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Mark Twain ended his travel-writing career much as he began it,producing a successful narrative based on a highly publicized tour with a speci¤c itinerary, a farewell tour for America’s most popular tourist . Following the Equator comes the closest of his travel books in its form and structural execution to matching The Innocents Abroad as representative of this vastly popular genre. This heralded tour provides a ¤tting closing bookend to his canon. Uni¤ed and coherent, it re-creates a speci¤c journey for readers, and it is the most typical of Twain’s travel books since The Innocents Abroad became the prototype narrative for the Tourist Age. Almost thirty years after his initial astounding success, Twain with Following the Equator offers readers yet another companion to The Innocents Abroad and illustrates wholly how he recognized the vagaries and idiosyncracies of the genre throughout his career and how he mastered its demands. Still, Following the Equator is often the least readable of his travel books, and it never matches the humor and energy of its predecessors. It has comic moments, but its humor is more likely to garner a smirk or bemused acknowledgment than the boisterous laughter evoked by The Innocents Abroad (and the others). As such, the narrative may be 5 Touring the Round Imperialism and the Failure of Travel Writing in Following the Equator “Whenever it’s a damp drizzly November in my soul,I quietly take to sea.”—Ishmael Herman Melville, Moby-Dick “You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.”—Huck Mark Twain,Adventures of Huckleberry Finn less like a formal closing to a century of “innocent” travel and more like a sad, if cynical, acknowledgment of what is to come, a watershed narrative marking the close of the ¤rst phase of the Tourist Age and an end to willful ignorance of its dark, imperialistic context. If the markedly different reading experience does not derive from the structure or application of travel-writing conventions, or even from effective and powerful writing, it must come from the mind of the tourist and his changing ways of seeing the world. This ¤nal narrative , then, is Twain’s most ethically con®icted travel book. He is forced to grant his readers a tour of the world through the eyes of the tourist, as he has for thirty years, while also for the ¤rst time becoming acutely conscious that the tourist is by no means a harmless if indulgent visitor who enters, roams, and departs from a landscape and culture without leaving a lasting trace. At the close of the century he is not only trapped again by the vacuousness of touristic experience (the primary source of Twain’s playfulness throughout his career) but also openly aware of his complicity in the imperial culture he has come to abhor so vehemently. If The Innocents Abroad heralded the beginning of the Tourist Age,complete with obnoxious but relatively harmless Americans, Following the Equator announces the end of its¤rst phase. The vandals have evolved into oppressors. As a result, despite its formalistic coherence, Following the Equator is rather schizophrenic in that on the one hand it reaf¤rms the imaginative core of touristic experience explored in each of his other travel books, while on the other hand it rejects the imperialistic component of the great popular movement that sets the stage for such touristic play. The tide of tourism has circled and, indeed, engulfed the world, and its affectations have remade it according to its simplistic and self-indulgent vision. Though similar in its structure to The Innocents Abroad, Following the Equator is of a wholly different time and has a far darker tone throughout,a point of view that allies Twain more with the modernists of the twentieth century than with his fellow Victorians, or with his earlier tourist self. The ¤gure in this carpet is Twain’s struggle to reframe his relationship to native populations as the tourist. As the travel writer, he confronts a similar crisis in this his last narrative. Twain, for the ¤rst time, applies the implications of touristic experience directly and at length to the nature of narrative itself. The many years and experiences that intervene between the two texts not only offer evidence of his mastery of travelTouring the Round 139 writing formula but also his ultimate disenchantment with the limits of language. As the tourist, Twain can no longer play the innocent; he can no longer ignore...

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