The Songbird will not sing.
What should we do?
Kill it, says Nobunaga.
Make it want to sing, says Hideyoshi.
Just wait, says Tokugawa.
An old Japanese school rhyme
Shogun came to the awareness of most people in the form of the twelve hour miniseries made in 1980. As a film, it was squarely in the tradition of Kurosawa’s samurai films which were copied into American films as spaghetti westerns. But Shogun, both novel and film, went beyond the Kurosawa films by making Japanese samurai culture accessible and understandable to westerners, a concern that Kurosawa did not need to have. How this historical romance, complete with love story, about an Englishman trapped by circumstance in the middle of the massive power struggle to unite Japan at the very start of the 17th century came to be written by an English-Australian-American is itself a story worth telling.
James Clavell (1924 - 1994) volunteered for military duty with the British Royal Artillery in World War II, was captured by the Japanese in 1942 and sent to the infamous Changi prisoner of war camp outside of Singapore, where he remained until the end of the war. This experience appears to have informed his writing as several of his novels – King Rat [1962] (set in Changi prison), Shogun [1975] and Gai Jin [1993] – are studies of cultural differences between westerners and Japanese at critical times in Japanese history. Clavell was most interested in bushido (the way of the warrior) and how Japanese imperialism developed from this concept central to samurai culture.
A word about the use of Japanese words in Shogun and Clavell’s other novels. By the time one finishes reading Shogun, the reader will have a useable Japanese vocabulary for the basic courtesies of social interaction. And this matters, for part of the samurai culture involved the observance of proper manners. Indeed, as will be mentioned below, it was death not to do so.
Shogun is set at the very end of the agonizingly long era of the feuding states, also known as the age of civil wars. Throughout much of the 15th and 16th centuries, Japanese warlords struggled to each be the victor in the attempt to unify the country under one leader, who could then petition the emperor for the title of Shogun, signifying supreme military leader. The emperor was politically and militarily powerless throughout this time. His power was traditional and religious only.
A brutal warlord named Oda Nobunaga (Goroda in Shogun) managed to take control of the central province of Owari in 1559 and proceeded to capture the nominal capital (Kyoto), residence of the emperor, by 1568, and to subdue a number of provinces during the 1570s, most notably that of Takeda Shingen, a celebrated figure in Japanese history about whom a number of recent movies have been made, e.g. Kagemusha and Heaven and Earth [Ten to Chi to]. Nobunaga was assassinated in 1582; he was succeeded by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, later called the Taiko (Nakamura in Shogun).
Hideyoshi was remarkable for his ability to persuade enemies to come over to his side without firing a shot. None the less, he too had to resort to war to continue the unification of Japan, which was mostly accomplished before his death in 1598. He left an infant son and appointed a number of regents from the powerful daimyo (lords). As would be expected, some of the regents quickly began to plot and conspire to gain power for themselves. Among the regents was Tokugawa Ieyasu (Lord Torunaga in Shogun), who had ruled Edo (now Tokyo) throughout the rise of Nobunaga’s power and Hideyoshi’s consolidation of control, and who had sat undefeated and patient on the sidelines until this point in time. His principal rival is Ishida Mitsunari (Ishido in the novel).
Clavell starts his story with a Dutch ship running aground on the east coast of Japan within the territory controlled by Tokugawa/Toranaga. The year is 1600 (April) and the protagonist of the novel is Blackthorne, an Englishman who is the Pilot Major of the ship. Blackthorne stands out from the rest of the crew for his intelligence and courage and earns the respect of their Japanese captors.
Clavell displays Samurai culture at its most brutal, with at least one example of a samurai beheading a peasant who refuses to bow, with crucifixion the common form of punishment for crime, and torture taken freely upon one’s enemies. But he also shows it at its highest, with its devotion to the fine arts, cleanliness, refined manners, the martial arts, and courage in the face of death.
As a result of his courage and intellect, Blackthorne eventually meets and gains the favor of Torunaga and is made a samurai and retainer to Torunaga. One could be easily forgiven at this point for thinking that Clavell has created this character for strictly literary purposes. But no, Blackthorne represents the historical person William Adams, an Englishman.
Adams, too, was a pilot major of a Dutch ship, and did indeed gain the favor of Tokugawa Ieyasu, who made him not just a retainer, but samurai, with the name Miura Anjin [Anjin being Japanese for pilot]. Clavell’s Blackthorne is then quickly promoted to the rank of hatamoto, the most trusted level of retainer to the lord. So also with Willliam Adams, but not within the constrained dramatic time frame of the novel (six months).
Adams replaced Joao Rodriguez, Tokugawa’s Portugese translator for interpretation of western communications; he built European style ships for Tokugawa, and became his lord’s advisor on all things western. His reward was a mansion in the royal palace of Edo, a fiefdom on the coast and income therefrom, and almost unlimited access to Tokugawa, even when he became Shogun. As a hatamoto and samurai, he at last had the right to marry a person of nobility; he did marry a Japanese woman, the daughter of a government official, but not a noblewoman. They had a son and a daughter.
In the story, Blackthorne learns Japanese from a noblewoman named Mariko and falls in love with her. Their affair is doomed from the start as no Japanese woman in her position (married to a samurai retainer to a powerful lord) could ever have a licit relationship with a mere foreigner. More than that, no Japanese woman in her position would ever be sufficiently unattended that she could have an affair with the foreigner to begin with, but that is one of the few places where Clavell stretches credibility. Mariko is based on the historical figure of Hosokawa Garasha or Gracia (1563 - August 25, 1600). Yes, that latter name is Christian.
If anything, the historical Gracia was more interesting even than the shining character of Mariko. Born Tama, daughter of Akechi Mitsuhide, she was married at the age of 15 to Hosokawa Tadaoki, a nobleman. In 1582, her father assassinated Nobunaga, and she became known as the traitor’s daughter. Her husband protected her from reprisals by confining her to his mansion in Osaka Castle. In 1587, having secretly attended Christian services, she just as secretly converted to Catholicism and was baptized with the name Gracia.
After the death of Hideyoshi in 1598, Tadaoki cast his lot with Tokugawa, and went east with his army. The historical Gracia died in circumstances similar to those in which Clavell has Mariko die, when her home is invaded by agents of Ishida, who were trying to take her hostage so that he could try to force Tadaoki to switch sides. Since, as a Catholic, she could not commit suicide, a retainer killed her to keep her from becoming a hostage. Hosokawa Gracia has been the subject of many Japanese works, including a novel by Ayako Miura.
One of the interesting historical elements of the time was the theretofore successful penetration of Japanese society by Portuguese Jesuit priests. In the novel, when Blackthorne learns of the presence of the Jesuits, he tells Lord Torunaga that, in 1494, Pope Alexander divided up the world, for purposes of exploration and conquest, between the Portugese and Spanish, in the Treaty of Tordesilla. The Portuguese got Japan. Adams made a similar disclosure to Tokugawa. The consequence of this revelation in Japanese history was, first, as noted above, Tokugawa’s replacement of the Portuguese Joao Rodriguez with Adams as his interpreter, and, second, after Tokugawa became Shogun, the suppression of the Christian religion and the limitation of contact with westerners to the port of Nagasaki.
Clavell ends his novel on the eve of the Battle of Sekigahara, October 21, 1600, with Lord Torunaga proclaiming that he knows it is his destiny to become Shogun. The historic Tokugawa did indeed win the battle, consolidated power, and in 1603 was named Shogun, thus beginning the Tokugawa Shogunate or bakufu (bureaucracy, administration), which lasted until Japan was forced in 1868 to open itself to western commerce.
Clavell wrote Shogun for an English speaking audience, but as we shall see in the second part of this article, he was also writing within a Japanese tradition of historical fiction.
Clavell really did his homework in staging Shogun. The 20th century Japanese historical fiction writer Eiji Yoshikawa wrote two massive novels set in this time frame. The first,Taiko, published in 1935 (and available in English from Kodansha International since 1992) during the period of Japanese political and military expansion, deals with the life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. It relates among other things the ill-fated but almost fanatical efforts of Hideyoshi to subdue Korea after the unification of most of Japan. Given the political situation of the 1930s, this aspect of the novel may have served to historically justify the then current Japanese expansion into Korea and China.
Taiko ends with the death of Hideyoshi in 1598. His second novel of the period, Musashi (also available in English from Kodansha International since 1981), tells the story of the great swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, who authored, in his later years, The Book of Five Rings (in English, Overlook Press 1974), a book as critical for the individual warrior as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (Delta Publishing 1983, edited and with a foreword by James Clavell) was for armies. The novel Musashi begins with the end of the Battle of Sekigahara, as Tokugawa’s victorious cavalry ride across the battlefield killing stragglers.
Musashi begins, symbolically, with the start of peace in Japan. It is, therefore, the beginning of the end for samurai warriors. Not that the samurai disappeared altogether for more than two hundred years, but their main purpose, to protect their lords and wage war for them, was constricting with the last screams of Sekigahara. The age of the ronin (masterless) samurai was coming. Martial arts as arts became the business of samurai, running schools to teach the art of stylized warfare to others. An age of civil war had gone, an age of politics was coming, with international isolation, reversion to traditional religions, the banning of westerners from all but an island in the harbor of Nagasaki (for minimal international trade).
