Customer Reviews

Lighting Out For the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture

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This book is all over the map. At its best the book covers the intellectual and moral distance from Twain's boyhood in Hannibal (where slavery was accepted as "natural") to his Elmira, Connecticut evolution, where, as a kind of Southern expatriate (and son-in-law of a fervent abolitionist living in an important Underground railway stop), he challenged himself and the nation to fight racial inequality. At its worst, the book is a somewhat self-important narrative of the author's journey from researcher to advocate. In toto, it is well worth reading.

Dr. Fishkin, editor of Oxford's complete works of Mark Twain, wrote the earlier "Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American voices" in which she argues that the "voice" of Huck Finn is drawn directly from the "rich creative oral tradition" of slaves and ex-slaves whom Twain met. Here she revisits Hannibal, the town that practiced "mild domestic slavery," though Twain's own father sold a slave "down the river" (and away from his family) for $40 worth of tar. Perhaps not coincidentally this is how much the eventually tar-feathered king and duke received for selling Jim. Racism is still evident in Hannibal, where the "erasure" of any black history mirrors the nationwide removal of "Huckleberry Finn" from school libraries. Fishkin argues convincingly that Twain's use of humor and irony serves, from Elmira onward, to expose, ridicule, and directly confront the enduring injustices of the Reconstruction years. Indeed, the controversial ending of `Finn,' in which an already-freed Jim is locked up and subjected to terrors by Tom and Huck, is interpreted by Fishkin and others as an accurate comment on the mirage of freedom offered to ex-slaves during Reconstruction.

This covers the first 126 pages of the book, and aside from some rather self-important comment on a five-year-old's hitting her with a miniature bullwhip, "I had just been bullwhipped on the banks of the Mississippi," it is a sobering and fascinating account of the racial whitewashing of Hannibal and America.

The next 77 pages contain some redundant, wide-eyed commentary on the omnipresence of Twain in American culture, both low and high (Chapter 3), and, in the epilogue, unnecessary innocent-by-association defenses of Twain. Both sections could have been pruned and achieved the same effect. Chapter 3 is amusing; it seems that Twain's image has been appropriated by entrepreneurs, playwrights and others to sell everything from imported ale to dry-cleaning to TV scripts. Many of Twain's famous quotes (e.g., "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it," and "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco") are either undocumented or came from someone else. But these examples, while suggesting that Twain functions the "consummate Rorschach test" of one's beliefs about America, are piled atop each other to include digressions such as which is the best movie adaptation of Twain's work; a long catalogue of books and other media that are either about Twain, "borrow" from his works (including her 11-year-old's "A Return to Camelot"), or that feature a fictionalized Twain; a comparison of both Fishkin's laptop computer and an IBM voice recognition machine to Twain's interest in an automatic typesetting machine. (The IBM machine, Fishkin dutifully reports, interpreted Twain's "rotten glad" as "writing glad," and "anybody but lied" as "any body butterfly.")

The "epilogue" also takes too long; Dr. Fishkin vigorously but somewhat condescendingly defends "Huckleberry Finn" from Jane Smiley's 1992 critique in "Harper's." Fishkin questions whether Smiley's could comprehend writer Ralph Wiley's deep valuation of Twain: "How could understanding Mark Twain's works be essential to any child in twenty-first century America....Smiley would shake her head. Not a clue." Dr. Fishkin also parades an all-star gallery of authors who defend Twain, and comment on his influence on their writing. She quotes a "silver-haired Oxford don" who sputtered, "This is going to sound very negative, but I can't figure out what you Americans see in this book," and later speculates, somewhat smugly, that the "don would have agreed, most likely" with an 1870 British publication describing Twain as a "very offensive specimen of the vulgarest kind of Yankee."

