The Name of the Rose : Overlapping of History and Fiction

The Name of the Rose opens avenues for re-looking at the conflict between two disciplines – history and literature  – as the reader after reading the book finds himself on a fragile ground to understand if he has read a history book or a postmodernist detective fiction. When we study The Name of the Rose in context of postmodernist theory of history and fiction, we find that Eco prioritizes concerns to present the changing social, political and religious spheres with the help of fiction. It also leads us back into the domain of detective fiction wherein the world of Conan Doyle emerges. Fiction grounds on imagination that helps in the construction of narrative picture and history gives the picture of past. Fiction infiltrates into the territory of facts with the presentation of verified data in the form of names, factions, dates, and incidents. This crossing of the boundary blurs the demarcation of history and fiction as the reader finds himself incapable to treat the content fact or imaginatively constructed. Linda Hutcheon argues that the

writing of postmodernists is best represented by those works of historiographic metafiction which self consciously distort history. This distortion of history could be accomplished through various means such as blending of “history and fantasy.”  Postmodern historical novels incorporate historical documents, events and historical personages into the fictional worlds of their works, drawing attention at the same time to this process. Linda Hutcheon in her Poetics of Postmodernism labels postmodern historical novels as “historiographic metafictions” since they thematize the theory of contemporary historiography and problematize the distinction between history and fiction. She explains her reason for such a label thus: “[historiographic metafiction] puts into question, at the same time as it exploits, the grounding of historical knowledge in the real past. This is why I have been calling this historiographic metafiction.” [1]

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[1] Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. 1989 p. 92.