By Ivan K.
Ms. Quijano begins the article “Malady of Love,” published in Sun.Star Weekend Magazine’s February 7, 2009 issue, by declaring Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose “quite meaningless.”
A friend of mine, a postgraduate student of philosophy, told me that he found this dismissal of a great work of literature quite insulting. In the first place, he said, “Eco did not intend his novels for light reading.”
The Name of the Rose is complicated because it attempts to present the concept of “intertexuality” wherein the meaning of a text is in turn shaped by other texts. Hence, we read Eco say in the novel, “books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told.”
“Recall for example,” he said, “the last line of the book, when the library was burning and the text enigmatically mentioned of throwing away the ladder. It was he believed, “alluding to Wittgenstein’s phrase, ‘throwing away the ladder,’ which refers to things that goes beyond analytic and linguistic understanding.”
“The book’s complexity,” he adds, “is interesting because it tries to blur historical facts from fiction. The inquisitor Gui was a real person so was the Franciscan Superior, Michael of Cesena. But where does history end and fiction begin? Were all the books mentioned in the novel real? Was there really a second book of Poetics?”
The way we see it, the problem is not at all the lack of meaning as such but rather the overabundance of meaning.
But let us leave it at that. Since it is the season of love, perhaps it is appropriate to shift our focus on the more interesting half of Ms. Quijano’s article. The comments dismissive of Eco’s novel, after all, can be seen as a device meant to introduce Ms. Quijano’s real concern: a lengthy passage from the book answering the question, “What is love and how do you conquer it?”
We will not anymore question the privileging of this quotation over the rest of The Name of the Rose’s six hundred pages which Ms. Quijano dismissed as a “waste of time.” Instead, following her example, we will conclude this brief missive by lifting the following passage from the opening scene of the documentary Žižek!
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek basically agrees with the diagnosis pointed out by Ms. Quijano:
“What would be my spontaneous attitude toward the universe? It’s a very dark one. The first thesis would have been a kind of total vanity: there is nothing, basically. I mean it quite literally, like… ultimately… there are just some fragments, some vanishing things. If you look at the universe, it’s one big void. But then: how do things emerge? Here I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics, where… the idea… is that the universe is a void, but a kind of positively charged void, and then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed.
“I like this idea of spontaneity very much, the fact that it’s not just nothing. Things are out there – it means something went terribly wrong, that what we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe: things exist by mistake. And I’m even ready to go to the end and to claim that the only way to counteract this is to assume the mistake and go to the end. And we have a name for this: it’s called love.
“Isn’t love precisely this kind of a cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted with this notion of ‘I love the world,’ ‘universal love’ – I don’t like the world. Basically, I’m somewhere in between ‘I hate the world’ or ‘I’m indifferent towards it.’ But the whole of reality, it’s just it: it’s stupid. It is out there. I don’t care about it. Love, for me, is an extremely violent act. Love is not ‘I love you all’ Love means I pick out something…. Even if this something is just a small detail, a fragile individual person, I say ‘I love you more than anything else.’ In this quite formal sense, love is evil.” (Sun.Star Cebu)
