The Construction of the ‘Self’ in Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad: 'The Positional Superiority' of the American Identity in the Nineteenth- century Travel Narrative

An analysis of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad with its emphasis on cultural representations in the American culture, touches very significantly upon the question of the rising of the American identity and its connection with the American Travel Narrative in the nineteenth century. While it is believed that the novel produces "pure" "true knowledge”, or "a neutral exercise" of basic facts and realties, we argue that Twain’s narrative entails a genre of political knowledge that is premised on the basic requirement of self/other constructions. The ideological apparatus of Americanized emerging identity, nationalism, power and authority are fundamental issues in the Twains narrative. Furthermore, it is not only the personal motif that is the basis of Twain's The Innocents Abroad, as he claims in his preface, nor is it a "Great Pleasure Excursion," as he pretends. The novel structures relations according to the rising American norms and values in the nineteenth century clearly acquired and absorbed by the American travelers in The Innocents Abroad. It also subscribes to the complication of the American character in order to develop, process and reconstruct cultural relations in the narrative. In this sense, we argue that Twain's narrative raises discursive ideological questions about the rising of the American national identity and its connection with other cultural components, the Oriental, in particular.


Introduction
"There are many humorous things in this world; among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages." (Twain: 1897: 213) In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain presents one of the most readable and popular works of travel literature written in the American history. On one hand, this remarkable travel narrative, written in 1869, was appreciated for its wide scale of representation and "its matter-of-fact style and length," as some reviewers believed (Hyde: 51). Generally, the significance of the American travel narrative in the nineteenth century, is in its capacity to mingle the real with the imaginary. It can also reveal much about gender, representation of experiences, power, politics, ideological transformations and their connection with cultural constructs including geography, history, religion, economy and other political ideologies in the American society. Critics have addressed some of these issues analyzing Specifically, for some recent Modern and Post-modern writers, Twain's work contributed to an American tradition of imperialism in the Orient, known as "American Orientalism" (Little, 2002), which had its roots in travels like Twain's The Innocents Abroad. Little argues that, from an American perspective, such works about the 'Middle East' have the upper hand in the construction of the American hegemonic political relations with other countries and locales in the modern history. Many other writers before Little had argued that European and American travel writings had been promoting European political, economic and imperial domination and expansion in the Western history. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) provoked the works of Mary Louise Pratt, Mary B. Campbell providing a postcolonial perspective for travel writings and similar genre. Twain's work, then, might provide explorations of the political function of the travel in the American history and culture. Additionally, in her essay "The Empire, Travel Writing and British studies", Susan Bassnett looks at why it is important to study travel writing from the Postcolonial and cultural perspectives. Recently, issues related to Twentieth century culture of Anglo/American Orientalism(s) are addressed by several critics including Schueller Malini Johar's U. S. Orientalism: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890, (1998), English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (2000 by Barbara Korte, Douglass Little's American Orientalism: The United States andthe Middle East Since 1945 (2002), and Travel Writing and the Empire, edited by Sachidananda Mohanty, (2003) .
Twain's narrative raises various cultural issues related to the function of language, discourse and their politics. Major directions in recent travel writing scholarship touch upon the role of gender in travel and travel writing. Gender andRace in United States, 1880-1917 by Gail Bederman study the connection of gender and colonialism, and the role of women in travel writings as compared to masculine produced narratives. Informed by Said's Postcolonial theory, criticism of Twain's narrative has forwarded the theory of travel writing in many directions including interdisciplinary preoccupation with cultural hegemony and globalization.

Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's travel Writing by Sara Mills and Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of
Drawing on the above, the key premise in this essay is the idea that Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad with its highly emphasis on discursive representations is considered to be a mirror of the cultural background of the American nineteenth century age. In opposition to Edward Said (1978) who claims that such cultural representations are the product of empire, or the "dynamic exchange between individual authors and the large political concerns shaped by the three great empires -British, French, American-in whose intellectual and imaginative territory the writing was produced: (14-15), we focus on the historical specificity of the American condition in generating literary productions like travel writings. Our objective is that Mark Twain's literary achievements reveal insights into the social, economic, cultural and political developments of the American character during his time. For example, his blatant hostility to the other in his popular travel narrative The Innocents Abroad (1869) could be realized through the specific historical and cultural contexts of the nineteenth century America. In other words, Twain's attitude to the Orient in his most popular travels cannot be read in isolation from the historicized and detailed American material and cultural realities that had produced it to the American reader, during the nineteenth century. More clearly, we claim that the American travel narrative does not ascribe its own realities and references to Oriental "objects" (as many critics tend to argue) as much as it does to its own individuality (or specificity) which is ultimately a product of the nineteenth American historical and cultural realities. This means that the American travel narrative allocates or rather projects its specific historical condition and circumstance into the Oriental situation on an organized and discursive basis.
Drawing on Postcolonial theoretical tents, we endeavor that the narrative is not based on the traveler's plain and neutral understanding of the other's people, traditions and geography as much as on the traveler's own historical, political and cultural backgrounds and requirements. As we demonstrate below, the specific cultural processes included in the American travel narrative representations are frequently, if not always, manipulated and intervened in for some cultural formations and political functions required in the American life and culture. We contend that Twain's travel narrative The Innocents Abroad has become a whole American nationalist effort to ideologically touch upon questions of identity, of nationalism, of power and authority and their connection with their mainstream American cultural life during the nineteenth century. The Orient, in particular, has become a cultural space unto which the American has projected his own rising aspirations and confirmed his own political and national visions.

Identity Formation: Situating The Innocents Abroad within the Nineteenth/Twentieth-centuries Ideologies
The idea of "empire" or the American Orientalist set of mind, to a remarkable extent, is spurred by the ideas of 'nation' and identity, and the cultural discourses of Twain's travel narrative during the nineteenth century contribute to the construction of a distinctive American national character and identity. The Innocents Abroad provides an understanding of the complicated historical and cultural processes that were pertinent to the construction of the American national identity throughout the American history. Schueller Malini Johar's (1998), in hisU.S. Orientalism: Race, Nation, andGender in Literature, 1790-1890, highlights several issues that touch upon the creation of the American national identity and the building of an American superior image. Schueller maintains that the book with its focus on cultural representations has played a significant role in shaping an emerging American nation's culture through its perception and understanding of the 'other'. The Innocents Abroad produces not only a rising American perception and perspective of other foreign cultures and locales, but also an understanding and identification and construction of the ongoing conflict and contradictions inside the American self. Although the work is an attempt to recognize and establish the individual American as a singular and distinct person, it is also and primarily, a reminder, of some deep transformations in the American life and culture. From this perspective, the American travel narrative in the Orient cannot be separated from the specific ongoing cultural formations in the American life and history during the nineteenth century.
