The Closed Room - 'The Name of the Rose' - A Structuralist Reading By J.P. Rajendran
There are novels, short stories, and movies that cannot be easily understood immediately after reading or watching them. Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is one of them, and it is also one of the novels I gave up on after trying to read it in English two or three times. As a medical college student, I bought it on a sudden impulse during a time when the internet was not widespread, making it impossible to just sit in an internet cafe, take notes, and read a novel to my own's heart content.
The novel does not yield itself very easily. Somehow, this attempt gradually slipped through my fingers. Having studied in five Christian schools, I think I bought it with some courage given by Bible classes, moral classes, Sunday sermons, Christian rituals, and familairty that came with partaking in Christian festivals. However, I only learned later that this kind of familiarity and intimacy alone was not enough to read this novel, as it required a different kind of library that I did not possess at the time. Another day, while wandering around with this novel in hand, one of my teachers asked for it, and I readily gave it away. In a way, I felt proud, telling myself it was better for him to have it than me, and then I completely forgot about it.
Now it has been published as a Tamil translation (ரோஜாவின் பெயர் translated by M.D. Muthukumarasamy, Ethir Veliyedu), and I have been carefully observing and reading that copy. Even though there is no major language barrier between English and Tamil, I still couldn't easily enter this novel and didn't get very far in my first reading. To be precise, I am still stuck on the title itself. What is the rose a symbol of, why have they kept the rose flower as the title of this novel, and is the rose its central theme?
Things like Rosicrucianism—transforming a rose flower into a cross, and a cross into a rose flower, along with all the letters and transformations, not to mention the Hollywood movies about it—have all been huge barriers preventing me from entering this novel. This is an attempt to record only my experience. I have long been stuck on angles of some soteriology, theology, and the yearning for how individual liberation can be achieved, asking how spiritual realization could occur and whether divine experience can be attained or not.
Are they trying to say that after finishing this novel, there is nothing, or are they saying there is a great mystery in this and understanding it will yield great power? Or is this a medicine to forget desire and agony? I do not know. Regarding this nothingness, what comes to mind is the children's movie Kung Fu Panda. In it, everyone searches for the Dragon Scroll, believing that whoever gets it will gain limitless power, but when it is finally opened, there is nothing inside except a shiny surface reflecting the viewer's face. There is no secret. Two people see it—the Panda and his enemy, the snow leopard; one can accept it, while the other cannot. To the one who cannot accept it, it is a deception, but to the one who accepts, it is liberation: a single emptiness with two different receptions. I did not connect this with Umberto Eco at that time, but I had to connect it later.
Like the lotus, the rose is a flower, but we do not know of a fruit specifically for the rose; we only know its thorns. We know that a rose plant does not bear fruit, and that they are flowers of unparalleled beauty, many colors, and a short lifespan. It is completely full of thorns, gives no fruit, and has a short life. I spent a long time wondering what this signifies, as for us, we have the lotus. Whether it is in mud or clear water, it will somehow rise to the top and bloom; it is a great flower that declares permanent peace is possible. While comparing these two, my focus scattered, and I wandered aimlessly. A major contradiction to this was the structure of the story, which read like a mystery novel. I wondered what the story and its symbols were trying to say, whether there was a connection between the two, and whether they were implying that if one engages in deductive reasoning like a detective, one cannot reach God or attain peace. Thinking like this, I left it without understanding it.
During a time when I was struggling to write a short novel, I was reading about how human civilizations were formed and its various trajectories. Not knowing how to understand and connect the myths and symbols found within them, I started reading Claude Lévi-Strauss. Right from the start, he stated that "myth is like music," explaining the practice of understanding myths through music. Because music was also highly incomprehensible to me, I couldn't understand his proposed method either. I only possessed the superficial understanding that myths and symbols could be read in many ways, isolating what a myth says, what we know, what we don't know, and what we need to know. I didn't know how to deeply connect them to one another. It is only very recently that I have been studying music practice and music theory, which is when I finally understood what Lévi-Strauss was trying to say. Reading music from left to right, parsing every single sound and instrument separately, is one possibility. Stacking everything on top of one another to see where the music sounds, where it vibrates, and where it transgresses is another possibility. In the preface to The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss says a sheet of music should also be read from top to bottom, proposing this second method for analyzing myths. I only began to understand chords and resonances then.
