Postscript to The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (review)

Book Reviews143 with such obscure tenacity that all the images form a true esthetic picture. The subterranean flow between the characters keeps ebbing between extremes. The lover is pathetic, wise, and wonderful in his meekness. The mother has an undaunted obsessive personality bordering on folly. With this novel, Duras returns to the neorealist approach of her first works while keeping her most recent "écriture." At 71, she publicly shows she has come to terms with her own past, an act of courage which does not remain unappreciated by the reader. L'Amant stands as the heart ofthe volcano ofher own life. In her other works she had embroidered around the volcano, touching the lava, evoking its heat. Now shejuggles with the boiling core. She says: "I have written much about the people in my family, but as I was making them, they still were alive, the mother and the brothers, and I have written around them, around those things without going up to them" ( 14). Indeed, this book sheds a light on all her previous output. Perhaps a few critics will have to discard one or two painfully elaborated theories on Duras. On the other hand, L'Amant is the same story revisited with a clearer autobiographical approach. On careful reading, L'Amant indirectly explains the story of every single book Duras has written, such as Des Journées Entières dans lesArbres, Nathalie Granger, Indian Song, Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, or Hiroshima to name a few. Still L'Amant continues to be a pondering on the art of writing from Duras: "Writing nowadays seems very often to be nothing. At times I know this: as long as, all things merging, it is not going to vanity and to the wind, writing is nothing" (15). As a last remark, L'Amant is a book which makes us forget the repetitive tone ofher last novels. This direct confrontation with her truth, with no sign of"pudeur," makes it its own cause and effect, and its own explanation. The book is dedicated to Bruno Nuytten, the man who calls Duras years later to tell her that "he still loved her, that he could never stop loving her, that he would love her till death" (142). [Editor's note: Translations in this review were made by its author.] CLAUDINE G. FISHER Portland State University UMBERTO ECO. Postscript to The Name ofthe Rose. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, 1984. 84 p. "I wrote a novel because I had ayen to do it . . . . [and] a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk" (13). The novel is The Name ofthe Rose, scholar-critic Umberto Eco's first work of fiction. Published in Italy in 1980, Name was translated into French and German before being brought out in English in this country by Harcourt in 1983. It is a hefty (502 pages) dose of medieval history, theology, philosophy, art, literature, and politics, sweetened slightly by a complex detectivemurder story seemingly out of A. Conan Doyle as "translated" by Jorge Luis Borges. The dose was effectively administered, however, to a large number of delighted "unsophisticated readers." Name was weeks on the bestsellerlists in all languages; and semiotics, Eco's specialty, turned up in sidewalk conversations . (Admittedly, most conversations were brief.) Postscript was prompted by the many questions from readers; some Eco 144Book Reviews comments on but all he refuses to answer. ["A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work" (1).] Instead, he writes a terse, intriguing commentary on the "technical problems" which had to be solved while creating a distant, bewilderingworld, accessible to the general reader, who already "has his own idea, usually corrupt, of the Middle Ages" (77). Eco also reflects on what it means to a literary critic to have written a popular work of fiction —and, to make it worse, detective fiction. (He was so embarrassed, he tells us, at turning author himself, that he buried his story in the "fourth level of encasement") Postscript is written with the same provocative wit and elegance as was the novel. In the chapter "Naturally, the Middle Ages" (echoing the inscription of the novel, "Naturally, a Manuscript"), Eco cites his "direct knowledge of...