American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (review)

The nineteenth century witnessed “an ongoing obsession with the Holy Land that insistently entwines itself with secular constructions of national identity. This is an interweaving of transcendent values with colonial settlement expressed in the idiom of sacred landscape” (5). Persistent—indeed, obsessive—“preoccupations with the Bible and biblical geography stood at the ideological core of American colonial expansion,” ultimately allowing Americans to rewrite the Holy Land as American “territory,” displacing it with “the American New Jerusalem” (5). Situating Melville and Twain within this complex of religio-national myths, American Palestine examines how both Melville’s Clarel and Twain’s Innocents Abroad “run against the dominant grain of typological destiny and millennialist restoration” (5), providing “infidel” countertexts (13) that subvert conventional suppositions about America’s divine mission. Although Melville and Twain shared many prejudices of the day, especially regarding Arabs, Jews, and Native Americans, both writers—in radically different ways—“undermine the assumptions of American exceptionalism” (3)—its sense of destiny and identity.

Clarel’s poem-pilgrimage demands that readers embark on a pilgrimage of their own, a “textual” pilgrimage of signification that questions “all textual and intellectual authority” and subsequently nullifies “America’s sense of covenantal settler-colonial destiny” (59). Regarding any final sense of the text (both Holy Land and poem), the reader is destined never to arrive: signification always and everywhere disfigures itself. The travel of meaning (metaphor, and figuration in general) disrupts the very meaning of travel as a whole. Indeed, the end of the poem-pilgrimage suggests the failure of “America” as well as the utter “exhaustion of meaning” (6).

Innocents Abroad likewise explodes the myth of America and the settler-colonial ideal. Over and against Melville’s pessimism and doubt, however, Twain deploys iconoclastic humor (“the American Vandal”) to undermine the presumptions and conventions of “American” identity. Marking a transition from pilgrim to tourist, Innocents Abroad looks toward “the future of all-pervasive commodification and its touristic effects in the second half of the century as radical reformulations of settler-colonial social and religious relations” (59). Twain’s “realism” thus discloses “the tyranny of exchange value’s end paradoxically through the extension of its reign to all realms, including those of the sacred” (158). To this effect, both the subject of travel (Holy Land-Holy Book) and the traveling subject (America-American) lack any sense of their own (identity). Twain’s narrative reflects this instability: in place of the divinely authentic, the subject encounters nothing but “fragmented sights,” “flattened landscapes,” and itself as “disembodied parcel” (264).

American Palestine falls into three parts, with four initial chapters on the historical background of the “Holy Land Mania,” four chapters alloted to Melville’s Clarel, and the final eight chapters devoted to Twain’s Innocents Abroad. My reservations reflect nothing more, perhaps, than personal prejudice and preference. Like most contemporary criticism, Obenzinger’s book is primarily a study of historical, sociological, and ideological contexts with secondary attention given to the texts as such. In general, however, the book is thoughtful, well written, and well researched.