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Even its devotees have rough going in making Clarel accessible, and Obenzinger himself admits that the poem is "persistently difficult, sometime impenetrable, often boring, and so unpopular it is almost as unread to day as when it first appeared." In pre paring this review, I went back to the original, and could make as little of it as I did some ten years ago when I made my first attempt. What is worse, Obenzinger is no help, for his ability to write intelligible English is limited. I don't believe that I am an ignorant or unserious reader of American Palestine, but I have little idea what Obenzinger is talking about in respect to Clarel. I do think the poem is a very frail reed on which to build any thesis about American interest in Palestine. The only "mania" involved is Melville's.
Better to turn to Innocents Abroad, which was an enormous bestseller through the end of the nineteenth century, and which I read again for the first time in 30 years with pleasure and understanding. This book is Twain's ac count of a European tour he made with some 65 other well-to-do tourists. It is filled with the author's humor, much of it directed at the shrines of Christendom and the reverence of tourists for them. Here is what Obenzinger tells of Twain's wonderful read:
Twain … inscribes a "touristic" vision of violent parodic desanctification and commodification whose "realism" still dominates the way readers regard Ottoman Palestine today [p. 6].
The Holy Land … [for Twain] complicates the paradoxical semiotics enormously be cause the reading of "the authentic 'culture' of places" is now qualitatively altered by the inevitable questions of hermeneutics, faith, and orthodoxy [p. 171].
[Twain] transforms his disappointment [with Holy Land sites] into an appropriation of sacred geography and Holy Land myth for the American imagination, a sensibility that, despite being crude or "innocently" hypocritical, is very much the dead Other's living Other [p. 180].
Twain creates a double of … [the Holy Land] by means of perceptual blurring, a surface literary effect with pro found "internal" consequences: the disappointing, dead land … is resurrected only in the imagination by the effects of distancing or through nature's theatricality [p. 217].
What are we to make of these passages, and so many others throughout the text that mimic what Obenzinger says of Clarel? With Clarel, Obenzinger takes an impenetrable text and makes it worse. With Innocents Abroad, he takes a straightforward work and transforms it into an obscure one, and then obscurely interprets it. Twain does tell us that the main goal of the trip was the Holy Land, but of my 700-page edition of Innocents Abroadd only 250 pages deal with this part of the tour. Moreover, only eight of the 65 passengers on the tour—all youngish men—made the difficult detour through Palestine that Twain's 250-page chunk of text is about. That is, the other travelers for various reasons decided not to walk in sacred steps the way Twain did. Finally the secular popularity of Twain's irreverent text does not suggest the agonized mania that I can extrapolate from Obenzinger's Clarel-like explication of Innocents Abroad. The popularity instead intimates that many Americans who traveled to the Old World were not much absorbed by spiritual anxieties.
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