Chapter 5 - The Death of the Author: Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil

Summary

This chapter investigates modernist biofictions, with a particular focus on Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil, 1945). Engaging with Virgil’s texts and the ancient biographical traditions about him, Broch’s novel neatly foregrounds the interactions between biofiction, classical reception and the literary, intellectual and political preoccupations of the first half of the twentieth-century. The novel’s title proleptically echoes Roland Barthes’ famous essay on the modern ‘Death of the Author’, self-consciously bringing techniques of intertextuality to bear on the biofictional reception of Roman poetry, as, in Broch’s words, Virgil’s text and biography are ‘continuously interwoven’ (‘fortlaufend eingewoben’) with his own. It is steeped in the author’s reading of Freud, engaging with contemporary psychoanalytical techniques to construct Virgil as a biofictional subject. Finally – written partly in a Gestapo prison – the novel puts biofiction at the heart of twentieth-century political concerns. As the ostensible biofictional entity ‘Virgil’ merges in an interauthorial dialogue with ‘Hermann Broch’, biofictional reading of Roman poetry becomes a medium for interrogating the role of art at a time of cultural and political crisis.