Travelling can be seen as, primarily, intended to enhance the emerging national American identity in its capacity to mingle 'fact' and 'fiction', which reveals much about identity formation. As Said puts it:"National identity always involves narratives -of the nation's past, its founding fathers and documents, major seminal events, and so forth, [which]… is never undisputed, or merely a matter of the neutral recital of facts" (Said: 1999, 5). In this sense, the American identity poses a unique problematic historicized condition. In other words, since a national identity is related to the complicated historical recital of facts, the nineteenth century American Man found it hard to understand or assemble one, which reflects the complicated American historical and personal situation. For a number of American critics (e.g. Obenzinger and Anouar Majid), travels to the Orient, stimulated and controlled by a particular religious sect, operates under the name of religious traditions and American national identity. This is why that the American sense of identity and nationality could be also located in the American long history of exploration, discoveries, not only in the American continent but also in journeys and travels made into foreign locales and terrains. Such travels are regularly maintained by American travelers, and they were on the rise, to sustain and accommodate with the cultural transformations in the American life. The significance of the American Travel narrative, as we will argue, could be understood in its distinctive capacity to produce ideology, in the sense that it inheres the imaginary production of otherness. The awareness of the 'self' is obviously reflected in many of the real occurrences of the American contacts with his other, which is clearly embodied in travel journeys, and Twain's The Innocents Abroad is no exception.
The Innocents Abroad appeared in periods of great social and cultural changes which were sweeping both the American and British nations. These periods were mid Victorian England, and the American Gilded Age, the American revival after the civil war. While the European Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had played important and clear roles in the transformation of people's life in the nineteenth century, the American's stance was more complicated and passes through intrinsic processes of social change and identity formation. Such processes were entirely dependent on culturally contextualized, complicated and inherent circumstances that incorporate several traits including: the American's man origin and ethnicity, the hierarchical division between people who belong to different nationalities, race and class, the complication of geography, and the diversity of historical and cultural backgrounds to which the new Americans belong. These elements remained problematic characteristics of the American's man identity and culture. Such historical and cultural conditions, we claim, had defined the American nineteenth century life and they made themselves felt in almost every aspect of the American academic and cultural lives, instances, including its literary production, mostly manifested in the popular American travelogues at that time.
The Innocents Abroad is situated within a number of complicated cultural transformations in the American society which, accordingly, had changed rapidly due to a number of cultural, social, demographic and political factors that have affected the course of travel outside the American frontier. Sean Dennis Cashman claims that the American culture was moved toward technology, industrialization and to transcontinental communications and networks. For Cashman, Americans during the time period became obsessed with invention and remarkably celebrated the industrial expertise of American architects, scientists, and inventors (49). For Jeffrey Steinbrink, such influential factors include the culture of materialism as well as the development of domestic mass markets to consume the products of American Industry. In Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930 in her analysis of the risng American Orientalism during that period of time, argues that this kind of correlation between the American literary production and the historical condition was both formative and complex; she reasons: In the case of American Orientalism, the period from 1870 to 1930 was complex and formative. It was a time when the United States emerged from the devastation of the Civil War and sought to join what were thought to be the 'civilzed' nations of the world. Political, cultural, and psychic horizons were expanding in relation to a variety of 'other's' including Native American peoples, France, and the Orient. (7) Moreover, a nineteenth century travel narrative would expose how Americans are repositioned from being British colonized subjects into being travelers and explorers, believing in and fulfilling an ambitious national scheme, supposed mainly to be an enlightening one, but disguised, most of the times, in a missionary, civilizational, colonial or imperial mission. Travelers to the Orient felt the burden (and may be the contradiction) of such a mission; similarly, American citizens, at home, still dealt paradoxically and incompatibly with persistent and changing values and high expectations that kept on shaping the American life and culture. Ultimately, this complicated cultural trauma in the American life came as a result to the drastic transformations in different cultural extremes related to the eighteenth and nineteenth American histories and cultures.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the image of the American character was hardly seen to come into a concrete being. It however has become more essentialized during the later on nineteenth century, especially as it became the focus of literary as well as different academic material. An analysis of the most popular travel narratives during that period of time shows how the production of and renovation in the American identity comes according to a number of cultural factors related to the American history, geography, religion and other factors as well. Works like Yusef, or, the Journey of the Frangi: A Crusade in the East was written by John Ross Browne and issued by Harper and Brothers in 1853. Even one would argue that Browne was not approaching his travels with a political mind, and even intended his travels to be "less profound than the usual book on the Holy Land" (Walker,83), this travel is political in its nature. Furthermore, Herman Melville's famous "Clarel", 1876 is eighteen thousand lines of poetry in which he capitalizes upon his Holy Land experiences. Howard C, Horsford, in his introduction to his edition of Melville's Levant diary, remarks: "Clarel, so far as the narrative goes, is virtually an elaborated recapitulation of the Palestinian section of the journal" (4). Specifically, such works and others can exhibit how identity of the American man went through a number of phases and transformations as it becomes identified by the idea of American nature, the wilderness, history, geography, the foreign frontier, and other cultural components, as well.
