Umberto Eco provides his reader with an incredibly challenging text in The Name of the Rose, which not only involves a labyrinth in the form of a library, but also attempts to literally manifest this labyrinth. While William and Adso search for the truth behind the mystery, the reader tries to find the truth or meaning behind Eco's work. Instead, the text offers no clear hints or insights, instead numerous choices, directions, and passages to other texts. Yet, perhaps like Daedalus, the mythical creator of the Labyrinth at Minos, we can use the same skill with which the maze was formed in order to escape it.
To do so, we turn to the structuralist literary critic Gerard Genette and his theory of transtextuality. Genette's theory presents "a poetics which gives up on the idea of establishing a stable, ahistorical, irrefutable map or division of literary elements, but which instead studies the relationships (sometimes fluid, never unchanging) which link the text with the architextural network out of which it produces its meaning" (Allen 100). According to Gerard, there are five types of transtextuality: intertextuality (allusions to other texts), metatextuality (commentary on other texts), architextuality (the expectations of a text), paratextuality (surface details attached to the text), and hypertextuality. The last form is the most confusing, but the one will help us the most. Genette defines hypertextuality as "any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary" (108). In other words, the meaning imparted by text B depends on its hypertextual relationship with text A. It differs from inter- and metatextuality, because it is not merely an allusion nor a clear commentary of the previous text. Indeed, it may not even be entirely clear that text B refers to text A, and the relationship is difficult to find. For this reason, Genette likens hypertextuality to a palimpsest, a manuscript that has been written on several times and scraped clean, leaving the remnants of the earlier writing beneath the new text. With this understanding of hypertextuality, we analyze The Name of the Rose as a palimpsest, where Jorge Luis Borges' "The Library of Babel" serves as the hypotext: