Mark Twain, the World, and Me: Following the Equator, Then and Now by Susan K. Harris (review)

Among the long list of titles in Mark Twain studies, Susan Harris's three previous books are high-water marks and exhibit the evolution of her critical sensibilities. From her synthesis of phenomenological and rhetorical analysis in Mark Twain's Escape from Time (U of Missouri P, 1982) to the biographical and feminist reassessment of Olivia Clemens's intellectual curiosity and her relationship with her more famous husband in The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain (Cambridge UP, 1997) to God's Arbiters: America and the Philippines, 1898–1902 (Cambridge UP, 2011), an ambitious and impressively successful examination of US foreign policy at the turn of what would become the American century, Harris has shown a remarkable range of critical insight about both the private and public influence of Mark Twain and the role that his writing has played in the formation of American cultural identity. Most of us would be proud to have turned over half as many stones in our investigations of Mark Twain. In Mark Twain, the World, and Me, Harris is at it again, offering an innovative way to connect the public and the private, the scholarly and the self-reflective.

Every term in the book's title has particular relevance. The text is both a reading of Mark Twain's late travelogue Following the Equator, which recorded his observations during his 1896 round-the-world lecture tour, and a personal memoir of Harris's own travels following in the footsteps of Mark Twain's Following the Equator journey, and it pays close attention to the differences that history effects between "then" and "now." The opening line of Harris's introduction—"I wasn't wild about visiting Australia"—makes clear that her approach here is distinct from other books on Mark Twain, one in which her voice engages directly with the reader. In the hands of a writer with more modest talents, the book might have unfolded as a chronological account of the Mark Twain critic's parallel experience to the one he narrated in 1897. But Harris's book is not wedded to itinerary and, instead, muses on topics that are inspired by her extended visits to Australia, India, and South Africa, a month in each country. The seven chapters that constitute a coherent set of meditations are equally successful as freestanding essays on a range of topics—religion, pollution, economics, ancestor worship, genocide, the psychology of dreams, ecotourism, and the fluidity of race and gender. Each ponders what it means to be a traveler in a culture quite different from one's own.

Harris has done her homework. Mark Twain had read and commented on a number of texts in his travelogue, and Harris studied these same texts as context for understanding Twain's impressions as well as for her own cultural navigation in these various environments. And she accessed archives in each locale that add historical depth to her remarks on the topics she has chosen. Just as Twain had, Harris contemplates the histories of imperialism and the racial assumptions that fueled colonial exploitations by the British empire and other European nations. But Harris's reflections are not echoes of Twain's critiques of injustices from a contemporary American perspective. Instead, she acknowledges the biases and privileges that inform her point of view and distinguish it from Twain's, as well as the different historical conditions that influence their often diverging interpretations.

Unlike Mark Twain, who had never encountered these cultures prior to his 1896 tour, Harris's visit to India was not her first exposure to Hindu culture. At thirteen, she spent a summer in Nepal, where her father was working. The fieldwork she undertook for the book prompts her to compare her fifty-year-old memories to contemporary observations at a mature stage of life. This layering of perspectives, her own and Mark Twain's, give the...