Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose published in 1980 was the first author’s fiction. The novel’s postmodern content is formed on the basis of elements of the traditional form. Eco's novel, despite the elements of a traditional detective novel, seeks an original image of the past, which he fills with his own ideas, in which he meets the postmodern perception of the world. Postmodernism is always based on a ready material – here is the medieval era with its special cultural and historical situation and the world of a Catholic abbey.
Analyzing the features of the traditional elements in the novel, one can find its postmodern nature. One of its significant manifestations is the deconstruction of the genre of the detective novel. The existence of the detective line introduces Eco's novel into the world of already existing books in this genre, through clichés and rules the writer seeks to rethink. Thus, the version of solving crimes associated with the book and the library is often changed in the course of the development of the actions (versions of the struggle for power and personal conflicts).
The protagonist, monk William of Baskerville, is trying to understand whether the events in the abbey are connected with the actions of a maniac trying to adjust events under the execution of the Apocalypse, or whether the abbot is guilty of everything. The novel turns out to be a labyrinth, a strange web of threads and meanings, which create a connection with the tradition of the detective genre. The organization of the novel according to the scheme of the books written before it, leads to the ironic use of peculiar analogies in the creation of images of the new Holmes and Watson (William of Baskerville and Adso of Melk) with an ironic reference to the literary tradition. The image of William is traditional in that he is able mentally to take the place of a murderer. However, William ends up a man of the modern Eco’s era, for whom the world is emptiness, a symbol already filled with interpretations that cancel each other.
Eco creates the novel as a book within a book, in which Adso's manuscripts have an atmosphere of a distinctly bookish narrative. This, together with the details of the origin of the manuscript, referring to historical or detective novels, turns out to be involvement with tradition, and an outright parody, the use of a traditional form to fill it with its own. Therefore, the multiplicity of versions of a detective story turns out to be both a parody of the detective genre and a reflection of the postmodern notion of the world as chaos.
Therefore, the ending of the novel is not so typical for a detective - the guilty are not punished, the investigator comes to disaster, and the reason for the crimes is an object that does not bring material benefit. William, like Holmes, notices evidence and has extensive practical knowledge. The intrigue in the novel, as in any detective, is replete with suspects and dead bodies. But all the events here can be realized as signs, events of inner life – the search for truth. And William takes the reader with him from things to names, from form to content. The detective line receives many interpretations, endlessly reflected in the mirrors of the reader's consciousness.
The Name of the Rose is characterized by a special attitude to history, which it reinterprets. The thread of history connects the biblical plot, the events of the novel and the present: the manuscript from the Middle Ages seems to be republished in the era of postmodernism, placing the traditional elements of form in the world of new content.
