The Standard Of Interpretation:The Tension Between Eco’s The Name Of The Rose And His Interpretive Theory

When interpreting Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, scholars always link it to Eco’s theory as the result of Eco’s identity as a theorist before writing the novel. However, most existing researches have the shortage of regarding the novel as the reflection of Eco’s theory, so that they not only obliterate the richness of the novel, but couldn’t understand the real relation between Eco’s theory and novel. Actually, we can find out a proper method to study the relationship between the two by treating William’s detective activity as text interpretation based on Eco’s perspective that the sequence of events investigated by a detective can be defined as a text. From this point, this essay begins with the demonstration about the inference process of the novel’s protagonist William. He used "abduction" and constructed the "Apocalypse pattern" for a series of criminal cases, but this pattern is evaluated to be wrong. Then we treat William’s detective activity as text interpretation, by which we find the novel is concerned with "the standard of interpretation". The essay then analyze Eco’s perspectives on this problem in his theory and connect it to the details in the novel, concluding that the "text intention" Eco put forward in his theory, is invalid for judging whether a certain interpretation is reasonable. In this sense, the novel falsified the theory, and in this way, we reserve the value of the novel itself and get a deep comprehension between Eco’s theory and novel.