Abstract
“Enchantment” is undergoing a reassessment across several disciplines. Against traditional fears associated with enchantment, contemporary scholars such as Rita Felski, Jane Bennett, and Akeel Bilgrami link it to the potential for developing ethical relationships and attitudes toward our work as literary scholars, our world, and others. In this essay I argue that the writing of Henry David Thoreau is especially useful for a contemporary revaluation of enchantment because in his writing, enchantment does “delude and disable” us. Rather, Thoreau asks us to think about enchantment as an embodied, material experience that, as he puts it, “attunes” us to the universe. I tease out the dynamics of this “attunement” and argue that for him enchantment is, importantly, linked to hearing rather than seeing. This emphasis on sound in his writing raises three issues for ongoing discussions about enchantment. First, Thoreau’s writing draws on the idioms of sound and music to develop a concept of enchantment that is embodied. This choice distinguishes him not only from Emerson and his transparent eyeball, but from the longstanding emphasis on seeing and its association with truth in the western tradition. Second, we are called to reframe the supposed loss of self control commonly associated with enchantment, as well as reconsider the importance of self control in Thoreau’s writing. To Thoreau, enchantment holds us open to the ambiguity of existence wherein we are neither master nor mastered. Finally, I argue that Thoreau’s writing provocatively insists that chance is perhaps the most crucial condition of possibility for enchantment. Ultimately I argue that attention to the way Thoreau employs enchantment in his writing not only complicates our understanding of his thought, but also points us to a rich textual ground in which to continue cultivating our renewed interest in enchantment and its potential.