These two authors do not seem to have anything in common at first : ancient Greece vs. 20th century USSR, philosophy vs. literary criticism. One thing stands out, however : laughter, or comedy. It is Umberto Eco's tour de force and greatest achievement to have made the works of these two influential authors meet in his 1980 medieval whodunit The Name of the Rose. At the centre of the plot is a labyrinthine library, worthy of Borges's Fictions, which houses books worth dying for - and killing for. The meanders of the story lead the two protagonists (a master, William of Baskerville and his disciple, Adso of Melk, both monks) to the source of all deaths.This is made possible by William's high rationality and logic (inherited from Conan Doyle, and Eco's own field: semiology), and one of Adso's dreams (the book is Adso's Bildungsroman in some way). His dream is the comic and subversive re-enactment of the Coeana Cypriani (The Supper of Cypriani), probably written by Saint Cyprianus just before the 6th century. The supper is the scene of a reversal of all biblical values, of blasphemy, of debauchery, where the King becomes a buffoon, where Adam and other famous charcters are satirised, as if they were all part of a book by Rabelais. This disorder, the inversion of the values is the gist of what Bakhtin calls the "carnivalesque", of what used to happen during carnival days int he Middle-Ages. Laughter and supper lead etymologically to "comedy": "komoidia" is the song of a band of revellers after a banquet. This is the nodal point of the novel: Aristotle wrote his Poetics on tragedy and comedy: only the former subsists, the last copy of the latter having perished in the great fire of Alexandria's library in the Middle Ages. His analysis of laughter was the ultimate aim for any scholar, and in this case, any monk. Laughter in the Bible is a debated notion among monks in the abbey: it is welcomed but also rejected. The Gospels are considered as being devoid of any laughter. Hence the desire of one monk to make Aristotle's rational study unreachable and inaccessible to vulgar people. William of Baskerville will discover that the reason behind it is the fact that people would then be justified in using humour, which would make the foundations on which the Church was built collapse, that is, God's wrath and fear. 
