由義大利著名符號學家艾伯托˙艾科所寫的《玫瑰的名字》是一本重述過往事件的小說。三份主要手稿中的第一份是由十四世紀時的一位本篤會修士，梅可的埃森所寫。第二份則是亞里斯多德討論笑聲與喜劇的手稿。第三份手稿則是在二十世紀時一位不知名人士所加上的前言。將此三份手稿放在一起看時，其實就顯示出歷史知識的不確定性以及追尋歷史事件源頭的不可能性。梅可的埃森所寫的手稿即是一種所謂後現代的偵探小說，然而，這類小說卻無法如福爾摩斯探案一般在故事最後為所有的事件提出一個完美的答案。故事中的主角，巴斯克維爾的威廉亦無法為一連串謀殺案找出最終的起因。在調查謀殺案的過程中,威廉與埃森發現這一切都與亞里斯多德所寫一份討論笑聲與喜劇的神秘手稿有關。佐治，這位在本篤會修道院裡待了大半輩子的盲修士，因害怕這份亞理斯多德的手稿會推翻基督教數百年來所累積的基業，因此決定將手稿藏在神秘的大圖書館中，以避免被外人發現。小說的前言亦指出嘗試找出源頭的不可能性。不管經過多少的嘗試，這位不知名的人是就是無法證明埃森手稿的真實性。這份埃森的手稿，“與他所敘述的事件一般”“籠罩在重重迷霧當中,不管是作者的身分、修道院的確切位置、埃森都固執地一概不提”。
一方面考慮到各手稿的特殊性與個體性—即歷史知識的不確定性以及追尋歷史事件源頭的不可能性—以及另一方面，以往已經被批評過的面相—如神學、哲學、情色、同性戀、笑聲與亞理斯多德手稿重建的諸多議題，我認為可以從班雅明所提出的觀點—一種平衡文本、形式與內容的閱讀方法學—來看《玫瑰的名字》。班雅明的這一套閱讀方法學是由兩篇文章—“德國浪漫主義中的批評概念”以及“歌德的《選擇的親近性》”—中所發展出來，其目的就是要找出閱讀這本小說的其他可能的面相。為充分表達思索、形式與內容三者緊密聯繫的論點，班雅明認為“批判所找出的是藝術品中的真理內涵;批評,則是找出其表面議題。因此，我以班雅明的觀點閱讀《玫瑰的名字》，意義就在於如何融合並調整以往的批評,以形成一套提供閱讀此小說的批判，並如何藉由此批判找出小說的內在精神與真理內涵—現在與過去之間相互拉扯、干涉、層層交迭的關係。

Written by the well-known Italian semiotician Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose is a contemporary retelling of past events. Of its three constituting parts, the first is a manuscript supposedly written by Adso of Melk, a Benedictine novice in the fourteenth century. The second, devoted to the theory of laughter and comedy, is attributed to Aristotle. The third is a foreword presumably composed by an anonymous narrator in the twentieth century. These three documents, when put together, reveal the uncertainty of historical knowledge and the impossibility of tracing back to the origin. Supposedly narrated by Adso of Melk is a so-called postmodern detective story which, unlike the Sherlock Holmes’s series, doesn’t provide a clear-cut solution to the mystery surrounding the murder cases. William of Baskerville, whose name is reminiscent of a well-known Sherlock Holms story, fails to find out the ultimate cause of the serial killings and thus concludes that each crime was “committed by a different person, or by no one” (NR 492). In the course of their inquiry, William and Adso find that a series of murders were closely related to one mysterious manuscript written by Aristotle, the second part of Poetics devoted to the theory of laughter and comedy. Jorge, the blind aged monk in that Benedictine abbey, fearing that this manuscript of Aristotle would destroy the learning that Christianity had accumulated for centuries, decided to hide the manuscript in Aedificium, the mysterious big library, so that the book would be reckoned as never been written. The foreword also points to the impossibility of locating the origin. No matter how hard he has tried, as the twentieth-century narrator says, he fails to prove the authenticity of Adso’s manuscript. As he asserts in his comment, this memoirs of Adso “shares the nature of the events he narrates” and is “shrouded in many, shadowy mysteries, beginning with the identity of the author and ending with the abbey’s location, about which Adso is stubbornly, scrupulously silent” (NR 3). What is revealed from the three documents is the impossibility of reaching the origin of historical knowledge.
Considering, on the one hand, the special character of each manuscript—the uncertainty of historical knowledge and the impossibility of tracing back to the origin, and, on the other, the prospects explored by critics before—the issues of theology, philosophy, eroticism, homosexuality, laughter and the reconstruction of Aristotle’s manuscript, I think that would turn out to be a new way of reading The Name of the Rose with the methodology of reading—to balance the artwork, form and content—proposed by Walter Benjamin, which is developed from two of his articles, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism” and “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in order to find out some other possible interpretation of this novel. To elaborate in his discussion, Benjamin formulates his idea—a play and a dialectics of reflection, form and content—in one sentence, “Critique seeks the truth content of a work of art; commentary, its material content,” together with his discussion on politics among the author, the artwork, and its reader (“GEA” 297). So my attempt to read The Name of the Rose in the light of Walter Benjamin is to comprise and to reconfigure past commentaries that are directed to the novel, and to transform them into a new critique, and by the help of which, the truth content of the novel—how past distorts, interferes, realizes and imbricates with present-ness of the now—would be hopefully excavated.

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