Clavell, then, has set his own novel within that two year time period between the death of Hideyoshi and the decisive victory of Tokugawa, the only period of time not covered by Eiji Yoshikawa. The precision with which the novel fits between the two Yoshikawa works is evidence that Clavell knew exactly what Yoshikawa had written. He was, in effect, filling out the gap that Yoshikawa had left, with his own novel written in the same tradition in which Yoshikawa wrote.
Clavell later marks the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate with his novel Gai Jin [meaning alien], which is set in the year 1862. After 260 years, the Bakufu had all of the weaknesses of any inbred society. The power of external developments are unknown to it and it has become overspecialized and unable to respond to rapid change. Gai Jin describes the enormous pressures exerted by the USA, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Russia to open Japan to western commerce and influence. Modern western warships occupy the harbor with their guns as a silent (though sometimes audible) threat to achieve their diplomatic goals one way or another. The Shogunate will not fall for six more years, but the forces are assembled to make it crumble.
Historical accounts of this transition may be found in Oliver Statler’s Shimoda Story (covering 1856 - 1859) and Ernest Satow’s A Diplomat in Japan (documenting 1862 - 1869), making one wonder whether Clavell is again fitting an open time frame.
Curiously, the collapse of the Shogunate in the Boshin War (1868-1869) between the forces of the Shogun and those of the Emperor, while it restored political power to the Emperor – the Meiji Restoration, as it is known, also provided the means – knowledge of modern military techniques and warfare – that both brought an end to the age of samurai and that enabled Japan to embark upon a period of industrial development and militaristic expansionism that led it to occupy Korea, defeat the Russian navy, invade Manchuria, expand into China proper, ending only with the disaster of World War II. So much flowed from the “Opening of Japan”.
As we noted at the start, Clavell had also recorded this latter event, WWII and the collapse of Imperial Japanese ambitions, with his earlier novel King Rat, which ends with the Japanese guards of the prisoner of war camp surrendering to the prisoners and American army that was arriving on the scene.
The Japanese soldiers of WWII mimic the samurai culture of three centuries past but cannot authenticate it in their lives. A massed army cannot allow for the feats of individual combat attained by Samurai heroes. It cannot distinguish even the noble born from the commoner. So from the end of the Shogunate to the end of WWII, we see the demise of the noble warrior similar to that seen in the West with the passing of the middle ages and the rise of regular, uniformed armies and navies during the age of exploration and discovery.
The three Clavell novels, taken in the chronological order of history show the samurai culture at its highest and most brutal, through its bureaucratic stultification at the end of the samurai culture and on to the end of Japanese militarism altogether. Clavell saw in the Japanese soldiers at Changi something that demanded further study and has provided us with a guide to the culture that produced them.
[Editor: Australian readers might be interested to know that new editions of Eiji Yoshikawa's novels Taiko and Musashi have recently appeared in our bookshops.]
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and singing, made.
from The Idea of Order at Key West
by Wallace Stevens
Though it may not appear so at first from the inclusion of numerous murders, the condemnation to the stake of three people declared heretics and the conflagration that consumes the great library of the Abbey, The Name of the Rose is about laughter and comedy. Though more an intellectual approach to these issues, it none the less partakes of many features of traditional comedy. But, just as the two main characters, Adso of Melk, the inner narrator, and William of Baskerville, have to navigate a labyrinthine library to find what they are seeking in the story, so the reader must find the key and navigate the literary labyrinth to understand the puzzle that Eco has created.
The story is written on many levels. If one chooses to ignore all the historical, philosophic, religious, literary and linguistic references, it is still a great mystery novel. But it is the rare occurrence of all of the above in one work that gives The Name of the Rose its immortality. One article cannot do justice to the complexity of this work. Indeed, so deeply entwined to the fabric of the narration is even the subject of laughter that this one article may not do justice to that one topic.
Let us begin then with the first words of the text (two pages before page 1): “Naturally, a Manuscript”. The words signify (for Eco is a semiologist and all words “signify”) the foremost position of the text as text. And what immediately follows? A “fiction” in the style of Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, the august Argentinean author, and the first bit of humor, aping the great writer, and giving a history to a manuscript of the inner text. Nor is this the only reference to Borges, for the librarian in the Abbey is named Jorge de Burgos, a variant form of Jorge Borges, and his position – librarian – brings to mind the story in Ficciones entitled “The Library of Babel”, to which the Abbey library, towering above its cliffs as they arrive bears some resemblance. Indeed, on arrival at the foot of the cliffs, Adso remarks [p. 21] that the cliff and tower are of the same colors and “extend, reaching up toward the heavens.”
The outer narration consists of five pages, by an unnamed narrator, relating how he was handed the manuscript, apparently in Prague, by an unnamed person, on a certain day in August (the 16th) of 1968. Who gave it to him, why it was given to him and all the other questions that one might want to ask of this handing over are left unspecified and brushed aside by the mention in the first paragraph of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, ending the “Prague Spring” of 1968. He then meets his beloved (whose gender is also unspecified) and they romantically sail up the Danube to Melk, Adso’s home, after which his companion abruptly and permanently departs, taking the one and only copy of the manuscript, which vanishes forever from the narration.
The text he was given was a French translation from 1842 of a 14th century Latin text (by our inner narrator Adso, a German monk), which the outer narrator starts to translate into Italian. This project remained unfinished at the time of his lover’s departure, and he describes how, for the following twelve years, he devoted himself to finding quoted excerpts from the original text, so as to stitch together a simulacrum of the original text, two languages removed.
This outer narration is in fact the key to the labyrinth of the inner text. And that text is, in part, about another text, the lost Second Book of The Poetics by Aristotle. The First Book of The Poetics dealt with tragedy, making passing references to comedy, which was the subject of the Second Book. In the inner narration, a copy, apparently the only extant copy, of the Second Book is stored in the stacks of the library at the Abbey in the Piedmont region of Italy where the story takes place. It is the existence of this book and the emotional and intellectual responses that it generates that gives rise to the violence and destruction in the story. And, as in the outer narration, at the end of the inner story, the one and only copy in the world of this important manuscript, is lost in the fire that destroys the library. But, if I am correct, we are reading a comedy not a tragedy, and the actions of the outer narrator, who spent more than a decade reconstructing the inner text, give direction to the reader to reconstruct the book of comedy employing the text of The Name of the Rose as a guide. The text may be gone, but the information it contained is not gone, and can be rebuilt. As with the reconstruction of the inner narrative, the reconstruction of the Second Book of The Poetics may be the equivalent of two languages removed from Aristotle, but, the message is, it can be done.
And so we move on to Adso’s Prologue in the inner narrative. And, in keeping with the concern about texts, it begins with the words “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” the opening sentence of the Gospel of John, but also a reminder that for humanity, language and the word is God, and is that which makes a human human. But, he continues, we now see “through a glass darkly, and the truth . . . we see in fragments . . . so we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us . . . .” The reference is to Paul’s epistle, 1 Corinthians 13:12, which argues that humanity can in this world only view the truth in bits and pieces. At the least, this is a further dictate to the reader to look for meaning in fragments, which, when one thinks about it, is the appropriate way to treat a novel, which is not an essay and does not attempt the dogmatic explication of anything. And, perhaps, that is the strength of the novel.
The comedy begins forthwith, at least in the form of irony, which has been called the “dry mock”, the laugh that dies with a bitter taste. For Adso assures us that he wants to be:
the transparent witness of the happenings that took place in the abbey . . . toward the end
of the year of our Lord 1327, when the Emperor Louis came down into Italy to restore the
dignity of the Holy Roman Empire, in keeping with the designs of the Almighty and to the
confusion of the wicked usurper, simoniac, and heresiarch who in Avignon brought
shame on the holy name of the apostle (I refer to the sinful soul of Jacques of Cahors,
whom the impious revered as John XXII).
So much for our transparent witness who cannot restrain himself even to the end of the sentence. See also [p. 21] where, after William has performed a Sherlockian analysis of the missing horse, Adso, unable to reason out how William made his deductions, asks William to explain, saying “in the end I could not restrain myself”. How much that applies to Adso’s narration. Adso becomes a full-fledged monk and lives a life of rules and worship, but toward the end of his life, he cannot restrain himself and has to narrate the inner story. The word bursts forth.
Adso’s view is at odds with the general opinion of historians. Louis’s military expedition, in response to his excommunication by the pope, was undertaken to set up an anti-pope in Rome and have himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor. While he accomplished this, his anti-pope achieved no respect whatsoever and eventually stepped down, and the only achievement was a standoff with the pope for a few more years. Adso’s viewpoint is very politically aligned, then, with the position of Emperor Louis and the Germans against that of the French King and the pope, who, as noted above, was now residing in Avignon, close at hand to the French King. Despite the clear historical failure of this expedition, and even though Adso is narrating from decades later with full knowledge of the farcical failure of the anti-pope, he declares that Louis was acting according to “the designs of the Almighty”, strong language for a failed mission, but typical of a fanatic for any position. Finley Peter Dunne, writing about a hundred years ago for the Chicago Post as Mr. Dooley, once said “A fanatic is a man who does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew all the facts.” So Adso is not a reliable narrator and we must question what he says.
Adso proceeds to give us his version of the political and religious history that gave rise to the events of the story. The Franciscan monks, who espoused a severe form of poverty, were aligned with Emperor Louis, on the basis that such a view of religious poverty went hand in hand with abstention of the pope from matters of this world, such as the election of the Holy Roman Emperor. Pope John XXII, on the other hand, opposed the Franciscan position, not only for the reason just given, but also because it implicitly condemned the wealth and pomp of the pope’s court, and by further implication, the solitary authority of the pope on even religious matters. All this, it will be noted, prefigures the Protestant Reformation that occurs nearly two hundred years later. This theological debate gets distilled later in the text to one question: did Jesus own the clothes he wore, which was also the subject of the 1323 Papal Bull Cum inter nonnullos, to which Adso refers. I suggest that much as the question may have stood for a philosophical issue, the asking of it is still humorous.
