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Summer 1991

Framing the Authentic: The Modern Tourist and The Innocents Abroad

Richard S. Lowry College of William and Mary, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Lowry, Richard S., Framing the Authentic: The Modern Tourist and The Innocents Abroad (1991). New Orleans Review, 18(2), 18-28. http://www.neworleansreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/18_2.pdf?056111

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FRAMING THE AUTHENTIC: THE MODERN TOURIST AND THE INNOCENTS ABROAD

n one of the best known moments in Mark Beecher, the flutter became a crescendo on his ITwain's The l1111oce11fs Abroad, he visits what he visit to the painting coJJection at the Palace de calls " the most celebrated painting in the Luxembourg in Paris. If not ty pical in its world- 'The Las t Supper' by Leonardo Da intensity, his account nonetheless exemplifies Vinci."' Coming as it does in the midst of what the disorie nting shock m a n y felt w hen is already, barely a quarter of the way into the encountering authentic art. He felt himself narra ti ve, an almos t frantic gallop through undergo an "instant con version, if the hotels, cathedrals, and museums, the episode expression be not irreverent": "to find myself represents just one m ore s top on a hectic absolutely intoxicated - to find my system so itinerary. In Milan a lone, itself sand wiched much a ffected tha t I could not control my between a few days each in Genoa and Venice, nerves-to find myself trembling and laughing the tr<1vclers already have visited the Duomo and weeping, and almost hysterical, and that in and its "7,148 marble sta tues" (129), the s pite of my shame a nd resolute endeavor to Ambrosian library- where they see, along with behave better,- such a power of these galleries an autograph letter of Lucrezia Borg ia, some over me l had not expected." ' Even the more drawings by Michelangelo and Leonardo ("They urbane art critic James Jackson Jarves, who lived :-pell it Vinci and pro nounce it Vinchy; much of his life amid the European art he loved foreigners a lways spell better than they and collected, recalled wandering the Louvre pronou nee" [1321)- and a public bath, before feeling "oppressed, confused, uncertain, and they find their way to "an ancient tumbledown feverish," struggling "in a convulsive effort to ruin of a church." There, in this anonymous maintain mental equilibrium."• place, they pause to see for themselves the In part these accounts record honestly "wonderful painting, once so beautiful, always overwhelming experiences of confronting, after so worshipped by masters in art, and forever to years of having access only to reproductions, the be famous in song and story" (136). authentic works themselves.' "I have seen good The episode opens as a rehearsal of what by copies a ll over the world," con fessed one 1869 had become a familiar ritual of viewing art traveler, "but they lose their charm after seeing described time and again in tra vel literature. so much of heaven ly beauty and earthly Primed, like Twain, to a hig h pitch of s wee tness as this glorious work of Raph ael expectation by guide books, art reproductions, exhibits."• Another attested to "the new sense lectures-the whole range of nineteenth-century which is deve loped b y the sight of a cultivated educc1 tion- previo us travelers approached European art like l larriet Beecher Stowe, who, as she mounted the s teps of the 'Siar Pnp<'rs; or, £xper11•11u,- of Art am/ Nature ( e" ' York: J. Louvre, felt a "flutter of excite ment and C. Derby, 1855) 59, 57. expectation." 2 For her brother Henry Ward ' The Art Iden, ed. Benjamin Rowland (1 864; Cambridge: The /1111vft'11I,; Al>road (, ew York: ew American Library, Harvard Univ. Press, 1960) 44. 1966) 136.

'See Neil I la rris, The A rtist i11 A t11eric1111 Socil'ly: T/1e ·S1111ny Memories llf r ()rcign I ,11111~ {Boston: Phillips, Formative Years, 1790- /860 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, Sampson, 1854) 2: 159. 1966) 124-69.

