While, in the wake of Edward Said's Orientalism, scholars of the travel scene habitually emphasise the Western traveller's' ethnocentric attitudes, the most recent academic discussion on the issue focuses on the ways the travel experience is internally divided and thus undermines its own hegemonic tendencies. In my paper, I would like to explore how Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad develops a critical strategy in line with this recent discussion.
The Innocents Abroad recreates the nineteenth-century American travel experience in Europe and the Middle East in order to subvert it. Expressing his desire "to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who travelled in those countries before him," Twain's narrator poses as the critical tourist who refuses to be fooled by romantic travel accounts, superstitious monks, and ignorant tourist guides. Twain, however, shows the posture of independent observer to be preposterous. Making his narrator parrot the words of predecessors who also claimed to be engaged in demystifying the overly imaginative narratives of earlier travel writers, Twain indicates how futile the effort is. Epigones in more than one respect, nineteenth-century American visitors to Europe and the East can hardly be expected to offer original depictions of the sites they visit: cliches and stereotypes fill their accounts.
The importance of The Innocents Abroad, however, lies exactly in Twain's awareness and handling of the double bind constituted by the narrator's assertion not to impose his own views upon others and his inability to live up to this promise. Convinced that the notion of unbiased appraisal is erroneous and that the refusal to indicate how readers ought to digest travel impressions conceals the didactic mediation inherent in the position of author/narrator, Twain not only makes often outrageous value judgements, but also tries to redefine their nature and scope. Twain transfers the prejudicial judgements about religion, politics, and morals expressed in nineteenth-century American travel narratives such as W.C. Prime's onto his own narrative: blatantly repeating the prejudices of others is part of Twain's strategy of bringing them to light.
Twain's travel narrative has a resonance that is at once political and psychoanalytical. As Twain would have it, a truly democratic philosophy does not celebrate the notion of perceptual independence, but forces the perceiver to accept his or her complicity in the vices attributed to others. In his exploration of America's perception of foreign countries, Twain not only notes, like Alexis de Tocqueville, how self-proclaimed liberal individuals embrace authoritarian ideas and attitudes, but paradoxically also calls for a non-judgemental judgement of earlier American travel accounts that tries to take into account these tendencies. Repeating the prejudices of others as his own, Twain makes what Freud calls transference an integral part of his efforts to draw attention to and subvert prejudices.
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