The antagonist to William of Baskerville in "The Name of the Rose" is the venerable Jorge of Burgos, a name that transparently alludes to Jorge Luis Borges.
It is often said that Eco intended this as a tribute to the great Argentine writer. Yet, in truth, this is no homage at all. Just as the venerable Jorge embodies the obscurantism that resists the empirical spirit personified by William, Eco’s own worldview stands in sharp contrast to that of Borges. By naming the novel’s "dark" character Jorge of Burgos, Eco was, in fact, making an explicit critique of Borges’s vision.
But how can that be? – one might object – how could Eco possibly see as an obscurantist one of the most imaginative and refined writers of the twentieth century? If anything, a more likely criticism of Borges would point in the opposite direction: that he was too idealistic, too much of a dreamer.
At the center of "The Name of the Rose"—not only in terms of its plot but also its symbolic weight—stands the library. Correspondingly, one of Borges’s most profound and incisive creations is "The Library of Babel”: and it is precisely this vision that Eco opposes.
In the Library of Babel (made up of hexagonal halls filled with books of 410 pages) there are infinite volumes containing every text that can be imagined. Within them, the letters of the alphabet—and of every language, real or possible—are arranged in every conceivable way. They contain books on every subject, together with their refutations, and all derivative works arising from internal variations: counter-arguments, partial explanations, even a single misprint. For the mere alteration of one letter generates a new and different text. Thus, there also exist unreadable writings, texts that seem devoid of meaning, composed of the endless repetition of a single word or of one or more letters in every possible configuration—and these, too, are texts. In the Library of Babel there are, accordingly, descriptions—some true, others more or less false—of every possible object and situation; the biographies of every human being, accurate or mistaken; the prefigurations of all past and future events, along with their countless variants and refutations.
Borges’s library contains everything and its opposite, and even what lies beyond everything. It is infinite because it cannot be delimited or exhausted by Logos: it is the transcription of life itself, of its endless possibilities.
This magnificent and deeply philosophical vision of the relation between the human mind and reality may be said to form the unifying thought of the Argentine writer, unfolding from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in "Ficciones" to "The Congress." It rests upon eighteenth-century idealism in the manner of Berkeley, yet filtered through Nietzschean skepticism, and finds in Saramago a kind of literary heir: one who walks a parallel corridor to Borges when he notes that, beyond the content of any communication, what is equally decisive for its intelligibility is the range of tones and undertones in which it may be expressed.
And thus, tracing it back still further, Borges’s poetics finds its true stepfather in Plato.
Indeed, this very realm of epistemic uncertainty—the acknowledgment of the insufficiency of rational and empirical means to grasp concrete reality—is precisely what Eco rejects and opposes.
Eco, a scholar of semiotics (the study of language in its formal and signifying dimension), was deeply influenced by the pragmatism of North American thought and by the analytic philosophies of the English-speaking world. To Borges’s Platonism he opposed a realism of Aristotelian origin. As a saying, one that Borges himself liked to repeat, has it, we are born either Platonists or Aristotelians: Eco was Aristotelian in spirit, as Borges was unmistakably Platonic.
Eco’s library is a realm of logic and pure reason. Its order may seem confused, yet it is governed by a rule. Where there are enigmas, there are also solutions; and even when these cannot be found, the only proper mode of human conduct remains rational action. It is to this uncompromising rationalism that Eco alludes through his William of Baskerville, who recalls Conan Doyle’s famous maxim: in a complex situation, once the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains—no matter how improbable—must be the truth.
Eco believes, and in this he is thoroughly Aristotelian, that human beings can reach some degree of truth, however partial or reductionist, through the exercise of reason. For Borges, on the other hand, truth is merely the outcome of humanity’s stubborn impulse to invent a simulacrum of explanation, a comforting illusion; genuine truth belongs, rather, to a kind of knowledge that transcends the ordinary capacities of the human mind. Eco trusts only what can be grasped by the hand, whereas Borges dares to suggest, for example, that it was Judas who truly sacrificed himself for the good of humankind—a vision that, though paradoxical, is nonetheless possible and, in a sense, abstractly true.
Since Eco appears to criticize Borges without granting him a direct response (a procedure that might otherwise seem somewhat inelegant) it follows that, for Eco, Borges’s Platonism genuinely constitutes a form of obscurantism. To refuse the torch of reason is, in Eco’s view, a fundamental error, a moral and intellectual failing. Platonists and esoteric thinkers, by contrast, regard reason itself as a dim and limited light, capable of illuminating only what lies immediately before it; the true lux clara belongs to a higher order of understanding, one not reducible to syllogistic reasoning.
It would be mistaken, however, to interpret Eco’s frequent use of enigmatic or even initiatory motifs as an endorsement of esoteric knowledge. When the venerable Jorge, at the conclusion of the novel, reproaches William for failing to find the shorter path to the secret, Eco’s intention is rather to indicate that he has examined such traditions—as they appeared within the intellectual culture of the medieval West—without discovering in them anything genuinely illuminating.
Borges, by contrast, does not require references to tantric or ascetic practices to kindle in the reader the burning desire for genuine knowledge.
And in this opposition, once again, the contrasting attitudes of the two writers come into view: Eco’s empirical mindset, unaware that any rational attempt to explain the sacred results in a kind of short circuit, and Borges’s, who seeks to kindle in the reader’s mind the higher, supra-rational intellect—the Aleph.
Between these two visions—the drive toward a civilization of technique on one side, and the openness to the sacred on the other—the reader is left free to be drawn toward whichever exerts the deeper attraction.