The Unity of Melville's "The Encantadas"

Abstract

M V tELVILLE'S The Encantadas presents a special problem in literary unity. It has been generally accepted as fine work, and it presents a single image, a unified experience; but as a collection of ten apparently loosely related sketches it is simply not the sort of thing we are used to appraising.1 Its immediate purpose is the purpose of many travel books: to interest its audience by exhibiting the exotic and the strange; and for this end the geographical unity of the locality in question is usually considered sufficient. The Encantada,s, however, is a travel book plus, in which the Galapagos Islands have been recreated in Melville's imagination, and assimilated into his total vision of reality. The sketches are bound together by two related meanings, the one abstract and explicit, the other, which grows out of the first, concrete and indirect. First, Melville presents a thesis: The Encantadas, barren and blasted by fire, prove by their existence the Fall of Man and of the world. They look much as the world at large might, after a penal conflagration; In no world but a fallen one could such lands exist. The islands are also, however, a microcosm of complex reality, viewed by Melville with a creative skepticism akin to Keats's negative capability, which is willing to say only