Stefanie Mueller

The 'Poetry of Salt Water': Archipelagic Thinking and Insular Knowledges in Herman Melville’s The Encantadas, or The Enchanted Isles

In 1847, Herman Melville anonymously penned a review of two non-fiction books about seafaring and whaling. While praising the books for the faithfulness of their accounts, he also chided them for being among those recent works that “[had] revealed so many plain, matter-of-fact details connected with nautical life that at the present day the poetry of salt water is very much on the wane.” In my talk I will use Melville’s comment as a starting point for an investigation of oceanic epistemologies and archipelagic thinking in one of his magazine pieces, “The Encantadas, or The Enchanted Isles” (1854).

For this portrait of the Galapagos Islands, Melville drew on personal experience as well as on accounts of the islands written by naturalists and explorers. In my talk I begin by arguing that Melville’s story runs counter to the endeavors of previous visitors to survey and categorize nature in the Galapagos islands, most notably in Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839). The piece’s formal aesthetic draws on the tradition of the literary sketch as well as the convention of the travel narrative, thereby emphasizing the impossibility of gaining a totalizing knowledge of the islands. At the same time, however, the sketch’s “aesthetic of fragmentation” (K. Hamilton) allows Melville to stage the ocean as a site of authorial identity and authority in which fiction emerges as a privileged discourse on the sea that can ostensibly disclose more than the writings of naturalists. Based on recent work by Brian R. Roberts and Michelle Stephens as well as Elizabeth Deloughrey, I expand upon this interpretation by focusing on the Galapagos archipelago itself. Rather than “aesthetic of fragmentation,” I argue, we can read the islands as imposing on Melville’s sketches an archipelagic aesthetic in which each sketch may focus on an individual island yet ultimately relies on the archipelago’s fundamental connectedness (what E. Glissant has described as poetics of relation) to produce the text. As a consequence of such an approach, I argue further, we can see more distinctly the degree to which the ocean is not only a stage in “The Encantadas,” not only a surface, but also a submarine space that affords interspecies encounters (fish, whales, and in particular tortoises) that fundamentally unsettle the author-narrator’s epistemological frameworks and ultimately also the subject position he makes such an effort to define and claim in the first place.

Selected bibliography: E. Deloughrey, “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene” (2017); E. Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1997); K. Hamilton, America’s Sketchbook (1998); E. Hau‘ofa, We Are the Ocean (2008); B.R. Roberts & M.A. Stephens, eds. Archipelagic American Studies (2017).