Adso then embarks on three ironical paragraphs in which he: (1) declares that other than the physical description of William of Baskerville to follow, he will not describe the appearance of characters in the narration; (2) tells us that the world is topsy-turvy; and (3) describes the appearance of William.
As to the first, Adso does not deliver. He constantly describes the appearance of the personages in the story, and for good reason. They are humorous. They have the comic appearance of the figures sketched by Leonardo da Vinci in his Notebooks. This is deliberate on Eco’s part. Adso cannot restrain himself. He is carried away, a traditional comic trope. As one of many examples, let me quote the words of Adso on meeting Salvatore:
His head was hairless, not shaved in penance but as the result of the past action of some
viscid eczema; the brow was so low that if he had had hair on his head if would have
mingled with his eyebrows (which were thick and shaggy); the eyes were round, with tiny
mobile pupils, and whether the gaze was innocent or malign I could not tell: perhaps it was
both, in different moods in flashes. The nose could not be called a nose, for it was only a
bone that began between the eyes, but as it rose from the face, it immediately sank again,
transforming itself only into two dark holes, broad nostrils with thick hair. The mouth,
joined to the nose by a scar, was wide and ill-made, stretching more to the right than to
the left, and between the upper lip, non-existent, and the lower, prominent and fleshy,
there protruded, in an irregular pattern, black teeth sharp as a dog’s. [p. 46].
Looking ahead to the fragmentary quotes that William finds one of the monks had made while reading the Second Book of The Poetics, we find among them [p. 284], “Use humble persons, base and ugly, take pleasure in their defects.” Adso has certainly adhered to this precept of comic writing.
In the next paragraph, Adso complains about the sad state of the “aging world” [p. 15], whining that:
Mary no longer loves the contemplative life and Martha no longer loves the active life,
Leah is sterile, Rachel has a carnal eye, Cato visits brothels, Lucretius becomes a woman.
While not identical, the following from Juvenal’s First Satire is an apt predecessor for this plaint:
When a soft eunuch takes to matrimony, and Maevia, with spear in hand and breasts
exposed, to pig-sticking in Etruria; when a fellow under whose razor my stiff youthful
beard used to grate challenges, with his single wealth, the whole nobility; when a
guttersnipe of the Nile like Crispinus – a slave-born denizen of Canopus – hitches a
Tyrian cloak on to his shoulder, whilst on his sweating finger he airs a summer ring of
gold, unable to endure the weight of a heavier gem – it is hard not to write satire.
(Ancient History Sourcebook - http://www.fordham.edu/HALSALL/ancient/juv-sat1eng.html)
And Juvenal’s conclusion from observing the topsy-turvy world, in the last line, is that in these circumstances, madness in the world provokes laughter, satire, irony. And Adso finds it hard not to write satire.
In this context, Adso, then a Benedictine novice, introduces us to William of Baskerville, an English Franciscan monk, with whom he is to travel from Pisa, where Louis is besieging the city, to the abbey where the events occur. The name Baskerville calls up Sherlock Holmes to almost all the world. And here we have a monk who investigates crimes. But Eco makes the identification even more pointed. Adso, having noted that he will not comment on the physical appearance of people other than that of William of Baskerville, describes him using almost the exact words that Conan Doyle uses in A Study in Scarlet to have Dr. Watson describe Holmes on first meeting him.
But what of the other half of his name: William. There too Eco was not acting randomly. For the famous Franciscan monk, William of Ockham, was in fact pertinent to the historical events just described. William of Ockham was held captive at Avignon with Michael of Cesena, the leader of the Franciscan Spirituals and vocal opponent of Pope John XXII, until their night-time escape on May 25, 1328. Michael of Cesena arrived in Avignon on December 1, 1327 [the novel being set in the last week of November]. Curiously, while Michael is a prominent character in the story, and while William of Baskerville cites Roger Bacon, also a Franciscan and also English, as his intellectual mentor, William of Ockham is mentioned only in passing. The reason, I submit, is that William of Baskerville is, in part, a fictional version of William of Ockham, who is most remembered for his aphorism, known universally as Ockham’s Razor, namely non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem (entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity), which demands that one inquiring into a phenomenon look for natural answers and not attribute events to angels or devils. This is precisely the approach of William of Baskerville, to the annoyance of the Abbott and to the rage of Bernard Gui (another historical person who figures in the novel), a Dominican monk and papal inquisitor. Also, he argued that things only exist in the particular, that there are no universals outside of the mind, and that words simply act as signs for things and connectors to concepts. In this, William of Ockham may be considered an early semiologist. No wonder Eco focused on him.
And, one may wonder, is the word “Adso” so far off from the word “Watson”?
Leaving the Prologue, where one could spend still more time explicating subordinate keys to the story, let us next turn to the second inner narrative – the story itself. While the Prologue begins with “In the Beginning”, the story begins with the end – the end of November and hence the end of the Liturgical Year, just before Advent, a time of growing darkness, appropriate for an Apocalypse. And, indeed, there will be many endings before this story is over.
To be continued
Athenian Stranger: I say that about serious matters a man should be serious,
and about a matter which is not serious he should not be, serious;
and that god is the natural and worthy object of our most serious
and blessed endeavours, for man, as I said before, is made to be
the plaything of god, and this, truly considered, is the best of him;
wherefore also every man and woman should walk seriously, and pass life
in the noblest of pastimes, and be of another mind from what they are at present.
from Plato, Laws, Bk. VII, 803c
As mentioned in Part I, there is a political context for the novel, viz., the debate between the papacy and the Franciscans regarding poverty, placed symbolically in the question “Did Jesus own his own clothes?” The philosophical context of the novel, or I should say one of them, the issue of laughter and comedy, is also framed, within the story itself even, with a parallel question "Did Jesus laugh?" [See pp. 95, 128-129.]
There is also what I will call the overt mystery and the covert mystery. The overt mystery is the whodunnit question: who is responsible for the deaths of the monks at the monastery and why? The covert question, which proceeds from the why of the first mystery, is: what is this text, the Second Book of Aristotle’s Poetics, that it should draw such strong emotions out in people? So, from fragments of this text, let us explore the second mystery. The difficulty, of course, is that the Second Book of the Poetics really is missing. We must, if we can, reconstruct it from fragments.
I will concentrate mostly on the crucial episodes where the subject of laughter or comedy is discussed or where Aristotle’s Poetics becomes relevant with some nods to the plot and context. Most particularly, this part of the article will concentrate on the scenes involving Jorge de Burgos, an older, blind monk, whom we learn later knows more about the Library than the current librarian. He is also William’s nemesis in both the overt mystery and the covert mystery.
The plot proceeds from the request of the Abbott that William, a former inquisitor, investigate the very recent death of Adelmo, a monk, who was found one morning at the bottom of the cliff below the Aedificium, which contains the Library, apparently having jumped, fallen or been pushed from one of the Library’s windows. Thus, William of Baskerville comes to ask the Abbot about this extraordinary Library, only to receive a most peculiar response; namely, that the Library is a physical and spiritual labyrinth and that only the librarian (and the assistant librarian) are privy to the secrets of the labyrinth, and only the librarian decides who sees what books, “because not all truths are for all ears, not all falsehoods can be recognized as such by a pious soul” [p. 37]. As the plot proceeds, monks associated with the Library or with a certain book continue to die at the rate of one per day. The Library then is the focus of inquiry, both for William and for the reader.
But before this curious Library with knowledge restrictions can be explored further, the reader’s attention is diverted to the church of the monastery as Adso and William go there to meet Ubertino, the leader of the Franciscan Spirituals. The church, Adso tells us, is not majestic [p. 40]. Indeed, but for the striking apocalyptic stone capital, the building itself gets little attention, and practically none compared to the Library, the real concern of this monastery. But the stone carving is worthy of mention, for the “Seated One”, as Adso calls the figure of God, holds a sealed book in his left hand. And the human figure to the right of the Seated One is also holding out a book. And further, two figures – monsters of heaven, not hell – at the feet of the Seated One, a bull and a lion, each also clutch a book. So, indeed, the word is with God and, apparently, always with God. Adso’s vision, not his last in the story, goes far beyond the stone itself as he even imagines the Seated One shouting words.
And words are what dominate next as Adso and William are greeted by Salvatore, whose wild physical appearance was described in Part I of this article. Salvatore’s appearance is matched by his language, as he freely mixes Latin, French, Spanish and Italian into the same sentence, a true tower of Babel all by himself. His speech is as comical as his appearance.
After Salvatore, we meet Ubertino, and Adso’s first words, in contradiction of his earlier promise, are “I studied that face, its features sweet as those of the sainted woman with whom he had fraternally exchanged profound spiritual thoughts.” Ubertino is a serious, even grim, man, and when William ventures on humour, responding to Ubertino’s claim that “Nature is good because she is the daughter of God” by asserting “And God must be good, since he generated Nature”, completing the circular argument, Ubertino is edgy and says, “I can never tell when you Englishmen are speaking seriously. There is nothing amusing about such a serious question.” This opinion is later echoed by Adso.
