Committing Comedy Laughter as the Heresy of Worldliness in The Name of the Rose

"Postmodern" novels have a vague reputation for tending to resort to the comic, even though they are philosophically supposed to cut across traditional generic boundaries such as tragedy and comedy. Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (1980), however, has achieved its preeminent stature as an exemplum of postmodernism by taking an altogether peculiar approach as regards the comic. In fact, hardly is there a respite in the novel from the sombrely descriptive or confessional mode of narration, complicated by cumulative layers of historical, esoteric and eschatological erudition; the murder mystery involves the medieval "mundus inversus" (upside-down world) theme common in Biblical marginalia, but to the modern reader that topos is more grotesque than risible. This paper attempts to read the celebrated semiotic intricacy of the novel in terms of two overlapping binaries: theological doctrine as opposed to its (heretical) subversion through the heterological threat of comedy, and Christianity vis-à-vis the secular or heathen world of technological knowledge. These factors coalesce in the Borgesian labyrinth of the monastery's library, and the textual "metapsychomachia" against the impulse of laughter is catenated to that against the sciences of the material world. Consequently, the nadir of heresy for Jorge is an African alchemist's attribution of Creation to the divine laughter of God. Dhee Sankar"Committing Comedy Laughter as the Heresy of Worldliness in The Name of the Rose" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-2 | Issue-3 , April 2018, URL: http://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd11539.pdf http://www.ijtsrd.com/humanities-and-the-arts/english/11539/committing-comedy-laughter-as-the-heresy-of-worldliness-in-the-name-of-the-rose/dhee-sankar