Faces that speak

In his Postscript to The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco espouses a Barthesian view of the death of the author, when he writes ‘A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations’. ¹ In this tradition, the novelist becomes merely one of many interpreters of his or her own work: no more or less privileged than any other reader. It is not the author, but the text, the novel itself that ‘generates’ meanings and interpretations. Describing the novel as a ‘machine’ is a brutal reminder that this narrative form, traditionally associated with sensibility and emotion, deploys a number of conventional techniques and devices that are programmed to produce quite specific effects, often with considerable economy.