American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the holy land mania

This study examines Herman Melville's faith-doubt poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage to the Holy Land (1876) and Mark Twain's touristic satire The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress (1869) as "infidel" counter-texts challenging the conventions of the extensive literature produced by Americans traveling to Ottoman Palestine before the beginnings of modern Jewish settlement in 1882. While travel to Palestine allowed Americans to "read sacred geography," to experience an exegetical landscape at the narrative core of Anglo-America's understanding of its own covenantal mission as a New Israel, Twain's explosive laughter and Melville's dark pilgrimage construct oppositional narratives to the dominant ones of typological destiny and millennialist restoration. Through Clarel's obsessive poem-pilgrimage towards covenantal failure and Innocent's Abroad's touristic vision of violent parodic desanctification and commodification, Melville and Twain write their own sacred geographies. Structured by frontier encounters from maritime or Western contact zones, these texts undermine the assumptions of American exceptionalism, even as they remain complicitous with colonial expansion. Clarel and Innocents Abroad are examined here in the context of other, related literary and historical texts, such as the Jewish convert Warder Cresson's The Key of David (1851), the Liberian colonizationist Edward Wilmot Blyden's From West Africa to Palestine (1873), and the array of literary, journalist, and consular accounts of the Adams Colony of millennialist "Holy Land regenerators" in Jaffa in the late 1860s.