Although the thematic structure of the American travel narrative is (supposedly and naturally) about the other cultures and locales, we argue that it touches very significantly upon the complication of the American cultural formations, especially as situated within more specific questions of cultural categorizations as identity formation, nationalism which have generated, on its part, concepts related to power and authority during the 19th century. The cultural representations of The Innocents Abroad are closely connected to the cultural and historical transformations that assembled the American Identity during the nineteenth century. In other words, the American travel narrative does not only raise questions about the other cultures and locales, as much as it provides insights into the formation and the development of the American identity and its associated complications during that period. Accordingly, the manifold relations constructed in The Innocents Abroad, for example, could be rooted in the intricate cultural and historical backgrounds of Twain and his American travelers. In particular, in what comes after we will demonstrate how it is the outcome of American/ Oriental confrontations (clearly shown in self/other representations) in Twain's narrative that can demonstrate the link between American travel narrative and the historical specificity of the nineteenth century era. We argue that Twain's narrative is not rooted in this kind of obsession with travelling, but are rather apolitical as it constructs an American nationality by assembling one of its cultural components in a discourse of self/other binaries. In this vein, it is possible to view The Innocents Abroad as signaling a significant phase in the development, growth, and complication of the American self abroad.
Specifically, an analysis of the cultural discourses of Twain's travel narrative shows how the American identity grows abroad by the continual accumulation in the consciousness of the superiority of the self and the inferiority of the Other. Through contact with the other foreign people and locales, the American man, as situated in diverse, far-off, unfamiliar, distant, overseas, unknown and foreign frontiers, becomes more aware of issues related to self-image, independence and American individuality and distinctiveness. Processes of identification or separation, incorporation and integration, assimilation, adaptation or exclusion, expulsion, rejection, dismissal or denial, are some of the several strategies employed in Twain's travel to depict the Other Oriental man and woman (which are also significant characteristics of some rising American traits), the American travel narrative relentlessly structures in its discourses. Ironically, the American travel narrative becomes about the American travelers' search and aspiration (need and desire) for self affirmation, and cultural and material developments, autonomy and self-determination, especially in different geographical regions and locales, more than about the pure interest in knowledge for other cultures and locales.

The Construction of the Positional Superiority via the Alterity of the Other
Twain's representation of self/other relations in The Innocents Abroad unfolds a significant aspect of the rising American identity, which is one product of the alliance between the modern American and the Euro-centric imperialist projects in the Orient in the nineteenth century and aftermath. The dichotomies of East/West, old/modern, civilized/uncivilized including other hierarchal relations inscribed in the narrative of The Innocents Abroad are considered an essential part of the rhetoric of power and supremacy used to constitute and maintain the opposition between two different and static worlds, the civilized West and the Primitive Orient. This depiction of the Orient in the Holy Land journey in Twain's narrative resonates with the nineteenth century arising American interest in power and authority producing a discourse of power relations. Such basic structure is shown in the differences depicted in the patterns of representation between the American and his Other, or in the politics of cultural differences. In what we refer to as 'Differential Representation Technique', we use this analytical method to approach the structure of the American/Orient representations in Twain's travel narrative.
The significance of the "positional superiority" technique in Twain's narrative is found in its capacity to place the American traveler in a discourse of power relations, to borrow a Saidian concept, which creates a relentless superior standpoint with the Oriental 'Other' all throughout Twain's narrative. This is one more way to say that Twain's narrative shows a discursive pattern of relationships which is based on relations of power and domination of various degrees between the American traveler and the Other Oriental. In doing so, the American travel narrative structures and develops self/other configurations in a static, one-sided and self pattern of differential relations employing a differential representation technique. This reflects the growing American desire not only for power, conquest and domination of foreign territories and terrains (when applying an Orientalist approach), but also a personal yearning and aspiration for individualizing American characteristics or qualities. These quantities depend on the need of self awareness and development, interest and different forms of self authority as well as authenticity, which are essential requirements in the idyiosyncratic American case during the nineteenth century.
Twain's travel narrative structures a number of hierarchical relations through the instrumentation of the differential representation technique in the narrative. In his differential representation technique inscribed, Twain enforces dichotomies in the structure of the American Holy Land journey, which becomes functional in many different ways in the narrative. On one hand, the differences the representations produce are intended to show the superior attitude of the American traveler which is an unrelenting, unsympathetic and prejudiced attitude that is kept all throughout the narrative. It is clearly shown that the American pilgrims keep showing such attitude whenever they come in contact with other cultures and people, most clearly in the Holy Land Journey scene. The American pilgrims hold a 'lofty' attitude while talking about the Other, which is always accompanied by an elevated sense of self awareness and American consciousness, as shown in the structural and rigid representations of the Other Orient in some Arab and Islamic countries.
Examining a number of contact scenes between the American traveler and the Orient, in the Holy Land, the differential representation technique projects the positional superiority of the 'self' (the American traveler) over the 'other' (the Orient). This becomes Twain's instrumental technique of inventing and structuring the dominant formulaic, rigid and fixed, devices of representation and acculturation in the narrative. Specifically, on one hand, relying on this technique makes confrontation with the Orient evocative, or 'worldly', to borrow Spivak's concept (1995b), suggesting a strategy of political employment with which the Orient is subjected to the rising ideals of the New Man. On the other hand, according to this strategic apparatus, Twain's representation brings in and implicates this political strategy to produce and generate a series of fixed representations whose basic function is found in the capacity to generate a number of mental and sensual images of the Orient in the mind of the American audience. In fact, this strategy has established whole generations of the American representational production and reproduction of the Orient in the American literature, film and media in the American culture.
Guided by this general strategic technique (the differential representation technique), Twain's authoritative voice ,as shown in the following extracts, reflects how an American travel discourse of the Holy Land in the mid-nineteenth century would repeatedly construct the Orient ('Other') as passive, spiritual, and fanatic and instinctively lacking the refined behavior, norms and high ideals of the American identity. Right from the beginning, this technique is presented through the sharp opposition drawn between the backward and primitive Orient and the "intelligent", "considerate", "full of generous impulses", and wonderfully good natured" (24, 25) American man depicted all throughout the narrative. Twain's representations relentlessly and even blatantly imbue the American traveler with such high attributes, especially as they are being strikingly and contrastively posed against the inferiority and inadequacy of the personality of the Orient. It is significant how such traits are depicted as inherent, inborn, intrinsic and innate attributes in the Orient, allowing the high cultured, refined and civilized traits portrayed in the American traveler to prevail in such narratives and, therefore, achieving the American positional superiority sought for characterizing the American identity and distinctiveness. In his introduction of his fellow men, specifically his room-mate, Mr. Blucher, in the pilgrimage Twain maintains: In the fullness of time the ship was ready to receive her passengers. I was introduced to the young gentleman who was to be my room-mate, and found him to be intelligent, cheerful of spirit, unselfish, full of generous impulses, patient, considerate, and wonderfully good-natured (25) .
