Writing from the depths of a European context, Umberto Eco challenges different dimensions of capitalism in his full-length novel, The Name of the Rose (1980). He deploys such postmodernist narrative strategies as pastiche, rhizomatic design (ridden by chance, play, choice) and anachronism (marked by polyglotism, intertextuality, transhistoricism) in an attempt to undermine the causal and periodized basis of the system of capitalism. This paper reads The Name of the Rose in the light of the political, cultural, and historical upheavals of 1968. It argues that Eco’s deliberate anachronism draws an analogy between the medieval setting of the novel and its postmodernist context. The present paper focuses on the way the highly disciplined monastic world of the novel analogizes the panoptic, surveillance-ridden atmosphere of its Western context. The intertextuality of The Name of the Rose allows an Orientalist reading which draws a semblance between this novel and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The paper concludes that more than a mere aesthetic endeavor, The Name of the Rose can be approached as Eco’s comments on his Western capitalist context.

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