American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land
Mania, by Hilton Obenzinger. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.
xxi; 316 pp.
Overall, Obenzinger's book is an advance on previous scholarship
about travel writing in the region. 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 rationale for a "promised" land and a
"chosen" people. This geography was then re-inscribed in Palestine
when tourists started flocking to Palestine in the 19th century. At
the hand of fundamentalists, it took the form of "sacred geography"
- that is, the attempt to trace biblical stories in the land,
trying to find any shred of surface evidence to show their
"veracity." Hundreds of such obsessed accounts about Palestine were
published by clergymen and lay travelers.
The word "mania" comes from Herman Melville's journals, where he
comments during his visit in 1856-57 on the work of missionaries
and ultra-fundamentalists in Palestine. He had earlier made similar
comments about missionaries in Polynesia. Obenzinger picks up this
word to describe forms of obsession in the writings of
millennialists, adventists and other fundamentalists. This
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 this process of cross-transfer between the Old World
and the New World, the book concentrates on two famous U.S.
writers: Herman Melville and Mark Twain. The reason is not that
these two writers represented mainstream culture and opinion. Most
other "Holy Land books" sought "in one way or other to appropriate
Palestine for the American imagination" (x), seeing an invented
Palestine, rather than what was actually before their eyes. In
contrast, Melville and Twain are selected for discussion because
they are "least representative" counter-texts and because they
highlight the discrepancy between physical realities and mythic
narratives, sordid facts and imagined bonds. Twain sardonically and
Melville darkly uncover "crudities, 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) resulted from his excursion in
Europe and the eastern Mediterranean with a group of American
"innocents." Unlike other enchanted grounds the excursionists
visited in Europe and the Levant, Palestine's associations are
entangled in strange ways in America's own acts of
self-construction: it was "home" and not home. (Today, the
appropriation is complicated by the fact that geographic Palestine
was dismembered in 1948 and that America/U.S.A. has, from its
inception, identified with biblical "Israel" as its covenantal
paradigm.) Innocents Abroad is written through the ironic screen of
a typical American narrator through which Twain satirizes both Holy
Land travel and American mannerisms.
Herman Melville's Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land
(1876) is a very long and difficult poem: a novel in verse that
rewrites much of his earlier fiction. It tells the story of a
divinity student whose exposure to Palestinian landscape deflates
his earlier assumptions and begins his real education in religion
and in life. Clarel travels from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea then
Bethlehem with a diverse group of "pilgrims" whose observations
(and sometimes deaths) are a symbolic journey of "unlearning" and
learning. It is an encyclopaedic poem, epic in its dimensions, and
its purpose lies at the center of the 19th-century struggle between
religious faith and scientific doubt.
American Palestine contains 16 chapters, arranged in three parts.
Part 1, "Excavating American Palestine," has four chapters devoted
to introductory concepts that relate "sacred geography" and
typology to colonial encounters and their assumptions about a
special "covenant" (or agreement derived from the Bible). Chapter 2
on George Sandys suggests curious intersections in colonial
encounters between Holy Land travel and the construction of Western
culture. Sandys, English treasurer of the Virginia Company, who
participated in actions against the Powhatans in 1622, wrote an
account of his journey in 1610 to the Ottoman empire that
anticipates later colonial plans for the region.
Chapters 5 to 8 are devoted to Clarel, with specific attention to
the characters of Nathan as "the Puritan Zionist" and Ungar as a
debunker of the American myth. The remaining eight chapters engage
in a number of interesting connections to Mark Twain's Innocents
Abroad (1869) and Tom Sawyer Abroad (1896), as well as his remarks
"Concerning the Jews." Obenzinger demonstrates more competence in
his treatment of the Twain material than he does with
Melville.
Melville's Clarel is central to the argument, though discussion of
it occupies less than a quarter of the book. It is to Obenzinger's
credit that he uses the term "anti-Judaic" to describe Melville's
positions (6). He thus seems to avoid making rash conclusions other
critics have made that Melville had anti-Semitic feelings merely
because he opposed Protestant millennial missionary madness in
Palestine (he calls their atttempt to convert Jews in preparation
for the "second coming" a "preposterous Jew mania"). Obenzinger
seems to recognize that Melville was consistently opposed to any
kind of monomania, and that his opposition to a hegemonic paradigm
based on exclusionist religious interpretations is not the same as
having ill feeling toward a religious group. In this respect,
American Palestine represents a perceptual advance over ealier
scholarship, which either misinterpreted Melville or tried to
subvert his criticism of Western culture. Yet, Obenzinger still
seems reluctant to consider how far Melville departs from the
sacred geographers. Strangely, Obenzinger even praises some of
their works as "popular, informative, even scholarly accounts"
(162).
