Borges And The Name Of The Rose
...and so on, each considers the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) a great influence. No exception is Umberto Eco, whose laudatory blurb on the recently published Collected Fictions of Borges reads, "Though so different in style, two writers have offered us an image for the next millennium: Joyce and Borges. The first designed with words what the second designed with ideas: the original, the one and only World Wide Web. The Real Thing. The rest will remain simply virtual." These are traditions Eco hopes to follow, as he stated in a 1989 interview, "I would like to do with ideas what Finnegans Wake does with words." The present study examines Borges' considerable influence on Eco's The Name of the Rose, specifically through "The Library of Babel," "The Secret Miracle," and "The Garden of Forking Paths."
There is, first and foremost, "The Library of Babel," written by Borges in 1941, whose very first line sets off alarms to a reader of Eco: "The universe (which other call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal galleries, with enormous ventilation shafts in the middle, encircled by very low railings." (79) Firstly, and most obviously, the library is certainly the world of Eco and Borges, two titans of learning whose lives are devoted to books. At the time "The Library of Babel" was written, Borges had spent years as First Assistant in the Miguel Cané branch of the Municipal Library, a menial job. Later in life, however, he assumed the post of director of the National Library of Argentina (resigning in 1973 when Perón returned to the Presidential office). Not only is the library the world of Eco and Borges, but also their characters. William of Baskerville, Adso, and the other monks often express themselves by unconsciously quoting books, not only because the entirety of human knowledge was kept in the monastic...
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