Umberto Eco was a prolific writer who made a major impact on postmodernist fiction and semiotic studies. Born in 1932, Eco pursued his studies at the University of Turin, where he examined medieval aesthetics in the writing of Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas. Eco briefly worked in state broadcasting before returning to Turin to work as a lecturer. The intersection of these experiences informed his first pieces of writing, as he started to offer cultural commentary on mass media, popular culture, and textuality.

Eco’s nonfiction writing provided a blueprint for the thematic concerns of his fiction work. His 1962 book, Opera aperta (“The Open Work”), proposed that literary texts should strive to be “open” fields of meaning, engaging different perspectives and interpretations, in opposition to a “closed” text, which limits interpretation to a singular line of meaning. Consequently, this idea encouraged readers to view works of literature through multiple lenses, rather than the strict lens of an authoritative worldview or theory. In 1980, Eco would publish his first novel, The Name of the Rose, which would help to demonstrate this principle in practice while also helping to bring postmodernist principles like intertextuality into the mainstream.

The Name of the Rose is a historical mystery set in a monastery in medieval Italy. Though the novel resembles a typical detective story on its surface, it undermined genre conventions by having the protagonists rely heavily on other texts, like the missing second half of Aristotle’s Poetics, to illuminate elements of the murder at the center of the story. The novel also evokes conscious comparisons to other texts of detective fiction, especially as the book’s protagonist, William of Baskerville, is deliberately modeled after Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, who was a major influence on Eco, also receives a nod in the novel through the character of librarian Jorge of Burgos and through the narrative elements of obscure literature and secret labyrinths hidden throughout the monastery.

Foucault’s Pendulum explores similar thematic territory while also directly drawing from Eco’s personal experience. Eco grew up in the shadow of Italian fascism, which prompted his family to move to a rural village in Piedmont. Though Eco was initially raised to embrace Fascist principles, the liberation of his village in 1945 allowed him to consider alternative cultural viewpoints and criticize Italian national values from a distance. In Foucault’s Pendulum, the character of Jacopo Belbo is depicted as having a similar backstory. Belbo’s frequent asides to his youth during World War II inform his character, especially as it is revealed at the end of the novel that a formative experience during this period influenced his decision to pursue a career in the humanities. Outside the character of Belbo, the novel relies heavily on allusions to other texts, using the device of The Plan to craft a metanarrative of world history based around the historical order of the Knights Templar. Each chapter of the novel contains an epigraph that foreshadows the events or moods of the characters. Within the text of the novel, Casaubon explains that these epigraphs were among Belbo’s files, further collapsing the wall between Eco’s fictional world and the real world. These techniques support Eco’s assertions that a text should dynamically engage the reader, inviting them to lend their own interpretations of “truth” in the same way that the editors and the occultists surrounding them reveal their own readings of world history.