18 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW masterpiece. It is as if we had always lived in a ca binet that made solid what had only been world where our eyes, though open, saw but a dreamed 0£. 10 To visit otre Dame, Shakespeare's blank, and were then brought into another, home, Florence, Athens was to make literal the where they were saluted by . .. grace and literary, to make authentic the imaginary, to beauty."7 These were Americans finding for divest allusion of illusion: "The Capitol, the themselves, by following a program of leisured Forum, St. Peter's, the Coliseum-what few self-cultivation fi rs t codified in the eighteenth­ hours' ramble ever took in places so hallowed century Grand Tour, what many intellectua ls by poetry, history, and art?"" Thus it was the had felt their country lacked: a rich tradition of viewing of art, a lready consolidated in culture made sturdy by a backbone of canonical impressive collections in Paris, Florence, a nd mas terpieces and ancient monuments. It was above all in Rome, that in many travelers' this expectation that had persuaded Harvard accounts mos t accurately conden sed the earlier in the century to send abroad such experience of visiting Europe. prospective faculty me!Ttbcrs as George Ticknor, In visiting the Leonardo, then, Twain walks a Edward Everett, George Bancroft, and Henry path already well-trod by Americans eager to Wadsworth Longfellow to prepare for their roles open the door to authentic nrt and culture. In as educators." Their experiences in turn helped fact, he figures "The Last Supper" as the essence inspire Americans to import as much of Europe of Art, "celebrated" not just by travelers and as they could for their own ediiication. Boston's critics, but by other "mas ters in art"; it is, in Anthology Society Reading Room-later to short, the masterpiece of masterpieces done by become the Athenaeum- was founded on the the original and originating Master. Twain's strength of books travelers brought back from language deftly echoes a tradition of almost Europe.• Later in the century Jarves, inspired by giddy homage to the picture both by critics and his experience at the Louvre, assembled an travel writers-an earlier traveler visits "This impressive coUection of Renaissance Italian art, celebrated painting, a copy of which, in one which Yale acquired in 1868 for its own museum form or another, everybody has seen, and which (Strout 70, 72). Similarly, New York's has been pronounced one o f the fines t in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boston 's world." 12 In their use of "celebrated," both Museum of Fine Arts both opened their doors in writers in turn echo one of the most powerful 1870 stocked with the products of their patrons' pronouncements of the painting's value by European buying tours. Goethe, whose essay on Leonardo's "Celebrated Thus when Bayard Taylor, the most popular Picture of The Lord's Supper," published in travel writer in America after mid-century, Englis h in 1821, ci ted it as "The picture . .. confessed, ''I cannot disconnect m y early known to all that have ever heard the name of longings for a knowledge of the Old World from art pronounced."13 According to Mrs. Jameson, a still earlier passion for Art and Literature," he whose Sacred nnd Legendary Art went through merely made explicit what many travel accounts numerous editions, Leonardo, "the g reates t took for granted: Europe was for nineteenth­ thinker as well as the greatest painter o f his century Americans a vast museum, a collector's age," had with this painting brought forth "a

•John Overton Choules, Thi! Cruise of the Steam Yacht North ' By-Ways of Europe (1869;, cw York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, Star; a Narrative of the E1:c11rsio11 of Mr. Va11derbilt's Party 1889) 8. (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1854} 221.

"Bayard Taylor, Vi£,w~ Afoot, or C11mp<' Sm, wit!, K1111psack 'W. M. Gillespie. Rome: A~ Seen by 11 New-Yorker i11 "/843-4 mid Stnff, rev. houschdd ed. ( 1855; New York: G. P. Putnam, (New York: 1845) 82, as qtd. in Hnrris 128. 1890) 407.

'Cushing Strout, Tl1e A 111ericm1 Ima!~(' of the Old World ( ew ' 1Rev. John E. Edwards, Rn11do111 Sketches 1111ft Noles of York: Harper, 1963) 64. £111·01iea11 Tmuel i111856 (New York: Harper, 1857) 268.

See Lewis P. Simpson, "Joseph Stevens Buckminster: The "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Observations on Rise of the ew England Ch~risy,'' Tlit· Ma11 of Le/lers in Nt•w Lcon.irdo da Vinci's Celebrated Picture of The Last Supper," l:11gla111/ and the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. tran~. G. H. Noehden. in G1H'lhr 11 11 Art, ed. John Gage Press, 1973). (Berkeley: Univ. of California f' rl•Ss, 1980) 166.