William and Adso proceed to the Scriptorium (below the Library in the Aedificium). [First Day, After Nones] While at Adelmo’s desk, the blind Jorge de Burgos approaches from behind and makes his presence known by proclaiming, in Latin, “I do not speak empty words or those fit for laughter.” William is of quite a different disposition and takes up the challenge implicitly made by the former Librarian. He counters Jorge’s accusation that laughter is provoked by bad speech with a comment that marginalia (the illustration of manuscripts with drawings of beasts and angels, etc.) is used to edifying ends as are examples from the animal world used in sermons as examples of morality (viz., Aesop’s Fables). Jorge then responds “mockingly, but without smiling”. Considering Jorge’s distaste for humour, this is remarkable, but also illuminating. Jorge has chosen as his linguistic weapon the reductio ad absurdum argument, whereby a debater makes an extreme form of the opponent’s argument look ridiculous. But, as serious as this is as a debating form, it also partakes of comedy, in its satirical form.[1]
William replies “humbly” according to Adso, but this humility is not a submissive humility, but also a form of mockery, for while William’s tone may be humble, his words continue to challenge the venerable elder. He notes that other writers have argued for truth being revealed in distorted images, whereby the mind is “obliged to perceive the mysteries hidden under the turpitude of images”. In doing so, of course, William hides his own opinion.
Jorge, on the contrary, does not hide his opinion. He decries the monstrosities of art, even including the aforementioned designs on the capital of the church entrance, asking “what is the meaning of those ridiculous grotesques, those monstrous shapes and shapely monsters?” While Jorge finds no edification in them, it should be remembered that Adso in his description of the capital emphasized both literary and numerological interpretations of the scene. Thus, Adso, in a humorous way, provides a silent answer to Jorge’s question.
At this point, Venantius breaks into the dialogue. Venantius, we will later learn, is obsessed with gaining a philosophical understanding of laughter and comedy. He makes Jorge recall that two days before Adelmo died, a similar conversation took place there in the Scriptorium, in which he notes that Thomas Aquinas was sited for the proposition that God is revealed better by dissimilitudes than similitudes. But as he starts to mention what Aristotle had to say on the subject, he is rudely interrupted by Jorge, who brusquely claims he does not remember the discussion. In truth, Venantius is playing with Jorge by mentioning Aristotle, for he has learned the secret of the Abbey, namely that the lost Second Book of the Poetics is there. Jorge, frightened by the mention of Aristotle in the presence of William, quickly diverts attention from this dangerous topic. Venantius will not let him go, however, and pushes the issue of the prior discussion, which was whether the use of metaphor, puns and riddles forces us to look at matters in a “new and surprising way”. Only the intervention of Berengar, the assistant librarian and soon to be victim, keeps the discussion from becoming rancorous.
The subject of the discussion changes, but one last riposte awaits. When Jorge mentions a book about the coming of the Antichrist, William notes that the book was written before the millennium, implying harshly that it was obviously false, since it is now 327 years later. The world failed to end. Adso narrates Jorge’s rage in the following words: “‘ For those who lack eyes to see,’ the blind man said, ‘The ways of the Antichrist are slow and tortuous.’” We are left to wonder if in his anger Jorge sees the humour in his own declaration. In any case, Eco illustrates that laughter and anger can intertwine.
The dance of words between William and Jorge continues that evening at dinner [First Day: Compline] when Jorge claims that John Chrysostom said that Christ never laughed. Immediately, William takes the other side, arguing that “nothing in his human nature forbade it...because laughter...is proper to man.” William enthymatically avoids the other side of the theological issue – the divine nature of Jesus – to deny which there would have been the grossest heresy. This reduces Jorge’s position to a mere “The son of man could laugh, but it is not written that he did.” Finally, the Abbott uses his authority to bid everyone be silent, and once again the serious sparring about laughter between the opponents is cut off by a third person. [This arcane debate presages the more formal theological debate to come with the Dominicans and Minorites about the poverty of Jesus.]
The next morning [Second Day: Prime] William and Adso accost Benno and make him relate the discussion that Jorge said he could not remember that occurred before Adelmo’s death. Benno does, and relates a pointed argument between Venantius (who also achieves victimhood as a murdered monk) and Jorge about what Aristotle says about laughter, and in particular, what might have been written in the Second Book of the Poetics. The discussion was heated but was ended with a double entendre by Berengar, the assistant librarian, who remarked (after a careless comment by Jorge about not taking African poets as models) that “if one sought carefully among the Africans, quite different riddles would be found.” Berengar was referring humorously to the hiding place in the Library of the lost Second Book of the Poetics and taunting Jorge with this secret knowledge. Jorge, defeated by a laughable comment, stormed off, and, as we later learn, used this time to prepare his ultimate defense against anyone reading the book, poison.
William and Jorge clash again a short while later in the Scriptorium [Second Day: Terce], when Jorge, again approaching from behind, again makes his presence known first with words, this time “The library is testimony to truth and error.” William had just been examining a book by Lucian, similar to one by Apuleius[2], about a man who is turned into an ass. William responds to Jorge that the fable, beneath its fictions, is a moral tale about how we pay for our errors.[3] Jorge counters that Jesus told parables, not fables. And William replies that laughter is curative, especially of melancholy and that laughter is peculiar to man and a sign of his rationality. Jorge then sets up a false dichotomy to try to prove that laughter at evil and laughter at good are both bad. William, however, avoids the false extremes and produces quotes from Quintilian and Pliny the Younger about appropriate uses of laughter. To this, Jorge can only call those writers “pagans”. William then makes a remark most profound. He says that in the Christian era, Synesius of Cyrene said that the divinity could harmoniously combine comic and tragic, and adds that Ausonius recommended moderate use of both the serious and the jocose. I suggest that it is just this balanced combination tragic and comic that Eco strives for in this novel.
After William and Jorge trade quotations for a while, Jorge propounds that “Laughter foments doubt”, to which William quickly replies, “But sometimes it is right to doubt,” a remark that might not be wise to make in a monastery. Jorge attacks, classifying William along with those committed to reason, not faith, who “submit all problems to the cold, lifeless scrutiny of reason not enlightened by Scripture.” Of course, to anyone reading this now, the allusion to enlightenment coming from Jorge is filled with irony, as the 18th century enlightenment was opposed to the superstition of religion. And Jorge concludes, “With his laughter the fool says in his heart, ‘Deus non est.’”
William does not contest these pronouncements of Jorge, as he probably agrees that they are true. Instead, he diverts from these strong points to claim that Jorge’s characterization of Abelard as a castrate was unfair. After the diversion, William can resume the argument for reason, tempered with respect, by saying, “Of us God demands that we apply our reason to many obscure things about which Scripture has left us free to decide.” Arguing for a reasoned examination of any proposition put forth by someone claiming authority, William returns the discussion to laughter by claiming that laughter can be a weapon in argument, “serving to confound the wicked and make their foolishness evident.” When Jorge sneers at William’s example of a martyr making fun of his torturers, William tells Jorge that “Though you are controlling your lips, you are tacitly laughing at something nor do you wish me to take it seriously. You are laughing at laughter, but you are laughing.” Laughter, then, is perhaps, not only something peculiar to humans, it may also be inescapable for humans.
Once again, Jorge counters with the proposition that Christ did not laugh. William, this time, is ready with counterexamples, suggesting that Jesus used witticisms to confound sinners, citing His challenge to the Pharisees that he who is without sin should cast the first stone, the reference to the image of Caesar on Roman coins, and the pun on the name Peter, viz. the rock on which Jesus will build his church. William goes on to give a ribald example of humour in the debates of monks, gaining laughter from the monks listening to this discussion and enraging Jorge who resorts to an equally raunchy insult. Surprised, William backs down and his act of humility ends the discussion.
But what of this proposition that Jesus never laughed? Adso wants an answer, and later that day [Second Day: Compline], Adso asks William about it as they are walking through the Ossarium to the Library. William’s response to Adso is very different from that he gave Jorge. William says, in full, “Legions of scholars have wondered whether Christ laughed. The question doesn’t interest me much. I believe he never laughed, because, omniscient as the son of God had to be, he knew how we Christians would behave. But here we are.”
That last sentence may relate to the fact that they had reached the end of the corridor, or it may also relate to the previous sentence. The ambiguity is interesting. William’s remark about Christ never laughing is striking for two reasons. On one level, it shows that he could have agreed with Jorge but chose rather to argue with him and enrage him. He was acting deliberately in that and perhaps playfully. But on another, higher level, it argues for the difference between the human and the divine. The divine, as in the quotation from Plato that introduces this part of the article, is serious. It is humanity that is filled with playfulness. The distinction is important and must be maintained, lest we try to act like gods, as, I submit, Jorge does, who at least believes himself to be the tool of God.
So why is it that laughter is appropriate to humans and not to gods? Perhaps, an answer is suggested by the discussion between William and Adso when William solves the Library labyrinth, not while they are inside but when they are outside. Adso asks him how he could do this, and William replies, “Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.” And as we do not know its rule, the world appears absurd, and the only response to absurdity is laughter.
William deciphers Venantius’s cryptogram eventually [Fourth Day: Terce, p. 284], and provides a list of fragments written by Venantius before the poison killed him. The fragments are in fact mostly from Aristotle himself, deriving from either the First Book of the Poetics or from the Rhetoric or other quotes attributed to him. They are as follows:
The terrible poison that gives purification...
The best weapon for destroying the enemy...
