Eco’s The Name of the Rose: Bricolage and montage of cultural history

Abstract

Umberto Eco loved analogies, was an artist of the déjà-vu and a great bricoleur in architecting a pastiche of genre and a collage of intertextual anxieties of influences. I begin with his inspiration from one of his favorite and most influential writers, James Joyce, and will close with the influence of his all-time favorite movie, Casablanca. Eco’s remarkable study of Joyce’s works appeared in the first edition of Opera aperta. The influence of this meticulous analysis of puns, riddles, metonymy, and interactive metaphors resurfaces with his encyclopedic knowledge in The Name of the Rose. My argument is that Eco, keeping the famous Irish writer in mind, structured his own novels as dynamic epistemological metaphors. In addition to the skillful use of parodies, irony, puns, metaphors, erudition, semiosis, details, and comic relief, The Name of the Rose reveals many of Eco’s narrative strategies. Socratic dialogues, intertextual frames, citations, palimpsests, and chains of associations are at the center of his possible world of fiction where History and stories intertwine. From the cult movie Casablanca Eco learned how an intertextual collage of clichés was used constructively: “two clichés make us laugh, but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves and celebrating a reunion.” In The Rose we encounter clichés, archetypes, and familiar quotations that with Eco’s encyclopedic knowledge contribute to making his first hybrid cognitive narrative an excellent example of docere et delectare.