Twain supports these supposedly innate characteristics when he refers to the agreement among Americans, insinuating the American's possession and privileges of such traits: "Not any passenger that sailed in the Quaker City will withhold his endorsement of what I have just said" (25). Repeatedly those superior (Assumed and proclaimed American) qualities are underlined: "I walked about the city a good deal with a young Mr. Blucher, who booked for the excursion. He was confiding, good-natured, unsophisticated, companionable; but he was not a man to set the river on fire." (24) In exposing what he considers low and degraded in the Oriental societies, Twain builds up and sustains a number of stereotypical images that give continual and sensual photographic pictures of the lowliness of the Oriental man and culture-thereby elevating the American, in contrast, as a civilized American and modern citizen. In the long and repeated processes of the hierarchical oppositions between the American and the Orient, the Orient is always on the lower level. Accordingly, Twain's structural pattern of relations shows how terrible the Oriental man and woman are, and how different are their bad ways. Assigning himself as representative authority, Twain's narrator tends all the time to contrast the bad ways of the Palestinian man and woman in the Holy Land (considered representative of all the Oriental people in the East) with his fine civilized qualities, and his enlightened civilized mind with the wicked nature of the Oriental people he encounters in the East.
The effect of such representational strategy is influential in producing a symmetrical and outlined pattern of relations enforced in the text between the two (becoming) opposing parties. Accordingly, Twain is not only attributing the positive and affirmative traits to the American personality, but he rather recounts their opposite and negative meanings to the Other Oriental, in doing so he produces stark differences, disparity, lack of correspondence and discrepancy between the American self and the Other Oriental. Working within this general strategic technique (of the differential representation technique) together with its ideological apparatuses, Twain symmetrically represents the American man as someone who is "confiding, good-natured, unsophisticated, companionable;" (24). Conversely, however, the Oriental is naturally and unsurprisingly depicted in many of the Holy Land scenes as suspicious, evil, and someone who is not sociable and cannot, therefore, be trustworthy nor friendly. The same attributes are relentlessly and unalterably being repeated in the narrative achieving the distance, detachment and remoteness sought and intended by Twain between the American self and its Other in such a narrative. Furthermore, such a structural, stereotypical representation is reiterated in the narrative to produce the same effect. For example, toward the end, the American traveler is repeatedly depicted with similar superior and archetypical characteristics when the narrator says 'Jack, my boy, you are about to go among a brilliant company of gentlemen and ladies, who are refined and cultivated and thoroughly accomplished in the manners and customes of good society," (443). The recurring resonance of such a typical American speech act in the narrative will accumulate positiveimages (of being American) in the mind of the American reader, even if its parallel negative counterpart (the Oriental inferiority) is not mentioned correspondingly. Twain relies heavily on such parallelism and as it is reinforced in many configurations in the narrative, is considered a major strategic technique all throughout the narrative.
Nonetheless, such a strategy can be encountered by employing the term 'contact' in travel discourses. According to Mary Louise Pratt (1996) the "contact zone is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal "copresence" of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical differences, and whose partition now intersect. Pratt (1996) uses the term "contact" to encounter the separation and division enforced in narratives like Twain's. Instead of disengagement, she emphasizes connection and "relations" in travel discourses. She states: By using the term 'contact,' I aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination. A 'contact perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and 'travelees,' not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power 6." (6-7) Like the societies of the contact zone, the Oriental people are commonly regarded as "chaotic," "barbarous," "lacking in structure". "Contact zone" in our discussion is not synonymous with the positional superiority technique employed in this paper, it is rather its opposite, the production of opposite effect. While the latter term is grounded within an American cultural constructive perspective (Twain's technique is valid only with respect to the American abroad), in contrast, it is an attempt to invoke the spatial and cultural separateness of different subjects whose difference is intended to increment the high consciousness of the American identity. This is one more way to say that instead of invoking a "contact zone," in Twain's representations, the discrepancy in the self/Other relations poses conflict as a central thematic issue and underlines difference as the basic strategic apparatus technique in the representation of the American/Orient corollary in the narrative. This offers an explanation of the nature of the unsettled conflict between Twain and the subjects/objects of his travels as he makes his journey deeper through the Holy Land. Furthermore, the differential representation strategy, that Twain's narrator resolves to employ, causes an apparent conflict between the American and the Orient. This conflict is stimulated in the narrative and is maintained in structuring relations and representations through difference. Whereas Twain's presentation of his American travel companions is far above the ground, all throughout the narrative, his horror and disgust is manifested of the Oriental people who come across his eyes in the journey. His repeated descriptions of their tactics as repulsive and abhorrent, which they make to manipulate the travelers, -is significant to his deliberate strategy of stereotyping the Orient. He rarely points out their poverty and defenselessness and the fact that they are colonial subjects who had been grumbling for years under the yoke of the Ottoman colonization. Twain's reaction to everyday happenings, whatever he encounters in his travels and his high expectations of the various countries he visits, comes in agreement with this prejudiced, hegemonic and one-sided representational framework, which falls within the ideological act of structuring difference and uniqueness in the American individuality.
This positional superiority that produces conflict all throughout the narrative, structures Twain's journey and brings into beings the contemporary existing stereotypical representations of the Orient in the American culture and media. Twain consolidates this image by writing more about the ugliness of the Oriental people, (especially the Oriental woman who is found "Like a mummy," talking about Syrian women), and their lack of cleanliness; some ideas that are being offensively repeated wherever he finds himself surrounded by Oriental people. This Oriental "ugliness" was represented earlier in the lands of the Moors, when he talks about the "atrocious ugliness" of the Moorish women: I have caught a glimpse of the faces of several Moorish women (for they are human, and will expose their faces for the admiration of a Christian dog when no male moor is by), and I am full of veneration for the wisdom that leads them to cover up such atrocious ugliness (64).