Use humble persons, base and ugly, take pleasure from their defect...They must not die...Not in the houses of the noble and powerful but from the peasant’s villages, after abundant meal and libations...Squat bodies, deformed faces.
They rape virgins, lie with whores, not evil, without fear.
A different truth, a different image of the truth...
The venerable figs.
The shameless stone rolls over the plain...Before the eyes.
Deceit is necessary and to surprise in deceit, to say the opposite of what is believed, to say one thing and mean another.
To them the cicadas will sing from the ground.
While William and Adso do not know at that time what to make of these quotes, the informed reader can see the list as mainly classic tropes used in classic Greek comedies. Indeed, many of these tropes are used in this novel itself, illustrating by example these fragments from Aristotle. But as we have seen in the discussion so far, there is much more to laughter and comedy than just the employment of specific artifices.
From the Second Day until midnight commencing the Seventh Day, William and Jorge do not meet again, though Jorge once passes by, whereupon someone dies. The intervening time is consumed in detection and learning that which will prepare William for the final confrontation with Jorge. In the interim, too, events occur that provide us further examples of humour: Adso and Salvatore make a bilingual pun on “truffle” and “teufel” (the German word for devil); Adso mimics/plays the traditional lovesick character of comedy [pp. 323-325] with dry mouth and pounding heart, using words right out of Saphho’s famous fragment No. 31; a solemn meeting of monks to discuss theology degenerates into common name-calling [pp. 346-348]; Adso picks up the book that includes the long sought Aristotelian text, and William tells him to put it down [p. 363]; William lies to Bernard Gui and tells him he was looking at a book on canine hydrophobia, which he insists must have been of great use to Bernard – who is a Dominican, an order often referred to as the “Lord’s dogs” [pp. 378-379]; and William at least twice says the opposite of what he means, confusing Adso no end. This latter merits elaboration.
On the Fifth Day: Nones, Bernard Gui has brought Salvatore out for trial as a heretic. Adso whispers to William that Bernard has tortured Salvatore. William drily remarks, “Not at all...An inquisitor never tortures. The custody of the defendant’s body is always entrusted to the secular arm.” To which, Adso protests that it is all the same thing. William again drily tells Adso that the inquisitor keeps his hands clean so that when he arrives the accused can find in the inquisitor an easing of his sufferings. Adso, appalled, says, “You’re jesting,” to which William replies, “Do these seem things to jest about?”
To the reader, having the advantage of centuries and being outside the frame, the irony of William’s remarks are deep and bitter. On the one hand, he is not jesting. He is accurately relating the self-delusion that inquisitors used to justify to themselves the horror that they perpetrate. On the other hand, by describing it in the dry manner that he does, he undermines the proposition, by focusing on the horror. The dry mock is indeed a weapon against the self-important destroyers.
In the second instance where William says the opposite of what he means [p. 425 Sixth Day: Prime], Adso and he are discussing false relics and William refers to one church which had a skull of St. John the Baptist as a twelve-year-old. Adso said he thought John was much older when he died; and William responds that the other skull must be in some other church. In frustration Adso declares that he never knows when William is jesting as he appeared to laugh “only when he said serious things and remained very serious when he was presumably joking.” Faithful as Adso is as a narrator, his own admitted inability to understand William’s irony serves to increase the effect of that irony on the reader. He is William’s straight man.
There remain two significant incidents to discuss before the final confrontation: the sermon by Jorge at Compline on the Fifth Day, and Adso’s bizarre dream on the Sixth Day. These we will discuss in the final part of this article as they directly relate to the words and events of the Seventh Day.
1 See The Dry Mock, A Study of Irony in Drama by Alan Reynolds Thompson, U. Cal. Press 1948, wherein the author defines irony in terms of a mocking laugh that dies on the lips.
2 Apuleius, The Golden Ass
3 The modern reader can be forgiven for being unaware of the low regard in which Christianity held fictional writing for centuries. Fiction was considered to be falsehood; therefore, it was improper to write or to read it. This attitude prevailed in puritanical America longer than in England and the rest of Europe. As a result, the first American novel did not appear until 1793, long after the art form was established in Europe. The reader may be interested to know that that first American novel was, however, about adultery and incest.
To be continued
An existential system cannot be formulated. Does this mean that
no suchsystem exists? By no means; nor is this implied in our
assertion. Existence itself is a system – for God; but it cannot
be a system for any existing spirit. System and finality correspond
to one another, but existence is precisely the opposite of finality.
Søren Kierkegaard
from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the “Philosophical Fragments”
Part II of this article examined the verbal fencing and wordplay between William of Baskerville and Jorge de Burgos, the blind super-librarian of the abbey. That is ended now. What remains is the final confrontation and conflagration.
But first, Eco allows Jorge an uninterrupted seven page speech, the sermon at Compline on the evening of the Fifth Day, with everyone, including the papal legation, sitting silent and listening. Jorge gets an opportunity to indirectly justify his actions, since he cannot admit to the assembled group what has really transpired. Does Eco allow him this speech to give the devil his due? Or does Jorge have something of value to say?
Knowing, in retrospect, that Jorge is responsible for the deaths makes the meaning of this obscure speech clearer. In the first paragraph, Jorge lays claim to the defense of many crusaders and other schizophrenics, viz., that he is doing God’s work and that what he is doing is necessary. He invokes Judas as a most necessary actor in the drama of redemption, but denies Judas himself that redemption, and by implication, accepts that he will suffer the same fate. Later, however, in the final confrontation, Jorge declares to William that he believes “the Lord will absolve me, because He knows I acted for His glory.” [p. 471]
And what is this necessary work? First, he expounds on the function of the library and the librarian. But of our work, the work of our order and in particular the work of this monastery, a part – indeed, the substance, – is study, and the preservation of knowledge. Preservation of, I say, not search for, because the property of knowledge, as a divine thing, is that it is complete and has been defined since the beginning, in the perfection of the Word which expresses itself to itself. Preservation, I say, and not search, because it is a property of knowledge, as a human thing, that it has been defined and completed over the course of the centuries, from the preachings of the prophets to the interpretation of the fathers of the church. [p. 399]
Besides bringing us back directly to Adso’s opening words in the Prologue, and thereby suggesting that maybe something of what Jorge says is accepted by Adso as true, it asserts an existing completeness of knowledge that Adso in the Prologue leaves to eternity or at least to revelation face to face with God. Adso acknowledges that in life, at least, knowledge is viewed in fragments, while Jorge proclaims it complete. And from the rest of the speech we see that he acts with the certainty of having complete knowledge. Knowledge is, in his view, nothing but “awed comment” on scriptural truths.
And sometimes an apposite comment came also from the pagans,
who were ignorant of them [the prophets and church doctors],
and their words have been taken into the Christian tradition.
But beyond that there is nothing further to say. There is only
to continue meditation, to gloss, preserve. [p. 399]
And he contrasts what he sees as the Christian tradition of preserving both correct and incorrect commentary (the first because it is correct, the latter so it may be refuted at the appropriate time in history) with the Islamic way, as he sees it, of destroying all commentary, the good because it is already in the Koran, and the bad, because it is bad. And he uses for the latter the example of a caliph who burned a library to the ground for that reason. And yet, the retrospective reader knows that the book ends with Jorge causing a conflagration that wholly destroys this magnificent library and the one copy of Aristotle’s second book of the Poetics in existence. Not only does he destroy, as we shall see below, he laughs when he destroys. The hater of laughter laughs. How can Jorge, the Christian librarian, reach such a point? The next point in his sermon helps here:
Now, my brothers, what is the sin of pride that can tempt
a scholar-monk? That of considering his task not preserving
but seeking some information not yet vouchsafed mankind,
as if the last word had not already resounded in the words
of the last angel who speaks in the last book of Scripture
[Revelation]… This is the pride that lurked and is still
lurking within these walls: and I say to him who has laboured
and labours to break the seals of the books that are not his
to see, that it is this pride the Lord wanted to punish if it
is not brought down and does not humble itself, for the Lord
has no difficulty in finding, always and still, thanks to our
fragility, the instrument of His vengeance. [p. 400]
Though Jorge attributes pride to those who would seek knowledge, it is he who exhibits the most pride in the story by insisting that he knows the mind of God, that he is, in fact, God’s instrument to prevent others from reading this text of Aristotle, and that he, as God’s agent, may do so at all costs. And, one may ask, which cost is greater, the taking of human lives, which he has already done and will do again, poisoning Malachi, the next curious monk to try to read the book, and trapping the Abbot to his death, both on the Sixth Day, or the destruction of a unique library? Curiously, by the time the reader reaches the Night of the Seventh Day, the deaths of the monks somehow seem small compared to the loss of the Second Book of the Poetics and the library. But Adso has warned us in the Prologue that these times are topsy-turvy.
