Colonial Oceanic Environments, Law and Narrative in Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and Juan Benet’s Sub rosa

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the environmental imagination of the ocean to claim that these open spaces lend themselves to narratives where law and justice are interrogated and subverted through narrative techniques connected to unreliability. The essay’s primary interest is in the pairing of narrative ambiguity and the trouble with wilderness in colonial maritime narratives, in which narrators tend to harness the fact that international waters are environments largely liberated from social, legal and political constraints in their attempts to offer up “justice” aboard ship. The essay uses the analysis of Benito Cereno and Sub rosa to demonstrate that narratologists need to consider the environmental imagination for a more fruitful discussion of narrative space.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Vincent Brown for generously providing key references and rich discussion, which gave birth to this new research project.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Marta Puxan-Oliva http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6436-9198

Notes

1 Benet, Inspiración, 144.

2 Díaz, 121.

3 The narrative voice in Benet’s Sub rosa is highly ambiguous. It is a third-person, non-characterised voice, heterodiegetic, but dubiously omniscient and extradiegetic. The voice seems to be at times that of an intradiegetic narrative instance that narrates from experience and the present time of the diegesis, as seen in the quote below, which would make it neither omniscient nor extradiegetic as it might seem in most of the narrative discourse. The novel plays with this narrative ambiguity.

4 Benet, Cuentos, 185. All quotes from Benet have been translated by Igor Knezevic and revised by John Shakespear. I reproduce the Spanish original here to account for its peculiar use of tenses, which shows the ambiguity of the narrative voice:

de tiempo en tiempo, y con frecuencia decreciente, van surgiendo los contradictorios vestigios de un suceso que carecerá para siempre de verdad, de la misma manera que un portento no presentará nunca el mismo cariz a los diversos testigos que lo presenciaron, hasta que el olvido y el desinterés se cierran definitivamente sobre él, como las aguas del Atlántico  …  se soldaron y cerraron de nuevo sobre el remolino de espuma negra donde desapareció el casco del Garray.

5 Benet, “Un escritor, 33–8.

6 Melville, 50.

7 Herman, Jahn, and Ryan, 552.

8 Chatman, 96–106; Bal, 133–4; Bridgeman.

9 Ryan, “Cognitive Maps”; Ryan, “Narrative Cartography.”

10 Zoran, 326 (emphasis in the original).

11 Bakhtin; see also McDowell.

12 Heise; Buell, Future; James.

13 De Lange et al., eds, xiii (emphasis in the original).

14 Buell, Environmental Imagination.

15 See Buell, Future, 17; Buell, Heise, and Thornber; and Hiltner, ed., for descriptions of the first and second waves of environmental studies.

16 Clark, 6.

17 Cronon, 102–19.

18 Mellor, 105.

19 Crane, 17.

20 To a certain extent related to Thornber’s “ecoambiguity”.

21 Mellor, 104.

22 Melville, 47, 46.

23 See “The Sublimation of the Sea,” in Cohen, 106–31.

24 Rediker, 112.

25 Sundquist, 135–82.

26 Cronon, 109.

27 Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 105.

28 Klein and Mackenthun, eds, 2; Connery, “Oceanic Feeling.”

29 See Deleuze and Guattari. On a related discussion on Heidegger’s conception of building, dwelling and space, see Miller, 9–56.

30 Boelhower, 94.

31 Cohen, 4. For studies of oceans in literature, see Cohen; Larsen; Connery, “Oceanic Feeling”; “Sea Power”; Mathieson, ed.; and Bystrom and Hofmeyr.

32 Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 105.

33 Benton, “Of Pirates,” 82.

34 Benton, Search for Sovereignty, 110.

35 Ibid., 112.

36 See Posner and Sykes; Steinberg; Hannigan.

37 Benito Cereno and Sub rosa approach justice as occurring on the oceans—rather than defending justice done to this environment, or focusing on “matters of public health and social discrimination” (Clark, 88). This might suggest another approach to ecojustice. For studies on ecojustice, see Percival and Alevizatos, eds; Adamson, Evans, and Stein, eds; Adamson; and Coyle and Morrow.

38 Cronon, 109.

39 Benet, “Un escritor,” 37.

40 Melville, 49. See this doublevoicedness in Boyden, and the limitation of perspective that results in the failure of speech in Barnett.

41 Melville, 64.

42 Ibid., 74.

43 Benet, Sub rosa, 196.

44 Various passages in Sub rosa suggest that something was being hidden by Captain Basterra for unknown reasons, on pages 179, 185, 186, 187. See De Lope for the enigma.

45 Benet, Sub rosa, 185.

46 See analyses on suppressed accounts and muteness in Boyden; Goldberg: Lee; and Swann.

47 Melville, 103.

48 Coulson, 18.

49 Melville, 112.

50 Benet, Sub rosa, 186.

51 Ibid., 183.

52 Ibid.

53 On the questioning of law in Benito Cereno, see Weiner; DeLombard; and especially, regarding international law, Gottlieb.

54 Brooks, 4.

55 Coulson, 31.

56 Benet, Sub rosa, 185.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the European Commission under a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Grant (PIOIF-GA-2012-3303100).