L’Écrivain imaginaire: scénographies auctoriales à l’époque romantique (review)

This compendious volume outlines a new kind of literary history devoted to the various imaginary projections of authorship as elaborated particularly — by writers and readers alike — in the Romantic period. In so doing, Diaz is also contributing in a major way to the return of serious critical interest in the figure of the author. With his focus on the écrivain imaginaire that is produced by every text and is necessary for all literary communication, Diaz argues that this imagined writer is as much a creative product of the author as is the text. The field that Diaz is concerned with is therefore neither the sociological one associated with Bourdieu, for example, nor is it the strictly textual implied author identified by Wayne Booth. Equally, the écrivain imaginaire is far more ‘performed’ than Bénichou’s account of the sacralization of the writer allows. Diaz finds a very acute consciousness of the phenomenon amongst a number of other, occasionally unlikely authors and commentators, including Sainte-Beuve, Zola, Valéry, Sartre, and Barthes. In Part I he sets all this out in the context of Romanticism, where the authorial figure becomes the ‘pivot scintillant d’une littérature qui a perdu ses autres modes de légitimation’ (p. 233), and he suggests that the ‘strong’ writers of the period (Hugo, Lamartine, Balzac) adapt existing models of authorship for their own purposes and deploy more than one such figure over the course of a lifetime. Such claims are not really supported by any sustained analysis of the strategies — textual or paratextual — involved in these processes, and instead Diaz relies largely on his extraordinarily wide-ranging and precise knowledge of the period to back up his claims. The sheer range and number of his illustrations convincingly demonstrate the extent of the awareness that writers of the time had of the functionality of the authorial image. Part II presents a detailed account of the five main images that marked the Romantic period, each associated with a particular phase of the movement: le poète mourant or malheureux of a romantisme mélancolique of the 1820s; Hugo’s poète-prophète who emerged between 1827–30; its slightly more demonic variant in the figures associated with the Jeune-France and Balzac who represent a romantisme de l’énergie; the more capricious and perverse personae who accompanied le romantisme ironique (Nodier, Janin, and Balzac in a different guise); and, finally, le poète désenchanté who came to the fore after 1830. A summary cannot do justice to Diaz’s work since its main achievement consists in his marshalling of reference and quotation. There are few, if any, scholars who can match the scope and detail of his reading. That said, the sheer volume of illustration does ultimately tend to swamp the argument, so that by the end of the book the figures he discusses come close to being illustrations of a model of authorship that, in comments such as ‘Nerval [. . .] a plus nettement encore ce sentiment masochiste d’être un tard venu’ (p. 586), seems to differ little from familiar modes of biographical portraiture. This reservation aside, Diaz’s history of these imaginary writers is indispensable reading for anyone concerned either with concepts of authorship or with Romanticism, and the book is quite simply an outstanding scholarly achievement.