Archvillain or Scapegoat: René Girard visits the abbey of The Name of the Rose

Abstract

Antagonists are usually the understudied characters of a literary world. Often, they are dismissed as mere narrative structure or despised as the epitome of villainy. Jorge of Burgos, the dogmatist of The Name of the Rose, is the ultimate villain in Umberto Eco's oeuvre. Nevertheless, there are almost no exclusive character studies of him. This article undertakes a subversive reading of the novel and the character, utilising René Girard's theoretical framework of scapegoating. Sketching the contours of Girard's theory, the article examines the mimetic nature of the crimes and evil within the abbey, as well as the crises in the larger world depicted in the novel. The deconstructive reading reveals that Jorge was truly a scapegoat, and the novel is, in fact, a literary text of persecution, aligning with the persecutors’ perspective. It challenges Eco's idea of the model author as susceptible to ideological capture. Rather, the article asserts that literature can be a liberative pedagogy through a revisionist rereading that accepts the unacknowledged scapegoats.