Eco's Sequel Effective But Condescending

UMBERTO ECO scored big in 1983. The English translation of his The Name of the Rose appeared in the United States and was a phenomenal success. A mystery novel set in a 14th century Italian abbey, it entertainingly combined detailed scholarship and philosophic inquiry with the pace and plot of a top-notch potboiler. A book that succeeded on many levels. The Name of the Rose earned itself a rightful place on widely disparate shelves, from the pulp-novel racks at the A & P to the syllabus for Professor David Herlihy's History 31, Medieval Europe.

But how does one capitalize of such an unexpected success? Mark Twain followed Tom Sawver with a slew of spin-offs, some, like Huckleberry Finn, classics in their own right: others, like Tom Sawyer, Detective, obvious efforts to keep the Clemens' larder well-stocked at a minimum of effort.

Mystery writers are especially prone to follow an exceptional early work with loads of lesser stories. Ellery Queen's later books, or, more recently, the sorry sequels Gregory Mcdonald wrote for Fletch, show writers struggling to regain the spark they had the first time around.

Eco, however, is not a pulp novelist but an intellectual by trade. A semiotics expert and James Joyce scholar at the University of Bologna, his Postscript to the Name of the Rose is largely a discussion of the thought he put into the first book.

Rather than offer us further adventures of his protagonists. Brother William of Baskerville and his loyal it confused sidekick Adso of Melk, Eco uses Postscript to show off all the work he did in writing The Name of the Rose. In a volume shorter than even its paltry 84 pages would suggest, Eco chats with us over the meaning of the book's title and more The book's theme raises enough coffee-table questions to run up a sizable bill at the Pamplona: "How much should an author identify with his characters?" "Can an historical novel be truly modern?" "Can a novel written today be truly historical in outlook?" "Is there a medieval postmodernism?" "Is the detective story the ultimate in metaphysical fiction?"

On a deeper level, though, we see Eco the academic struggling to understand his unexpected success. Popular success that is, Far as a member of the academic community. Eco must have been taught that the popular appeal of a person's work is irrelevant to its ultimate importance. That's how an Egyptologist can justify his life's effort against that of a scriptwriter for Fridays. In Postscript, Eco tries to tell his colleagues that he hasn't pandered to the public, by offering explanations of why The Name of the Rose was such a hit with unsophisticated readers." Says Professor Eco: "I gave them back their fear and trembling in the face of sex, unknown languages, difficulties of thought, [and] mysteries of political life." He need the book to "construct the reader," leading even the lesser read into the patterns of thought of medieval scholastics. The Name of the Rose, Eco suggests, was not a sellout of academic reserve but a combination of scholarly work with the appearance of what the public wants. The Name of the Rose promised "sex and a criminal plot where the guilty purely discovered in the end," but like most medieval university lectures, offered only "Latin, prac5ically no women, [and] lots of theology."

This sorr of condescending professor talk limits Postscript's appeal, and unfortunately so. Eco rather interesting questions about literature and the craft of writing in general, but it's no fun to watch an author be little must of his audience. If you read The Name of the Rose on your lunch break at the assembly line, you might find its Postscript a had insulting. But no matter, if you go to Harvard and level The Name of the Rose, you'll get a kick out of Postscript.

In the end, Postscript to the Name of the Rose emerges as a sort of printed faculty dinner conversation with Umberto Eco. The slim volume costs $8.95, about double the price of the original's paperback edition. Still, that's a bell of a lot cheaper than flying to Italy to catch Professor Eco's office hours.