La mort de Cook ou la naissance de l’Auteur

Abstract

The story of Captain Cook’s death, within the narrative of his third voyage, accomplishes the feat of making Cook the author of a text he could not write. Considered as the apotheosis of the history of scholarly exploration journeys, the "voyage to the Pacific Ocean" becomes a poetic model that retrospectively invites us to re-read all the narratives of scholar travels. It suggests that this genre, although claiming to be scientific in scope, is fully literary and plays a bit of an auctorial role in establishing the authority of the statements retraced. It is the obvious realization of what literary and philosophical critics have called the “function auteur”: a dead individual can only become an author if the author is a textual construct.

Keywords

• auctoriality
• authority
• author
• narrative
• monument