ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Nemo's narrative based primarily on the idea of a mobile, submarine 'space of memory', the Nautilus, which sustains itself by exploiting underwater dominions may be considered as a translatio maris. By translating the sea into the Western master code of the dry-land world, Jules Verne's submarine novel offers a nineteenth-century, oceanic version of the early modern translatio imperii et studii. In particular, Verne repeatedly quotes one of the founders of this discipline, Matthew Fontaine Maury, author of The Physical Geography of the Sea, in his novel. The chapter also shows how Verne more or less invisibly translates Maury's oceanography into his work and it examines the role played by these concealed translations in the novel. Ultimately, Verne's geo-poetics of the oceans does not disrupt the positivist and colonialist porthole of its vision, but it nevertheless prefigures features of later globalization by means of its performative, textual negotiation of territorial practices.