LOWRY 19 creation so consummate, that since that time it with the ineffable graces of the first society." has been at once the wonder and the despair of Unburdened by education (if "on e has no those who have followed in the same path."" opportunity in America to acquire a critical Leona rdo was more tha n a g reat artis t, he judgment in art," then he will parade, rather embodied Art; he was, according to Charles than hide, his "uncouth sentiments" (170, 171 )), Eliot orton, a "great genius, one whose power the Vandal gazes at Art "with a critical eye and all the world recognjzes and honors, [one who] says it's a perfect old nightmare of a picture and stands apart from his time, unapproached, he wouldn' t give forty dollars for a million like alone."" it.",. Twain's visit to the painting is framed by a Twain's innocent may represent an American whole set of expectations that links the genre in abroad- one Englis h reviewer characterized which he writes-European travel literature­ him as "a very o ffe nsive s p ecimen of the with a discourse o f a rt appreciation and vulgarest kind of Yankee"-but he places more demands his reaction to the painting. Where he emphasis on the Vandal whose uncultivated or had avoided such a confrontation earlier at the "inexperienced eye" underwrites a clear-eyed Louvre with a casual reference to "its miles of skepticism, always quick to expose the Empire's paintings by the old masters," here he faces the new clothes, to dismiss as shams the fruits of d em ands o f conventio n (100). And he d oes civiliza tion offered to him by breathless guides regis ter a new v is io n, but it is o ne tha t and sanctimonious guidebooks.'7 If Europe is a d eliberately traves ties those of others. The museum, he suggests, it .resembles more that of painting he describes is "battered and scarred in P. T. Barnum than Charles Wilson Peale: a house every direction, and stained and discolored by of humbug filled with disfigured paintings by time.. . . The colors are di.mmed with age; the "Old Masters" and buckets of nails from the countenances are scaled and marred, and nearly True Cross. And it is this humbug, distilled in all expression is gone from them; the hair is a the catch-phrased awe of visitors to "The Last dead blur upon the wall, and there is no life in Suppe r," a nd p erpe tua ted b y other travel the eyes" (1 37). Despite the image's writers, that Twain will expose. "This book," he inscrutability, Twain finds himself alone in his posits i1, his preface, "has a purpose, which is to disappointment. Around him artists assiduous.ly suggest to the reader how he would be likely to copy it onto canvases while touris ts s tand see Europe and the Eas t if he looked at them "entranced before it with bated breath a nd with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those parted lips," uttering "catchy ejaculations of who traveled in those countries before him. I rapture." Gauging their reactions agains t his make small pretense of showing anyone how he own, he wonders, " How can they see what is 011gi11 to look at objects of interest beyond the not visible? . . . You would think that those men sea-other books do that, and therefore, even if I had an astonishing talent for seeing things . .. were competent to do it, there is no need." which had faded out of the picture and gone a While this bravado led Bret Harte, for hundred years before they were born." Indeed instance, to praise Twain as a "hilarious image­ his eyes lead him to notice "how superior the breaker," Twain's contentious stance is not as copies we re to the o rig inal, that is, to m y straightforward as hls preface suggests.18 In fact, inexperienced eye" (138). his d isappointment about the Leonardo was, by The moment captures in miniature the 1869, in many ways no less a cliche than the irreverent texture of the text of The l1111occ11ts rapture of those who stood around him. "I sat A bronrf as a who le. Twa in visits "The Last before it for some time," noted one traveler, Suppe r" as what he calls elsewhe re an "and looked at it, and read all the guide-books "American Vandal," "the roving, independent, free-and-easy character of that class of traveling ••"The Anw rican Vandal Abroad," Mnrk Twai11 Spenki11g, 11ot Americans who are elaborately educated, ed . Paul Fatout (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1976) 27, 29. cultivated, and refined, and gilded and filigreed "Uns igned review, Saturday /{cvil•w 8 Oct. 1870, in Mark "Sncrt•d n11d Legendary Ari, 8th ed. (1848; London : Twai11, Tlic Critical Heritage, ed. Frederick Anderson (London: Longmans, Green, 1879) 2: 268. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971) 43.

"Notes of Tro11e/ and Study 111 /Inly (Bosto n: Houg hton, Mifflin, 1859) 3 17. "Ouerla11cl Mo11t/1ly Ja n. 1870, in Anderson 33.

