Lighting Out For the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture
1998
Order from: Oxford University Press
Mark Twain has been called the American Cervantes, our Homer, our Tolstoy, our Shakespeare. Ernest Hemingway maintained that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the phrase "New Deal" from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Twain's Gilded Age gave an entire era its name. Twain is everywhere--in ads for Bass Ale, in episodes of "Star Trek," as a greeter in Nevada's Silver Legacy casino. Clearly, the reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated. In Lighting Out for the Territory, Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin blends personal narrative with reflections on history, literature, and popular culture to provide a lively and provocative look at who Mark Twain really was, how he got to be that way, and what we do with his legacy today.
Fishkin illuminates the many ways that America has embraced Mark Twain--from the scenes and plots of his novels, to his famous quips, to his bushy-haired, white-suited persona. She reveals that we have constructed a Twain often far removed from the actual writer. For instance, we travel to Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's home town, a locale that in his work is both the embodiment of the innocence of childhood and also an emblem of hypocrisy, barbarity, and moral rot. The author spotlights the fact that Hannibal today attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists and takes in millions yearly, by focusing on Tom Sawyer's boyhood exploits--marble-shoots and white-washed fences--and ignoring Twain's portraits of the darker side of the slave South. The narrative moves back and forth from modern Hannibal to antebellum Hannibal and to Mark Twain's childhood experiences with brutality and slavery. Her exploration of those subjects in his work shows that Tom Sawyer's fence isn't the only thing being white-washed in Hannibal. Fishkin's research yields fresh insights into the remarkable story of how this child of slaveholders became the author of the most powerful anti-racist novel by an American.
Whether lending his name to a pizza parlor in Louisiana, a diner in Jackson Heights, New York, or an asteroid in outer space, whether making cameo appearances on "Cheers" and "Bonanza," or turning up in novels as a detective or a love interest, Mark Twain's presence in contemporary culture is pervasive and intriguing. Fishkin's wide-ranging examination of that presence demonstrates how Twain and his work echo, ripple, and reverberate throughout our society. We learn that Walt Disney was a great fan of Twain's fiction (in fact, "Tom Sawyer's Island" in Disneyland is the only part of the park that Disney himself designed) as is Chuck Jones, who credits the genesis of cartoon character Wile E. Coyote to the comic description of a coyote in Roughing It. We learn of Mark Twain impersonators (Hal Holbrook, for instance, has played Twain in some 1,500 performances) and recent movie versions of Twain books, such as A Million to Juan. And we discover how Twain's image can be seen in claymation, in animatronics and robotics, in virtual reality, and on any number of home-pages on the Internet.
Lighting Out for the Territory offers an engrossing look at how Mark Twain's life and work have been cherished, memorialized, exploited, and misunderstood. It offers a wealth of insight into Twain, into his work, and into our nation, both past and present.
Reviews
"Certain literary scholars reach a point in their careers when they earn enough distinction in their field to write something other than literary criticism. Fishkin, lifelong Twain scholar, is just such a scholar. In her previous volume, Was Huck Black?, Fishkin boldly argued for the influence of African American voices on Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Here, she has produced a collection of essays that is one part American history, one part literary criticism and two parts travelogue. Drawing on America's geography and popular culture for background, Fishkin revisits her earlier work from the perspective of a stranger in a strange land-the "world of Twain" as it exists in America today. In her first essay, Fishkin describes with biting irony her visit to Hannibal, Mo., Twain's birthplace, which is now a tourist trap, and the obliviousness of Hannibal's citizens to Twain's darker views on Southern racism. In her second, she visits the abolitionist town of Elmira, N.Y. in an attempt to understand why Twain's residence there changed his views on race. In the third, she takes up Twain's popular presence in film, modern novels and on stage. Fishkin is fascinating and cogent throughout: tough on censorship, soft on Twain, Fishkin's book is a call to arms that we not forget America's history of racism by banning from our classrooms one of the few authors who wrote about it with honesty and clarity." --Publishers Weekly
"In these three essays and long epilog, Fishkin (Was Huck Black?, LJ 4/1/93), whose recent discovery that Twain modeled Huckleberry Finn's voice after a black boy's made news beyond the academic world, discusses how Americans have, for nearly a century, appropriated Twain for a multitude of their own purposes. In doing so, she argues, they distort the work of the author and his often troublesome beliefs. Twain is everywhere in American culture, from "Tom Sawyer's Island" in Disneyland, to the name of Missouri banks, to Hal Holbrook's meticulous impersonation, "Mark Twain Tonight." Often, however, we are guilty of seeing only the Twain with whom we feel comfortable. His hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, for instance, which derives millions from tourists, glosses over the antislavery core of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to construct an appealing (and lucrative) but historically fraudulent picture of a haven for white childhood innocence. Jargon-free and reader-friendly, Fishkin's personal narrative is recommended for all libraries.” — Library Journal
"Ms. Fishkin's ;reflections on Mark Twain and American culture; are an illuminating companion to any consideration of Twain's work. -- The New York Times Book Review