Traveling with Twain in an Age of Simulations
Rereading and reliving The Innocents Abroad
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
II.
It may seem odd that I began this essay on rereading Innocents Abroad with a series of paragraphs that refer to such quintessentially twentieth-century phenomena as Disneyland, television shows, and films. After all, Twain’s book, in which he often subjects the American travelers in whose company he journeyed to the same sort of humorous scrutiny that he turns on the sites and people of foreign lands, is very much a product of the period in which it was written. That was an era that predated by close to a century the founding of Anaheim’s famous theme park and television’s rise to prominence. The origins of the cinema lie in the very late 1800s, closer to the period of Twain’s first crossing of the Atlantic. Even where film is concerned, however, we are dealing with a medium that did not become a powerful shaper of popular images until Innocents Abroad had been around for about half a century.
Fig. 2. Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris (front), from Ticknor, An American Family in Paris, 129. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
This said, it is worth noting that a recurring theme in Twain’s book is precisely the one that my opening paragraphs on Disneyland, television, and film addressed: the experience of encountering for the first time things about which one has already formed images and already has expectations. In Innocents Abroad, Twain repeatedly explores his responses to encountering directly for the first time something to which he has already been exposed in an indirect manner. Sometimes, he describes his initial encounter with the real thing as a source of disappointment, of the sort I felt when I discovered how complicated and worrisome driving was going to be until I got the knack of it. Consider, for example, the section of chapter 34 titled, tellingly, "The Turkish Bath Fraud." According to Twain, his first Turkish bath was a terrible, indeed traumatic experience, so shockingly devoid was it of the elegance that literary accounts had led him to anticipate.
In other cases, though, Twain shows us how previous exposure via representations can give a new experience a pleasing sense of familiarity mixed with novelty, akin to what I felt when reading Tom Sawyer, after being primed for it by Disneyland. He describes "speeding through the streets of Paris" for the first time, all the while "delightfully recognizing certain names and places with which books had long ago made us familiar." Seeing pictures of the Louvre in advance prepared him for the look of the "genuine vast palace" itself; it was "like meeting an old friend when we read ‘Rue de Rivoli’ on the street corner"; and he instantly recognized the "brown old Gothic heap" that was Notre Dame, since it was so much "like the pictures" of it he had seen.
In still other cases, he claims, encountering a site about which he thought he knew what to expect in advance could turn out to be nothing short of a revelation. Take, for example, his section on "The Majestic Sphinx," in which he describes seeing for the first time in person an Egyptian icon that was doubtless as familiar to him via representations of various sorts as the Matterhorn was to me during my Southern California childhood. "After years of waiting, it was before me at last," he writes, and then begins describing its wondrous qualities in a way that makes it clear that he was unprepared for just how impressive he would find it. So taken with it was he that his description of the Sphinx stands out as an unusual part of the book, since in extolling its glories, Twain drops his usual satirical tone and just enthuses.
Fig. 3. The view from the top of the "brown old Gothic heap" in 2003. Photo by Gina Bock.
But sometimes, Twain suggests, only true novelty–a first encounter, devoid of expectations–will do. "One charm of travel" dies for him in Rome, where he finds there is nothing "to feel, to learn, to hear" that others have not already felt, learned, and heard. While Twain makes it clear that he does not yearn for actual discovery–being the first to go somewhere–he hungers occasionally for the next best thing: to see sites that have not inspired artistic creations or made it into guidebooks.
