Voyage en Tasmanie ou l’hybridité éloquente dans English Passengers de Matthew Kneale

• Main Author: Catherine Mari
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2010-06-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: M. Kneale; comedy; duplicity; echo; hybridity; speech
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/3209
• ISSN: 1168-4917; 2271-5444

Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000), with its curiously notional title which seems to predefine the voyage, is, at the diegetic level, the tale of an absurd expedition whose diverse objectives are inevitably incompatible. The novel, in which two stories (separated by 30 years or so) are juxtaposed, is a singular mix of two modes : to begin with, the primary narrative, a crazy, parodic comedy, relates the history of the extermination of the Aborigines, a reality which is gradually unveiled through various other narratives, each no more than a few pages in length (reminiscent, in their form, of a log book), attributable to a succession of homodiegetic narrators who make up a representative sample of the population of Tasmania at the time. The two-tiered narrative structure of the novel is thus a reflection of the duplicity of the colonists. Yet, despite the disparity of tone in the different stories, this apparently hybrid novel, with its numerous echoes, gradually makes sense. The two strands, moreover, come together in the last quarter of the novel thanks to one particular character, a half-caste (one of the rare survivors of the massacre). In fine, English Passengers successfully assumes the risks of hybridity. Not only does the novel entertain the reader by subverting the form and philosophy of travel literature, but it also offers a history of the Aborigines to whom, for the space of the novel, it gives voice.