Nearly twenty years passed between my first attempt to read and understand this and my realization of what Lévi-Strauss was saying. Armed with that understanding, I returned to Eco and immediately realized that I had made a fundamental mistake twenty years ago. The character in the novel, William does not use deduction; he uses abduction. The difference between the two is not small: deduction goes from a rule to an effect (all men are mortal, he is a man, therefore he will die), while abduction is the exact opposite, where we see the effect first and guess the rule. Eco shows this at the very beginning of the novel when William predicts a horse he has never seen—its color, height, and that it is the abbot's favorite—based merely on hoof prints in the snow, hairs caught in a bush, and branches broken at a specific height. This is not proof; it is a guess. The horse did not automatically emerge from the footprints; he guessed the horse first and then fitted it to the prints. The price of abduction is that the one who guesses can also make a mistake, and William does indeed err—the theory he built upon the seven trumpets of the Book of Revelation turns out to be false, as there was no such plan behind the murders. Yet, through that very wrong guess, he arrives at the truth. Eco is a semiotician, and he didn't do this accidentally. Once I understood this difference, the center of the novel shifted for me. Because a guess always comes from the outside as a leap toward something not in hand, the very purpose of a closed room is to prevent that leap.
Any tradition builds a room to sustain itself, and someone decides what can and cannot enter that room. The question is not what is inside the library, but rather who holds the key. The profound truths of a tradition lie not in what it protected, but in what it kept out; the guardian is not just the protector of knowledge, but the definer of its boundaries. This is not a new question for Tamil. It is a language that claims to have been born of itself, needing nothing from the outside, protected by an institution called the Sangam. The First and Middle Sangams that were submerged in a deluge represent a closed vault that grants authority to all claims precisely because they were lost. The Pure Tamil movement stated this very honestly: if the room is not closed, purity will not remain pure. This is not an accusation, but a structural stance that repeatedly appears in many traditions, serving as our first example.
It is here that Eco's novel serves as our second example. It features a fourteenth-century Italian monastery with a library occupying an entire floor, containing a closed room behind a glass door—finis Africae—guarded by Jorge, a man who lost his sight after reading everything. Notice the precision of this image: the one who knows everything becomes the one who can no longer see anything; the moment the room is closed, the guardian too goes blind. The name Jorge is not accidental either, referencing the blind librarian Jorge Luis Borges, who lost his sight while directing the National Library of Argentina and wrote about an infinite library in The Library of Babel. Eco places him not merely as a respected predecessor, but as the murderer in his novel. We can read this as suggesting that the distance between someone who has read all books and someone who removes a book from the world is smaller than we think. This is merely one reading, but Eco does not prevent it. Eco turns this library into a murder weapon with poison-laced pages; the reader must touch his finger to his tongue to turn the page, and in doing so, he must die.
Knowledge kills the body, but in our Tamil tradition, this relationship is exactly inverted. I believe this is the first door the novel opens for a Tamil reader. A palm-leaf manuscript does not kill the one who touches it; rather, it dies by itself if there is no one to touch it. The palm leaf survives only through being copied, and if the copying hand stops, termites will finish what is left. Eco's page kills the reader; our page dies without the reader—it is the exact same relationship, but with the opposite sign.
This is why U.V. Swaminatha Iyer stands as the direct opposite figure to Jorge within the structure of this novel. He did not guard a closed room; he brought manuscripts out of closed rooms by walking from house to house and monastery to monastery, asking, being refused, and asking again. In En Sarithiram (My Story), he recorded those refusals, including the hesitation, suspicion, and indifference of the manuscript owners. There is no such person in Eco's monastery, and there is no hand reaching outside the library, which is why it burns.
In the end, what remains are only the fragments that Adso carries away in a sack. This scene is familiar to us, as it is exactly how texts like Kundalakesi and Valayapathi have survived for us: not as complete texts, but as quoted remnants left by those who refuted them. Aristotle's second book also survives only in the words of the one who destroys it and speaks about it. Adso's sack, the quote surviving within a refutation, and the Sangam submerged in the deluge are all the same thing. One turns loss into authority, one turns destruction into preservation, and one gives us only what is left; all three are different sides of the same movement.