These passages, in fact, bespeak Twain's astonishment and resentment of what Twain's narrator assumes different and supposedly negative aspects of the Eastern societies, before he depraves them of their humanity and sarcastically declares at the end that "There is something human about them somewhere" (435). It is not only that the Oriental people are ironically deprived of humanity, passion and sympathy, but these people always remind the narrator of the red Indians, not "the noble savage" this time, but those barbarians who "had but little clothing,… [and] uncomplaining impoliteness." (340) For Twain, one more common attribute between the two undervalued species, the Indians and the Oriental, is filth, or lack of cleanliness. It is also one characteristic that combines his hatred and disgust of the other species: "These people about us had other peculiarities which I have noticed in the noble red man, too: they were infested with vermin, and the dirt had cracked on them till it amounted to bark." (340) Twain's narrator is repetitively suspicious whether the Other people are "human," as he announces plainly his inability to understand such Oriental "peculiarities." By "peculiarities" Twain, of course, means the un-understandable differences he locates between the white American and the other Oriental. This also could refer to the failure of his mind to assert and vindicate the images that had been laying up (accumulating) about the Oriental for so long. This could explain Twain's reaction to the other as aggressive, hostile and violent especially as he is all the time reminded by the other different species at home. When he said that this is "so truly Indian," to the extent that it "makes a white man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe" (340), the white man's savagery is only intimidated, or invoked by the savagery of the other. Hence any hatred and hostility against the other is justified all throughout the lines of the story. In doing so, Twain sustains that unbridgeable gap, that space or distance between the two unlike parties, hence, Twain's structural representations maintain the huge difficulty of any communication between the two oppositional subjects at any level.
Such representational categories allow Twain to work within a structural strategy that includes the following underpinnings: First, any people of different behavior or characteristic becomes classificatory or categorical according to their race and origin. Any supposed difference is incomprehensible to the American's mind. Many of Twain's representational strategies depict the characteristics of the Other as inherent and naturally built in the body and mind of the Oriental man and woman, as well as of the Indians, since he deals with racial or geographical entities, not with cultural, individual and worldly constructs.
Second, Twain's attitude is accordingly uncompromising and unbending as there is no room for negotiation with difference in his narrative. This is because the allocation of the Indian/Oriental traits results from the positional superiority strategy which keeps such categories within an organized representational system. This system identifies and categorizes the American identity consistently and firmly (i.e. to recognize or establish the American as a distinct person). In Twain's narrative, the categorization of people into defined groups comes on the basis of some all ready pre-identified characteristics such as similarity or difference of visible resemblances. While other systems may employ other formative factors, Twain is allowed under this hegemonic umbrella to put people into universal-wide kinship classes on the basis of their race, color and religion or the oppositional superiority relationship rules.
Third, in such a rigid structural representation, Twain is allowed to make all-encompassing and irrefutable statements about himself and the Oriental people: "Christ knew how to preach to these simple, superstitious, disease-tortured creatures: He healed the sick" (341). On the national level, the differential representation technique allows Twain's narrator to focus on the weaknesses and shortcomings of the Oriental societies he makes visits to. Their cultural heritage, social and political structures, military power the economic system and its productivity, if any is located (are some of the urgent issues that travel writers keep their eyes on while journeying in the Holy Land) are only visible and materialized in the narrative to reinforce the incapacity for any form of civilization and modernization. In referring to home experiences in the same context, this idea sustains the American image as one that is superior and different from the Others, especially in handling foreign affairs. Thus, Twain is, ultimately, making the American dialectic of supremacy and incomparability the basic structure of his narrative. He provides a 'legitimate' rationalization and reasonable justification for the stereotypical representations he uncompromisingly sustains in his narrative, especially as they are highly embedded with power relations.
In the same context, Arab division, lack of sense of nationality and desire for warring are also some of the recurring ideas that are shown as inherent qualities of the Arab, psyche, mentality and part of a natural course of the Oriental life. The idea of being dispersed and shattered, "lawless" without being controlled by abiding laws falls within the general scheme in the narrative. Accordingly, the outline of photographing Arabs as primitive people without a record of civilization is persistent all throughout Twain's narrative, to the extent that the whole region is depicted as a desolate tract or a wasteland. While touring Jordan, Twain makes his American audience realize the distinction of their Americanism in contrast to the lowliness of the orientalism of the Eastern people. Drawing such differences is one more way to define the American identity, in terms of providing images of its surrogates. He also draws differences that highlight the bitterness of a desert Oriental way of life in contrast to the technological and modern American way of life, to enhance an identity or a way of life that is not full-grown, developed, solidified and strengthened yet. Inclusive statements are made about this issue: Rumors of war and bloodshed were flying everywhere. The lawless Bedouins in the valley of the Jordan and the deserts down by the Dead Sea were up in arms and were going to destroy all comers. They had a battle with a troop of Turkish cavalry and defeated them; several men killed… (426).
Twain reinforces this strategy when he repeatedly brings The Red Indians into the Oriental scene. He puts emphasis on the common aspects of their wild way of life, warring mentality, lack sense of modernity; some of the ideas which are constantly referred to in the text. Muslims and Arabs are equated with "lawless" Bedouins and the savagery of wary and bloodshed Indians, who are also repetitively imbued with savagery and primitive qualities. This is to enforce stereotypical qualities of primitivity and barbarity, inhumanity and insensitivity to civilization as innate characteristics of the Oriental people and way of life. Through the iterant construe of the Oriental inhumanity and inattentiveness to modernization and civilization, the White modern Americans become so greatly infuriated by the Oriental ignorance to the extent that they are justified to start carrying out their innovative, original scheme ( historically disguised in missionary activities) of civilization to the Holy Land.
Ironically, when Twain's narrator is allowed to locate some common aspects between him, an American civilized man and the Oriental, being primitive in many different ways; it is the "nomadic instinct," which is found in the text to combine and lay the bridge for the two opposing parties. In doing this, Twain is allowed to depict the American as a reasonable, evenhanded, sensible modern man with passion for the Other. However, the "nomadic instinct," which for Twain, while being 'a human instinct", yet it is found as the opposite of "civilization" and modernization; it is naturally the opposite of what is considered progress, education and development from a Western/American point of view: It was painful to note how readily these town-bred men had taken to the free life of the camp and the desert. The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet. It has a charm which, once tasted, a man will yearn to taste again. The nomadic instinct cannot be educated out of an Indian.
