Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture. - book reviews

*** When Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a leading Mark Twain scholar, visited Hannibal, Mo., where the author grew up, she found that the town, in effect, had been transformed into a theme park, a living evocation of pages from Tom Sawyer. However, she was appalled to discover how much of Twain's searing vision, as well as the unpleasant realities of 19th-century Hannibal, had been expunged from the popular tourist attraction. Sanitized Hannibal is a monument to nostalgia for pre-industrial innocence, a sentimentalization of childhood and antebellum America. What the nation has made of Twain is the inspiration for Fishkin's meditation that is likely to arouse anyone with even a casual interest in American culture.

"Mark Twain may be the consummate Rorschach test for anyone who sets out to understand the United States," declares Fishkin. In her investigation to understand how Twain has been interpreted and misunderstood, her first stop is Hannibal, but she also looks into Elmira, N.Y., and Hartford, Conn., as well as Twain's continuing presence in books, classrooms, films, plays, television programs, and ads throughout the world. Fishkin's Twain is first and foremost a scourge of bigotry, and she is intent on restoring him to his proper place in this country's continuing conversation about race.

"How did Twain come to understand the unspeakable betrayals at the heart of American history?," Fishkin asks. Her answer takes her to Elmira, where Twain was bestfriended by Jervis Langdon, his abolitionist father-in-law, and where he absorbed the stories and voices of former slaves, including Frederick Douglass and Mary Ann Cord. In Hartford, she comes upon a Twain letter that demonstrates his role as benefactor to a black law student and that puts the lie to current attempts to portray the author of Huckleberry Finn as himself a racist.

Fishkin defends Twain's complex novel against the obtuse claims of literalists who want to ban it from classrooms and libraries. She argues that the racism in Huckleberry Finn is not the author's, but a necessary ingredient in Twain's intricate irony designed to expose the hypocrisy extant in American justice. Fishkin catalogues authors of many races and nationalities who claim Twain as progenitor and find, as she does, that the lessons of his stories are "troubling and dangerous and disruptive and crucial."

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