20 1EW O RLEANS REV IEW said about it, but was not able to work myself own us e of m edia-tha t the "origina l" up to the point o f extravagant admiration masterp iece had long since, in Goethe's words, expressed by some travelle rs in its "almost ceased to exist, in its own substance" contemplation" (Edwards 268). Bayard Taylor (166). To later connoisseurs, the picture was no admitted to a similar reaction in viewing the mo re than the "wreck of a glorious presence" comparably admired Venus de Medici: "It may (Jameson 268) in which less educated travelers be considered heresy, but I confess I did not go could "distinguish little beside the composition into ra ptures, nor at first perceive any traces of a nd the general sentime nt of the picture."'" By superhuman beauty" (Views Afoot 352). Even the nineteenth century the real picture had been Harriet Beecher Stowe' s flutter of excite ment for centuries known best only through copies; its s ubsided once s he entered the Louvre a nd fame and its "beauty" lay solely in its "aura" of experienced "no thing of that overwhelming, authenticity paradoxically a ttested to by the subduing nature which I had conceived" (23). ubiquity o f, if no t al wa ys the s kill in , the The p e rs is te nce o f s u c h reactions, o fte n reproductions.2<1 Thus in turning a n "impartial" coming as they do hand-in-hand with but "inexperienced" eye from the original to its expressions of g iddy elation, s uggests that copies, Twain su ggests that the rhetoric o f disappo intment itself was as integ ra l a reverence finds as its true object nothing more component of the rhetoric of authentic culture as tha n the m e nta l image s uc h la n g u age has was rapture. Indeed, Twain's purpose is not so shaped beforeha nd. much to d e nig ra te art-he admits to be ing Art is not the only sight on Twain's itinerary "satis fied that 'The Last Supper' was a ve ry to disappear behind the fl ood of images and miracle of art once" (138)- but to explore his, expectations framing it. At virtually no point and by impUcation his readers', relationship to d oes his tour elicit a n experie nce "authentic" that art. The narrator's disappointment in "The enough to exceed his expectations. The issue is Last Suppe r" s tem s fro m the fact th a t the comically foreclosed at one of the earliest s tops painting-far from being too cultural for his on his tour at the city of Tangier, "the spot we vulgar taste-is not authentic enough; as merely have been longing for all the ti me . ... We wanted a scarred piece of history, it cannot deliver the something thoroughly and uncompromis ingly pure experience that the conventional rhetoric of foreign-foreign from top to bottom-foreign rapture leads him to anticipa te. Tn his from center to circ umference-foreign inside disillus ionment, the narrator is as much a victim and outside and all around . . . . And lo ! ln of the rhetoric of reverence as are his fe llo w Ta ngie r we have found it" (57-58). As the travele rs in their illusion. He, too, vis its the apotheosis of the authentically foreign, the city's painting to experience in the original what he a rchitecture, the exotic dress a nd customs of its had known only in reproduction and in prose. inha bitants, and its associations with a history His "impartial" description o f the disfigured reaching to the time of ancie nt Thebes, a ll lead picture, by virtue of how thoroughly it negates Twa in to invest Ta ng ie r with a n uncanny the ra pturous comments of o thers, p erfectl y "foreignness": expresses his disappointed expectations once he is there. Indeed, so caught up is he in his search Herc is not the slightest thing that ever we for aesthetic experie nce that he endorses the have seen save in pictures-and we always copies as "superior" precisely because they at mis trus ted the pictures be fore- they least help him recall what he came to see. seemed too weird and fanciful for reality. Thus the irony in his carefully worded praise But behold, they were not w ild enough­ for the pa inting: "The Last Suppe r" is "the they have not told half the story. Tangier is picture from which all engravings and all copies a foreign land if ever there was one, and the have been made for three centuries" (137). This true spirit of it can never be found in any seemingly naive statement, in fact, points to the fina l s ig nificance o f T wain's s tag ing his "Grace Greenwood (Sara Jane Lippincott], Hn/JS n11d confrontation with Art with the Leonardo rather Mrs/,n/1~, or, A To11r III Europe (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and than in, for ins ta nce, the Louvre. As informed Fields, 1854) 397. commentators were well aware, in the decades afte r "The Last Supper" was painted it had '""The Work of A r t in the Age o f Mechanical suffered such damage from fl ooding and heavy­ Reproduction," ll/11111i11ntio11s, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah handed restoration-not to mention Leonardo's Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969).

