The author of this polifacetic novel, the semiotician Umberto Eco, was born in Turin the 5th of January 1932. After studying at the University he worked for the RAI from 1954 to 1956. He lectured at the University of Turin from 1956 to 1964. He worked for two years at the University of Milan before becoming professor of Visual Communications at Firenze in 1966. There, he published an important essay called La Estructura Ausente. After being Professor at the Polithecnic School in Milan, Eco has been Professor of Semiotics in Bologna since 1971 and a reputed lecturer in different American universities. While his research on the analysis of the sign and signifier has influenced many academic groups, he has been world wide recognised as a journalist and as a novelist for his two most famous novels Il Nome della Rosa (1981) and Il Pendolo di Foucault (1988). Both novels show us how vast his knowledge is in Philosophy and literature. Il Nome della Rosa. We could define this novel as detective story, It shows us a very complex net of characters who interact among each other, and in the middle of all this mess there is a serial criminal. This definition is very reductive. There is much more to say about this story. Now we will see some historical data that can be extracted from the novel. The action is set in an Abbey on the mountains in the north of Italy. This is not a coincidence. The Abbey is located in the middle point of the triangle Avignon-Babiera-Rome. Avignon was the actual Papal court. Babiera was the court of the Emperor Luis. The sociopolitic context in which the novel develops is very complex. Europe is divided into two main centres of power. On one side we have Philip IV king of France (1268-1314) and protector of the Pope and dissolver of the Order of the Temple. The period of time in which the Pope was moved to Avignon was called the Babylonian Captivity. On the other side we have Louis of Baviera Emperor of the so-called Roman-Germanic Sacred Empire, Protector of the Order of the Franciscans in his confrontation with the Pope. In the middle of all this the Abbey stands. It is the place where everything is going to happen. Our main Character is William of Baskerville- mask for the famous philisopher William of Occam called Venerabilis Inceptor. To understand better the personality of our main character we have to know more about the life of William of Occam. He studied at Oxford, being member of the group of the spirituals, who opposed Pope John XXII because of his position against poverty. He composed many theories about Church and State following his ideas about Philosophy and theology. As a Nominalist, he criticised the realism of the essences and gave value for the sensitive individual knowledge (influenced by his master Roger Bacon). But now, there is the multifunctional scenario created by Eco in Il nome della Rosa where everything is surrounded by crimes. We have a Benedictine Abbey. What is happening there is an image of what is happening inside the Roman Catholic Church. We have two churches. The first one is the powerful Church; the Church of the High class, of the corruption, the church of wealth where one can buy the redemption of his soul with gold. The Church of the Holly Inquisition, the Church of Avignon, the Church of the Pope John XXII and his Cardinals, the Church of the Benedictines and their opulence. A non-committed Church. This Church gives us another side of Religion. The side of a punisher revengeful and cruel God. The face of a God that just need a little excuse to destroy the world (very popular idea at those pre and post millenium times). The second one is the church close to the lower classes. A church that starves, humble and sometimes, because its radical faith, took them to be persecuted, like the case of the Spirituals and its dazed interpretations of the Bible. This radicalism started with the reaction of some factions of the Church against the corruption of the Papal Court at Avignon. The novel develops in an age of strong contrasts, as it can be clearly perceived in the story. A contrast between aged William (Middle Ages) and youth Adso (Renaissance); contrast between Benedictines (Wealth) and Franciscans (poverty); contrast between Gui (radicalism and fanatism) and William (serenity and realism). But based on this contrast I have to say that the horrible crimes that are happening in the Abbey are just a mere excuse that serves us as a conductor string of the story of two antagonist positions. William of Baskerville represents the first position, a defender of the Laugh and at the same times a cultivated man, student of the Classics and a very pragmatic man of big sagacity. Because of its qualities we could have said that he was a disciple of Francis Bacon . With William of Baskerville we have another big character, Adso of Melk. This character plays various roles through the novel. He is the narrator of the story. A very old man, about to die that speaks or at least whispers different languages, German, Latin, and the language of book. It can be perceived Joyce's influence in this mixture of languages. What Joyce did in Finnegan's Wake was destroy all the norms of the XX century narrative.

