The Name of the Author as Biographical “Neo-myth”: the case of “Byronism”

Résumé :

This contribution would like to start from Michel Foucault’s remarks on “the name of the author” and the “author function ” in his lecture “Théorie de la literature: Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” revisited, together with Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the author’”, by Antoine Compagnon in his lecture “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur”. We would argue that the name of the author can be viewed as a particular case of what Edgar Morin calls the “neo-myth”: Le néo-mythe ne réintroduit nullement l’explication par le vivant, le singulier, le concret là où règne l’explication par le physique, le général, l’abstrait. Mais c’est le concret vécu qui, s’infiltrant dans l’idée abstraite ou générale, la rend vivante. Il ne réintroduit pas les dieux et les esprits. Il spiritualise et divinise l’idée de l’intérieur. Il ne retire pas nécessairement le sens rationnel de l’idée parasitée. Il lui inocule une surcharge de sens, qui la transfigure (Morin 1986: 168). “Byronism” is a case in point, in so far as it defines a way of being-in-the-world—more exactly than a way of life—a mythic model, produced by Byron’s life story, as much as it is an implicit projection having its origin in Byron’s poetic work. It was first a modern myth, constructed and enacted by Byron as the project of becoming “the great Napoleon of the realm of rhyme”. But it also served as the active principle of Byron’s after-life, or symbolic survival, by becoming a living paradigm, an evolving role impersonated by writers, artists, and men in all walks of life, for more than a century after his death. This paper would attempt to adumbrate a portrait in miniature of this living idea.