LOWRY 21 book save The Arabian Nights. writers is not a particularly scrupulous (58) veracity-the standard avowal of virtually every writer-but the fact that he travels Europe as a Just as in front of "The Last Supper," Twain's tourist rather than as a cultural pilgrim. In his attention oscillates between the object (the city, irreverent haste he anticipates what Henry the foreign) and its image, as he weighs the James would later characterize as the reality of one against the expectations generated "passionless pilgrims" who evinced "a by the other. At first it seems that Tangier does, disposition, which had perhaps even at most a indeed, exceed its images, which tell only "half comic side, to treat 'Europe,' collectively, as a the story." In citing The Arabian Nights, however, vast painted and gilded holiday toy, serving its Twain finally locates the authentically foreign in purpose on the spot and for the time, but to be a "reality" measured not by its difference from relinquished, sacrificed, broken and cast away, images, but rather by its resemblance to what at the dawn of any other convenience."22 The travelers know beforehand. Tangier, as he sums commentaries Twain offers, the history he up, is nothing less than "an oriental picture," an supplies, the comic comparisons he constructs, image of the foreign best embodied in a book of all serve to fragment "Europe" into a touristic fantasy. collection of interchangeable sights that are then In interpreting the "foreign" or the "authentic" shuffled and reintegrated in a narrative by its image, as he does both in Tangier and organized as much by the contingencies and before "The Last Supper," Twain represents both coincidences of Twain's tour, as well as his encounters in essentially aesthetic terms. Indeed, personal predilections, as it is by the countries under Twain's "ignorant" eye, all of Europe he visits. emerges as a form of art. Whether he visits the While James may have characterized the Vatican, the dungeons of the Castle D'If, the modern tourist as "passionless," Twain's markets of Constantinople, or Notre Dame ("We pilgrim, in fact, emerges as a creature of recognized the brown old Gothic pile in a enthusiastic anticipation riding a cycle of moment; it was like the pictures" [95]), his expectation and consummation or dis­ vision tears each site from any historical or appointment. Far from rejecting aesthetic ex­ social context-any foreign or authentic perience, he revels in it; from the opening pages reality-and transforms it into a "sight" framed he immerses himself wholeheartedly in the by pre-existing images linking it to other levelling vision of tourism, trusting in the very "site/sights."21 The Leonardo, Notre Dame, equivalence of one sight to another to sustain his Rome, Tangier: no matter the scale, everything passion. The excursion, he is sure even before he in Europe is there to be visited, recognized, and sees the itinerary, will be "a picnic on a giant categorized with other images. The result is an scale," a "royal holiday" during which experience that is remarkably uniform, even at passengers would "scamper about the decks by times boring. "What is there in Rome for me to day, filling the ship with shouts and laughter" see that others have not seen before me?" he (17). Nor does the dry language of the asks in mock desolation. "What is there for me prospectus advertising the trip's itinerary-"The to touch that others have not touched? What is undersigned will make an excursion as above there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, during the coming season" -dampen his that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What enthusiasm (18). In fact its catalogue of sights can I discover? Nothing whatsoever. One charm gives shape to the innocent's revel by invoking of travel dies here" (190-91). Like the "twelve a litany of magical names-Lyon, Genoa, hundred pictures by Palma the Younger ... and Correggio, Corsica, Napoleon, Joppa, Jerusalem, fifteen hundred by Tintoretto," much of Europe Caesar: places and names mingle in a soup of leaves Twain "weary with looking" and association linked only by the timetable of incapable of interest, much less enthusiasm (169- travel. Twain opens the list of marvels by asking 70). "who could read the program of the excursion Twain's prefatorial claims notwithstanding, without longing to make one of the party?" (18), what differentiates him from previous travel and closes it by answering emphatically,

"The distinction comes from Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: ""Preface to 'The Reverberator,'" The Art of the Novel, ed. Schocken Books, 1976). R. P. Blackmur (New York: Scribner's, 1962) 189.

22 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW "Human nature could not withstand these evaluating the actual place in light of its prior bewildering temptations" (22). image, and comparing it to other sites and The Innocents Abroad opens with the tourist experiences. Geographic places and material already preformed, keyed to a pitch of comic objects are torn from their social context and hyperbole by the anticipation of travel itself. transformed into images of themselves, tourist And in fact, this lust for travel, more than the "sights" framed by the touristic imagination. attraction of any particular site, fuels the Sights for Twain are commodities the cultural pilgrims' trip. Despite their repeated dis­ value of which is established not by any "aura" appointments, indeed despite their growing of authenticity, but by guides and guidebooks, skepticism as to whether these promises can be by the planned activity of tourism as it fulfilled, Twain and his companions time and materializes in the ship's relentless itinerary, again eagerly strain for the first glimpses of and most of all by the act of consumption itself. Gibraltar, France, Milan, and Jerusalem, their appetite whetted by pictures, guidebooks, II religious and historical associations. Once having arrived, no matter how completely each Twain's comic discovery of Europe rode a place may satisfy or disappoint their ex­ mounting tide of American travel oriented more pectations, the pilgrims quickly succumb to a to sightseeing and less to personal cultivation. simple thirst for travel that pulls them to the With the Paris Exhibition, which Twain visited next sight. on his cruise, in full flower in 1867, In this sense, The Innocents Abroad unfolds as a unprecedented numbers of visitors took sustained exegesis of the opening prospectus advantage of lower steamship fare and faster Twain significantly prints in full as "a text for and more comfortable continental travel to visit this book." For if Europe promises a certain kind Europe. Twain himself estimated the number of of "experience," this experience is valid insofar Americans traveling abroad in 1867 as nearly as it recreates and fulfills the promises of the 100,000 per year. 21 More sober judgments set the prospectus. Europe emerges as a metonymic number at mid-century, before the travel boom 2 series of buildings, paintings, streets and vistas; following the Civil War, at around 30,000. ' like the words in the prospectus, it is linked as a Despite these numbers, however, Europe system of equivalent signs. Indeed, Twain ends remained for most Americans inaccessible: even his text evaluating the success of the excursion a second-class cabin for a return trip between in precisely these terms: "I have no fault to find New York and Liverpool cost no less than $150, with the manner in which our excursion was far beyond the means of even the middle class. conducted. Its program was faithfully carried Their experience of Europe came strictly at home, out. .. our holiday flight has not been in vain­ where they read widely popular travel literature for above the confusion of vague recollections, or viewed stereocards and chromolithographs of certain of its best prized pictures lift themselves famous art works and well-known European 2 and will still continue perfect in tint and outline vistas and monuments. ' after their surroundings shall have faded" (474- Indeed, despite popular travel writing's 75). The "pictures" he has in mind are not those explicit use of the rhetoric of authenticity, it by the "Old Masters" but the very sites, stimulated such vicarious consumption of impressed now as images, vaguely hinted at in culture. Even as authors sought "to make words the prospectus: "We cannot forget Florence­ a substitute for pencil and palette," even as they N aples-nor the foretaste of heaven that is in struggled to "acquire the power of bringing the delicious atmosphere of Greece-and surely not Athens.... We shall remember Baalbek­ '"Cited in Dewey Ganze!, Mark Twain Abroad: Tlie Cruise of the pyramids of Egypt" (475). Twain ends his the "Quaker City" (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968) 3. book where it began, with another prospectus that registers his experience only in the few modifiers with which he surrounds each "Foster Rhea Dulles, Americans Abroad: Two Centuries of "sacred" word. European Travel (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1964) 44. Tourism then is not strictly a form of enlightened travel, but a comically philistine cycle of anticipation and consumption-a "See Peter C. Marzio, The Democratic Art: Pictures for n 19th­ process which entails reading about each site, Century America (Boston: David Godine, 1979).