¿Est ubi gloria nunc Babylonia?¿Dónde estan las Nieves de Antaño? La tierra baila la danza de Macabré...Gott ist ein lautes Nichts, ihn rührt kein Nun noch Hier...

...(como sugería tu Bacon)... El Nombre de la Rosa, Umberto Eco,1980, 448.

He is telling us, from his advanced age, some events that happened when he was just eighteen years old. By looking at this character from another point of view we could think that he is just mask at a fourth level of inclusion, within three different narrations . He tells the story with the voice of someone that goes through all the events, captures everything with the photographic memory of an adolescent that does not understand anything. This character is getting mature through his relation with William, he is awakening as an adult. We can also see in this character some psychological evolutions, even Freudians. We can see that in the part where he describes us the dream he had while he was listening the Dies Irae . He is referring to the young prostitute.

Y me mostraba, que Dios me perdone, su vulva, y entre en ella, y era una caverna bellísima

El Nombre de la Rosa, Umberto Eco,1980, 471.

The Benedictine holds the second positions. They had the power inside that Church. As an example of this Just say that by 1354 the Benedictins had given 24 popes, 200 cardinals, 15000 bishops and 1560 saints. A big difference with the Franciscans is that the Benedictines did not put much emphasis on austerity and ascetism. Within these, we find the antagonist of William of Baskerville, the venerable Jorge of Burgos. This characteristic is very influential inside the Abbey. If the Spanish saying Los ojos son el espejo del alma was true we could have in this character the most clear example of this, the cold eyes of a blind man but passionate from another point of view. I said passionate because he will carry his ideas to the last consequence. Madness? Maybe, but we should take into account that his character is violent and desperate, cold and with a extreme cruelty. In fact he is the instigator of the crimes in the Abbey. And this, Why? Intolerance in pure state. He considers that Laugh is something frivolous, and said that Christ did not laugh with things like:

La risa sacude el cuerpo, deforma los rasgos de la cara y hace que el hombre parezca un mono.

El Nombre de la Rosa, Umberto Eco,1980, 125

El ánimo solo está sereno cuando contempla la verdad y se deleita con el bien que ha realizado, y la verdad y el bien no mueven a risa. Por eso Cristo no reía. La risa fomenta la duda . La risa es la debilidad, la corrupción, la insipidez de nuestra carne.

El Nombre de la Rosa, Umberto Eco,1980, 126

Jorge, at his youth in Santo Domingo de Silos, found a fascinating book considered incredible, the Coena Cypriani also known as the second Treaty of Poetics by Aristotle, called by Jorge as the Philosopher. Then, he steals the book and hides it at the Abbey where it has stayed since then. Different reasons may account for the fact that Jorge hid the book. One cold think that the book is evil so it has to be kept, but at the library were thousands of books like that, the problem that Jorge saw, was that Aristotle was the author. Because of this, laugh cold be considered as something good, and Jorge could not tolerate this. To conclude I will mention one aspect of this wonderful novel that very few readers notice. Why this name? Why the Rose? It is a very confusing aspect. Eco in his Postille a Il nome della Rosa tell us that the rose is a very multidimensional metaphor. A Rose is a Rose is a Rose, mystic rose, war of the roses... Just by looking at the last lines in Latin , Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus ,we may find relationships between William of Baskerville and William of Occam nominalist philosopher. Also Abelardo the Franciscan uses nulla rosa est to show that language can talk about things that have disappear or about things that never existed. The Abbey, with its big library with rose form is burnt, and many years later Adso returns to the Abbey, and he just finds ashes, the remembrance of what a ROSE was.

Cervantes, El Quijote, II, 3.

What is an historical novel? What characteristics has to have a novel for being called "historical"? What is that make possible to put the same label such a different novels like Ivanhoe or The last of the Mohicans? The most evident characteristic is that all of them, locate their action, invented, in a past, real, more or less remote. This is just a mere approximation, too vague and to general that is going to coincide with a definition given by Buendía:

To be really historical, a novel must reconstruct or at least to try to reconstruct the times in which the action happens. If we have as a sine qua non condition for a novel, the archaeological reconstruction of a given time, to be historical, the number of historical novels decreases a lot because not many get that amount of reconstruction. Solis Llorente states that it has to be an intention from the author's part to present an age, to take advantage of the historical setting to show the historical reality of a given epoch .

