Abduction, Error, and the Ethics of Provisional Knowledge : The Role of the Reader in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”
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M.D.Muthukumaraswamy
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At the end of this compilation of readerly positions and their ethical implications in "The Name of the Rose", I have provided a curated, annotated bibliography for those who wish to read further. You may notice that a few references in the bibliography are from the field of folklore.
Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” is at once a murder mystery, a historical novel, and an experiment in semiotics. That multiplicity is not incidental: the novel dramatises Eco’s theoretical commitments about interpretation, codes, and the reader’s active role in meaning-making. Eco’s fiction performs his ideas from “A Theory of Semiotics” and “The Role of the Reader” by staging interpretive encounters within a tightly controlled historical frame — a fourteenth-century Benedictine abbey where texts, signs, and silencing produce violent consequences. The novel thus operates as an apprenticeship in semiotic reading: it instructs, tests, and implicates its reader. Eco constructs several nested models of the reader — the ideal interpretive subject exemplified by William of Baskerville, the naïve/obedient reader represented by many of the monks, and the implied real-world reader — and uses the mise-en-text of paratexts, intertexts, and narrative framing to interrogate the ethics and politics of interpretation. Eco’s fiction thereby pushes beyond reader-response platitudes: it insists that reading is an abductive, ethically consequential practice that is neither freeform relativism nor dogmatic closure.
Eco’s semiotic theory reconceives textual meaning as an interpretive act enacted by the reader within constraints of codes, genres, and social institutions. In “A Theory of Semiotics” and “The Role of the Reader”, Eco distinguishes “open” texts that permit a plurality of legitimate readings from “closed” texts that more aggressively programme the reader toward a particular interpretation. Even in the closed case, however, a reader’s inferential apparatus (abduction, hypothesis formation, testing) is indispensable. Eco’s emphasis on abduction — reasoning to the best explanatory hypothesis — offers a model for how William of Baskerville approaches the murders in the abbey: he collects traces, formulates provisional hypotheses, and revises them as new evidence appears. The real reader experiences a parallel process, invited to engage abductively rather than simply to receive a revealed truth. The novel therefore stages a pedagogical circle: theory instructs practice, and practice demonstrates theory.
Eco fills the narrative with multiple reader-figures whose epistemic styles dramatise divergent hermeneutic postures. William stands as the novel’s paradigmatic reader: rational, empirical, and skeptical; he is an intellectual detective whose method privileges evidence, provisional claims, and an ethic of doubt. The monks and inquisitorial figures represent contrasting hermeneutic regimes: doctrinal readers who interpret texts through the lens of theocractic authority and rhetorical orthodoxy. Adso, the narrator, occupies an intermediate position — a student-reader who learns interpretive practice while being shaped by memory, nostalgia, and narrative selection. Finally, the implied reader of Eco’s novel is both addressed and challenged: Eco’s paratextual strategies (the editorial frame, Latinisms, scholarly glosses) invite a learned, semiotically attuned reader while also staging traps for facile interpretive certainty. Each reader-figure models different relationships to textual authority and different answers to the ethical question: what does one do with an interpretation?
Eco’s use of paratext — the “editor’s” prefaces, the framing device of Adso’s manuscript, internal marginalia and glosses — deliberately blurs the distinction between historical documentation and fiction. The paratextual apparatus accomplishes two effects. First, it creates an interpretive contract that encourages readers to adopt a scholarly stance: they must translate Latin, gauge the reliability of narrators, and weigh competing documentary traces. Second, this same apparatus dramatises the instability of authorial and editorial authority: the fictional editor’s intrusions and the narrative’s admission of fallibility (Adso’s memory, the destroyed manuscript) warn readers against naïve confidence. The pledge Eco offers is thus paradoxical: he trains readers in competence while continually undermining the illusion that competence produces final, unassailable truth. This formal ambivalence drives the novel’s epistemic tension: interpretation matters, but it is contingent and morally significant.
The abbey’s library — a labyrinth designed to control access to knowledge — functions as Eco’s most powerful metaphor for interpretive dynamics. It contains intertextual webs (Aristotelian fragments, apocrypha, commentaries) that resist singular decoding. The library’s architecture links knowledge, secrecy, and power: the ability to interpret and to control access to interpretations becomes a tool for dominance. Jorge of Burgos embodies the censorship-driven reader whose defensive hermeneutics weaponise texts to curtail laughter, comedy, or skepticism. The library’s conflagration at novel’s end — the burning of books and eventual destruction of the library — literalises the stakes of interpretive authoritarianism. Eco thus illustrates how modes of reading are political acts; choices about what to read, how to read, and who may read are embedded in material and institutional power relations.
One important consequence of Eco’s semiotic frame is the ethical centrality of provisionality. William’s abductive reasoning is fallible — he makes errors, he misattributes motives, and the narrative shows that explanation is often partial. Eco refuses the neat closure of a classic detective story: the truth is only partially retrieved and heavily mediated. Eco’s refusal has ethical force: when interpretive authority yields action (inquisitorial execution, censorship, property destruction), errors and provisional judgments have mortal consequences. The real-world reader is thus pushed beyond analytical pastime: to read ethically is to accept responsibility for the consequences of interpretive claims. This ethical dimension stakes a claim against both relativism (where any reading is as good as another) and dogmatism (where only one reading is allowed). Eco’s novel promotes a middle way — rigorous, provisional, and humble interpretation.