Returning to the central crime of the novel: why does Jorge kill? He kills to prevent Aristotle's second book of Poetics—which is about comedy—from coming out, arguing that laughter destroys fear, and without fear, there can be no faith. This crime becomes almost incomprehensible when viewed from within the Tamil tradition. When the Tolkappiyam details the eight emotional expressions (Meyppadu), it places laughter (Nagai) first. Laughter here is not a leak; it was accepted from the very beginning as a formal bodily expression and a fundamental unit of poetic theory. But categorization is one thing, and the right to it is another; accepting laughter as a poetic unit is different from permitting laughter at the sacred. Our answer to the latter lies with the Siddhars. Sivavakkiyar mocks those who call a planted stone God; Pattinathar satirizes asceticism; Pambatti Siddhar turns the very pretense of ritual into song. All three mocked devotion not from the outside, but from within. That is the direct refutation of Jorge, rather than the Tolkappiyam.
This incomprehension should not be viewed as a flaw in the translation; instead, it is the best entry point into the novel. The Tamil reader does not need to accept Jorge's prohibition merely as a characteristic of the time period. Let him realize how bizarre it is, and that very bizarreness will provide the standpoint from which to read. However, we cannot simply leave such a clean argument alone. Tamil too had a closed room, and while it didn't lock laughter inside, it did lock away dissenting opinions. The story of Jains being impaled in Madurai—which is not established as historical truth and is mostly considered a later fiction—performs the exact same function that Bernard Gui performs in the novel: the job of removing dissent even from memory. Whether the annihilation actually happened is one question, but why the tradition needed a story celebrating that annihilation is a different, more important question.
With this said, the part of the novel that will feel vibrant to the Tamil reader shifts from the sections on the theory of knowledge to the sections on the inquisition. This includes men being called by names they did not choose, and Remigio confessing under torture to crimes he didn't commit—a confession devoid of substance that serves merely as a pure signifier. The moment a name is affixed to a man, he disappears. Our reader will not enjoy this as an intellectual argument, but will feel it viscerally in his body.
The tool I am using here is not my own. Lévi-Strauss taught us to read a myth not through its narrative flow, but through the relational sets hidden within it. His argument is simple: when a society confronts a contradiction it cannot resolve, it does not resolve it; instead, it creates a mediating object—something that stands between the two poles and touches both simultaneously. This mediating object brings comfort, but it is also dangerous because it brings to light the fact that the contradiction is irresolvable. In Eco's monastery, that mediating object is laughter. Standing between eternal divine truth and the perishable human body, laughter suggests that truth can be grasped lightly. This is why it must be killed—Jorge poisons the book, eats it himself, and destroys it. When the mediating object is removed, order does not return; rather, it reveals that order never existed in the first place, leaving no way out but to burn.
I did not learn this method from a book; I learned it from M.D. Muthukumarasamy. He does not cite Lévi-Strauss as a theoretical authority, but picks up his framework just as a carpenter picks up a tool suited for the grain of the wood. Importantly, he didn't apply it exclusively to ancient myths, but directed it at the most ordinary and commercial object of our time: the Tamil movie. On the surface, it is a love story, but deep down, it is a ritual where Tamil society simultaneously attains in a single dark room the two things it cannot reconcile in its daily life: purity and desire. The theater becomes a temple, and the viewer becomes a worshipper. Everyone leaves having acquired what the outside world denies them. He did not state this as a theory, but held it up as a mirror reflecting what the Tamil imagination already inherently knew. What I took from him was not a conclusion, but a way of seeing.
Returning now to the rose and the lotus. The final line of the novel—stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus (the rose of old remains only in its name; we hold only naked names)—works precisely because the rose has been emptied. The substance is gone, and only the name remains, much like the opened scroll that is empty. The lotus is a completely different kind of symbol. Its meaning lies entirely within its substance—the mud, the stem, and the flower; the plant itself performs its meaning, and its name and substance cannot be separated. To the question I asked at the beginning—whether divine realization can be attained or not—this is not the answer. If a Tamil reader reading the last line seeks the lotus behind it, he finds comfort in the exact place where Eco established emptiness. Therefore, the lotus should not be brought into this structure. Let it stand outside as an alternative mediating object that this tradition did not have to kill.
A final note: This is not a conclusion, but an exercise. In an attempt to pick up and practice a new tool, I simply turned it on a book that was at hand. It was a book left unread, given away, and forgotten. The method itself is more important here than the conclusions. Nothing has been proven; I have merely tested a few things, and corrections and refutations are entirely welcome.
