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... tion to matters in much the same way as Watson does with Holmes, and you can almost imagine that William is saying to Also, Precisely Watson whenever Also shows that he is understanding of a concept or situation. Adso's name is also procured from Doyles characters, its real pronunciation being ocean and it only takes a small change to make it Watson. The reason for Ecos blatant citation of the Sherlock Holmes characters is not only to make the novel easier for the reader to relate to, but also to highlight a more important facet of his inter textual technique, this being the way that William actually solves the crimes. His way of thinking is bordering on modernism, and he epitomizes the advent of logical and scientific chains of thought, as opposed to more superstitious and religious beliefs that had developed as a result of the massive amount of unexplained phenomena that surrounded the human race. Instead of trying to explain things in unknown quantities he took what he knew (which was a vast amount) and used it to solve a problem.
He never made up an explanation for something that would create further consternation over a completely different answer, but stuck to the laws of science and logic and in this way he was able to use deduction to solve almost anything within the boundaries of his knowledge. In this manner Eco is able to show the difference between William, who has been exposed to a comprehensive education, and many of the other characters in the novel, who havent had access to much of the knowledge that William has been able to gain throughout his life. William can use his great quantities of learning to benefit his well being and that of others, and his logical attitude is very different to that of the monks, who use religious phenomena to explain some happenings, as opposed to looking at the cold hard facts and deriving an answer from that. A pertinent example is that of the apocalypse and the way they were able to link every crime to it, thus dismissing them as acts of god rather than the doing of mortal beings. By contrasting William of Baskervilles calculative deduction to the methods of some of the less educated characters in the novel, Eco portrays the effect that the church's withholding of information has had upon the people and the difference it would have made to society if they had allowed access to their immense coffers of philosophical, scientific and even theological works. Not only is the difference between the educated and non-educated of the middle ages catered for by Ecos uses of intertextuality, but also the violent contrast that is present between the ways of thinking that existed in the 1300 s and that of today.
Eco uses intertextuality as a powerful vehicle to render his widely acclaimed postmodernist themes within the novel. William of Baskerville is a man ahead of his time, and he uses renaissance and modernist lines of thought to solve problems. Consequently he represents the use of knowledge that occurs in the modern day, a clinical and scientific way of looking at life. Eco uses him to celebrate the change in thinking between the Middle Ages and the renaissance period, the difference between the deductive and religious modes of thought, which are so differently regarded today than they were in 1327. Whilst the similarities between William and Sherlock Holmes are the main tools Eco uses to emphasize his postmodernist themes, small allusions to postmodernism are added throughout the text.
For example at the very beginning Also writes, But now we see through a glass darkly, by this he means that we will never see the true nature of some things until many years later or even until the end of time. This line is central to the idea of postmodernism as it accentuates the fact that we didnt really know that the changes society and science were going through would be as revolutionary as they eventually were. It is also a clever allusion to the behaviour of the monks; at the start we assume that they are a good model of discipline and service to god, but eventually we find out that they are all corrupted and have sinned profusely, therefore having not a pure atom inside. In this the ultimate hypocrisy of religion is exposed. One of the most intriguing enigmas in The Name of the Rose is Jorge's partiality to the idea that humour and laughter are sinful and a detriment to humanity. Throughout the novel he argues with William with consistency regarding this matter and it highlights the churches fear of losing their control of western civilisation.
As William and Also are on the trail of the murderer William says of the finis Africa, the book that so many monks had been killed over, If someone kills for a handful of gold, he will be a greedy person; if for a book, he will be anxious to keep for himself the secrets of that book. Jorge set up this whole murder mystery and its happenings by putting poison on the pages of the valuable Aristotelian work, thus killing anyone who reads it and protecting its precious secrets. The reality that the he is not in favour of laughter or humour, coupled with the fact that the finis Africa uses humour to convey its ideas, would lead one to believe that Jorge is simply following the attitude of the church. This being that works which use methods to make their concepts especially easy to understand are very dangerous, and therefore they above all others should be prevented from circulation into society. Umberto Eco has made the theme of knowledge a central subject within The Name of the Rose, and the literary techniques he uses as well as his highly complex characters are highly successful in conveying the way knowledge was treated in the era of great power that the catholic church held. The use of Sherlock Holmes in an inter textual sense and the consequent post-modern aspects of his amalgamation within the story are especially clever methods which serve to provide a very interesting tangent to the novel.
The Name Of The Rose can be taken both on surface value as a typical crime story and from underneath as a wonderful political piece that embodies the attitudes of the time whilst still maintaining its ironic edge as a Sherlock Holmes murder thriller set in the early 1300 s, 500 years before Doyles work, and written in the 1980 s, some 100 years later than the Holmes mysteries were first published.
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Research essay sample on Sherlock Holmes Inter Textual
