-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: Matters of Conscience
Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2022 10:01:58 -0700
From: Scott Holmes <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Thank you very much for this note. Controversies can be interesting
and, being of a geographical nature, this one I find particularly
intriguing. I do like Regan's thought on referring to the stork as "The
Pilgrim" . "This intrusion of fiction into a work of almost
journalistic reliability should assure us that the author knew what he
was about-that he perceived the need for early treatment of the pilgrims
as the boys' antagonists and as their foils."
On 4/4/22 08:54, Robert H. HIRST wrote:
> I thought Scott Holmes might be interested in a draft note to the bird in
> the Marseilles zoo, draft that is for the edition of Innocents we hope to
> publish in the next year or so:
>
> 2.23 <100.35> the great Zoölogical Gardens] The Jardin Zoologique was
> situated behind the Palais de Longchamp in northeast Marseilles, “a branch
> of the Jardin d’Acclimatation at Paris,” a Parisian zoo founded in 1860
> (Baedeker 1891b, 437). Because Dr. Jackson mentioned their visiting some
> nine “principal places and objects of interest” but did not mention the
> zoo, some scholars have concluded that the visit—and thus the “Pilgrim”
> bird (clearly a stork), the dromedary, the monkey (really a baboon), the
> “hippopotamus from the Nile,” and the “colossal elephant” with its feline
> friend— were entirely a fiction. “Never did their path come within a mile
> of Marseilles’ small zoo” (elsewhere dismissed by the same scholar as the
> city’s “dinky little zoo”). The skeptics trace the places Jackson does
> mention on a contemporary map and conclude that that “confirms the point:
> the ‘boys’ had too little time available in their one day in Marseilles to
> visit the remote Zoo” (Regan and Dickinson 1995, 3) [bib34371]. But the
> Jardin Zoologique was hardly “remote”: it was less than a mile away from
> their hotel, an easy carriage ride, and visiting it might have
> preceded (or
> followed) their other “objects of interest,” even though Jackson does not
> mention it. Other passengers easily made the trip. On 5 July Emily
> Severance recorded that, along with her husband Solon and Mary Mason
> Fairbanks, she visited the Zoological Gardens, describing them as having
> “extensive grounds beautifully laid out. . . . The trees are large, the
> gardens fine, undulating, rock work with water playing over it, cages of
> singing birds of all kinds, wild and domestic land and aquatic, animals of
> every sort.” Passenger William James visited it as well, noting that
> he had
> seen ostriches, monkeys, a baboon, an elephant, as well as a “white stork
> with pink legs.” Mark Twain’s ingenious embroidery of that stork does not
> make the passage into that rarity in *Innocents*, a pure fiction. Added in
> revision (the zoo isn’t mentioned in the extant newspaper letters), it is
> rather an especially good example of his finding meaning in what he
> did see
> (Jackson 1867d [bib10723]; Regan 1982, 248–49 [bib35383]; Regan and
> Dickinson 1995, 3 [bib34371]; Scharnhorst 2018, 468 [bib35787]; Baedeker
> 1914, 526–35 with two maps [35790]; Severance 1938, 55–56 [bib00191];
> James
> 1867a, entry for 5 July [bib34536]).
>
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2022 at 12:33 AM Scott Holmes <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>> While searching for information on Ain Fijeh aka Figia, or The Fountain
>> of Balaam's Ass, I was reading Robert Regan's article /The Reprobate
>> Elect in The Innocents Abroad /and found the notion that the Pilgrims
>> did not actually have an aversion to traveling on the sabbath. Looking
>> at the schedule of The Long Trip, it seems they had no problem traveling
>> on the subsequent Sundays - 9/22 and 9/29. They just wanted to get to
>> Damascus.
>>
>> On further reading this article I find that Sam, Dan and the Doctor did
>> not visit the zoo in Marseilles and that the "gray-bodied, dark-winged,
>> bald-headed, and preposterously uncomely bird" came from a "fabulous
>> bestiary."
>>
>> Sabbaths have a long history with Mark Twain, particularly his
>> relationship with GW Cable. I had long held the Twain's writing on long
>> ride to Figia on a par with Huck's moral dilemma. Both are fictions yet
>> both represent truths. But then that preposterous bird was just a
>> device to prepare the reader for future descriptions of the Pilgrims. So
>> it goes ....
>>
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