Jorge then goes on to attribute all this current manifestation of pride to the works of the Antichrist, whom, he alleges, is there now and is working his evil, for the end of days is at hand. And he recites the strange things that will happen in such times, listing the evils much as Adso decried the times in which he lived in the Prologue, but at greater length and with more pointedness toward the clergy. As Jorge is at the height of his description of the panoply of evils that will befall the world from one end to another, he describes the Antichrist:
These are the features that will mark him: his head
will be of burning fire, his right eye will be
bloodshot, his left eye a feline green with two
pupils, and his eyebrows will be white, he lower
lip swollen, his ankle weak, he feet big, his
thumb crushed and elongated. [p. 403]
And here William whispers to Adso, “It seems his own portrait.” [p. 403] And Adso laughs spontaneously, though his hair had begun to stand on end. He laughs a laugh that in the momentary silence was “A sound that . . . was clearly audible, but fortunately everyone thought someone was coughing, or weeping, or shuddering, and all of them were right.” [p. 403] First, we find ourselves right back to Aristotle’s comment, discussed in Part II of this article: “Use humble persons, base and ugly, take pleasure from their defect.” Second, Adso’s response to William’s “very wicked remark” suggests what the book is all about: it is the ability and necessity of laughter to intrude on the pious, the proper and the imperious, to place apparent tragedy in a different light and perspective. But in calling William’s remark “very wicked”, he is showing some intellectual kinship with Jorge who would condemn such humorous, but ridiculing, statements.
Jorge concludes his fire and brimstone sermon with a catalogue of seven final days, noting that on the Seventh Day there will be judgment, but on the Eighth Day, the blessed will be set free and “all together they will rejoice because the destruction of this world will have been consummated!” [p. 404] There it is, there is the reason that Jorge laughs as fire consumes the library. He believes that the end of time is already here and he wants the world destroyed before any more can, as he sees it, be corrupted by this evil text. So, when the library begins to burn, Jorge sees it as evidence that the world is being destroyed and he rejoices. And in so doing, he involuntarily laughs. There is nothing else he can do.
We turn now to the final confrontation between William and Jorge. It occurs at midnight at the start of the Seventh Day. Adso is unambiguous, saying, “Two hours after compline, at the end of the sixth day, in the heart of the night that was giving birth to the seventh day, we entered the finis Africae.” [p. 460] Eco is using an Apocalyptic sequence, following the references in Revelation to seven seals, seven angels, etc. As mentioned in Part I, Adso tells us [First Day: Prime] that the events take place at the “end of November”, 1327. He also says there that they heard mass in the valley before approaching the Abbey. [p. 21] That would make the first day a Sunday. He further tells us [Sixth Day: Matins] that the Abbot is soliciting chants to prepare for the Christmas High Mass. [p. 412] In the year 1327, Christmas fell on Friday , so the First Sunday in Advent, the start of the Liturgical Calendar, would have been November 29th. The Seventh Day of the story, then, would be Saturday, November 28th, 1327, the last day of the Liturgical Calendar, and symbolically, the end of time and of the world. Eco fittingly places the confrontation, then, at the end of the church year and the end of six days of laborious seeking, to which Jorge has made reference in his sermon. The Apocalypse theme had already been introduced by the elderly Aldinardo, who believed the one-a-day deaths mirrored the several themes associated with the seven trumpets in Revelation.
The discussion begins casually, as if two old friends were filling each other in on the recent events of their lives. At one point Adso comments:
I realized, with a shudder, that at this moment these two men,
arrayed in mortal conflict, were admiring each other, as if each had
acted only to win the other’s applause. The thought crossed my mind
that the artifices Berengar used to seduce Adelmo, and the simple and
natural acts with which the girl had aroused my passion and my desire,
were nothing compared to the cleverness and mad skill each used to
conquer the other, nothing compared to the act of seduction going on
before my eyes at that moment, which had unfolded over seven days,
each of the two interlocutors making, as it were, mysterious
appointments with the other, each secretly aspiring to the other’s
approbation, each fearing and hating the other. [pp. 472-473]
And so between them they explain the hidden events to the reader. At this point there is no joking, no humour. William declares that he wants to see “the second book of the Poetics of Aristotle, the book everyone has believed lost or never written, and of which you hold the only copy.” Jorge believing that he can still defeat his opponent, hands him the book across the table, and offers to let Adso read it – afterward. But William is wary of the poison and wears gloves to hold the book and turn the pages, a fact that the blind librarian cannot know.
And so William begins to read the start of the book, as Eco gives us his idea of the opening page of Aristotle’s commentary on comedy, setting forth the ways in which comedy excites laughter – by action (comparison of best with worst, surprise and deceit, impossibilities, debasing behaviour) and words (puns, misunderstandings, mispronunciations, etc.). Then William reveals to Jorge that he is wearing gloves and knows the secret of the poison. More explicatory discussion follows, until the subject turns to their prior encounters about laughter. William says, “Gradually this second book took shape in my mind as it had to be. I could tell you almost all of it without reading the pages that were meant to poison me.” [pp. 471-472] He then comments on how Aristotle saw the origins of comedy from peasant villages, that unlike tragedy it does not deal with the famous and powerful, but rather with the base and ridiculous, by showing defects and vices of ordinary men.
Jorge asks William if he reconstructed the book by reading other books. William acknowledges that this is so. And this is key to understanding The Name of the Rose. For it indicates that from the signs that we perceive, we can construct other similar signs, that must be, even though we cannot see them. Analogously, this is the way that astronomers proceed to measure objects they cannot see. And it returns us to the opening pages where William describes the Abbot’s horse, even to his size and name, without ever seeing the horse.
In turn, Jorge reveals why this book is so anathema to him. First, it was written by Aristotle, the recovery of whose works has undermined Christian dogma at every step. Second, and here Jorge speaks uninterrupted for two pages, he complains that Aristotle has elevated the function of laughter from the base and ridiculous, to the level of art, making it an object of philosophy, and, possibly, of theology, a situation he cannot sanction. For laughter frees one from fear of the devil, and this book teaches that that is a form of wisdom. He fears that one could infer from this book, that since laughter is unique to man, it is the goal of man. And it is not so far to go then to be freed from fear of God, which he sees as essential to good behaviour. To have all this follow with the blessing of the Philosopher (i.e., Aristotle) would destroy the church, destroy, even, all knowledge, as there is no answer to mockery of scripture.
In response, William tells Jorge he is the devil, because:
The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance
of the spirit, faith without a smile, truth that is never seized
with doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going,
and, in moving, he always returns whence he came. [p. 477]
William challenges the overwhelming certainty that Jorge has about everything, a certainty that has led him to murder to protect what he is certain God wants to protect. Jorge is bound to this system, but humans have too limited a perspective for a system, which, if there is one, can only be viewed from the perspective of God. Seeing through a glass darkly does not admit of systematic answers as Jorge would have. William realizes this to his own dismay as he says to Jorge, “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.” [p. 470]
Jorge then tells William he is a clown, like Francis of Assisi, “who de toto corpore fecerat linguam” [p. 478] that is, he made his speech out of his whole body. William, instead of challenging this, gives a further example of St. Francis’s humorous behaviour used to teach others to see from a different perspective. In other words, William uses humour itself as a weapon in the discussion to neutralize the insults of Jorge, and in fact, forces Jorge to relate another humorous story. In the end, Jorge is driven back to his assertion that he is the hand of God, that he knows with certainty what the will of the Lord is, “and I acted, interpreting it.”
Silence follows, necessarily, for against such certainty, however misguided, no argument can prevail. Jorge, for his part, sees only one path open against defeat, and he begins to eat the book, literalizing the metaphor of eating words, referring as he does to the Seventh Angel of the Seventh Seal, taking up the book and eating it. And he laughs.
And at that point, words give way to action, as a struggle ensues in which Jorge grabs the lamp and flings it away, causing the oil to spill onto a pile of books and burst into flame. What is most important to notice is that William is no longer able to restrain his anger and rage. He gives Jorge a violent shove, he utters a vile curse, he is confused, he is fighting fire, which heeds no logic, which he cannot defeat in his customary manner with words. Finally, he weeps, defeated. The positions of Jorge and William have been inverted. And yet, William should know, intellectually at least, that though the library is lost, the knowledge can be reconstructed, as he has reconstructed the lost book of the Poetics without seeing it. But his reaction is otherwise, for he says that the Antichrist is truly at hand, an Antichrist born of excessive love of God or the truth, because now no learning will hinder him. Recovering somewhat, William issues a warning to Adso:
Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth,
for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before
them,at times instead of them. . . . Perhaps, the mission of
those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth,
to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning
to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth. [p. 491]
Such words written in Italy a few years after the terror of the Red Brigades in the 1970s, which included the kidnapping and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, ring just as vitally true today as religious suicide bombers happily and angrily go to their death, bringing others with them.
But something has shaken William philosophically as well. He tells Adso that while he did indeed perceive the signs [signifiers, in current parlance], which are all that humans have to go on in any case, he misread the relationships between them. He reached the solution to the problem by accident, through incorrect inferences. His logic has failed him. William concludes from this that there is no order in the universe and that the presence of such order would offend the free will of God. And when Adso asks whether such a statement does not lead to the conclusion that God must not exist, William moves further toward solipsism by asking: “Do you mean . . . that there would be no possible and communicable learning any more if the very criterion of truth were lacking, or do you mean you could no longer communicate what you know because others would not allow you to?” [p. 493] From there William seems to slip away, saying, “There is too much confusion here . . . Non in commotione, non in commotione Dominus.” [p. 493] Translated this means God is not in the chaos.
William disappears, and Adso retires to a quiet monastic life, only to communicate by writing the story decades later. Adso, then, does not accept the pessimism that engulfs William. In fact, by narrating, he rejects William’s conclusions. He does, wittingly or not, make the truth laugh, and thereby argues for an underlying order in the universe, even though it is glimpsed only in fragments. By narrating, Adso’s action asserts that while tragedy exists, as shown in the destruction of the Abbey and the library and the lives of many monks, none the less, comedy also exists, inexplicably interweaved with tragedy. This may be in contradiction to his words proclaiming complete uncertainty: “And it is a hard thing for this old monk, on the threshold of death, not to know whether the letter he has written contains some hidden meaning, or more than one, or many, or none at all.” [last page, p. 501] But action in the face of doubt and uncertainty may be all that be attained. To persevere is to laugh in the face of absurdity.