LOWRY 23 attribute to art itself a power to shape society. only implicit in the writing of others. He joined "Art is the surest and safest civilizer," wrote one the Quaker City cruise as a well-known traveler. "Open your galleries of art to the humorist and newspaper writer whose fare was people [as the Europeans do] and ... you give paid, like that of others on the trip, by two them a refinement to which they would newspapers which printed the letters he otherwise be strangers," a "sense of the beautiful regularly dispatched in the course of his travels. and the sublime" that, when accompanied by "a After returning, he revised his articles into a few salutary lessons on the necessity of book only when publisher Elisha Bliss could submission to authority," will eventually leave promise Twain the extensive profits of Americans "as well-behaved as the people of subscription publishing-an early form of mass France or Italy." 28 publishing whereby huge numbers of books Travel accounts did more than document the were sold door to door by itinerant canvassers. mutation of enthusiasm into evaluation, In signing his first book contract, Twain entered ignorance into knowledge. They stood as its a terrain of culture shaped broadly by values of final result. They offered their readers more than the literary as embodied in and disseminated by secondhand descriptions of culture. They the book, and every bit as codified and suggested a language, a disposition, a set of canonized as was Europe. As when abroad, expectations that allowed readers to maximize Twain traveled this new land as a vandal to their own presumably more meager aesthetic taste. capital in a stance of taste. Thus the pretext of It has been common to characterize Twain's travel writing lay in the pretensions of taste and attention to, and at times obsession with, the hierarchy that lay implicit in virtually every business of writing as separating him from the episode of art viewing, pretensions that linked more literary concerns of his peers. Yet Twain's proper uses of culture with social hierarchies. pursuit of the profits of culture actually placed The meaning of Europe lay not in how texts him at the center of Gilded Age literary represented its cultural wealth, but in how they production, where culture and capital coexisted dramatized travelers' reactions to that wealth. in uneasy union. Even as the marketplace for Twain's consuming vision threatened this reading-shaped by the expanded scale of book rhetoric on a number of different grounds. In publishing, the growth of mass-circulation displacing an aesthetics of appreciation with one magazines, and the emergence of reading as a of recognition, he implied that the acquisition of leisure-time "habit" -seemed to offer greater cultural capital lay not in collecting the authentic prospects for a popular dissemination of culture, but in reflecting the conventional. The values it threatened to transform all writing into a form of his culture lay not in distinction (among art of commerce, and author's names into, to quote works, among connoisseurs) but in indis­ William Charvat, "brand names, to be sold, tinguishability (among originals, and between goods [to] be promoted."30 originals and their images). His was, in short, an Bliss could assure his new author of great aesthetics of mass culture, an aesthetics profits because, unlike many of his more genteel potentially outside the realm of taste, peers, he felt relatively free, in the words of one dramatized by the blissfully ignorant tourist critic, to treat "literature and art ... like common vandalizing the hierarchies of culture. merchandise."31 The result, for many in the book Thus it was not in Europe that Twain played trade, was a kind of "false" culture. Subscription the American Vandal most successfully, but at books, fumed another critic, were easily home, where he could align the vision of the identified: "[A] gorgeous binding, usually in "uneducated" or "impartial eye" of the innocent very bad taste, thick but with cheap paper, abroad with "the mercenary eye" of the outrageously poor woodcuts, the largest types practicing author.29 Twain took seriously the connection between capital and culture that lay "'Matthew Brucolli, ed., The Profession of Authorship in America: The Papers of William Charvat (Columbus: Ohio State "Charles Bullard Fairbanks, Aguecheek (Boston: Shepard, Univ. Press, 1968) 273. On the politics of the literary Clark, and Brown, 1859) 127, 128, 129. marketplace, see also Christopher Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985). ''Letter to Henry Houghton 12 Feb. 1875, Mark Twain's Letters to His Publishers 1867-1894, ed. Hamlin Hill (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967) 83. "Publisher's Weekly 21 June 1880: 8.