In view of Obenzinger's enlightened treatment, other opinions by
him may also raise the eyebrows of those who want to agree with
him. Most Melville enthusiasts will find it difficult to support a
statement that, even as they undermine American myths, both Twain
and Melville "remain complicitous with colonial expansion" (3). In
other instances, Melville and Twain are similarly conflated, or
distinctions between them blurred, as in remarks that Twain, like
most travelers, reacted negatively to Arabs, Turks, local Jews, and
Islam (50). As any careful reader of Clarel will discover, Melville
comments favorably on Bedouin life and on Islam. These comments are
consistent with his statements about native life elsewhere and his
use of "Ishmael" as the name of the narrator in Moby-Dick. The
monomaniacal captain Ahab in Moby-Dick leads the ship and its crew
to destruction, whereas Ishmael's existential attitude results in
his symbolic survival. Even Twain cannot be confirmed in
anti-Indian/anti-Arab biases, if we are to take account of his
ironic style and to remain consistent with the idea of an "invented
persona" in Innocents Abroad (6).
Other conflated personae are similarly inaccurate or unattractive
as literary conclusions, such as equating Melville's opinion with
that of the young protagonist Clarel (83), or suggesting that the
poem is sympathetic or ambivalent toward the monomaniacal extremist
Nathan. It may even be inconsistent with Obenzinger's own
theoretical framework to suggest that Warder Cresson (the
missionary model for Nathan) is someone whose ideas Melville would
"relish" or to whom he felt "deep attraction" (120, 114).
Melville's severe reaction to Cresson and Deacon Walter Dickson in
the journal of his visit to Palestine in 1856-57, and his sentence
on religious extremism in Clarel, would not support much cute
ambivalence.
These are sources of some irreconcilable points in American
Palestine. Existentially, is a model for a non-obsessed life to be
suggested by the image of the Wandering Jew, or, indeed, by the
figure of Ishmael? Is there a real difference between Ishmael and
the Wandering Jew, as metaphors for existential roaming? What is
the meaning of the extreme manias represented in Ahab and in
Nathan, who destroys his family by building a fortress colony in
Palestine? Are "Jews" the natives or colonizers today? Are "Arabs"
unanchored ramblers clamoring for baksheesh or (as Obenzinger
sometimes hints) stalwart occupants of the land unchanged by
historical transience?
At one point, in Chapter 14, in discussion of the "Cultivated
Negro," Edward Wilmot Blyden, a parallel is drawn between the
Liberian project and the Zionist project:
Though the notion that Africans could "reclaim their fame" through
"restoring" themselves by means of settler-colonial imposition upon
an indigenous population could feel particularly alluring, the idea
contained, like Zionism itself, the destabilizing contradiction of
domination that was employed in a desperate attempt precisely to
escape such Western domination. The framework employed by all
covenantal settler-colonial projects is constructed from
contradictory narratives of divine escape, trial by wandering,
promised conquest, and selective contract, which predicated freedom
of the chosen on oppression of those who were not. (246)
This parallel relies on a sense of shared suffering between Jews
persecuted in Europe and Africans enslaved in America. A difference
may be that African Americans identified with some stories in the
biblical heritage that was enforced on them because they related
them to their persecution. However, other Africans recognize the
fundamental commonality of all colonial-settler assumptions based
on claims from the Bible (as many South African blacks have
observed). Further, resorting to "Western domination" as an
operative motive does not adequately explain or mitigate the way
Zionism adopted the same colonial strategies and used the same
original biblical tradition to draw its literal claims.
American Palestine is directly allied in its analysis to something
like Maxime Rodinson's Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? (1973;
first published in French, 1967) and Michael Prior's The Bible and
Colonialism. In Melville scholarship, it could be related to such
critical analyses as Carolyn Karcher's Shadow Over the Promised
Land (1979) and Michael Paul Rogin's Subversive Genealogy (1983).
However, these works are not mentioned at all in Obenzinger's book.
And his references to Clarel criticism are also limited. A reliance
on a wider range of critical commentary would have supported
Obenzinger's thesis better. And the problem in checking his use of
the criticism is made difficult by severe deficiencies and
inconsistencies in the book's index (for example, only one "Davis"
out of three is listed in the index).
Still, ideologically, American Palestine is distinct from much that
is available in criticism about "Holy Land literature." As
Obenzinger observes, the postcolonial and Americanist projects have
not been extended adequately to encompass writers like Melville and
Twain. In fact, the field of "Holy Land" studies has been
controlled by the "colonialist teleology" in much American and
Israeli scholarship that has reinterpreted the "rediscovery" of
Palestine in the 19th century as its own "prehistory." Obenzinger
places his work in direct opposition to the approach of someone
like Barbara Tuchman, whose Bible and Sword: England and Palestine
from the Bronze Age to Balfour celebrates and justifies the
connections between Western colonialism and Zionist thinking (7-9).
American Palestine follows the implications of identifying both the
United States and Israel as "colonial-settler states." Even someone
who initially disagrees with this perspective is made aware of the
potential for seeing Mark Twain and Herman Melville as two (among
other) writers who challenge the constructions of self-interested
paradigms masked as truths and dreams.