Mark Twain and the American Tourist
If you are anything like me right now you are sheltering somewhere in these United States day-drinking too much and waiting for the virus, the government, or the dark lord Cthulhu himself to emerge from the ocean to destroy us all. I decided to be constructive damn it! So instead of continuing to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation until Netflix pauses apropos of nothing to ask if I’m still there I decided to reread an old favorite. Since I can’t travel for the foreseeable future (and probably past that given the economic hell-scape which our country is about to become) I thought it might be fun to dust off my copy of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad. I suppose getting offended is the new American pastime…back then it was giving offense.
Let me start out by reassuring you, dear reader, that this is not meant to be a take-down of Mark Twain. I cannot stress enough what a positive influence on the world and America in particular he has been. From abolition, to women’s rights, poking fun at the obliviously wealthy, and disarming the superstitions of religious zealots, there would be no progressive America without voices like his. That being said; I studied Greek in college and not the ancient kind. I spent hours in cramped offices and mostly empty classrooms learning the language, history, and culture of what Greece became. As a result I get uppity when I see people trying to use Greece to re-conceptualize the past or try to pin a decline narrative on what is still a thriving culture with more complexity than this article can clarify. Trust me when I say that it is easy to use a glorified past to attempt to construct a model for modern life. For instance the statues of the Greeks and Romans were white marble underneath but they were brightly colored at the time. This discovery led to an absurd amount of criticism from the alt-right for daring to imagine a world not washed completely white. Museums from around the world cite a declining government in Greece (and other modern countries) as a reason they can’t return the artifacts they’ve been stealing for hundreds of years. I’m no saying this is what Twain does…what Twain does is what we all do as Americans…going into someones country and demanding (rudeness be damned) that your special and smarter than all those around you.
In Innocents Abroad, Twain describes Athens thus, “The Attic Plain, barring the grape-vines, was a barren, desolate, unpoetical waste — I wonder what it was in Greece’s Age of Glory, five hundred years before Christ?” (343). Gee, thanks. The formation of national identity is a delicate system of differentiation and perceptions of similarity between a Self and an Other. This is a system of assumptions based upon what Gayatri Spivak in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” believes to be “… the history of Europe as Subject” which is “narrativized by the law, political economy and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has ‘no geo-political determinations’ (66). In essence we have a perversion of identity. The confusion of ancient and modern Greece and the American ideal which must prove itself the reincarnation of Attic virtue at the expense of dehumanizing the modern inhabitants.
America had a vested interest in Greece from it’s inception which sets it apart from the rest of Europe. In the introduction to his book A Concise History of Greece, Richard Clogg writes “The degree to which the language and culture of the ancient Greek world was revered throughout Europe (and, indeed, in the infant United States where ancient Greek was almost adopted as the official language),” (1). The national identity of the American political foundation is based upon Attic ideals of democracy so ingrained in the minds of the founding fathers that there was a significant faction of intelligentsia in the United States lobbying to make Attic Greek the national language to foster a character of perfected governmental representation.
Twain is not an anomaly of travel to Greece from the western hemisphere. This American obsession with ancient Greek democracy was apparent in the Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire. According to Clogg, “Philhellene volunteers (including a substantial leaving of do-gooders, misfits and cranks) flocked to Greece from western Europe and the United States (a solitary Cuban is recorded),” (38). A Greek redefinition of identity as not Ottoman subjects attracted many people from Europe and America to support the cause as they saw in this the possible return to a golden age of antiquity. That was in the 1830s, however, and Twain’s excursion takes place in 1867, well after the revolution where an American idealist may see the actual result of the Greek peoples’ sovereignty. Which accounts for his focus on the world no longer there.
According to C. M. Woodhouse in his book The Philhellenes, the main reasons for the frequent visitations to the newly freed Greece were primarily “sentimental” as the travelers reflect upon their own classical education amidst the ruins of ancient Greece (24). But moreover, they seem to be detached from reality in a very specific way. Woodhouse says, “they wandered about Greece in their dream-world, oblivious of anything that had happened there since the 4th century B.C.” (24). This description has an odd relevance to Innocents Abroad as Twain does not seem to be moving through a real place but as a cypher for classical heroes (in the form of a witty American) within a sort of dream recreation of antiquity. Upon landing in Athens at night, Twain and his compatriots take to the quarantined city at night.
His description is very telling as it lets you in on his understanding of reality. As he writes he asks if “a thousand other heroes of the great Past were marching in ghostly procession through our fancies? What were sunsets to us, who were about to … go far down into the dead centuries and bid in person for the slaves, Diogenes and Plato, in the public market-place, or gossip with the neighbors about the siege of Troy or the splendid deeds of Marathon? We scorned to consider sunsets,” (340). This passage leads us directly into Woodhouse’s understanding. We have here a display of intellectual fancy as opposed to more factual representation of what the Attic landscape is to Twain. We even see the beginning of his usurpation of the classical hero as an American.
He describes he and his friends going ashore as “going down into the dead centuries” where they will become active in classical dialogue with philosophers and in epic conversation with commoners about the events of Homer’s Iliad. Their decent is even reminiscent of Homer’s Odyssey with Odysseus’ decent into the underworld to converse with the great heroes of his own antiquity. They, as Americans, are taking the place (in their own minds) of classical heroes and for a very specific reason. Because of their own national identity, not as heirs to the knowledge of antiquity as Europeans see themselves, but as heirs to their democratic way of life. Their ideal of national pride is not just identification with the classical Other but dominance of it.
