The Name of the Rose

The novel concludes with a short section, entitled “Last Page,” which begins with the news that the abbey “burned for three days and three nights” (605). This section also summarizes the journey of William and Adso back to the city of Munich, where they go their separate ways. We learn that Adso returns many years later, and is drawn to visit the ruins. The villages are gone, and “the lands around them “uncultivated” – the landscape has returned to a state of nature. Any signs of human civilization are destroyed: “of that great and magnificent constructions that once adorned that place, only scattered ruins remained.” (607-08)

In great and almost loving detail, the elder Adso describes each section of the abbey in its current ruined state. Snakes and lizards, birds and weeds, have all taken over. Symbolically, only the cemetery is recognizable, signaling the inescapabilty of death. Of the magnificent church door that had so mesmerized the young Adso, all that is left to see is “the left eye of the enthroned Christ” (608). Adso pokes around in the rubble, and climbs the ruins of the library. Along “one stretch of wall,” he finds what is left of a bookcase, “still miraculously erect,” despite having been “rotted by water and consumed by termites” (609). The world of learning has been taken over by nature’s elements.

Adso finds “scraps of parchment that had drifted down from the scriptorium and the library.” A glimpse of the past, they had “survived like treasures” (608). He begins to collect them, as if he “were going to piece together the torn pages of a book.” (608). Adso gets caught up in his “poor harvest,” toiling the entire day to collect the “disiecta membra” (i.e., scattered members) of the dismembered texts (609). This conflation of books with human remains hearkens back to the body parts of saints found in the abbey’s treasure crypt. Adso “collected every relic [he] could find” and filled two travelling sacks, dumping useful possessions in order to make space for “that miserable hoard” (609). It is significant that Adso also calls the paper remains “relic(s)” (609), again hearkening back to the scene in the treasure crypt.

“I spent many, many hours trying to decipher those remains,” Adso tells us (609). He tries to connect the remnants of the books to their intact selves: “Often from a word or a surviving image I could recognize what the work had been. When I found, in time, other copies of those books, I studied them with love, as if destiny had left me this bequest, as if having identified the destroyed copy were a clear sign from heaven” (609). The divine message, Adso believes, is “tolle et lege,” i.e., “take and read” (609). At the end of this painstaking “reconstruction,” Adso has made “a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books” (609). Here we see that Adso is trying to make meaning from these disparate parts, which echoes William’s earlier quest for meaning: to “discover, if not an order, at least a series of connections in small areas of the world’s affairs” (476).

In the end, the elder Adso wonders if there is any meaning in his manuscript. Perhaps it is only a “cento, a figured hymn, an immense acrostic” (610). The word “cento” has three meanings: first, a piece of writing, especially a poem, composed wholly of quotations from the works of other authors; second, anything composed of incongruous parts; conglomeration; and a third, obsolete word meaning a patchwork. All of these definitions are applicable here. And, even more interesting, an “acrostic” is a kind of puzzle, a series of lines or verses in which the first, last, or other particular letters when taken in order spell out a word or phrase. Again, the task of meaning-making is inextricable from human existence.

The novel ends in a cold scriptorium, where the elderly Adso leaves his manuscript, saying “I do not know for whom; I no longer know what it is about” (611). Thus, as narrator and as author, Adso renounces all meaning. His parting words to the reader are: “stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus,” which loosely translates as: "the rose of old remains only in its name; we possess naked names" (611). There has been a great deal of speculation about the final words of the novel, especially as they relate to the title of the book itself. Eco himself has been rather coy about affixing a meaning to his title, even going as far as suggesting that it was a totally random choice. At other times, Eco has suggested that the title alludes to the beauty of the past, that is now inaccessible to us, except through memory, and books. Readers and critics alike have speculated that the “rose” of the title is the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, the library itself, or the young peasant girl whom Adso loved.

At the novel’s end, we are really left with is a series of questions: how is meaning made? How do we make meaning out of books, and out of life experience? Can books lead us to universal truths? Are universal truths knowable to human beings? As Adso bids the reader farewell, he also bids farewell to “this aged world.” The world that Adso considers “aged” (610) had just entered its second millennium after the birth of Christ. Now, with another millennium begun, we are still reading Adso’s words.