Across the Equator

Mark Twain’s Chaotic Sea Changes

Abstract

In 1895, Mark Twain embarked on a worldwide lecture tour. The professional commitment combined with the writer’s urge to write a new travelogue (Following the Equator), featuring an American tourist persona keen on (re)discovering the planet for the sake of leisure and of writing the account of his “pleasure excursion” (28). This article focuses on Twain’s account of his crossing the equator at the beginning of the book, for it reveals at once the complexity of the touring experience: the passengers’ indulgent motivation leads to a regressive attitude, as the confrontation with the uncanniness of the liminal equator plunges them into a chaos whose baffling meaning is left to the attentive reader’s meditation. The last part establishes that Twain’s comfortable crossing of the equator reveals him to be simultaneously a foolish explorer and an accidental traveler of his psyche.