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

R E V I E W S American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania HILTON OBENZIN GER Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. xxi; 316 Pages. ilton Obenzinger’s book is a clear advance on previous scholarship about travel writing in the Levant. It is a comment on the growth of .American obsession with the “Holy Land.” In America’s beginning, the geography of Palestine (or rather biblical geography) was inscribed on the New World as a rationale for a “promised” land and a “chosen” people. This geography was then re-inscribed on Palestine when travelers started to flock there in the nineteenth century. At the hand of fundamentalists, it took the form of “sacred geography” attempting to trace the “book”in the land, to find any shred of surface evidence to show biblical “veracity.” Clergymen and lay travelers produced hundreds of accounts about Palestine. It is the critical reading of cross-transference and re-inscription, from the Old World to the New and back to the Old World, that is particularly valuable in Obenzinger’s approach. The word “mania” in the title comes from Herman Melville’sjournals of 1856-57,where he comments on missionaries and ultra-fundamentalists working in Palestine. He had earlier criticized missionaries in Polynesia, whose efforts coincided with colonial occupation. Obenzinger isolates this word as descriptive of forms of obsession in the writings and activities of millennialists, adventists and similar fundamentalists, as well as in motives for colonization. Implicitly and chronologically, the phenomenon of Christian Zionism preceded Jewish Zionism. Obenzinger levels a critical eye at America’s colonial project and at fundamentalist Protestant manias that later provided the “material” help and “ideological groundwork for Zionist settlement” in Palestine (12). To illustrate the process of cross-transfer between the Old World and New, the book concentrates on two writers: Herman Melville and Mark Twain. The reason is not that these two writers represented mainstream culture and opinion. On the contrary, most other “Holy Land books” sought “in one way or other to appropriate Palestine for the American imagination” (x); they reflected an invented Palestine rather than the land actually before the travelers ’ eyes. Melville and Twain are selected because they penetrate the perceptual mists: theirs are “least representative” counter-texts that highlight the discrepancies between mythic narratives and physical realities, between imagined bonds and sordid facts. Twain sardonically and Melville darkly uncover “cru9 4 L E L7I A T H A N R E V I E W S dities, fraud, or illusion” in place of the expected “authenticity, exoticism, beauty, or, particularly in the Holy Land, spirituality” (166). Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad (1869) is based on an excursion in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean with a group of American “innocents.”Its narrative and descriptions are transmitted through the ironic screen of an American narrator, a strategy that enables Twain to satirize both Holy Land pilgrimage and American travel mannerisms. The irony also allows a play on how Palestine, unlike other enchanted grounds, is entangled through strange associations in America’s own acts of self-construction. It was “home” and not home, as this passage from Chapter 61 (worth more extended quotation) shows: “Well, we were at home in Palestine. . . . We had cared nothing much about Europe. . . . After dismal, smileless Palestine, beautiful Egypt had few charms for us. We merely glanced at it and were ready for home.” (Today, the appropriation is complicated by the fact that geographic Palestine was dismembered in 1948and that America / U.S.A. has, from its inception, identified with biblical “Israel” as its covenantal paradigm. The use of “Palestine”in Obenzinger’stitle is a measure of how much a historical accuracy -the entire “Holy Land was called Palestine until 1948 - could be said to have become contentious. The geographical “Palestine” America used to construct its national myth has been shadowed by the actualization of a previously imagined “Israel.”) Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) is a very long and difficult poem: a novel in verse that integrates much of Herman Melville’s earlier writing. It tells the story of a divinity student whose experience of the Palestinian landscape gradually deflates his earlier assumptions and begins...