The historical novel is an hybrid genre, mixture between fiction and reality. On the one side, we demand to this kind of novels the reconstruction of am historical past epoch more or less remote, for which the author must carry a number of non fictional materials; the presence in the novel of this historical scaffolding will serve to show us the way of life, the habits and, in general, all the circumstances needed for a better understanding of that yesterday. But, at the same time, the author should not forget that in his work all this historical element is the adjectival, and the substantival is the novel. This is a main issue at the time of deciding if a given work is an historical novel or not: the quality of fiction. That is because the result of the mixture of historical and literary elements is not an issue of History, but of Literature. The historical novelist tries to combine the two subjects separated by Aristotle in his Poetics

All of this make the historical novel a sub-genre relatively complicated. As a matter of fact, the biggest difficulty for the historical novelist will focus on finding an stable balance within the element and the historical characters, and the element and the fictional characters. If the author fails on the side of excess in his reconstructing labour of the past, the novel will no longer be historical. But on the contrary if the novel fails on the side of default, the novel will be only historical by name, to set the action on the past and by introducing some themes and characters pseudo-historical. Umberto Eco distinguishes, in this sense, three different ways of approaching literately the historical past: the romance, that simply takes the past as a wonderful backcloth, as a base to leave the fantasy flies away; a cloak-and-dagger novel on the style of Dumas, in which characters and facts are invented over a more or less real historical background; and the historical novel, which characters, though fictional, would act as real ones from that ages. I would say that the historical novel is a narrative sub-genre in which construction includes some specific elements and historical characters. But there is no way on finding any specific peculiarity that allow us to distinguish a historical novel from any other type of novel. This is how Gyogy Lukács:

As Kurt Spang said in his La Novela Histórica, Teoría y Comentarios, there are two types of historical novel, the illusionist and the anti-illusionist. One of the most outstanding features of the illusionist type is the desire of the authors to create the illusion of authenticity and veracity of what is narrated. This desire is put on the structure of the narration on such a way that there is a strong sense of the authentic reproduction of the historical events. It is not strange that the author states that the story that he is narrating is true or affirms that he has documentary evidence that guarantees its authenticity. It is the kind of historical novel developed by Walter Scott. The main attitude that lies in this kind of novelising is the dialogue of the narrator, Adso, with the story. The story acquires such an entity and coherence that the author/narrator can judge the characters and their circumstances. The narrator is implied, so his presence is required within the story as an acting character and committed, not distant. Thomas Mann thinks in his novel, José y sus hermanos about this difficult and paradoxical situation, and wonders:

Conclusion

Eco, as Borges did, is obsessed with everything related to text. As Borges in Las Ruinas circulares, there is a strong influence in everything related to the paratext. By paratext we mean to make the access to the meaning easier. If we have an accumulation of freshholds, we end losing ourselves. It is typical of modernism to expand excessively the length and meaningless. The paratext, the access to the meaning, is rounded more difficult: language becomes an obstacle. The purpose of the paratext is anti-communicative. In La loteria en Babilonia Borges creates an alternative world without laws. The same happens in the Abbey of Eco. There is a sub-world ruled by the man of a person out of his mind, Jorge, and not by his superiors. This is a very post-modernist quality. Here, in Il nome de la Rosa, we have crimes, detectives, misteries. Borges has the same in Ficciones, but also it is Metaliterature. We also find this quality in Il nome de la Rosa. Al the crimes are going around a book. We also have the notion of the mirror present in both authors. All the works of Borges have to do with the search of meanings through books that at the same time is talking about another book and so on.

Bibliography

Umberto Eco, El Nombre de la Rosa, 1980, 471

Umberto Eco, Postille a Il nome della Rosa, 1984

Umberto Eco, The open Work, Cambridge, MA, 1989

G. Lukács, The historical novel, Penguin Books, 1962, 290

La Novela Histórica, Teoría y Comentarios, Navarra, EUNSA,1995

F. Buendía, La novela histórica española (1830-1844), preliminay study in his Antología de la novela histórica española (1830-1844), Madrid Aguilar, 1963,16-17.

R. Solís Llorente, Genesis de una novela histórica, Ceuta, Instituto Nacional de Eseñanza Media. 1964, 41