The Name Of The Rose And Pynchon's The Crying

After strict moral standards established many years ago appeared to have failed, and science had proven that it could not prove the origin of the universe, a new philosophical and artistic expression moved in to fill the void of the Modernist Movement. The Postmodern Movement was born out of a lack of faith in society and the established way of life as a whole, and embraced the philosophy of meaninglessness and a rejection of the transcendental meta-narrative. This move has been fully expressed in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 in which both demonstrate a plethora of postmodern characteristics such as strategic use of allusion and irony, and clever employment of intertextuality; per contra, these similar attributes are structurally the same but …show more content…
One abundantly clear attribute each of the novels share, is their reliance on allusion and irony throughout the texts. Umberto Eco describes the place of irony and humor in postmodern works of literature brilliantly, in the postscript of The Name of the Rose, when he writes, “The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently” (Eco 570). This means that a key attribute of postmodern literature is to comment without a perspective of innocence but one with an eye for irony, which is evident in so many areas of the book, such as the treatment of the medieval theocracy, the sciences of the day, and the sources of meaning in the fourteenth century. This is particularly evident with the deeply embedded allusion concerning the names of the novel’s main protagonist. William of Baskerville is clearly a reference to the detective and protagonist of The Hound of the