Holy
Lands and Settler Identities
Herman Melville's faith-doubt poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage
to the Holy Land and Mark Twain's travel satire The
Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrims' Progress challenge
the religous, cultural, and literary conventions of the
extensive literature produced by Americans traveling
to Ottoman Palestine before the beginnings of modern
Jewish settlement in 1882. Although they are quite dissimilar
in style and reception, both are "infidel" books,
in nineteenth-century terms. Travel to Palestine allowed
Americans to "read sacred geography," to experience
an exegetical landscape at the mythic core of Anglo-America's
understanding of its own covenantal mission as a New
Israel, yet Melville's dark pilgrimage and Twain's explosive
laughter create narratives that run counter to the dominant
ones of typological destiny and millennialist restoration.
Through Clarel's obsessive poem-pilgrimage towards
covenantal failure and Innocents Abroad's "touristic" vision
of violent parody, comic irreverence, and the commodity
consumption of "marketable sentiments,' Melville
and Twain write their own sacred geographies. Both books,
shaped by "frontier" encounters from maritime
and Western contact zones, undermine the assumptions
of American exceptionalism, even as they remain complicitous
with colonial expansion.
American Holy Land literature -- those texts based on direct
experience of Ottoman Palestine -- consists of hundreds of
books and an extensive array of newspaper and magazine articles
from the beginning of the nineteenth century to 1882. A considerable
archive embodying an insistent American religious and cultural
involvement in Palestine and the Ottoman empire becomes readily
evident, particularly when one also includes consular documents,
illustrations, panoramas, photographs and other non-literary
representations, such as John Banvard's theatrical Holy Land
panoramas, Frederick Church's Holy Land paintings, Robert
Morris's sales of "Holy Land Cabinets" of bits
of stone, wood, flowers, seeds and other items, even the
large-scale Holy Land garden erected along the shores of
the lake at the Chattauqua Assembly, the institution launched
in 1874, according to the son of its founder John Heyl Vincent,
as "a gigantic Palestine Class."1 Holy
Land literature draws from a deep cultural preoccupation
that actually intersects several genres: religious text (such
as tracts, sermons, memorials, exegeses, jeremiads, Sunday
School "illuminations," and missionary journals),
travel book, exploration narrative, archeological and topographical
treatise (particularly those seeking "evidences" of
biblical prophecies), even historical romance and poetry.
Such a literature, despite its uniquely "American" qualities,
springs from the larger library of Western involvement with
Palestine available to Americans, including centuries of
British Holy Land books and translations of accounts by C.
F. Volney (1781), Ulrich Seetzen (1810), Viscount F. A. de
Chateaubriand (1811), Johann Burckhardt (1822), Alphonse
de Lamartine (1835), and other Continental travelers and
explorers.
A distinctly American Holy Land literature begins to flower
with the publication of the correspondences to the Missionary
Herald as missionaries Pliny Fisk and Levi Parson departed
in 1819 to "occupy" Jerusalem for the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Throughout the
century articles and books by missionaries comprise a steady basso
continuo to the counterpoint of other texts, with William
M. Thomson's The Land and The Book (1859), written
after his sojourn of 25 years in Palestine and Lebanon, becoming
a fixture in countless Sunday school libraries and one of
the most popular books ever written by a missionary. Another
stream of documents was composed by religious innovators
and millennialist colonists, such as Elder Orson Hyde's brief
account of his sacred journey to Jerusalem in 1841 to perform
the Mormon Church's first official act: a ritual signaling
the imminent restoration of the Jews to the old Holy Land
in Palestine and the latter-day saints to the new Zion in
North America. The production of biblical knowledge produced
other, more descriptive or scientific texts, such as Edward
Robinson's Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai,
and Arabia Petraea (1841), the first attempt at a scientific
archaeology of sacred sites, while Lieutenant Commander William
Francis Lynch's Narrative of the United States' Expedition
to the River Jordan and the Dead Sea (1849), the acount
of the expedition undertaken in 1847 during the enthusiasm
for Manifest Destiny arising from the war with Mexico, allowed
readers to cultivate patriotic sensibilities as the disinterested
quest for knowledge.2
Earlier, John Lloyd Stephens, an "amateur," gentleman
traveler, much more like Geoffrey Crayon than was Washington
Irving, published his Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia
Petraea, and the Holy Land (1836), its great popularity
launching the secular Holy Land travel book. By the time
Melville traveled to Palestine in 1857, the production of
Holy Land travel books had achieved boom proportions, with
newspaper correspondences and volumes by J. Ross Browne,
William Cullen Bryant, William Curtis, William Prime, Bayard
Taylor, and numerous "adventurers," "gentlemen," (and
occassionally "ladies," such as Sarah Haight) and
others not associated with missionary societies, cultic movements,
or millennialist projects appearing during the decade of
crisis before the Civil War. After the war, bourgeois tourism,
that "tide of a great popular movement"3 which
swept Twain into the Quaker City, converged with the "Peaceful
Crusade," propelling ever greater numbers of Americans
to join Europeans in imposing themselves upon the Palestinian
landscape. As Jerusalem was increasingly turned into a "Christian
madhouse," the Holy Land travel genre expanded dramatically,
with articles and books by Samuel "Sunset" Cox,
Charles Dudley Warner, and scores of others, including genteel
women travelers such as Twain's friend and confidante Mary
Fairbanks.