The last line of the book, the bane of many readers, makes more sense in the light of this analysis. It is: “stat rosa pristina nomine, nomine nuda tenemus.” [p. 502] The rose stands pure in its name; we have it only by a bare name. The signifiers are always there. The question is what do they signify. William, in his despair, has given up trying to find the relationships between signifiers and signified, between signifiers and each other. Like Jorge, he demanded too much order from the world. And like Jorge it causes his downfall. Adso has at least maintained an agnostic balance.
Comedy and laughter then are not just theatre or theatrical devices. They are integral to human nature. They are a way of responding to a world whose signification is obscure at best, a way of responding that can be chosen or rejected.
I have, in my eclectic collection, two novels which I first read years ago and which, put together, give a fascinating overview of a period of history which is usually neglected, the latter years of the Roman Empire. This neglect is borne out by the fact that when, knowing little about this period, I consulted my library catalogue to find a general history, the only book they had was the classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon written over 250 years ago. (Fortunately there was an illustrated abridged edition I could cope with.) Gibbon’s vast oeuvre is daunting, but I would recommend it for the language alone. I do not think I have ever read history expressed in such delightfully elegant terms. I could easily imagine Jane Austen whiling away many an hour over it.
But back to our sheep as my French professor used to say. The two novels in question are Julian by Gore Vidal (1962) and Count Belisarius by Robert Graves (1938). A nephew of Constantine the Great, Julian became Emperor in 361AD. During his two-year reign he earned the appellation ‘The Apostate’ for trying to restore the worship of the ancient gods. Belisarius was born around 500AD and was the most brilliant general of his day. He began the transformation that would turn the classic Roman infantryman into the mounted knight of Medieval times.
The Roman Empire these two men knew was very different from the empire inherited soon after the time of Christ by the Claudius we met in Graves’ most well-known historical novels. Although the boundaries of the empire had changed little in the intervening years its character had changed markedly. It was continually at war, not only to maintain those boundaries against the barbarian tribes that were constantly straining and crossing it, but with itself.
A process for succession to the position of emperor was never fixed. It might occur through the incumbent nominating a member of his family, it might be by acclamation by the army or it might be by usurpation. This meant that the emperor always felt threatened by any relative or military leader who might covet his position. And as the empire proved too big and unwieldy to be controlled by one man, several forms of multiple leadership were experimented with. However, the inevitable distrust and jealousy between the leaders often led to civil war.
In Julian’s time, there was one emperor, entitled Augustus, who would give his heirs apparent the title of Caesar together with responsibility for a particular part of the empire. Although this system seems logical it still did not eliminate fear or jealousy. By Berlisarius’ time, the empire had been divided into two, the West and the East, but the western empire had been overrun by Germanic tribes and existed in name only.
The role of emperor had also changed. While Augustus, despite his wealth and power, had always considered himself the first among equals, by Julian’s time, the emperor’s court had taken on all the mystique and pomp of an oriental potentate’s. The emperor was a solemn and distant figure who was rarely seen by the people, dressed in splendid purple robes and was attended by a train of household eunuchs who protected and controlled him.
The culture of the empire had also changed. Rome had always been on the periphery of the civilised world, but its citizens had held to a strong Roman identity. By Julian’s time, Rome itself had been abandoned by the emperor whose western court was held in Milan, but who resided mostly in Constantinople. The focus of the empire had turned east politically and culturally and the language and mindset of the elite was now Greek. Latin was retained only as a ceremonial language, and as the rough camp Latin of the army.
And under Julian’s uncle, Constantine the Great, Christianity had become the state religion and the ancient gods had been abandoned. But the saintly early church had since changed into a collection of warring factions, who, forgetting Jesus’ fundamental message of ‘Love one another’, fought constantly over a theological matter that never seemed to bother their founder: What was the nature of Jesus? Was he God or Man, or both and in what proportion? The battle raged in Julian’s time and had still not been resolved in Belisarius’.
Although these two novels make a complementary pair, I was struck by how different the are. Vidal has succeeded in writing in a style that is modern and colloquial, but without being jarringly anachronistic. Julian is structured around three narrators. Mostly it purports to be Julian’s own notes for an autobiography which are interspersed with the annotations by and correspondence between two of his philosophical mentors who hope to edit and publish it. Written in the first person with comments from observers who love him but are not blind to his shortcomings, it gives a well-rounded picture of Julian. As the text stands it is ‘not meant for publication’ and thus not aimed at posterity, so the historical context is not overtly filled out, yet we get a full picture of Julian’s world.
Count Belisarius on the other hand purports to be a history written by one Eugenius, household eunuch and devoted slave to Belisarius’ wife Antonina. Written in a style that has a strong archaic feel, but without seeming stodgy or affected, it yet comes close to hagiography. Belisarius is portrayed as a warrior saint whose only flaw is a certain earnest gravity. Aimed squarely at posterity, it gives us a broad and detailed panorama of the period and its protagonists.
Yet for all these contrasts, the two eponymous characters have much in common. Both are military men, both are men of honour trying to maintain their integrity against hostile forces, and both hold strong spiritual beliefs. They also live lives made precarious by their inimical relationships with their emperors.
Julian is born into the imperial family. His father is the half brother of Constantine the Great. When Constantine dies, he bequeaths his empire to his three sons, but the arrangement does not last long and in the war that ensues the victor is Constantius, a ruthless man of rather limited intellect. He secures his throne by slaughtering all of his close relatives. Julian and his older brother Gallus only survive because they are children – Julian just six, and Gallus twelve, but sickly and not expected to survive long.
They are kept under close but comfortable house arrest far from Constantinople. While Gallus, a rather arrogant and heartless boy, tends towards the martial arts, Julian prefers his books and is destined for the church. However, even at a young age, Julian questions the integrity of Christianity. How can a man call himself a devout Christian, as does his cousin Constantius, yet put all of his family to death? By the time he reaches his teens, Julian has secretly rejected Christianity and has turned to the ancient Hellenic gods.
While Julian would prefer to devote his life to philosophy, his destiny lies elsewhere. Constantius is unable to have children, a punishment he ascribes to his killing his relatives. His only recourse is to make Gallus and Julian his heirs. However he is never at ease with this necessity. When Gallus proves to be monstrously ungovernable, Constantius has him executed and Julian’s own life is on the line until Constantius is finally persuaded to appoint him Caesar and send him to command the army in Gaul.
Despite having never studied the arts of war before, Julian applies his considerable intellect to the work and is spectacularly successful in defending the western borders of the empire. However, his very success stokes Constantius’ paranoia. Julian discovers that when your emperor suspects you of coveting his throne, the only way to protect yourself is to do just what he expects and overthrow him. With the support of his devoted army, Julian sets off across Europe to Constantinople, but finds that Constantius died just before his arrival. He enters Constantinople as emperor to popular acclaim.
However, Julian soon loses his popularity as he takes on one of the most powerful forces in the empire, the Christian church. Julian removes its status as the state religion and sets the rival factions against each other. He then sets about re-establishing the old gods, rebuilding and restoring their temples and re-introducing ancient sacrificial and mystical practices. However, Julian tries to achieve too much too quickly. Too much has been lost. Too few practitioners of the old religion remain to re-establish the old ceremonies on the scale he demands. At the same time, despite his intellect, Julian is vulnerable to exploitation by charlatans who take advantage of his genuine spiritual quest. He becomes convinced that he is possessed by the spirit of Alexander the Great and sets out to emulate his conquest of Persia.
Throughout this period, Persia was the great nemesis of the Roman Empire. Just as in Vidal’s own time, there was an uneasy balance between these two great superpowers. Persia could never gather the strength to do more than nibble at the border, while it was protected from Roman invasion by its difficult terrain of desert and broad rivers. Julian’s invasion of Persia starts out well, but eventually falters and turns disastrous. During the long retreat, Julian is wounded in a skirmish under suspicious circumstances and dies. His friends are convinced he was assassinated in a Christian conspiracy.
Belisarius is born into a patrician family. His mother, a devout Christian, inculcates in him a simple religious devotion he never loses. Even as a schoolboy he shows himself to be a leader of men and as a teenager becomes a cavalry officer. Of Slavic background himself, Belisarius is open to all the influences available to him in a multicultural empire. He adapts all he learns about military skills and technology to the training and equipping of his own household cavalry which over the years proves to be almost invincible. A brilliant leader and tactician, Belisarius becomes the empire’s most gifted general and spends his life in constant military campaigns in North Africa, Persia and Italy, winning the last back from the Gothic invaders.
However, the emperor at the time, Justinian, is as limited and paranoid as Constantius. The narrator Eugenius believes Justinian is so evil that he is possessed by the Devil himself, despite his Christian professions. Justinian cannot believe that Belisarius is his devoted servant and has no interest in taking his throne. Belisarius never does learn the lesson Julian did, and steadfastly refuses the crown despite several times being in a position to usurp it. Belisarius is only protected from Justinian’s jealousy by the empress Theodora who is a childhood friend of his beloved wife Antonina. After her death he is cruelly destroyed by Justinian and dies the death of a Christian martyr.
