I am posting this review on behalf of Joseph B. McCullough who wrote it.

Barb

~~~~~

BOOK REVIEW

Obenzinger, Hilton. _American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land
Mania_.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.  Pp. xxi + 309.
Bibliographical notes and index.  Paperback, 6" x 9". $18.95. ISBN
0-691-00973-2.

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

Joseph B. McCullough <[log in to unmask]>
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Copyright (c) 2000 Mark Twain Forum.  This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.

In the nineteenth century, American tourists, scholars, evangelists,
writers and artists flocked to Palestine as part of a "Holy Land mania."
Many saw America as a New Israel, a modern nation chosen to do God's work
on Earth, and produced a rich variety of inspirational art and literature
about their travels in the original promised land, which was then part of
Ottoman-controlled Palestine. But as Hilton Obenzinger recognizes in his
new book, _American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania_,
most American writers of Holy Land books stayed in Palestine only briefly.
They were travelers, explorers, adventurers, pilgrims, and tourists
"passing through the Levant," observing the natives and their peculiar
customs, visiting shrines, "reading sacred geography" with the Bible either
in their hands or firmly planted in their heads-and almost all of them soon
returned to the United States to inscribe their experiences in books.

Within this context, Obenzinger explores two "infidel texts" in this
tradition: Herman Melville's _Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage to the Holy
Land_ (1876) and Mark Twain's _The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrim's
Progress_ (1869).  He demonstrates that these works undermined in very
different ways conventional assumptions about America's divine mission.  He
suggests that 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
destine and millennialist restoration.  "Through _Clarel's_ obsessive
poem-pilgrimage toward covenantal failure," he argues, "and _Innocents
Abroad's_ touristic vision of violent parody, comic irreverence, and the
commodity consumption of market 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."

For Obenzinger, 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. Thus, by situating Melville and Twain with 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 the millenialist restoration as
each text seeks new grounds for faith and identity.

Obenzinger recognizes that most studies have examined _Clarel_ and
_Innocents Abroad_ as part of each author's oeuvre and not in conjunction
with each other or within the broader field of Holy Land literature.  But
he also anticipates that, except for the most partisan of Melville's
advocates, few readers have endured _Clarel_, a four-part poem of 150
cantos that runs to almost eighteen thousand lines.  Even Melville himself
anticipated its oblivion, when he wrote to his young English correspondent,
James Billson, in October of 1884 that _Clarel_ was "a metrical affair, a
pilgrimage or what not, of several thousand lines, eminently adapted for
unpopularity."  As a consequence, many of Obenzinger's complicated
arguments and detailed discussions are more difficult to relate to _Clarel_
than the more accessible and more widely read _Innocents Abroad_.

On the whole, this is a useful book, voluminously documented, even if the
reading is at times difficult.  It is not a book for the casual reader.
But Obenzinger does a distinct service by placing his discussion of the two
major works in a broader context than can usually be found.  He examines
American Holy Land literature within an overall framework that regards
American society and its culture as manifestations of covenantal
settler-colonialism, with this descriptive frame heightened even to the
point of an "alienation effect." Thus before moving on to Melville and
Twain, he examines in four chapters in Part One, titled "Excavating
American Palestine,": "Holy Lands and Settler Identities"(Chapter One),
"George Sandys: 'Double Travels' and Colonial Encounters" (Chapter Two),
"'Christianography' and Covenant" (Chapter Three), and "Reading and Writing
Sacred Geography" (Chapter Four).

In Part Two ("The Fatal Embrace of the Deity": Herman Melville's Pilgrimage
to Failure in _Clarel_), Obenzinger explores in four chapters the darkly
philosophical _Clarel_, in which Melville found echoes of Palestine's
apparent desolation and ruin in his own spiritual doubts and in America's
materialism and corruption.

Part Three, the final section (The Guilties Abroad: Mark Twain's Comic
Appropriation of the Holy Land in _Innocents Abroad_), devotes a full eight
chapters to Twain's use of the Holy Land for his comic extravaganza.  Here
Obenzinger develops how Twain's satiric monologue, in contrast with
Melville's work, mocked the romantic naivete of American abroad, noting the
incongruity of a "fantastic mob" of "Yanks" in the Holy Land and
contrasting their exalted notions of Palestine with its prosaic reality.
He demonstrates, however, that Melville and Twain nevertheless shared many
colonialist and orientalist assumptions of the day, revealed most clearly
in their ideas about Arabs, Jews, and Native Americans.

Finally, by paying careful attention to the context of American writings
about Palestine, _American Palestine_ throws new light on the construction
of American identity in the nineteenth century.  Its chapters on Twain are
particularly rich, and throw additional light on the growing and
complicated consideration of Twain's racial and ethnic views.