78
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
a done no good; and besides, it was just as I said; you couldn't tell them
from the real kind."
At any rate, Twain's participation in the excursion seems to have
been more suffered than welcomed, the representatives of the Plymouth
Church (apparently the moving spirit behind the whole enterprise)
preferring to advertise such better known prospective passengers as Henry
Ward Beecher and General Sherman, neither of whom finally went
along. Mark Twain, however, was there on schedule, along with "three
ministers of the gospel, eight doctors, sixteen or eighteen ladies, several
military and naval chieftains," and other similarly undistinguished but
pious fellow-adventurers. "The whole affair," Bret Harte was acute
enough to point out in 1870, "was a huge practical joke, of which not
the least amusing feature was the fact that 'Mark Twain' had embarked
on it." Yet that joke eventuated in a classic work which, without ceasing
to be amusing, marks a critical point in the development of our literature,
and especially in our attempt through literature to find out who we
Americans are.
We have always been aware that ours is a country which has had
to be invented as well as discovered: invented even before its discovery
(as Atlantis, Ultima Thule, a western world beyond the waves), and
reinvented again and again both by the European imagination-from,
say, Chateaubriand to D. H . Lawrence or Graham Greene-and by the
deep fantasy of its own people, once these existed in fact. And before
Chateaubriand, Shakespeare-inspired by accounts of a voyage
to
the
Bahamas-had sketched his own vision of the New World as Prospero's
island; and had even evoked an image of its aboriginal inhabitants in
that "brave monster," Caliban (his name an anagram of cannibal),
chanting his New Song under the influence of Old World liquor: "Free–
dom, hi-day! Hi-day, freedom! Freedom! Hi-day, freedom!" Europeans,
however, begin always with their own world, the Old World, as
given;
and define the New World in contrast to it, as nature versus culture, the
naive versus th'e sophisticated, the primitive versus the artificial. We
Americans, on the other hand, are plagued by the need to invent a
mythological version of Europe first, something against which we can
then define ourselves; since for us neither the Old nor the New World
seems ever given, and we tend to see ourselves not directly but reflexively:
as the Other's Other. Only when the two worlds become one, as they
seem now on the verge of doing, will Europeans and Americans alike be
delivered from the obligation of writing "travel books" about each other,
i.e., books whose chief point is to define our archetypal differences and
prepare for our historical assimilation.
In the past, certainly, most American writers have, either in avowed
