The Tamil Rose: Nietzsche, Borges, and Eco's Laughter
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M.D.Muthukumaraswamy
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In Umberto Eco's “The Name of the Rose”, Friedrich Nietzsche's aphorism, "I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar," resonates as a central, underlying theme. The novel can be read as a profound literary exploration of this idea, dramatising the conflict between a world ordered by a divine, absolute "grammar" and one where that grammar is questioned, deconstructed, and ultimately revealed to be an illusion.
Remember Umberto Eco's key work on fascism "Ur-Fascism" (also known as "Eternal Fascism"), which outlines the 14 fundamental characteristics of the ideology. This essay is featured in his book “ How to Spot a Fascist”, a collection of three essays that also includes pieces on freedom, fascism, and censorship. Eco draws on his personal experiences growing up in Fascist Italy under Mussolini to provide insights into how fascism manifests. The rigid structure of a ‘diving grammar’ is one of the characteristics of fascism.
Jorge of Burgos: The Guardian of Divine Grammar
The character of Jorge of Burgos embodies the rigid belief in a singular, divine grammar. As the blind, aged librarian, he is the fanatical guardian of not just the books, but of the absolute, unchangeable Truth he believes they contain. For Jorge, the world is a text written by God, and its grammar is fixed. Any text that introduces ambiguity, irony, or subversion—most notably, Aristotle's lost book on comedy—is a threat to this divine syntax and must be suppressed.
His argument against laughter is fundamentally a defence of this grammar. Laughter, he claims, "foments doubt" and kills fear; without fear of the Devil, "there is no more need of God". In Nietzschean terms, laughter is an "ungrammatical" act that disrupts the subject-verb-object certainty of faith. In Tamil this faith manifests as object-verb-subject structure. It suggests that the established order is not absolute and can be mocked, inverted, and questioned. Jorge's willingness to murder to protect this divine grammar demonstrates the violent lengths to which a belief in absolute structures can lead.
William of Baskerville: The Skeptic of the Grand Narrative
In contrast, William of Baskerville represents the skeptical, empirical mind that begins to question the overarching grammar of faith. He applies logic and reason not to confirm the pre-existing divine narrative, but to investigate the world's "faithful signals even when they seem obscure”. He operates under the suspicion that "the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment”.
His investigation is a process of deconstruction. Initially, he seeks a coherent pattern in the murders, a diabolical "grammar" mirroring the apocalypse. However, his ultimate conclusion is a profoundly Nietzschean one: "there was no pattern”. The deaths were a result of accident, individual motives, and chaos, not a single, ordering principle. By rejecting the "plot," William rejects the belief in a governing grammar behind events. He moves from believing in a coherent text to recognising a series of disconnected, contingent occurrences.
The Role of Laughter: A Theological Debate, Not Blasphemy
The novel's prose is not characterised by humour against God, but rather by a profound and central debate about the theological and philosophical legitimacy of laughter itself. The humour is not directed at divinity, but is instead used as a lens to critique dogmatism, fanaticism, and the suppression of knowledge within the Church. The core of the plot revolves around a lost second book of Aristotle's “Poetics” that discusses comedy, a text the antagonist fears could upend the world order.
The Language of Salvatore: A Microcosm of Linguistic Chaos
The unique linguistic presentation of the character Salvatore is a significant and memorable feature of the novel, though it does not represent the style of the entire book. Salvatore’s speech is a key element of the novel's exploration of language, signs, and interpretation.
Salvatore speaks a bizarre, macaronic language—a chaotic mix of Latin, Italian dialects, Provençale, Spanish, and other tongues he has encountered. The narrator, Adso, describes it perfectly by stating that Salvatore "spoke all languages, and no language". His speech is composed of "disecta membra"—severed limbs—of other sentences he has heard, patched together to suit the moment. This unique idiolect is not merely a colourful character trait. It embodies the "Babelic" confusion that is a central theme of the novel. Salvatore, a former heretic, has a fragmented past, and his language reflects this history. His speech serves to disorient the other characters and the reader, highlighting the difficulty of interpretation and the ambiguity of signs. Despite its apparent incoherence, Salvatore's language is functional. The other monks seem to understand him, and his jumbled words can accidentally reveal crucial clues that help William in his investigation. This demonstrates a core semiotic idea in the novel: that meaning can be found even in the most confusing and disordered signs. His speech functions as a recurring, concentrated example of the linguistic and interpretive chaos that William of Baskerville must navigate to solve the abbey's mysteries.
The Labyrinth and the Word: The Prison of Grammar
The novel's setting, central symbols and style reinforce this theme. The labyrinthine library is a physical manifestation of grammar—a complex, rule-based system designed to order and contain all knowledge. For Jorge, its purpose is to conceal and protect the established order. For William, it is a code to be cracked, a grammar to be understood in order to find the one text that would break it.
Conventional theories of translation do not adequately capture the unique character of "The Name of the Rose", which is built on semiotic filters such as fragmented Latin passages, 14th-century Italian, and complex syntactical structures. My aim was to replicate this narrative force and the effect of its syntactic filters in a way that is both appropriate for and disruptive to the Tamil cadence and register. In my Tamil translation my ultimate loyalty is to Umberto Eco's artistic project: to jolt the passive reader, transforming them from a mere consumer into an active constructor of meaning.
Ultimately, the novel's famous final line—"stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus" ("the rose of old remains only in its name; we possess naked names")—is the most direct engagement with Nietzsche's idea. It encapsulates the postmodern and semiotic core of the book: that we are left not with essential truths (the "rose"), but only with the linguistic structures we use to signify them (the "naked names”). The belief that our grammar perfectly captures reality is the metaphysical illusion that both Nietzsche and Eco sought to dismantle.
“The Name of the Rose” is a journey from the certainty of God's grammar to the unsettling freedom of realising we are left with only the words themselves.
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Photo courtesy: Markandan Muthusamy