76).
Umberto Eco's best-selling novel--The Name of the Rose challenges its readers to map their landscapes cognitively and illustrate the emergence of the late-twentieth-century novel of complexity, that is, the novel of emergence, itself an apparently self-organizing emergent phenomenon among several writers in contemporary culture. The popular success of Eco's novels is surprising because they all are complicated narratives, intellectually challenging, packed with arcane information, and complex in the street sense of the term. Their success seems to have surprised Eco, who puzzled for "two years" after the publication of his first novel, "trying to figure out why the book was being read by people who surely could not like such 'cultivated' books" (Eco, 1983).
In The Name of the Rose Eco involves his readers in the complications of early-fourteenth-century theological and political controversies and philosophical debates over nominalism. He further perplexes ordinary readers with the linguistic challenges of numerous snatches of classical and medieval Latin, French, and German, not to mention the peculiar polyglot speech of one of the characters. As he remarks, he gives his audience, "Latin, practically no women, [and] lots of theology," partially rewarding their attention by also providing "gallons of blood in Grand Guignol style" (Eco, 1983).
The late-fourteenth-century manuscript in The Name of the Rose is a model of simple and straightforward organization. Its author, the elderly monk Adso, divides his text into seven parts, spanning seven days; each part or day is further ordered into "periods corresponding to the liturgical hours" of the monastic day (7). Eco, however, in a prologue, sketches the complicated transmission of Adso's narrative down to the twentieth century and through several translations. The Name of the Rose is an early fourteenth-century historical narrative framed by the contemporary author's opening description of the manuscript and Adso's end-of-the-century epilogue.
