Darwin : The Voyage of the Beagle : un ouvrage palimpsestique

Abstract

The journey that Charles Darwin undertook at the age of twenty-two aboard the Beagle marked the onset of his career as a scientist but also as a writer. Recently, critique has focused on the literary dimension of The Voyage of the Beagle and has highlighted the subtleties of this work which constantly eludes the readers’ expectations when they might mistakenly regard it as a mere collection of scientific notes interspersed with travel impressions. The numerous intertextual references throughout the text lead us to see it as much more than a factual document. The Voyage of the Beagle is a palimpsest – an account in which travel narratives overlap - which suggests that the final text is the result of many rewritings. When Darwin revises his travel log so as to publish it, he is willing to embark his reader on an adventure with literary undertones. The comparison between the two texts – the travel diary and its published form – also highlights the production conditions of scientific travel narratives. It brings up the issue of how the voyage experiment and its writing forms are articulated. More generally it raises question of the status of travel accounts.

Keywords

• Charles Darwin
• Humboldt
• Sciences
• Scientific Travel Narrative
• Intertextuality
• Rewriting