Twain's account of the Holy Land creates an image of the Oriental man and woman that characterizes them as being instinctively primitive and eternally lacking civilization. . Twain believes, very similar to Said's famous quoted epitaph, that the Oriental people "… cannot represent themselves they must be represented" (Orientalism, 1978). His inadequacy and failure to make the Oriental people represent themselves, i.e. to have a voice in the narrative, is seen as a result of one form of the American cultural hegemonic violence that accompanies the construction of the rising American identity in the narrative. Such aggression which found terms in Twain's blatant and repeated hostile representations of the inferiority of to the Other in the narrative becomes a strategic act all throughout the narrative. Over again and again, this is one more way to incorporate "a discursive authority" or a legitimate position of speech as inherent requirements or characteristics in both the American identity and the American text. By means of such a technique, Twain is enabled to prey upon the already colonized subjects, whose own colonization has made them twice or thrice susceptible and vulnerable to, first, the yoke of the Ottoman's colonization, and second, to the positional superiority of the American identity depicted in negative attitudes of the American travelers toward them, and, third, and in an embedded way, to the textual confinement and captivity of the American author/traveler's transcript which employs proficiently and dexterously, on its side, more textual authoritative strategies of downgraded representations and domination of the Other Oriental as they are being based on and filled with so many forms of biases, favoritism and preconceived notions and conditions.
In Power Faith and Fantasy,Michael Oren concludes that "As a satirist and social commentator, Twain rarely had kind words for any ethnic or religious group, yet his disdain for Muslim was unrivaled. A "filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, superstitious people," (241) he alleged that "Such imprecations reflected deep-rooted American prejudices against Islam, as well as Twain's tendency to impute to Muslims a belief in the Middle Eastern myths to which he, in fact, subscribed" (241). Accordingly, it is very difficult to agree with Holy Edwards when she discusses her American's version of Orientalism in her influential Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America, 1870-1930 when she argues that American's involvement with the Orient is more "positive" than the European one. In discussing a newly opened exhibit at the Mint Museum of Art which focuses on America's version of Orientalism, she runs a comparison between the Eropean Orientalism and its American counterpart. She brings into controversy the idea that the exhibit examines how, unlike its European counterpart, American Orientalism is not embedded with the same forms of cultural superiority and prejudices.
Whereas some contemporary modernist American writers depict a more liberal image of the world, Twain's narrative seems to draw on his awareness of his nationality, history as well as to his loyalty to some explicit emerging political ideologies in the American life and culture. This is why his attitude towards Arabs and Muslims becomes the target of many critical writers. For Zougul "Twain, though hailed as an American writer who was assumed to have got rid of the burdens of cultural biases inherent in the long history of the continent and its continued course of inter and intra continental conflicts, hostilities and rivalries, was mainstream European in his attitude towards and perceptions of the East (3-4). However, Twain's narrative shows how it is difficult for him to separate himself from the history of the American culture with its "continental conflicts, hostilities and rivalries" (3). In several places in the narrative, reminisces of some historical American occurrences are imprinted in the traveler's diverse dealings with the Oriental man and place.

The Cultural Politics of Difference Twain's Authority
The use of difference in the American Orientalized texts provides space for comparisons to take place in the mind of the American reader, and to create special sensual and auditory effects in his imagination. In other words, the cultural politics of difference, Twain employs, consolidates the creation of photographic imagery in his mind as provided and controlled by the positional superiority strategy employed in the text. With an American reader in mind, Twain's narrator normalizes the scene to make the American strikingly aware of his different and superior identity, especially when repeatedly compared with the lowliness and the inferiority of that of the Oriental. This effect is created by placing different attributes of the two opposing and conflicting subjects such as affability, (friendliness), sociability, dependability, reliability, commitment, loyalty, and objectivity next to their lower Oriental counterparts, in line of the story.
It is unique how such strategies allow Twain to combine and amalgamate between opposites in the same Oriental context. Any positive attribute about the American is ironically contrasted by its opposite and negative image attributed to the Orient. Moreover, any positive idea about the Oriental people way of life is immediately followed by the American's failure to attend any affirmative element in the Oriental scene. For instance, in stark contrast to the luxury they formerly enjoyed while being hosted by some Syrian priests, the American travelers found out that the priests are relatively human (the scene at Mars Saba with the Hermits who were found as "dead men in several respects" (434-435) or "dead men who walk" (434). When he presents some Syrian people, he admires their being "naturally goodhearted and intelligent," (318) but he immediately regrets their lack of "education and liberty" (318). Syrians, ironically, as the case is being repeated in the new millennium Syrian situation nowadays, are depicted as defenseless, weak, powerless and accordingly they are politically and strategically introduced as being always in need of "the great world" which, they hope that will hopefully "someday come to their relief and save them" (318). Twain's authoritative and trustworthy voice assures his American readers that "These people are naturally goodhearted and intelligent, and with education and liberty would be a happy and contented race. They often appeal to the stranger to know if the great world will not someday come to their relief and save them." (318) From an American perspective, it is only a super power (mentality and personality) with passion for the whole human race that can put such problematic and intricate situations right. Twain's narrator reflects an elevated self-image of a new American modern man and woman who can lead the world to its utmost relief and happiness. For him, the American abroad is a civilized and enlightened, progressive and liberal man with a humanitarian mission for the whole human race, a central thematic idea that becomes an emerging American diplomatic strategy, put into effect and inflicted all throughout the twentieth and twentieth first centuries. It is justifiably apparent why such a strategy becomes repetitive in so much of the American cultural productions all throughout the twentieth century.
Difference has one more form and function in Twain's travel narrative. It is noticeable that Twain's narrative turns out to be about his disappointment, disillusionment and frustration from the Holy Land scenery and its inhabitants, the idea that becomes a central thematic issue all throughout the narrative. This central scheme recurs repeatedly and its function and utility are found in the replacement of the actual contact with real Oriental people with exclusion and lack of presence in the narrative. For that reason, instead of the detailed depiction of the Oriental man and woman, one that would satisfy the interest, curiosity and anxiety of the American reader about the Holy Land journey, which becomes one of Twain's failures to see and meet with real Palestinian people. In the deliberate repetition of such structural dialectic, Twain finds logic and sense to exclude and draw off the Orient from his narrative. This explains the impossibility of locating the Orient in many scenes in the narrative. Most of the times, the land is presented as a desert and empty with no population. This depopulation technique structures many of travels made to the Holy Land in the American literature. Like European former colonial discourse, this technique has become an obvious reflection of a nineteenth century emerging Zionist/ American alliance (supported with the American's newly acquired advanced and scientific knowledge) to occupy and fill in such emptiness and bareness, or the desert way of life.
