Foreign Scenes, American Spectacle (Week 3)

            Mark Twain’s writings in Innocents Abroad communicate both humane and unjust aspects of the human experience as opposed to experiences of other societies around the world. Twain details his touristic experiences through such locales as India, The Middle East, Italy, and more. His experiences transplant the witty sardonicism of a Mississippi raised humorist to areas of the world that are incredibly diverse and separate from Western understanding, yet Twain finds himself still firmly rooted in an Americanized lens of experience as he is traveling with a group of stereotypically insensitive Americans that often pervert his experiences.

            Particularly, this is witnessed in the section of Twain’s reflection on the Middle East, as Twain and company experience the Pyramids and the Sphynx in Egypt. Twain and his group are here engaging in a blatant act of thanatourism, which is a particularly dark type of tourism that allows tourists to visit sites of death or grief for a variety of purposes, from education to entertainment to memorialization. Twain’s Egypt writings convey a definite sense of thanatourism as the group experiences the Sphynx.

Twain recounts of the Sphynx “It was gazing out over the ocean of Time – over lines of century waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and nearer together, and blended at last into one unbroken tide, away toward the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking of the wars of departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow revolving years. It was the type of an attribute of a man – of a faculty of his heart and brain. It was MEMORY – RETROSPECTION – wrought into visible, tangible form. All who know what pathos there is in memories of days that are accomplished and faces that have vanished – albeit only a trifling score of years gone by – will have some appreciation of the pathos that dwells in these grave eyes that look so steadfastly back upon the things they knew before History was born – before Tradition had being – things that were and forms that moved in a vague era which even Poetry and Romance scarce knew of – and passed one by one away and left the stony dreamer solitary in the midst of a strange new age and uncomprehended scenes.”

Here, Twain describes the dark fascination he holds with the creature, which in reality is merely a crafted artifact of a different time, a different civilization – yet, he personifies the Sphynx and imagines the decay it has witnessed. However, it is import to distinguish that while Twain seems to utilize this moment of thanatourism to muse on and memorialize ages passed, the group he is with does not hold the same reverence, as evidence by the incident of one of the “reptiles – I mean the relic hunters” attempting to chip off a shard of the Sphynx’s ancient face as a souvenir. This instance reminds the reader that Innocents Abroad recounts not only the historical and societal observations that Twain has made – rather, members of his own country transform into touristic objects of spectacle within the foreign nations as well. 

Images taken from: clip art; http://paulbradleysmith.blogspot.com/

All outside information taken from class materials in Dr. Beringer's ENG 405 class.