Did Eco write for Garfield & Friends?

Note: This review will contain revelations about the climax of The Name of the Rose. If you don't want things spoiled for you, go read the book really quick and them come back and read this post.

I picked up Eco's The Name of the Rose after a conversation I had with my good friend the Math Avenger. I had just finished The DaVinci Code and remarked to him that I had enjoyed the mystery and thought the ideas were intriguing, but found the writing to be pedestrian at best and groan-inducing at worst (there's one passage where the main character describes entering the Louvre as "walking into another world"). The Avenger recommended Eco as an alternative, saying that he found him to be similar in ideas but better in execution. After finishing the book last night, I must say I agree. Eco's style is much more cerebral and demands more attention from the reader. There are more characters, more subplots and more issues raised. Eco's writing is excellent: I'm not familiar at all with medieval writing styles, but Eco says in the postscript that he studied several manuscripts of the period so he could write as a monk of the period might write. I have no idea if he actually succeeded (in that I don't know what a scholar would think if you gave him a copy and asked him how close it was), but the narration was certainly in line with what I might expect out of that period, and it created the right tone and atmosphere for the novel. Before I get to what I actually want to talk about, let me just say that after a bit of a slow start where I had a lot of problems tracking all of the different sects of monks people were talking about, I really enjoyed this book. The characters are excellent (William is Sherlock Holmes as a monk in the 1300's), the mystery is fantastic, and the religious questions that are raised (particularily concerning heresy) really give you something to wrap your brain around, if that's the sort of thing that gets you going. The long descriptive passages, where Adso (the narrator) goes on at length about the various imagery he encounters reminded me first of Homer's long registry of Greek ships that sailed to Troy, and second of some of the more imagistic passages of The Faerie Queene. I did have one problem, which is that I have never read a book that would benefit so much from footnotes. Now a sort of mini-discussion about medieval religious sects would be great, and some of the imagery that pops up could definately use a gloss. But more than anything, I want the latin (and various other languages) translated. Do you know why? That's right, because I can't read Latin, and some very important lines in the book, including the last one that gives the book its title, are in Latin. So it drove me a little nuts, since I was looking for some closure on the book, and I didn't have the last line of the book! So that is my one major problem. You'd think that since the book was already translated from the Italian, it wouldn't be a problem for the guy to do a few more quick lines and just shove them down at the bottom somewhere. But my main purpose wasn't really to review the book, but to talk about one of the main ideas it brings up. (It's at this point that I'll start talking about the climax, so if you don't want to know what happens stop reading now.)

Early on in the book there are several conversations about the licitness of laughter, which take the form of the monks debating about whether or not laughter is something that should be recognized as holy or not. Although it comes up a couple times early in the book, my memory of it was overshadowed by discussions on the nature of heresy that dominate the later half of the novel. As I was approaching the climax, I found myself wondering what massively dangerous knowledge was in the mysterious book everyone kept chasing. Since the Math Avenger recommended this book as an alternative to The DaVinci Code, I figured it was some secret that would destroy the church, but I knew that it wouldn't be the same sort of revelation because there had been absolutely no preparation on that front (and anyway if the book said that Jesus was married and the apostles were sexists the monks would simply have dismissed it). I was initially confused by the revelation that this dangerous text is actually the second book of Aristotle's Poetics, where he describes the nature of laughter and comedy. But Jorge's explanation of why he feared a society with comedy elevated to an art form with the blessing of Aristotle was convincing and intriguing. An excellent payoff, and it started me thinking about what exactly laughter does for us.

Before I get to that, let me go back a few days, when I was at the beginning of the book, and had just read some of the early discussions about laughter. It so happened that, either that evening or the day after, I went to Java Fortran's apartment, and watched a particular episode of Garfield & Friends, one of the better saturday morning cartoons of my youth. One of the episodes featured a US Acres bit where group of aliens who have come to steal Earth's laughter, since it is a dangerous weapon on their planet (which is also why Jorge goes to such lengthes to keep the book secret). After a song describing what the world would be like without laughter, the aliens are defeated when the US Acres crew makes them laugh. Although obviously on a different level, I was struck by the fact that a children's cartoon show and a highly engaging but difficult historical novel shared this theme. What exactly does laughter do for us? There's a Calvin and Hobbes strip somewhere where Hobbes suggests that without laughter, we couldn't react to a lot in life. When I posed the question to Java this evening, he replied that the reason we laugh is to make ourselves happy. Douglas Adams considered P.G. Wodehouse one of the greatest English writers because of his sublime humor. In the G&F episode Orson says (sings) that life without laughter would be boring, and in Name of the Rose Jorge sees it as an uncivilized and ungodly response that would threaten the church if legitimized. William, on the other hand, notes that "laughter is proper to man, it is a sign of his rationality." I see laughter as a mental safety valve: a release that allows us to react to things that would otherwise confound us. In the fall of my sophomore year at Carleton, there were two evenings I stayed up all night playing Risk with some friends. Both times I ended up getting so punchy that something set me off and I literally fell off my chair laughing. Humor is a personal thing, in that what is funny for one may not be for another, or may be but to a different degree. The same person may find the same thing more or less funny depending on their mood. Laughter calms us down, makes us happy, and relieves stress. It can help us physiologically as well as mentally. Laughter helps our mind to counteract stress, tedium, disappointment and pretty much any other negative emotion you can come up with. It literally keeps us sane. If those space aliens had succeeded in stealing out laughter, we'd have much bigger problems that being bored all the time.

I'd love to hear any thoughts you might have on this subject. The weather here sucks (it was 45 damn degrees today) so I can't really bring myself to expound the benefits of winter. My other thoughts for today: Smallville rules, the Pats are going to win the Superbowl, and Pericles starts at the Guthrie Lab next weekend, so I'm going to get to read my first new Shakespeare in awhile.