The authority Twain inscribes to himself in the narrative calls him to create rallying metaphors and depictions of the Orient according to the wish of the imaginer. Such realities are intentionally constructed to satisfy the curiosity and anxiety of the American reader about the 'exotic' nature of the Orient ('Other'). To fulfill this aim, Twain detaches himself and other travelers from some earlier stories that have been circulated in the American culture about the Orient. He poses ideological difference (between what the travelers had learned, heard, and read and the actual reality they encounter in Palestine) as the formulaic (rigid) basis of his representational relations in his narrative. Among several locations in the text is the comparison he makes between other American travelers' narratives (mainly Prime and Grimes) and his own which were all about the beauty of an Arab woman they had encountered while journeying in Nazareth. Ironically, Twain assumes that they are talking about the same woman who has been fixed and eternalized in such miscellaneous narratives. Twain expresses his suspicions of such narratives, and he makes clarifications of the erroneous, misguided and flawed images provided by those travelers. The falsification of this conclusion is intended to misguide the American reader to construct stereotypical images about the Other. This inclusive technique establishes Twain's narrative as a conclusive word of travels to the Holy Land. We can trace how Twain handles such issue in the successive representation of his "verdict" in the following quotes, before he look[s] up the authorities for all these opinions" (383) ( p365-370 on authority): "The Nazarene girls are homely. Some of them have large, lustrous eyes, but none of them have pretty faces. These girls wear a single garment usually, and it is loose, shapeless, of undecided color; it is generally out of repair, too… They wear no shoes and stockings. They are the most human girls we have found in the country yet, and the best-natured. But there is no question that these picturesque maidens sadly lack comeliness." (p. 383) "See that tall, graceful girl! Look at that Madonna-like beauty of her countenance!" (p. 383) "Another pilgrim came along presently and said: "Observe that tall, graceful girl; what queenly, Madonna-like gracefulness of beauty is in her countenance." (p. 383) "The third and last pilgrim moved by before long, and he said: 'Ah, what a tall, graceful girl! What Madonnalike gracefulness of queenly beauty!'" (p. 383) Such American narratives are vindicated by Twain's authoritative voice who suggests:"I said: 'She is not tall, she is short; she is not beautiful, she is homely; she is graceful enough, though, I grant, but she is rather boisterous.'" (383) After accumulating many versions of the same story, Twain concludes in bringing up the source for all these "verdicts": "The verdicts were all in. It was time to look up the authorities for all these opinions; I found this paragraph, which follows. Written by whom? Wm. C. Grimes" (383). One of Twain's basic jobs in the journey is to search for, or in his words to "look up the authorities for all these opinions" referring to the preceding American or European travel works on the Holy Land. Twain, himself, acquires the authority to act on behalf of all travelers and holds of the official permission to correct all the preceding narratives that had been circulated about the Orient in the American literary and non literary productions. In doing so, he practices the right to imprint facts (not representations) and to enforce images and portray ultimate descriptions as the only reality of the Orient -only from his standpoint. It is therefore not a significant issue for him if cultural, political or social circumstances vary/varied in different preceding or future travels, as his travel is fastened and fixated around such images, and, as such, is considered as the only true story of the Holy Land travelogues.
Twain's exclusion of the preceding American narratives utilizes differential representation strategy with its positional superiority technique. He makes it clear that his mission has become to "correct," the accumulated mistaken images that have been built up in the American's memory about the Holy Land, which becomes a major function of his narrative. Twain articulates this aim: "I claim the right to correct misstatements, and have so corrected the color of the water in the above recapitulation" (367). He also strives to strip beauty from descriptions which, according to him, were "well calculated to deceive" the American Mind: "It is ingeniously written descriptions and well calculated to deceive. But if the paint and the ribbons and the flowers be stripped from it, a skeleton will be found beneath" (367). This quote suggests Twain's assumption that such narratives are not only erroneous but they are made with the deliberate intention "to deceive". Twain, consequently, assumes an academic and authoritative voice as a superior standpoint to put the long American history of journeying to the Holy Land right.

Additionally, Twain's narrative is plausibly presented as an authentic and reliable
Part of the assumed originality and authenticity of this document originates in the assumed veracity of the text and the corrections made by Twain which are enabled by the differential representation processes and oppositional strategy maintained all throughout the travel text. Twain maintains a disapproving attitude toward such out of this world and imaginary transcripts.
