Resumen de Shelf lives: : On nostalgic libraries
In the “visual vocabulary” of nostalgia, libraries of books and manuscripts affected by the passage of time have long had pride of place. Affected by time—that is to say, either old or made to look that way so as to evoke the past in the cultural imaginary, calling up not merely associations but feelings of pleasure, desire, longing, and loss.
Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is a literary monument to books, making tangible the mysteries of the past signified by them. It revolves around one of the best-known fictional libraries and equates the suppression of a book with the elision of a past, with the concealment of a saving truth (secretly guarded and preserved by an Antichrist librarian, Jorge of Burgos), and it associates this disappearance, in turn, with the Inquisition’s intolerance, intrigue, and terror. To be fair, the inquisitiveness that solves the murder-mystery in Eco’s novel never recovers the suppressed past as such (the precious text by Aristotle perishes: partly eaten, partly devoured by fire [Eco 1984: 282–83]), and the novel’s final sentiment is melancholy: nomina nuda tenemus, all is past, “we hold but empty names.” There is also no denying the thrill and relief afforded by the reduction to ashes of this “greatest library in Christendom”—a knowledge-salvatory corrupted by its keepers, a “sink of iniquity” set ablaze, a virtual “inferno,” “a place accursed,” punished by “destruction” (ibid.: 291, 287, 234, 283). Despite its “divine chastisement” (ibid.: 289), despite this conclusion, Eco’s layered, narrative return to a bygone monastic culture—the unsettling, labyrinthine library at its heart, in the end a lost treasure—sets up a relationship with the past that we would not hesitate to call nostalgic. Rather than those last words, consider the “Last Page” (the title of the last chapter), which recounts the narrator’s visit to the abbey’s burned-out remains:
Poking about in the rubble, I found at times scraps of parchment that had drifted down from the scriptorium and the library and had survived like treasures buried in the earth; I began to collect them, as if I were going to piece together the torn pages of a book. . . .
Along one stretch of wall I found a bookcase, still miraculously erect, having come through the fire I cannot say how; it was rotted by water and consumed by termites. In it there were still a few pages. Other remnants I found by rummaging in the ruins below.
