Original scientific paper
THE HERMENEUTICAL RECEPTION OF THE CHARACTER OF JORGE DE BURGOS IN UMBERTO ECO'S NOVEL "THE NAME OF THE ROSE"
Katarina Dalmatin
orcid.org/0000-0002-3486-9578
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Split, Split, Croatia
Abstract
This article analyses the modalities of Umberto Eco's intertextual adoption of J. L. Borges' 'fictional person' and the specific literary metaphors Borges developed and used in his short stories when building the hermeneutical reception of the character of Jorge de Burgos, the villain of Eco's novel The Name of the Rose. While the critical literature on The Name of the Rose has devoted considerable attention to the former, the latter has remained neglected in some crucial aspects. The analysis of ideological and hermeneutic aspects of his character in Eco's novel revealed that, in creating his ethical and theological habitus and even in the development of the novel's main narrative, a significant role was played by double coded metaphors developed by Borges in his short stories The Theologians and Three Versions of Judas. This article analyses their role in the aforementioned short stories by Borges and their intertextual resonance in The Name of the Rose visible both, on the level of ideas and the compositional-narrative level. The basic Borges' metaphor, "Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it", was developed in the novel with the help of various figures of repetition. Within that primary metaphor, an important place is held by the metaphorics of Judas developed by Borges in Three Versions of Judas. Analysis of the hermeneutical reception of Jorge's character has revealed the crucial role of that metaphor in its creation.
Keywords
U. Eco; J. L. Borges; The Name of the Rose; Jorge de Burgos; hermeneutical reception; Three Versions of Judas; The Theologians; epistemological metaphors
Hrčak ID:
170408
URI
Publication date:
12.12.2016.
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