There is a very literal way in which they attempt to supplant the classical ideal by infiltrating or conquering it. When describing their ascent into the acropolis, Twain recollects that;
“Denny dropped from the wall in a twinkling, and we retreated in disorder to the gate. Xerxes took that mighty citadel four hundred and eighty years before Christ, when his five millions of soldiers and camp-followers followed him to Greece, and if we four Americans could have remained unmolested five minutes longer, we would have taken it too.” (345)
In this passage we see the way Twain see’s himself and his friends. To Twain, these four Americans, in an ironic way, were accomplishing the task of the famous Persian emperor and his multitude who conquered Greece for a time in a matter of minutes. On it’s primary level it is meant to be comical to draw distinctions between a time when the citidel was heavily guarded and the modern age when it is in ruins. But this also delivers a more simplistic and nationalistic joke. That four Americans can to in minutes what took Xerxes army thousands more men and much more time to do. But the Americans don’t only conquer and invade spiritually as well.
During their descent from the acropolis they assume not the role of the invading Persians but that of Saint Paul from Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. As Twain describes he and his companions looking for historical sights he looks “To the right” where he saw “Mars Hill, where the Areopagus sat in ancient times. and where St. Paul defined his position, and below was the market-place where he ‘disputed daily’ with the gossip-loving Athenians.” It is now that they have come into the position of Paul who brought the gospel to the Greeks. He relays how they “climbed the stone steps St. Paul ascended, and stood in the square-cut place he stood in, and tried to recollect the Bible account of the matter” (349). This Bible account he recalls at a later date and includes in the publication of Innocents Abroad with which this essay is analyzing. Twain quotes the following passage from chapter 17 of Acts;
“Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred in him, when he saw the city wholly given up to idolatry. Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews, and with the devout persons, and in the market daily with them that met with him. And they took him and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine whereof thou speakest is? Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious; For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription: To THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.” (349)
Paul brings the gospel to the Greeks as well as a defined knowledge of the ‘unknown’ God whom they have been worshiping since antiquity but did not understand. He attempts to dispel their ‘superstitions’ with the logic of the one true God. To place the Americans in this position privileges them with knowledge which the antique (and modern) Greeks are unaware. This reduction of the Greek person is tantamount to establishing American identity and potentiality. Twain portrays the Greek as the ‘superstitious’ and he the enlightened. In relation to this Spivak writes, “In the face of the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intellectual would be to put the economic ‘under erasure’…” (75). This understanding and identification places the American as supreme and the Greek as somehow secondary to their own understanding of self. This definition stretches out of the admired Attic and into the modern inhabitant. Clogg notes a specific case of American sentiments towards the modern Greek citizen. Clogg writes that;
“Early Greek nationalists looked for inspiration exclusively to the classical past. When, in the 1830s, the Austrian historian J. P. Fallmerayer cast doubt on the founding precepts of modern Greek nationalism, namely that modern Greeks are the lineal descendants of the ancient, he aroused outrage among the intelligentsia of the fledgling state. The first American minister to the independent state, Charles Tuckerman, an acute observer of mid-nineteenth-century Greek society, observed that the quickest way to reduce an Athenian professor to apoplexy was to mention the name of Fallmerayer.” (2)
This passage gives the context within which Twain was writing. Like the western Europeans, the Americans found modern Greeks woefully ignorant of their own past and evolution and wanted desperately to link them with their antiquated past. Woodhouse described the philhellenistic travelers as people who “knew just what to find in Greece, and they duly found it. The one thing their expectation did not include was the modern people of Greece,” (22).
This includes Twain and his attitudes towards those living Greeks he happened across in his excursion. Twain upon, their attempted entrance, describes how the “garrison had turned out — four Greeks. We clamored at the gate, and they admitted us. [Bribery and corruption.]” (345). The modern Greeks are first seen, not as noble heirs to any specific Attic heritage but as corrupted and despicable versions of human beings. His first encounter with the locals involves bribery and willful breaking of quarantine for money. Twain, like the other early philhellenists “… if they noticed the inhabitants of modern Greece at all, it was to amuse their intellectual fancy with classical parallels. (26).
He sees the locals as “a community of questionable characters” as these “men [who] were not there to guard their possessions against strangers, but against each other; for strangers seldom visit Athens and the Piræus, and when they do, they go in daylight, and can buy all the grapes they want for a trifle. The modern inhabitants are confiscators and falsifiers of high repute, if gossip speaks truly concerning them, and I freely believe it does.” It is in this respect that Twain is substituting the voice of the modern Greek for that of his own. He is taking into account his own judgment as to who is to be believed and sharing only that with us. Upon being confronted by the locals he writes that “they dismissed us with a warning, couched in excellent Greek, I suppose, and dropped tranquilly in our wake,” (351). Seeing as how the American’s are literally breaking a local quarantine to disrespect a city and it’s people all while acting supiror about it. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” we are reminded that “speaking” and “re-presentation” are not equal but “irreducibly discontinuous” because the one who speaks cannot encompass the voice of the subject (70). It is in this respect that Twain performs his own American identity which supplements, physically, spiritually, and vocally the Antique past which created it.
Basically Twain comes off like the worst type of entitled person you can think of. I’ve been this person on occasion…not because I was trying to be. Though I will always love Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and the Autobiography of Joan of Arc; Innocent’s Abroad didn’t age well. It’s fine that it doesn’t. Comedy doesn’t tend to. In that way, at least it seems less funny when a bunch of arrogant Americans defy quarantine, harass natives, and constantly wax poetic about how things used to be…