[ Home | Contents | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Chase mel99 11/5/99
Date: 11/5/99
Time: 9:00:24 AM
Remote Name: 130.68.51.70
Among his opening statements, Umberto Eco says, "I transcribe my text with no concern for timeliness. In the years when I discovered the Abbe Vallet volume, there waqs a widespread conviction that one should write only out of a commitment to the present, in order to change the world... (Now) I am comforted and consoled in finding (the story) immeasurably remote in time, gloriously lacking in any relevance for our day, atemporally alien to our hopes and our certainties." It is this statement that gives Eco away more than any other, for the Name of the Rose has very much to do with life in the 1980s, and even now as we approach the 21st Century. This is a story of the ways people cope with a worldwide struggle over morality and money. This is a world in which the poor have been forgotten, swallowed up by a system which holds only the wealthy to be of any importance, and casts out or kills anyone who disagrees with its current world order.
I ask, Is our present world any different? Our American government is every bit as controlling as the Papacy of John XXII in Avignon was then. We are told what to do, how to do it and when but never why, and there is no hope for a translation to enlighten us. Our government lies to its people because it has sold its soul, much, it seems, as the Pope's was in the novel. Yet our officials maintain that it is not money and business that lead our troops to kill citizens in developing nations but a sense of civic morality, that gives America the right to judge what is wrong with others and to correct their problems to our satisfaction. We are still burning our heretics today, but now we baptize with gunfire and cover it up by laying blame on the shoulders of those we kill off. This is a Cold War book sympthizing with those who have been left out in the cold by the predominant ideology and embraced by another, which introduced fear to the rulers. The Dolcinos were communists, preaching to the poor and advocating the downfall of the wealthy in favor of equality. The world was in the crapper then for the poor as now. Umberto Eco does not attempt to fool us, he merely wants us to reach the fruit inside the chaff. And he left us a clue to build from, like any good detective story.