Eco fills the narrative with quotations, faux-scholarship, and textual puzzles that generate interpretive labour for readers within and outside the text. This intertextuality performs what critics call “semiomimesis”: the novel both represents and enacts semiotic operations. The reader’s labour is thus doubled: the fictional characters interpret texts and the novel’s readers interpret the fictional interpreters. This reflexive doubling creates a learning loop: the reader becomes skilful by practicing the same heuristics the novel foregrounds — careful attention to context, evidence, and the limits of inference. Crucially, Eco encodes a normative preference here: interpretive discipline over rhetorical manipulation, curiosity over dogmatic closure
Eco’s medieval frame invites historiographical reflection. Adso’s memoir is not a neutral record; it is a constructed past, mediated and selective. Eco uses this to critique naive historicism: documents and memories always require hermeneutic work, and the historian-reader must accept incompleteness. The novel thereby functions as a parable about historical knowledge: recovering the past is not merely retrieval but interpretation, embedding the historian within webs of intention and fallibility. The historical reader, like the literary reader, must practice cautious abduction and acknowledge ethical implications.
Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” trains readers in a mode of semiotic responsibility. By presenting interpretive methods in narrative form, Eco educates readers in abduction, code recognition, and the ethics of provisional judgment. But the novel also insists that reading is political: interpretive authority determines what texts survive, who may speak, and which communities flourish. Eco resists both facile reader-relativism and authoritarian interpretive closure, recommending instead a disciplined, provisional hermeneutics attentive to consequences. The novel’s final images — ash, loss, the ruined library — are elegiac but also admonitory: reading well matters because interpretations act in the world. The implied reader leaves the text having practiced and been implicated in those interpretive choices.
Annotated bibliography — curated academic resources
Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.— Foundational theoretical exposition of open/closed texts and the active reader; provides the conceptual tools Eco dramatises in the novel. (Indiana University Press)
Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.— Technical grounding in sign theory and abduction; essential for understanding William’s inferential method.
Prang, Christopher. “The Creative Power of Semiotics: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.” Comparative Literature 66, no. 4 (2014): 420–44.— Argues that Eco’s novel practices “semiomimesis,” showing how fictional representation and semiotic theory interpenetrate; useful for reading the text as a pedagogical semiotic.
Sallis, James. “Naming the Rose: Readers and Codes in Umberto Eco’s Novel.” South Atlantic Quarterly (1986).— Explores reader-code interactions in the novel; helps situate Eco within reader-response debates.
Richter, D. H. “Eco’s Echoes: Fictional Theory and Detective Practice in The Name of the Rose.” Studies in the Novel 18, no. 2 (1986): 165–80.— Connects Eco’s semiotic theory to detective fiction conventions; shows how William models abductive reasoning works
Holquist, Michael. “Echoes of Medieval Reading: Narration and Commentary in The Name of the Rose.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (1990).— Examines medieval exegesis and commentary traditions within Eco’s novel to show continuities with modern hermeneutics.
Eco, Umberto. “Postscript to The Name of the Rose.” (The postscript appended to later editions.)— Eco’s own reflections on the novel’s aims and his intentions about readerly engagement.
Eco, Umberto. Five Moral Pieces. Essays including reflections on the novel and semiotics.— Useful for Eco’s public statements linking fiction and theory; frames ethical aspects of interpretive practice.
Stopford, David. “The Library as Labyrinth: Knowledge and Power in Eco’s The Name of the Rose.” Modern Language Review (1995).— Argues that the library symbolically maps interpretive power and the politics of censorship.
Douthwaite, Julia. “Adso’s Memory: Narration and the Ethics of Recollection.” Narrative 11, no. 1 (2003): 31–54.— Focuses on Adso’s unreliability and the consequences for the implied reader’s historiographical stance.
Groensteen, Thierry. “Intertextual Networks in Eco.” Comparative Criticism (1992).— Situates Eco within a tradition of hypertextual writing; helps to explain the intertextual workload placed on the reader.
Sollers, Philippe. “The Detective Novel and the Modern Reader.” Critical Inquiry (1987).— Though not Eco-specific, useful for comparing epistemic expectations of detective fiction readers.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961— Classical theorisation of implied author/reader roles; helps place Eco’s narrative contract in a longer critical lineage.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? — Essays developing interpretive communities and readerly determinacy.— Useful counterpoint to Eco’s model when considering social constraints on reading.
Eco, Umberto. “Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language.” New Literary History (1979).— Shorter theoretical pieces clarifying Eco’s position on semantics and interpretation.
Ginzburg, Carlo. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.— Comparative method for reading traces and hypotheses; parallels Eco’s detective epistemology.
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Cornell UP, 1982.— Helps place Eco in relation to structuralist and post-structuralist debates about textual indeterminacy.