LOWRY 25 i I with the thickest leads, add up to a very big, professed to prefer. gaudy book which a glib tongue or persistent Both Bliss and Twain, who eventually became boring cheats folks into buying for five dollars, a subscription publisher himself, recognized the when the reading matter which it contains, if importance of, and realized the profits from, this worth anything, would make about a dollar­ image-making process by offering buyers as and-a-half book in the regular trade." 32 This elaborate a piece of furniture as they could description was by and large accurate: afford. As Bliss instructed his door-to-door subscription books were in fact big, gaudy, agents, "Books are seldom bought for what they ornamental, and expensive. Publishers like Bliss are as a whole, but for some particular feature or worked hard to justify steep prices and high features they contain."" So his agents gave their profits by making sure that the customer customers as many reasons as possible for received as much physical book as possible: in purchasing by showing them ornate, leather effect, the text often served as nothing more than bound prospectuses containing title page, an excuse for the binding. In other words, illustrations, and some representative text. One entrepreneurs like Bliss succeeded because they of the most powerful selling tools was a list of focused on selling images of a culture their prominent local citizens who already had agreed customers could not otherwise acquire. Such to purchase a book. Adding one's name to the books were meant to be put on coffee tables or list allowed the customer to join, quite literally, a displayed prominently on shelves as much as select group of cultural consumers. Done they were meant to be read. correctly, Bliss assured his agents, such tactics As blatantly opportunistic as this marketing would give them "a kind of mesmeric power" strategy was, it did not necessarily represent a and "a tremendous leverage" over the buyer. cynical affront to taste. Rather, it traded on an In effect, agents offered their customers what increasing propensity by the American middle Twain was offered to join the Quaker City class to judge a book-and its owner-by the cruise: an "authentic" image of Culture. Thus cover. Even as genteel critics in dozens of advice when Twain opens his book with the travel books outlined for their readers courses of "prospectus," he literally offers "a text for this reading for improvement, they also charted book," a guide to buying his book translated as a what can be characterized as an etiquette of guide for his trip. Like the customer/ reader, book possession, implying that owning books the narrator is mesmerized by a commodity no­ entitled one to similar claims to distinction as table for its discrete features: "Constantinople! reading them. "[B]ooks are the most telling Smyrna! The Holy Land! Egypt and 'our furniture which can be placed in a room," friends the Bermudians'!" And like the cus­ assured one such writer. "[A]n opinion is tomer, he, too, enters a list, "selected by a formed at once, from them of the taste and pitiless 'Committee on Applications,"' which cultivation of the family."" Echoed another, includes celebrities like Henry Ward Beecher "Books are not made for furniture, but there is and General Sherman. Twain's tourist and his nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a reader travel the same terrain of the tasteless, a house. The plainest row of books that cloth or geography shaped as much by the consuming paper ever covered is more significant of pretensions of Culture as any authentic refinement than the most elaborately carved experience. etagere or sideboard."34 Subscription books thus This is not to suggest that in travestying the took their place in the family parlor with the distinctions of taste, in displacing the authentic very copies of the original artwork that Twain with the reproduced, Twain rejects the value of culture altogether. Rather, just as the tourist remakes Europe into an image of itself, so too ""The Subscription Book Trade," Publisher's Weekly 23 July 1872: 93-94. does Twain locate the ultimate value of culture in its images. This dimension emerges most powerfully at precisely the moment when Twain "Lyman Abbott, "Suggestions for Household Libraries," grows most weary of the "shams" of tourism: Hints for Home Reading: A Series of Chapters on Books and Their Use (New York: Putnam, 1880) 112.

------~------·- "The bookselling guide is reprinted in Hamlin Hill, ed., "Charles F. Richardson, The Choice of Books (New York: Mark Twain and Elisha Bliss (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri American Book Exchange, 1881) 164-65. Press, 1964) 170-82.