These novels are designed to be enjoyed by men. If you are looking for romance, look elsewhere. Neither hero has much time for women, Julian taking a vow of celibacy after a very limited experience and Belisarius being strictly faithful to his wife. These are books of action and ideas.
And there is action aplenty, especially in Count Belisarius, where there is one battle after another and another and another. Julian fortunately skips all the battles, except the most important ones, with a cheeky expedient. Every time he gets to one in his narrative, Julian just leaves a note for his secretary to insert the relevant passage from his military memoir.
Julian as a character is both profound and naïve. He is an intellectual in pursuit of knowledge and philosophy yet at the same time retains a certain innocence and sense of wonder. His spiritual journey is triggered by a mystical experience in which he feels touched by Helios, the sun god himself, and it is this divine union that he is seeking. Yet he becomes waylaid by the superstitious trappings of the old religion and allows himself to be exploited and deceived. The reader is left with the impression that if Julian had not been disillusioned with Christianity, he would have made a renowned Christian mystic.
Unfortunately, the reader does not get to know Belisarius at all well. The narrator’s admiration comes between them. Belisarius remains something of a Byzantine icon – perfect, serene and distant. In his forward, Graves compares Belisarius to King Arthur. They were both romantic heroes, he says, fighting the same battle, the only difference being that Belisarius’ story was not handed down as a fairy tale but written by his Greek-educated secretary. Yet Graves does make something of a fairy-tale hero of Belisarius, in that he is perfect in all things, his only errors being as a result of his exalted virtues. Although by the end the reader feels sad for him, it is difficult to empathise with him.
Both novels explore similar sub-themes – the nature of power, and the integrity of the early church.
In both books, the hero’s nemesis is not the barbarian horde he is constantly at war with, but his own emperor. Both our heroes are honourable men who do not crave power, but their emperors constantly project onto them their own craving and are unable to see past their own failings. Both Constantius and Justinian try to protect themselves by destroying their rival. Their fear and jealously bring them close to insanity.
Julian manages to fight back. Constantius has not earned his loyalty. Belisarius maintains his loyalty to Justinian, however undeserved it is. He refuses to fight back and is destroyed.
Both authors show the Christianity of this period in a very poor light. The rivalry between the various theological camps is played out as merciless violence in Julian and near farce in Count Belisarius. Both protagonists are maintained by their religious faith, but not by the beliefs of the world around him. Julian rejects Christianity altogether, but his spiritual quest ends in self-delusion. Belisarius retains his beliefs by divorcing himself from the surrounding controversy. In the end he dies physically destroyed but morally triumphant.
Reading both these books does need something of a commitment. Julian, with its more human approach to its protagonist, is a much more satisfying read. I would only recommend Count Belisarius to readers who are interested in matters military.
Set in Britain in roughly the second half of the fifth century AD, Mary Stewart’s version of the familiar legend of King Arthur is narrated by Merlin the Enchanter.
The first novel, The Crystal Cave, introduces Myrddin Emrys (Merlin) as the illegitimate son of the unmarried Princess of South Wales and an unknown father. His lonely childhood, in which he is tolerated rather than accepted at his grandfather’s court, takes a turn for the better when Merlin encounters the wise Galapas, a hermit living in a cave above the town. Galapas teaches the young Merlin not only medicine, music, natural history and languages, but also how to use his strange spiritual gifts of vision and prophecy. The Crystal Cave of the title refers to a crystal-lined geode off Galapas’ cave, where Merlin first experiences his power of second sight. His grandfather’s death and his uncle’s ambition send Merlin, aged twelve, in flight for his life. Chance – or fate – takes him to Brittany where Aurelianus Ambrosius, rightful King of Britain, is living in exile and building up an invasion force to reclaim his throne. Ambrosius (Latin form of the name Emrys) is revealed as Merlin’s real father. Merlin joins his father’s cause, and his powers of prophecy and vision place him at the centre of tumultuous events as Ambrosius challenges the usurper Vortigern for the throne of Britain and Ambrosius’ brother Uther burns with illicit passion for another man’s wife.
Beginning at the point where The Crystal Cave left off, The Hollow Hills traces Merlin’s fate-driven quest for the great sword of Emperor Magnus Maximus, known in Welsh legend as the hero Macsen Wledig. As the hermit of the Green Chapel in the Wild Forest in England’s Lake District, Merlin is tutor and guide to the young Arthur, born as a result of King Uther’s illicit tryst with Ygraine of Cornwall and being brought up in anonymity as the ward of Count Ector at Galava (modern Ambleside). Once again Merlin’s powers are called upon to bring the young Arthur to his destiny as Uther’s heir and successor – but not even Merlin can guard Arthur against the dark seed of destruction sown by Uther’s daughter Morgause.
The last in the trilogy, The Last Enchantment, tells the story of Merlin during Arthur’s reign. Having brought Arthur to the crown and the sword of his destiny, Merlin’s powers are fading and he is growing old and ill. Arthur’s two sisters Morgause and Morgan are brewing poison and treachery, and as the danger gathers Merlin seeks a pupil who will be able to take up his role as Arthur’s enchanter when he is gone. In the lovely Nimue Merlin finds his heart’s desire and recognises her as an enchantress with powers as great as his own. But how is she connected with Merlin’s foreknowledge of his own fate, to be entombed alive in his own cave in the hollow hill?
The trilogy is beautifully written in limpid prose. Landscape, wildlife and the changing seasons are especially well conveyed in vivid descriptive detail, bringing the world fully to life. The author says in the Note to The Crystal Cave that all the places described are authentic. There is no equivalent statement in the Notes to the other two novels, so I am not certain whether the same philosophy was carried throughout the series. Some of them can be pinpointed on a map, such as the Roman forts in the Aire Gap, while the site of the Green Chapel seems to be somewhere near Grasmere in the English Lake District but I wouldn’t like to say exactly where.
A series of novels with Merlin as the central character is always likely to contain magic, and sure enough there are some fantastical elements. Merlin has magic that works, can call fire from the air, can see events far removed in time and place, and fate or destiny dictates some episodes that would otherwise be outrageous coincidences. An interesting feature, perhaps connected with the importance of fate as a driver of events, is that Merlin’s magic is not entirely under his control. Whatever its nature, his power ebbs and flows, and Merlin interprets this as showing that he is being used as a tool by the god – God, singular, in Merlin’s world view. He accepts and honours numerous religions and deities, but believes, “All the gods are one God.”
The characters are complex and interesting, rarely either entirely bad or entirely good. Good people do bad things, and even the evil Morgause is accorded some measure of understanding for her actions. Merlin himself is an attractive character, which is just as well since the trilogy is narrated by him in first person and so the reader is perforce in Merlin’s company throughout. I often find first-person narratives frustrating, restricted as they are to a single character’s experiences and values. Fortunately Merlin is observant, curious, tolerant, a traveller in both body and mind, ever eager for new knowledge whatever its source, and his second sight allows him to recount events beyond his own experience. This has the effect of widening the scope of the narrative and allowing the story to unfold on a broader canvas than might otherwise be the case.
Most readers will, I would guess, be familiar with the Arthurian legend in general terms before reading the trilogy. In a way this perhaps mirrors the experience of the storytellers of old – a Welsh bard getting up to recount The Dream of Macsen Wledig or an English scop reciting Beowulf must have recognised that most of the audience already knew the ending. Some stories seem to have an indefinable narrative life that makes them absorbing even when you know the ending, and the Merlin trilogy manages to achieve that. At least it did for me – the episode of the entry into Tintagel and subsequent escape at the end of The Crystal Cave remains gripping no matter how many times I read it, even when I know perfectly well what happens to everyone involved.
The starting point for the trilogy was Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (Historia Regium Brittaniae), according to the Author’s Note to The Crystal Cave. This immediately gives you fair warning not to get pedantic about historical accuracy (insofar as there is any such thing in an era with so few sources and so few facts as post-Roman Britain). Geoffrey’s tale has the same cheerfully cavalier approach to history as the film Braveheart. The author describes Geoffrey as a “master of romance” (with which I would agree), and says of his book, “...he produced a long, racy hotch-potch of history…arranging his facts to suit his story, and when he got short of facts (which was on every page), inventing them out of the whole cloth. Historically speaking, the Historia Regium Brittaniae is appalling, but as a story it is tremendous stuff.” In the Note to The Hollow Hills, she quotes Geoffrey Ashe and goes on to say, “.... any given episode of my story can be ‘taken as fact or imagination or religious allegory or all three at once’. In this, if in nothing else, it is wholly true to its time.” The trilogy is best read in that spirit.
The novels can be read independently but work better if read in order. I found The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills to be the most compelling. The Last Enchantment did not work so well for me. This may be because The Last Enchantment deals with the period of Arthur’s reign around which many legends have accreted – the twelve battles, the Round Table, Guinevere’s abduction and adultery, the massacre of the innocents, the theft of Arthur’s sword, Camelot, the Holy Grail, the Lady of the Lake, Merlin’s affair with Nimue, Merlin’s imprisonment, Arthur’s two sorceress sisters, Merlin’s madness in the Caledonian Forest, and so on. The Last Enchantment has to touch on all these, which makes it rather meandering. By contrast, The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills cover Merlin’s early life and Arthur’s boyhood, which have far less legendary material attached and consequently allow a freer rein for the author’s imagination.
All in all, I found this an enthralling retelling of the Arthurian legend.
Carla Nayland is the author of Paths of Exile, and Ingeld’s Daughter. (see her website)
©Carla Nayland 2007