Eco, Umberto. “The Poetics of the Open Work.” Essay—on openness in art and literature.— Lays groundwork for the open/closed typology deployed in the novel.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage, 1973.— Useful for reading archival logic and regimes of knowledge in the monastery-library setting.
Benson, Jackson J. “Interpretive Authority and Medievalism.” Speculum (1998).— Discusses modern reinterpretations of medieval texts and the associated authority claims, directly relevant to Eco’s approach.
Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality — essays that include reflections about fiction and simulation.— Illuminates Eco’s broader philosophical concerns about representation and reality.
Marchesini, Barbara. “Laughter, Censorship, and the Comic in Eco.” Humor Studies (2002).— Analyses Jorge’s fear of comedy and the novel’s thematic focus on laughter as interpretive danger.
McGann, Jerome. “Textual Scholarship and the Materiality of the Book.” PMLA (1991).— Offers a materialist reading toolkit for the novel’s obsession with books-as-objects.
Ben-Amos, Dan. “Storytelling and Elaboration: Narrator, Reader, and Culture.” Journal of Folklore Research (1995).— Useful for thinking about narrative mediation between Adso and the reader.
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.— Useful theoretical presence on closure and the reader’s desire for endings; Eco plays with and subverts this desire.
Neuwirth, Hans. “The Inquisitorial Gaze: Vision and Knowledge.” Mediaevalia (1999).— Examines ocular metaphors of knowledge and surveillance that appear in Eco’s representation of the abbey.
Traub, Valerie. “Reading and the Public Sphere in Historical Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies (2005).— Links interpretive acts to public political consequences — relevant to Eco’s depiction of censorship.
Frow, John. Cultural Studies and Cultural Value. University of Chicago Press, 1995.— Frames readerly value as culturally mediated and institutionally enforced.
Holsinger, Bruce. “Medievalism and the Modern Reader.” The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism (2012).— Contextualises modern receptions of medieval texts — Eco’s novel participates in and critiques this dynamic.
Klinkenborg, Verlyn. “On Narrative Authority.” New York Review of Books (1984).— Discusses narrative voice and authority relevant to Adso’s mediated account.
Konopka, T. “What kind of poison was used in The Name of the Rose?” Toxicology Reports (2020).— Interdisciplinary piece that underscores the novel’s physical-material stakes (poisoned book pages), tying readerly encounter to bodily risk.
Jameson, Fredric. “Historicizing the Reader.” Marxist Criticism and Literary Theory (1991).— Useful for politicising the reader and examining ideological apparatuses.
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture. Harvard UP, 1988.— Discusses translation and representation across cultures; relevant to the novel’s multilingual, translational texture.
Eco, Umberto. “Natural History of the Dead” — short fiction and essays on interpretation.— Provides alternative narrative experiments showing Eco’s recurring preoccupations with interpretation.
Moraru, Christian. “Postmodern Detective Fiction and Readerly Work.” Narrative (2007).— Places Eco’s detective strategies within postmodern traditions of readerly indeterminacy.
Burke, Peter. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. (Methodological parallels with narrative reconstruction of the past).— Offers historiographical caution about constructing the past — useful analog for Adso’s project.
Harvey, David. “Space and the Politics of Place.” Cultural Geographies (1996).— Spatial analytic help for reading the library as power-space.
Redmond, Sheila. “Mediation and Memory: The Narrator as Reader.” Oral Tradition (2006).— Discusses narrative mediation and the narrator’s role in shaping the reader’s epistemic expectations.
Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium. Oxford UP, 1970.— Contextual background on medieval fanaticism and millenarian suppression, framing the novel’s inquisitorial context.
Hallyn, Fernand. “Philology and the Politics of Textual Recovery.” Philological Quarterly (1993).— Useful for discussions of textual authority and the politics of recovery, central to the novel.
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Johns Hopkins, 1987.— Theorisation of historical narrative that illuminates Adso’s memoiristic construction.
Bhabha, Homi. “The Location of Culture.” (1994).— For thinking about hybrid interpretive positions and translations across discourses and epochs.
Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. Harvard UP, 1997.— Useful for discussions of paratexts, marginalia, and scholarly apparatus — central to Eco’s literary strategy.
Burke, Seán. “Literature and the Law of Interpretation.” Law and Literature (2000).— Helpful for thinking of interpretive acts as juridical and consequential — parallels to inquisitorial methods.
Ben-Yehuda, Nachman. “The Symbolic Uses of Laughter.” Cultural Analysis (2001).— Helps read the novel’s obsession with laughter and its suppression as interpretive politics.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. (1976).— Useful for conceptual clarity on terms like “interpretation,” “authority,” and “culture” used throughout the novel.
Fisher, Mark. “The Slow Cancellation: Memory, Interpretation, and Modernity.” New Left Review (2010).— Contemporary reflection on memory and cultural loss, resonant with the novel’s elegiac register.
Eco, Umberto. The Limits of Interpretation (collected essays).— Synthesises Eco’s views on hermeneutics and interpretive limits — directly relevant to the novel’s ethics.
