Traveling with Twain in an Age of Simulations
Rereading and reliving The Innocents Abroad
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
IV.
Since rereading Innocents Abroad, I have been asking myself three different sets of "what if" questions about Twain’s voyages across the globe and on the page. One set has to do with sites associated with him that are now part of tourist itineraries. What would he make of his birthplace in Hannibal, Missouri, becoming a heritage site? Would he be flattered, annoyed, or simply amused by Tom Sawyer’s Island? And what would he say about the fact that the Magic Kingdom that now stands near Paris does not include this attraction? (Full disclosure: I have not made it to the European park yet, so my information comes from a bit of armchair travel–done twenty-first-century style, of course, via the Web.)
The second sorts of "what if" questions I have been asking myself have to do with what Twain would have thought of Shanghai, the subject of my current research, had he visited there in the late 1800s. He had plans to go China after completing his 1867 trip across the Atlantic, but despite an enduring interest in the country, he never made it. Twain wrote some interesting things about American policies toward China and about treaties that affected the city I study. And a character in one of his works of fiction sets off for America from there. But I can only imagine–and this is frustrating for a Twain-loving Shanghai specialist–what he would have actually thought about the sights, sounds, and smells of the city in the late 1800s. Would he have thought that parts of the old walled city of Shanghai were strangely familiar when he arrived, due to his prior viewings of Chinese artifacts at international exhibitions or visits to one of America’s Chinatowns? And if he had made it to Shanghai, would he have thought that the illustrations he had seen ahead of time of the new Western-style buildings of the famous waterfront "Bund" that ran through its newer foreign-run districts had done them justice? There is, alas, no way to know for sure.
Fig. 6. Faux Greek statuary in a restaurant window, 2003. Photo by the author.
The final set of hypothetical questions I have been asking myself are what Twain’s reaction would have been to certain experiences we had during our recent trip to France. I have decided that he would have liked our Parisian apartment, as the view from its window was a bit like a peephole into an international exposition. Looking out, we could see "people of all nations" pass by, as well as restaurants that not only served food from different countries, but also had hosts or hostesses wearing the traditional clothing of and contained objects associated with those countries. One restaurant had a white statue of a Greek hero, another a sign saying, "Visit Egypt," and a picture of the Pyramids. Our view was, in a sense, a window onto a miniature Epcot-on-the-Seine.
Another thing about our recent trip that would have impressed Twain is the speed with which we made the journey from Paris to Marseilles. In Innocents Abroad, Twain describes his preference for traveling by stagecoach rather than train, finding railway trips "tedious" and lacking in drama. Still, he was such an admirer of technological breakthroughs that he would have marveled that the TGV could whisk us from Paris to Marseilles in just a few hours. I am less sure what he would have thought of the precise fashion in which we made that journey. Though we had reserved seats, a strike leading to the cancellation of two-thirds of the southbound trains forced us into a small space usually reserved for luggage. Would he have found this a charming throwback to rough and ready travel by stagecoach? Interpreted it as a sign of the importance human factors will always have, no matter what technology accomplishes? Or simply lamented that we were deprived of seeing the landscape between Paris and Marseilles that he had found "bewitching"? There is no way to know.
Fig. 7. Beach at Nice, 2003. Photo by the author.
Similarly hard to decide is what he would have thought about Nice, our final stop, which was not on his 1867 itinerary. Since Twain wrote a few revisionist accounts of Old Testament stories, it would be interesting to bring him back to life and ask his opinion of the representations of these tales in the Chagall Museum. And I would like to hear his comments, after a few days in Nice, on the ways that the clothes people wear at the seaside and the kinds of boats that ply the Mediterranean have changed since the 1860s. Most of all, though, if I could ask the author of Innocents Abroad about just one thing that we saw in Nice, it would be a restaurant-cum-nightclub called "Le Mississippi," which stands near the city’s famed Hotel Negresco. From peeking into its window, my sense was that the main goal of the décor of Le Mississippi is to simulate for patrons the feeling of being on board a nineteenth-century American riverboat of the sort frequented and then made globally famous by Mark Twain. I would love to know the great man’s reaction to this place, the French Riviera’s glitzy answer to Tom Sawyer’s Island.
Le Mississippi’s existence intrigues me for another reason: it reminds us that cities throughout the world are now filled–much more so than in Twain’s day–with sites that provide residents of other countries with simulated encounters with imagined Americas. It is worth keeping in mind that such simulacra–including, for example, the Hard Rock Cafés found everywhere from Beijing to Buenos Aires–can be powerful shapers of images. And it is worth considering, as I did in Nice, that such sites may seem just as exotic as additions to the local landscape as Epcot’s faux Eiffel Tower is to that of Orlando.
Further Reading:
On Twain as a travel writer, see Jeffrey Alan Melton, Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement (Tuscaloosa and London, 2002). And for a very good general reference work on the author, see A Historical Guide to Mark Twain, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Oxford, 2002). The Innocents Abroad (1869) is readily available in several editions. The 2002 Penguin Classics edition–which comes with an introduction by Tom Quirk that does an excellent job of describing and placing into context the evolution of Twain’s account of his travels–was the one I took with me to France. There is also a 2003 Modern Library edition that I discovered after my return but before completing this essay, which contains a poignant introduction by Jane Jacobs that is particularly insightful on the interplay between mockery and empathy in Twain. In addition, there is a digital version of the book–and related materials, such as sample advertisements for it that were used to sell it when it first appeared–available here.
On the general subject of travel and tourism, a good collection of recent scholarly writings is Shelley Baranowski and Ellen Furlough, eds., Being Elsewhere: Tourism, Consumer Culture, and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor, 2001). On simulations in the nineteenth century, see Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-De-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998), and also Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass., 1978). For further readings on Paris around the time of Twain’s visit, the citations in Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, will take you to a variety of relevant works by Walter Benjamin and many others. For an idiosyncratic but fascinating account of spending time in this same city as an American toward the end of the twentieth century, see Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon (New York, 2000). And for the history of Nice and its changing place on tourist itineraries, start with Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley, 1999), 163-66, and proceed from there to the works he cites in his footnotes.
