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| Billie Silvey |
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| Recent years have brought a resurgence of interest in labyrinths. In Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, a philosophical detective novel, the detective, Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, uses deductive reasoning to solve a series of murders in a medieval abbey with the aid of his apprentice, Adso of Melk, a Benedictine novice. The plan of the labyrinthine library where much of the action occurs is based on a 13th century maze on the floor of Rheims Cathedral. The action involves solving the maze as well as the mystery. As William points out in the opening pages of the book, "The library defends itself, immeasureable as the truth it houses, deceitful as the falsehood it preserves. A spiritual labyrinth, it is also a terrestrial labyrinth. You might enter and you might not emerge." Later, a character calls it "the labyrinth of the world." And as they walk through the maze, William teaches Adso a three-mark system for keeping track of where you are in it. In his Postscript to the novel, Eco wrote, "An abstract model of conjecturality is the labyrinth. But there are three kinds of labyrinth. One is the Greek, the labyrinth of Theseus. This kind does not allow anyone to get lost: you go in, arrive at the center, and then from the center you reach the exit. This is why in the center there is the Minotaur; if he were not there the story would have no zest, it would be a mere stroll. Terror is born, if it is born, from the fact that you do not know where you will arrive or what the Minotaur will do. But if you unravel the classical labyrinth, you find a thread in your hand, the thread of Ariadne. The classical labyrinth is the Ariadne's-thread itself. "Then there is the mannerist maze: if you unravel it, you find in your hands a kind of tree, a structure with roots, with many blind alleys. There is only one exit, but you can get it wrong. You need an Ariadne's-thead to keep from getting lost. This labyrinth is a model of the trial-and-error process. "And finally there is the net, or rather, what Deleuze and Guattari call 'rhizome.' The rhizome is so constructed that every path can be connected with every other one. It has no center, no periphery, no exit, because it is potentially infinite. The space of conjecture is a rhizome space. The labyrinth of my library is still a mannerist labyrinth, but the world in which William realizes he is living already has a rhizome structure: that is, it can be structured but it is never structured definitively." The Name of the Rose was published in 1980 to surprising success. Expecting to sell only 30,000 copies, the publisher has sold over nine million. Jean-Jacques Arnaud directed the movie version of The Name of the Rose in 1986. It starred Sean Connery and Christian Slater. David Bowie starred in the 1986 British fantasy movie Labyrinth, playing Jareth the Goblin King. Jennifer Connelly plays 15-year-old Sarah Williams, who seeks to find the way though an enormous maze to rescue her little brother Toby from Jareth. She has to solve the maze within 13 hours to keep Jareth from turning Toby into a goblin. Other roles are played by puppets and a combination of puppetry and human performance in the Jim Henson film produced by George Lucas and designed by Brian Froud. Labyrinth, which was nominated for AFI's Top 10 Fantasy Films, has become a cult film with an audience of women as well as children. Since 1997, an annual two-day masquerade ball called "The Labyrinth of Jareth" has been held in Hollywood. Guests comes dressed as various characters in the film. In 2006, the English musician Sting produced an album of Songs from the Labyrinth. Featuring the music of Renaissance composer, singer and lutenist John Dowland, who is best known for his melancholy songs, it is performed by Sting in collaboration with Bosnian lute player Edin Karamazov. The music was featured on a "Studio 60" special on NBC later shown on PBS. It featuried the two artists in scenes shot at Sting's homes, Lake House near Wiltshire, England, and Il Palagio in Tuscany. Songs from the Labyrinth topped the classical charts for some time. |
| December 2011 |
| The Labyrinth in Popular Culture |
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| Counterclockwise from top: Umberto Eco; Sean Connery and Christian Slater in The Name of the Rose; Sting; David Bowie. |