Traveling with Twain in an Age of Simulations
Rereading and reliving The Innocents Abroad
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
III.
Twain’s interest in exploring and teasing humor out of the interplay between expectations and encounters resonates powerfully with contemporary concerns, as does his feeling that having clearly formed images of places in advance can sometimes add to but sometimes detract from the experience of travel. Much has been made of late of how important simulations have become in our twenty-first-century lives, and how new media have begun to drown us in representations. And much has also been made of the way that, in the current age, the tourist industry has to play to our desire for both familiarity and the exotic. We want to see firsthand places that we feel we know already, thanks to their appearance in movies, specials on the travel channel, National Geographic feature stories, and so on. And yet, as the popularity of "rough guides" show, we also hunger to get off the beaten track at least a bit and come as close to "discovering" things as we can in an era of information overload.
Switching from sites and accommodations to famous works of art, it is easy to imagine Twain feeling a kinship with the many contemporary travelers who wait in line in Paris to see the great Mona Lisa up close–then go away vaguely unsatisfied.There are many novelties about the current situation, of course, in terms of the specific media that shape in advance our images of distant places and the way we prepare for trips to far-off locales. Before leaving the United States, Americans can now journey into cyberspace not only to find places to stay but also to see images of their future accommodations. We did just this before the four of us set off to France last June. Prior to arriving in Paris, my wife showed our two children and me a Website that contained a photo of the Parisian apartment she had rented for us. Moreover, sometimes when Americans go abroad, they take with them images of a foreign country formed by more than just things they have read in books and seen on television screens, movie screens, and computer screens. Before our eleven-year-old daughter and fourteen-year-old son ever crossed the Atlantic, for example, they had visited the faux version of France that can be found at Epcot Center. (Just go past Norway and China; if you reach Morocco, then you have gone too far.) It remains an open question, though, whether these sorts of novelties mean that a chasm separates travelers of 1867 and 2004 when it comes to the interplay between images and experience. And reading up on the role of simulations in Twain’s day has convinced me that the divide between then and now is a much subtler one than it appears at first to be.
The work that has done most to push my thinking in this direction is historian Vanessa Schwartz’s fascinating 1998 University of California Press book, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. One of Schwartz’s main themes is that the nineteenth century, like the twentieth, witnessed the rise of many forms of mass media, from serialized novels to panoramas. Another is that, as a result, the mid-to-late 1800s were, like the present, a time when the lines between simulations and "reality" were continually being drawn, erased, and blurred in alternately confusing, disturbing, and exhilarating ways.
Fig. 4. Internet cafe in Paris, 2003. Photo by Samuel Bock.
There is much in Twain’s account that illuminates the role that the "new media" and newly important genres of the 1800s could have on a traveler. For example, though he could not see any cinematic representation of the Castle d’If before reaching that famous prison, he makes it clear that reading popular novels by Dumas that included scenes set within that edifice colored completely his first direct encounter with it. In addition, though he obviously could not go on the Web to get a preview of his living-quarters abroad, he did read brochures and guidebooks that gave him clues about what to expect. And, as with the Web, the information Twain gleaned from them turned out to be not so much inaccurate as incomplete. The digital photo of our Parisian apartment did not prepare us for the heady aroma that would enter it whenever we opened a window, due to the apartment’s proximity to a string of Egyptian, Greek, and Indian restaurants. Similarly, Twain was surprised that the guidebooks that sang the praises of the soaps of Marseilles did not tell him how hard it would be to find any bars of this substance with which to wash in that city’s hotels.
Switching from sites and accommodations to famous works of art, it is easy to imagine Twain feeling a kinship with the many contemporary travelers who wait in line in Paris to see the great Mona Lisa up close–then go away vaguely unsatisfied. Yes, these people say, it does look just like it does on the greeting cards and t-shirts. But it is hard to appreciate the famous smile when you come close to it, since the glass case encumbers your view. This postmodern disappointment echoes Twain’s reaction to another Da Vinci work, The Last Supper, which he calls "the most celebrated painting in the world." When he saw The Last Supper, Twain writes, he "recognized it in a moment," as it had served for centuries as the model for many "engravings" and "copies." "And, as usual," he continues, making a comment that he made as well about other renowned works, "I could not help noticing how superior the copies were to the original, that is, to my inexperienced eye." They were brighter and clearer, for example, the details easier to make out.
Fig. 5. Postcards showing views of Paris for sale streetside, 2003. Photo by the author.
Still, one might object, there remain some dramatic contrasts between our day and Twain’s. Yes, there may be contemporary counterparts to the know-it-alls of the 1860s that Twain lampoons, who would spout out, as though they were spontaneously formed opinions, impressive sounding comments on famous sites that turned out to be taken verbatim from a guidebook. The only difference is that now, the plagiarists often go to the Web rather than printed matter for inspiration. But surely, one might argue, there was nothing around in Twain’s time comparable to Epcot. To experience foreign travel then, you had to actually go abroad, did you not? Is it not only recently that going to an entertainment site can give one a literal and metaphoric taste of distant lands, a taste that can prepare you for an actual journey–or take the place of this kind of expensive and inconvenient undertaking? Can we not safely put Disney World in a special category, reserved for contemporary simulations? The answer to all of these questions, I think, is actually no.
Consider, for example, the panoramas and dioramas of the 1800s. In 1824, one travel writer called panoramas "among the happiest contrivances for saving time and expense," since for a "shilling and a quarter of an hour" they allowed one to make a journey that once cost "a couple of hundred pounds." Sometimes, panoramas displayed events, such as battles, but sometimes they just represented locales. The same was true of dioramas. In 1845, for example, crowds flocked to a Parisian diorama devoted to simulating the experience of seeing St. Mark’s in Venice. In short, as Schwartz puts it, panoramas and dioramas were early forms of "‘armchair’ tourism" that might "substitute for travel." Such spectacles belonged to a milieu that included many other sorts of popular simulations that made a fetish of "realism," yet often included fanciful elements. Wax museums, for example, and the Paris Morgue, a site open to public viewing where bodies awaiting identification were placed on display, sometimes posed in dramatic ways or surrounded by props.
We do not know from Twain’s account whether he saw any panoramas or dioramas or wax tableaus, either before or after heading across the Atlantic, that prepared him in advance for any particular sites. We do know that, while in Paris, he joined the crowds outside the windows of the morgue. And, more significantly, he went to the 1867 International Exposition, also in Paris. The great international expositions and exhibitions of the nineteenth century–two of the most famous of which were in London in 1851 and in Chicago in 1893–were precursors of the World’s Fairs of the twentieth. And these in turn would serve as models for the Disney theme parks.
Twain spent only two hours at the exposition–in part because he "saw at a glance that one would have to spend weeks–yea, even months–in that monstrous establishment, to get an intelligible idea of it." But he viewed his short time at the gala as a kind of miniaturized version of a world tour. The formal exhibits added up, he wrote, to a "wonderful show," allowing visitors to see objects from various regions. And yet, he writes, "the moving masses of people of all nations" made "a still more wonderful show," and he closely examined the faces and modes of dress of those who passed by. It is perhaps no accident that one party he was especially fascinated by was made up of people who had come from the Middle East, the part of the world toward which he was headed.
