Revisit Linda Hutcheon - - Eco’s Echoes Ironizing the (Post)Modern

LindaHutcheon initiates the argument with an important rather often neglected question – why Umberto Eco introduced renowned personas of the past in his best creations? Is it an allusion to the critical theorists of the present and the past? What is the significance of referring these personas in his works? These are some of the questions that grapple the reader, especially the academicians, who tries to set a connection between the fiction and reality. Linda also acknowledges it, “I want to argue that it is almost impossible not to think of MichelFoucault when reading this novel. But as the puzzlement dissipates, the ironies remain.”[1] Linda shifts the argument to the theoretical praxis in vogue that leads to the transition reflected through allusion – Postmodernism. The new theoretical praxis exemplifies that we are not in the process of creating new rather presenting the old in new form with no originality. The attempt to introduce Foucault’s Pendulum in the museum of Paris clandestinely is a remark against Foucault’s argument that the periodization of history is essentially a reference to the break of the knowledge that preceded the new period and prevailed in the earlier period. However, Eco believes in an alternative approach to the periodization – wherein the periodization mainly presents the old idea in new format but the essence of both new and old are the same. For instance – the beginning of Renaissance, according to Michel Foucault, is the initial phase of science discovery and the replacement of old knowledge of philosophy and truth with a new knowledge of finding the same truth through scientific ways based on observations and experiments to give reasons. The linkage between the pendulum and Michel Foucault, Casaubon of Foucault’sPendulum and Casaubon of Middlemarch is an irony that becomes an imperatives an important part of Postmodernism. Irony may not mean the sarcasm of the old character rather the critique of the old structural knowledge. Even the meaning of irony, “in Greek comedy the character called the eiron was a dissembler, who characteristically spoke in understatement and deliberately pretended to be less intelligent than he was, yet triumphed over the alazon—the self-deceiving and stupid braggart (see in Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 1957). In most of the modern critical uses of the term "irony/' there remains the root sense of dissembling or hiding what is actually the case; not, however, in order to deceive, but to achieve special rhetorical or artistic effects”[2] is to show the logical connection between the old and new. Huctcheon also acknowledge when she claims, although this is a novel about connections and resemblances that is structured,o bsessively so, on connections and resemblances, it is irony-the canker or cancer beneath overt resemblance-that makes Eco's plot different from Casaubon's Plan. Without irony, Eco's novel would be an exemplar of hermetic semiosis; with irony, it becomes simultaneously both an examplar and a critique.”[3]

The careful analysis of the title - Eco's Echo Ironizing (Post)Modern is an implied to reference to the ironization of the MODERN.

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[1] Linda Hutcheon, “Eco’s Echoes Ironizing the (Post)Modern” Diacritics, John Hopkins University, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp 2-16.

[2] M.H Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, Heinle & Heinle, 1999.

[3] Linda Hutcheon, “Eco’s Echoes Ironizing the (Post)Modern” Diacritics, John Hopkins University, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp 2-16.