Prologue
Is truth a substance, or a sign.
This is the central question posed by The Name of the Rose.
Umberto Eco adopts the fictional form of excavating and deciphering a manuscript left behind by Adso of Melk.
Through this strategy, he draws the reader into the medieval world—unfamiliar, yet governed by a rigorously ordered semiotic system.
This journey is not merely an exploration of the past. It is an intellectual adventure into a meticulously constructed labyrinth of signs.
The immense library that serves as the novel’s setting is not a sanctuary of wisdom.
It is a site of tension where rules and disciplines of interpretation collide.
Here, true power does not lie in the content of books themselves.
It is hidden in the modes of interpretation that texts impose upon their readers.
What William of Baskerville ultimately pursues is not substance, but the residual traces of signs left behind after substance has vanished.
Even the act of recording performed by the young Adso documents an interpretation confined within the limits of textuality.
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Even the name of the rose itself is a sign—one that is transformed and dismantled through interpretation.
We tend to believe that the phenomena before us are “substances.”
Yet Eco argues that everything we encounter is structured within an intricately constructed semiotic system.
Language is not merely a tool for explaining the world.
It functions as a mechanism that constructs and governs it.
Accordingly, what we call truth is not an absolute substance external to the text.
It comes into being only when it conforms to an order negotiated within the text itself.
By following the limits and rules of interpretation that Eco sought to reveal through this novel, we explore both the deterministic order enforced by the text and the method by which an ideal interpreter may navigate and decipher its labyrinth.
