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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Keeping the Touristic Faith in Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad"


Jeffrey A. Melton
Auburn University, Montgomery
meltonj@strudel.aum.edu

"Don't be a tourist," reads a commercial for The Travel Channel, a popular cable television network that provides, as its name implies, travel documentaries, promotions, and information. The message has two seemingly disparate applications: the direct one encourages viewers to tune into The Travel Channel to learn about foreign cultures and thereby avoid mistakes and embarrassing situations while traveling; the indirect one encourages viewers to stay at home and watch the rest of the world from the comfort of their armchairs. "Don't be a tourist," indeed. The promotion is a clever one; it easily taps into one of the most pervasive and powerful sentiments of the Tourist Age: everybody wants to travel, but nobody wants to be a tourist, at least conceptually. And there is the rub -- a great popular movement in which hordes of people want to participate but for which the same people refuse to admit their participation. As Dean MacCannell, in his seminal study The Tourist (1976), wryly notes, "tourists dislike tourists."

Walker Percy, in his essay "The Loss of the Creature," offers an interesting appraisal of the tourist's dilemma. In referring to the Grand Canyon, he questions whether any of us can approach the same sense of wonder -- the authentic sense of discovery -- that the first Spanish explorer, Garcia Lopez de Cardenas, felt upon his encounter. Using "P" to denote the value of the authentic discovery, Percy asserts, "if the place is seen by a million sightseers, a single sightseer does not receive value P but a millionth part of value P." The primary reason for this devaluation is not the numbers of tourists, necessarily, but the amount of information that we unavoidably carry with us as we go to the canyon. We store within ourselves a complex, deeply rooted collection of data that creates in us expectations of "The Grand Canyon" -- an image, an idea, not a physical phenomenon. We can see the canyon, therefore, not for what it is but for what we have been told it is. Though we should probably apply Percy's value "P" not to a Spanish explorer but to an unknown ancestor of the native Havasupai, his example still illustrates intuitively that the trouble with tourism, in this sense, is the trouble with travel writing: how to obtain the authentic in a world of make-believe. The only refuge, then, is for the tourist and the travel writer (and reader) to embrace a touristic faith.

By focusing on Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad (1869), the most popular travel book of its era, I will examine the basic dilemma for tourists who endeavor to see a world that is unavailable or, more accurately, nonexistent. Twain, as a tourist and travel writer at the beginning of the Tourist Age, reflects the struggles inherent in tourism, and his narrative illustrates how the primary conflict of touring the Old World comes from the difficulty of separating the real from the imagined. Touristic faith, it would seem, favors the imagination.


Jeffrey A. Melton
Auburn University, Montgomery
meltonj@strudel.aum.edu

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Updated May 23, 1999