umberto eco postscript to the name of the rose

In his 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco had three men feed an unwieldy amount of esoteric trivia - involving Templars, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Illuminati, and a thousand other occult sects - into a computer that synthesizes them at random to generate a master “Plan” explaining the course of European history. In adapting the aleatory (or chance-based) methods of composers like John Cage to the more nebulous domain of literary meaning, writers like Queneau updated the classical conventions of literature for a civilization riven by the conflict between freedom and order in unprecedented ways.Īlthough much of his work as a philosopher was devoted to explaining how such experiments were linguistically possible, Eco never set these constraints on his own fiction.

Meanwhile, Raymond Queneau’s A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems (1961) offered just that: 10 sonnets printed on separable lines of text that could be individually turned at will, producing 100,000,000,000,000 different poems for the reader’s pleasure. George Perec’s La Disparition (1969), for example, was a 300-page novel written without the letter “e.” The characters in the novel search for the missing letter, but can’t actually use it for fear of fatally injuring themselves. OuLiPo ( Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle ) was a collective of experimental French writers and mathematicians who, in the 1960s, developed a new form of “potential literature,” where the imposition of arbitrary rules became a constitutive part of the work’s meaning. “It seems,” Eco wrote, “that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the reader.” And a few lines later, with a wink: “Any true detection should reveal that we are the guilty party.” The text either ends or begins here, depending on your interpretation. At the very end of his playful Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1980), Umberto Eco made a casually sibylline gesture toward the future of interactive fiction.

Umberto eco postscript to the name of the rose