26 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW during his pilgrimage through the Holy Land. culture is at the same time its most thorough The journey re-enacts with greater intensity his parody, composed of monuments that are pure experience in viewing "The Last Supper." If his images, signs with no referents. The obsequious visit to the painting promised a paradigmatic rituals of pilgrims and monks, the vast encounter with an authentic icon of High ornamentation of the separate chapels, even the Culture, the Holy Land promises contact with Church itself, designate what is essentially an the origins of culture itself. It represents "the image of truth. chief feature, the grand goal of the expedition"; Out of this absurdity, however, emerges an the tourists' imminent arrival elicits "the wildest unexpected epiphany. As Twain did in front of spirit of expectancy" (309). In traveling overland the Leonardo, he shifts his attention away from to Jerusalem, the pilgrims will touch the the source to the image, from the "rock" of the authentic sites of the Bible, the most powerful Church to its "illustrious edifice." This time, text in Western Christendom. They will walk the however, he does so not to initiate a play ground once "pressed by the feet of the Saviour" between image and site, but to locate the and gaze at the same vistas "that God looked authentic in the image itself. Despite "its on.... The situation is suggestive of a reality claptrap sideshows and unseemly impostures of and a tangibility that seem at variance with the every kind," Twain concedes that the Church is, vagueness and mystery and ghostliness that one "in its history from the first, and in its naturally attaches to the character of a god" tremendous associations, [the] most illustrious (339). edifice in Christendom" (414). Adam's grave Almost immediately, however, whatever may be no more "true" than the bushel of expectations Twain entertains are dashed by the fragments of the "true cross" Twain has seen sheer absurdity of translating a text of religious during his voyage. Neither, however, are any of miracles to a bare and ruined geography. No these markers a sham: the Church and its sacred matter how much in disrepair was "The Last filigree have accrued too much meaning Supper," no matter how heavily framed it and throughout history to be dismissed as a fraud: other sights were by either the glib tongue of a guide or the preconceptions of guidebooks, they for fifteen hundred years its shrines have existed materially. In the Holy Land, on the been wet with the tears of pilgrims ... ; for other hand, Twain finds himself often visiting more than two hundred, ... gallant knights sights with no site. Biblical towns survive only ... wasted their lives away in a struggle to as impoverished hamlets or as "shapeless" seize it and hold it sacred from infidel ruins. The Sea of Galilee is a dreary stretch of pollution. Even in our own day a war that water in a harsh landscape bereft of the cost millions of treasure and rivers of blood fishermen of Biblical times. He and his fellow was fought because two rival nations tourists are shown the precise spot where Paul claimed the sole right to put a new dome was blinded on the road to Damascus, or where upon it. History is full of this old Church of Joseph's brothers cast him into the pit, knowing the Holy Sepulchre. full well that the location is not only disputed, (415) but in fact arbitrary. Absurdity reaches its highest point at the In inverting the normal touristic relationship pilgrimage's most sacred destination, the between the site and meaning (the church is not Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, full of history, "history is full of this old where the group enters both "the most sacred Church"), Twain explicitly relocates authenticity locality in Christendom" and a Barnumesque in the historical process that has designated that stage for humbug (405). Under one roof Twain site as worth visiting, a process that as a tourist visits Christ's grave, the hill at Calvary, the Twain affirms. Thus the true site in the Church "true pillar of flagellation," and the spots where of the Holy Sepulchre-indeed, the true origin Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene and to his of historical and touristic authenticity-is the mother after his resurrection. This zealous comically mistranslated sign reading, marking of origins breaks all bounds of the "'Chapel of the Invention of the Cross'-a name believable when Twain also encounters Adam's which is unfortunate, because it leads the grave and, next to it, a pillar marking the center ignorant to imagine that a tacit acknowl­ of the earth, from which the dust was taken to edgement is thus made that the tradition that form Adam. The authentic site of history and Helena found the true cross here is a fiction-an

LOWRY 27 invention" (411). Twain, of course, is one of imposture is The Innocents Abroad-an extended those "ignorant" visitors: in this "invention," prospectus for culture. Thus the book itself which has long since overwhelmed the integrity represents one more marker in the comic cycle of the original, lies the authentic. of expectation and fulfillment that both Twain­ The image here, the designating marker, as tourist and writer-and the consuming reader emerges not as a perversion of "true" culture, reproduce. Just as Twain's parody of travel but as culture itself. If the innocent abroad never rewrites the grounds for tourism, anticipating in really leaves the domain of the mediated, if he is its humor a new form of cultural consumption, caught in an endless deferment of the authentic so too does his text parody prior assumptions of as he visits cities, churches, museums, shrines, cultural value as they were embodied in the and monuments, he nonetheless actively book, initiating a new phase in literary participates in making them "authentic." production.• Moreover, it is in terms of this paradoxical situation that Twain's own text can be understood. Tourism, as he presents it, is an activity of reconstitution, of interpretation, and Richard S. Lowry is Assistant Professor of English at the College of William and Mary. finally of writing. The final product of this

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