The Poetics of Allegory and Enchantment in Melville's Americas

Abstract

This essay addresses the poetics as well as the politics of comparison in Melville's two short fictions that represent the territories and oceanic environs of Spanish America: "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles" and "Benito Cereno." I argue that the hemispheric poetics of these narratives are not ethnographic so much as allegorical, generating what José de Onís has called the "vital" figurative relation in Melville's work between "the two Americas." Drawing on Walter Benjamin's and Paul de Man's theorizations of "allegory" as a dialectical mode, I show how Melville's allegorical fictions deploy "enchantment" both as an experience and as a style. That is, they invite us to take pleasure in enchantment while also thinking critically about how its effects are produced and registered. I suggest that enchantment provides the engine for Melville's American allegories, signaling the contingency and complicity of the United States within hemispheric histories of exchange and exploitation. While "enchantment" in Melville's fiction is not unique to "the two Americas," I argue that this poetic and experiential mode has a particular resonance in articulating the uncanny likeness as well as the inscrutable difference between hemispheric North and South.