All of this literary production, no matter its secular
or religious orientation, speaks to an ongoing obsession
with the Holy Land that insistently entwines itself with
secular constructions of national destiny. This is an interweaving
of transcendent values with colonial settlement expressed
in the idiom of sacred landscape, including the "benevolent
disinterestedness" to convert the land's inhabitants
by the early missionaries, the Enlightenment empiricism to
measure and "read" sacred sites by archeologists
and explorers, the voluntarist compulsion to "facilitate" prophecy
by religious enthusiasts, and the literary ambition to edify
and entertain middle class readers by worldly travelers.
While the persistent preoccupations with the Bible and biblical
geography stood at the ideological core of American colonial
expansion, actual travel to Palestine allowed Americans to
contemplate biblical narratives at their source in order
to reimagine -- and even to reenact -- religio-national myths,
allowing them, ultimately, to displace the biblical Holy
Land with the American New Jersualem. In particular, the
Protestant doctrines of Jewish conversion and restoration
central to the millennialist eschatologies of most travelers
provided originary models for America's narratives of continuing
settlement and expansion: if the elect though cursed ur-nation
of Israel could be restored, so fallen Anglo-America, the
typological new Jews, could also be "restored" as
a racialized chosen-people.Consequently, Holy Land literature -- and the entire cultural "mania" with
the Holy Land -- became a crucial forum for negotiating American
settler identity, a site rendered even more complex by the
jarring disjuncture between imagined biblical narrative and
the actualities of a non-Western, "fallen" Palestine.
The discrepancy between land and text was heightened by the
advent of Darwinism, higher criticism, Enlightenment "Hegelized" Jews,
scientific archeology, geology, and other challenges to revealed
religion and identity in the post-Civil War period. By situating
Melville and Twain within this complex of religio-national
myths, along with the disjunctures of actual travel, "American
Palestine" examines the ways both of their books run
against the dominant grain of typological destiny and millennialist
restoration as each text seeks new grounds for faith and
identity.
Clarel's obsessive poem-pilgrimage demands that readers
embark on their own pilgrimage ordeal through engaging Melville's
strange and difficult Minnepean satire as primarily a religious
rather than secular literary experience. This pilgrimage
leads to death and the failure of all covenants, including
the promise of New World restoration, with such exhaustion
of meaning and emptying of promise ironically providing the
only cause for hope. At the core of all failures is what
Melville in his journal calls the "preposterous Jew
mania," the millennialist obsession with the original
chosen people and God's covenant, which gives the poem and
Melville's critique of America a distinctly anti-Judaic cast.Innocents Abroad, in a performance which simultaneously
embodies and explodes Anglo-American "frontier" identities,
provides a uniquely incisive comic appropriation of the Holy
Land. Twain -- and here I should acknowledge I am more interested
in the invented persona rather than that other, far more
elusive fiction of Samuel Clemens -- inscribes a "touristic" vision
of violent parodic desanctification and commodification whose "realism" still
dominates the way readers regard Ottoman Palestine today
and whose laughter ridicules the pretentions of Anglo-American
identity along with the sacred.
Notes
-
Herman Melville, letter to James Billson, 10 October
1884, in Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed.
Lynn Horth, from work by Merrell R. Davis and William
H. Gilman (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University
Press and the Newberry Library, 1993), 483.
-
William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain: Reminiscences
and Criticisms (New York: Harper, 1910), 8.
-
Edward Wilmot Blyden, From West Africa to Palestine (Freetown,
Sierra Leone: T.J. Sawyer, 1873), 9-12.
Review Excerpts
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