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Melville's The Encantadas.(Herman Melville)(Critical essay)

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From: The Explicator
Date: 20060622
Author:Blumenthal, Rachel

In Herman Melville's travel piece, "The Encantadas," he uses a terminology of decoding or translation that ultimately allows him to decipher the mystical and "fleeting [...] unreality" (767) of the "Enchanted Isles" (764) as the quotidian "Potter's Field" at the end of the last sketch (818). By recording the Encantadas as a readable travel narrative, Melville is engaged in a battle between the knowable and the unknowable. How much of the island mystique can he explain, decipher, and define? In the first sketch, Melville outlines the islands as a "fallen" world (766) full of ...

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