed, provides an interesting point of departure for considering his novel. It helps us to see what he achieved in The Name of Rose, and perhaps to understand as well what, for various reasons, he left untouched. As mystery novels go at least if we use as models those which Eco has himself discussed critically The Name of Rose is strangely unsatisfying. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which I hope to be able to suggest. But before turning to explanation, let us note that particularly in such fiction a failure to be satisfying is currently, for us, problematic and dark. In his examination of Superman, Eco has pointed out reason when he contrasts constant shocks and withheld gratifications of roman-feuilleton (the preferred fare of a society that lived in midst of messages loaded with redundance . . . valid rules of proper comportment in environment of eighteenth-century bourgeois society) with Superman comics and, by extrapolation, detective mysteries (Role of Reader, p. 121). These latter, comic books and mysteries, are castings ofour contemporary industrial society, Eco states, where the alternation of standards, dissolution of tradition, social mobility, fact that models
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