For some time it has been fashionable in literary circles to reject what is called scornfully the biographical method. It was inevitable. No mode lasts forever. Sooner or later, there is a change. This method was the law for too long. It had no rival. Under its tutelage the motto for teaching literature was “the man, his work”. It was by its authority that students were taught that La Fontaine was in charge of waterways and forests and master of the (...) hunt before writing his Fables, that they had to learn by heart; or that Beaumarchais had been a clockmaker, musician, secret agent and business man before inventing the character of Figaro, proposed for their admiration. There has been a reaction. Our irreverent and contentious age has put an end to that absolute sovereignty. For a good quarter of a century this practice and the assumptions on which it rests has been on trial, in the name of the various and at times even contradictory conceptions and theories about the nature of literature. These have in common, however, the belief in the independence of literature with regard to the human being who was the instrument of its creation, as well as the anathema cast by this fact on what is commonly accepted as “referential illusion”. (shrink)

Did the first men dream their voyages before making them? Or did they have to first take to the sea so as to be able to later embark on the ship of their imagination and thus embroider on accounts of their journeys? Is it the prestige of the dream that spurred them on to run the risk of translating it into a real experience? Or is it the account of authentic voyages that supported that of imaginary voyages? These are questions (...) that make one dream and that we continue to ask ourselves, even though we suspect that they are idle, since it is impossible to answer them with certitude. All that we know, or think we know, is that among the first written testimonies that have come down to us, real and imaginary voyages are mixed and confused in an alloy of a homogeneity that resists analysis and is perhaps an image of the reception they had from their original public. Who knows if the Greeks who listened in the middle of the first millennium B.C. to the poets singing the return of Ulysses to Ithaca, could, or wanted to, untangle the part of truth from that of poetry? Who knows if the Arabs who, at the end of the following millennium heard the enchanting tale of the voyages of Sinbad, distinguished, as the Western orientalists of the 19th century must have done, the real ports of call and the shipwrecks experienced in the dreamed places and fantastic adventures? (shrink)