New Mannerism? Mystery and Cultural Memory in Four Postmodern Novels
New Mannerism? Mystery and Cultural Memory in Four Postmodern Novels

Summary/Abstract: From a literary viewpoint, peculiar characteristics of Mannerism are intricate plots, refined style, fine rhetoric, particular metaphors, surprizing parallelisms and the taste for decorative elements. It seems that in four novels written at the end of the 20th century we can find the same characteristic features. Other common elements present in all four books (The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, The Emerald Game by Ioan Petru Culianu, Dictionary of the Khazars. A lexicon novel by Milorad Pavić and Hollóidő [Raven’s Times] by István Szilágyi) are the tremendous erudition and knowledge used by the authors to evoke and describe past periods, and the appropriate linguistic tools, with the help of which the authors can place the readers in past consciousness and eras. The evoked time slices are also common: the Middle Ages and the period of Mannerism faced with the present, which is related to the former ones. The moral, according to which all aspirations of reconstructing the past are mere illusions, is also common. And still: the moment of key importance in all novels is the aspiration to record all memories in writing.

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