The title

To be fair and , I have neither read the novel, nor watched the movie in a long while now. I loved the novel so much when I was younger, that I'm afraid it will disappoint me now. Well, I will end up rereading it, one day...

As to meanings & meanings - I didn't think that the two interpretations of the final phrase were opposed, just that the movie's was kind of diminishing the book's meaning. I remember the disappointment I felt. The way I remember it now (heavily filtered and interpreted), the book talks about a general meaninglessness, or purposelessness of the world, over which we are trying to project our own constructions, deductions, into which we are trying to infuse some sense, which sense, therefore, is bound to be heavily imperfect and, ultimately, to fail. Which is why the things (facts, people, places, thoughts, feelings) don't leave anything of significance behind them - lack of meaning leads to lack of interconnection between things, which leads to the loss of the trails they might leave behind. We give ourselves the illusion that we can hold something by holding its name, by trying to save it from decay and forgetfulness, when in fact the only thing that we've been holding on to was the bare name itself, with any trace of its original reference lost forever. Now of course that this whole ...thing ought to be adapted to the context in which the things that had been lost were composed themselves of words (aka books)... Ugh I'm lost . Anyway, compared to that whole thing, the interpretation in the movie does take a shortcut (but then, it was a movie, bound to fit in 2 hours, bound to use more images and less words than a book, so...). Enough of this though, I'm starting to feel too guilty for not remembering it well anymore (that above was mostly a bluff ). It's turning slowly into a bunch of nomina purely nuda. Gotta reread it.

On a side note, gosh it's nice to see the nomina nuda phrase again - not to remember it, but to actually see it written. There was a time when I was ending every single essay with it, no matter what the essay was about. Have you read Eco's The Island of the Day Before? It's the last of his novels that I read, about 2 years ago, during the week I spent in an Orthodox nunnery. I guess I ought to go back there and reread The Name of the Rose (even it was difficult enough to explain once to the nuns what precisely I was doing there, since I wasn't attending the liturgy, or doing the other stuff people are supposed to do when they go to the monastery / nunnery; I kinda doubt that I'd manage to pull that for a second time).

Words, Mr. Sullivan, are precious things. And they are not to be tempered with!