Twain's characterization of native Palestinian people, in the Holy Land plays a significant role in (re-)presenting, or (re)processing prior old images of the Orient and presenting them to the American reader according to the strategic dichotomy of differential representation. Twain's strategy reflects the weight that he puts on the absurdity of the Holy Land scene and its lack of resonance with images that had been accumulated in the American photographic mind. For Twain, such images, are not correct and they are totally estranged from reality as he repetitively stresses the differences between his 'realities' and the images that had been stored in Americans' minds. In Palestine, Twain makes American readers experience persistent and uninterrupted processes of reductionism and denial of those images with the intention of portraying the 'true' Orient. In such narratives, Twain intends to accomplish some conversions of the dreams and fancies, part of fulfillig the American self consciousness aspiration, that have been misleading Americans. Twain's representations make his readers conscious of the harsh reality of the Holy Land experience travel, which had been depriving him of the "most cherished" memories that he had constructed of Palestine: Travel and experience mar the grandest pictures and rob us of the most cherished traditions of our boyhood. Well, let them go. I have already seen the empire of King Solomon diminish to the size of the state of Pennsylvania; I suppose I can bear the reduction of the seas and the rivers. (433) What Twain encounters in Palestine is "reduced," "robbed," "failed" turned into being "legendary." This is why one cherished "dream" and expectation "had failed" after another in the Holy Land journey, together with "The legends of the Sunday schools" (427): "Because another dream, another cherished hope, had failed" (430). Repeatedly, Twain presents how the other American travel writers felt and what they wrote about Palestine. The diversity in their attitudes is one more erroneous approach for the Holy Land. But why should not the truth be spoken of this region? Is the truth harmful? Has it ever needed to hide its face?"(368) Twain wonders, when he addresses the diversity in the American traveler's attitudes to the Holy Land which could be, for him, one more erroneous and misleading approach for the Holy Land panorama: The veneration and the affection which some of these men felt for the scenes they were speaking of heated their fancies and biased their judgment; but the pleasant falsities they wrote were full of honest sincerity, at any rate. Others wrote as they did because they feared it would be unpopular to write otherwise. Others were hypocrites and deliberately meant to deceive. (368) In this implementation of "cultural politics of Difference," Twain introduces three major imperial contexts or devices through which American identity in travel literature is produced in the Holy Land scene. First, Twain normalizes the image of the Orient to the American reader, when he brings in already (American) scenes and familiar images of the Red Indians into the Oriental panorama. Second, when the scene is found familiar by the American reader, Twain is, logically and convincingly legalized to pass his idealized values and judgments (inscribed as being purely American in the text) about the Oriental people and their cultures as legal, valid and justifiable. In doing so, he imbues and reinforces the ideals that an American identity constitutes. For an American reader, Twain's text is, thus, legitimate and eligible, officially authorized, qualified and adequate to direct and have power over, and control the narrative with its assumed, accepted, taken for granted primitive components. Third, in his ability to reflect comprehensively on prior Holy Land works, Twain's narrator is made competent, highly knowledgeable and thus capable of making inclusive and wide-ranging conclusions, which are not indifferent in anyway, about the Oriental people and their cultures. Accordingly, Twain is enabled to conclude that it is the inadequacy of the Oriental people (together with their natural and inborn attributes of lowliness and inferiority) that "makes a white man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe." (340) "but all women and children looked worn and sad and distressed with hunger. They reminded me much of Indians, did these people. They had but little clothing,… uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly Indian, and which makes a white man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe." (340) In its entire reliance on the differential representation technique, with its emphasis on power relations, Twain's narrative produces and reinforces some newly acquired American distinctive traits and characteristics that become idiosyncratic of the American identity. The Holy Land journey from this cultural perspective shows with illustration how dealings with the Orient of The Innocents Abroad represents a number of modes or perceptions, each of which reflects the complicated development of the American self in the nineteenth century American culture from this positional power perspective: First, the inferiority of the other in Twain's course of travel is highly utilized to reflect and enhance the superior selfimage of the American. This superiority, (materialized in many strategies in the travel text) begins in inscribing power, authority, dominance, authenticity and other techniques, as well, in the self/other representations in the text. This produces the twentieth century noticeable American cultural and political hegemony or cultural legitimacy that accompanies so much of the American politics in the new millennium. This clearly illustrates why Twain's representation of the Orient cannot be detached from his American condition, social position and belief about the other cultures and peoples in his literary achievements.
Second, the superiority, Twain employs in his narrative, as produced in the differential representation technique, allows the American traveler to construct and constitute his identity only in relation to negative and unconstructive images, focusing, specifically, on the distinction of the American's personality and the inferiority, lowliness and inadequacy of the Other Oriental. And in doing so, Twain leaves no room for any form of communication to structure his travel narrative, to connect or bring together the two opposing parties. Hence, the evolving and growing identity of the American man is materialized in the narrative in terms of this sense of difference which is produced by the oppositional superiority technique as it tends all the time to capitalize on inscribing hierarchical, cultural and historical differences between the American and the Oriental other.
Third, Twain's cultural model in The Innocents Abroad is associated with the emerging American values and ideals, supported, maintained and legitimatized by the Western Eurocentric ideals of the Western mainstream culture, which are exemplified as being the only rightful and legitimate stance in the text. In doing this, Twain promotes American values as the only norm, bequeathing the white American traveler with power, authority, centrality and legitimacy and the Other Oriental with inadequacy, detachment, shortsightedness, lowliness, inferiority and weakness. The separation into two divisions, the American self and the Oriental Other, who differ widely from, or contradict, each other, (that Twain narrative insists on retaining), produces and sustains persistent and stereotypical dichotomies that begin to be repeated in other ensuing American cultural forms, most clearly in the rising and influential American film industry all throughout the Twentieth century. Ideologically speaking, this gives, again, rise to the American cultural hegemony in the Twentieth century which started to replace its British and French counterparts during that period of time.

Conclusion
The negative aspect of the Oriental way of life is a major premise in Twain's narrative; the idea that results in the production of relevant hierarchical representations. These images, repeated in different scenes in the narrative, are processed as a reality in the American life and culture. What is strikingly apparent in Twain's narrative is how a descriptive, graphic and explanatory representational work is based on images of negation, repudiation and denial and thus, being a travel narrative, leaving nothing to confirm, affirm or assert about the Holy Land scene reality, legitimacy and accuracy. Within these deconstructive and negative contexts, (which are filled with intentional images of denial, refutation, dissent and exclusion),-the authenticity of Twain's work as a travel writing lacks the veracity and firmness that travelogues are supposed to have. In what might be called the positivity of travel discourses, Twain strives to display these stereotypical depictions with claimed certainty, acceptance, or affirmation. Such failure in Twain's travel discourses demonstrates Twain's high awareness of his American identity, which is manufactured through the repudiation the Other. This failure in the part of Twain's discourse could be realized as an attempt to confirm the individual and national identity of Twain and his travelers. In other words, it is a further step to the projection of Americanism with its distinction, difference, and towering attributes.
In this paper, we attempt to construe a critical reading of Twain's transcript regarding the 'construction of the superiority of the 'self' via the inferiority of the Other (the Orient) in this case. Twain's narrative, in effect, is enabled to provide opposite negative images of the superiority of the American culture, personality and way of life; images that will be stored in the American mind for years to come. The American, in its supreme and practical (high) ideals, civilized and idealized image, is placed in complete opposition to the Orient whose image is constructed around inferior attributes which are basically intended to construct the America's modernized and unique identity. While such an idea might recur relatively and randomly in different academic forms, Twain's narrative invariably contextualizes, and restructures the rising American character in a discourse of political differentiation and power relations.