This is still an excellent book, despite its need for some editorial restraint, and its meandering trip through Twain's influence on culture. Because the book has so much to offer its few faults are all the more annoying. Perhaps Dr. Fishkin is preaching to the unconverted: Those who think Twain's masterpiece is a racist tract that should be abolished from schools and libraries. Despite the few flaws towards the end of the book, it is a fascinating account of a man's--and a nation's--challenging journey towards its ideals.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin clearly loves her work. She loves Mark Twain and she loves being able to write about him and teach about him. This book, written in an invitingly direct and personal style free of jargon, is best read as a voyage into the life and thought of a fine and creative scholar fully engaged with her chosen subject.

The book is arranged into three chapters. The first, "The Matter of Hannibal," ably juxtaposes Fishkin's experience of a visit to Hannibal, MO, and her reflections on that visit with her investigation of the role of Hannibal, MO, and Twain's youthful experiences on his classic novels THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER and THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN. The second, EXCAVATIONS, is a quasi-autobiographical account of her research and writing of her most famous book (WAS HUCK BLACK? MARK TWAIN AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN VOICES), blended with her reflections on the controversy surrounding HUCKLEBERRY FINN as an allegedly racist book. The last chapter, RIPPLES AND REVERBERATIONS, is a blend of historical literary criticism and meditations on the uses to which Americans and others have put Mark Twain the writer, "Mark Twain" the self-created character, and Mark Twain the human being.

LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY is a lovely book; it's a dream to read, and it's thought-provoking in the best sense. It's a model of how literary critics should write both for one another and for a wider audience, and it's an eye-opening examination of one of the greatest writers this country -- or the human race -- ever produced.

-- R.B. Bernstein, Adjunct Professor of Law, New York Law School

I find the book very refreshing on a number of counts. First, it demonstrates the ways in which the actual history of Blacks and Whites in American has often been misrepresented not only by fake historical re-creations such as the ones the author encountered in Hanibal, but by school texts, historical markers, and museum exhibits as well. Balanced and fair-minded, she also points out the struggles of people like the mayor of Hanibal to correct those distortions. Second, she helps to put to rest the often repeated charge that Huckleberry Finn is a racist novel by putting it in the context of Twain's other writings. Because the book is not only informative, but interesting and easy to read,I will recommend this book to my students. I am very glad our library has it. Every college library should.

Bear with me for a moment: Sometime around 7th grade, a teacher had my class keep scrapbooks with modern representations of Greek mythology. How quickly the books filled up with examples ranging from cartoons to place names, museum exhibits, sports writing and more! After cataloguing, we were asked, why do the myths live on? Lighting Out For the Territory reminds me of that exercise. It traces how America and Twain reached the point of the conception of Huckleberry Finn and asks how we have since lived with or, in some cases, without its lessons. What have we saved from Twain and his ideas, what have we lost of him and why? Was/is Twain and his work racist? Good questions, explored in the context of the scholar's personal adventures. Our author may not be able to do lunch in Hannibal, MO again soon, but she's welcome at my house any time.

Combining personal narrative, biography and criticism, this book examines both how America shaped Mark Twain and how he continues to influence American society today. The ways in which Twain is recognized and celebrated today are influenced by each person or group's perception of him. In Hannibal, Missouri, the setting of his most popular books, Twain is celebrated annually, but without reference to Huckleberry Finn or the slaveholding society that book depicts. In Elmira, New York, Twain married into an abolitionist family that was active with the Underground Railroad. This led him to reexamine the institution of slavery and provides the background for Elmira's broader recognition of Twain's career. The book's discussion of the issues surrounding race and slavery in Twain's writings and their reception today is especially illuminating and timely. The book also examines his role in inspiring hundreds of writers around the world to write in the vernacular first person, portrayals of him in later fiction (including a posthumous novel written by Ouija board!) and by Twain impersonators, the reasons he is so frequently quoted, and his prominent presence in cyberspace. Although written by a leading Twain scholar (author of Was Huck Black? and editor of the 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain), the book is made instantly accessible as we follow Fishkin's narrative of her own path to a fascination with Mark Twain. Highly recommended.

I enjoyed this book the way I enjoyed Richard Holmes' Footsteps and Thomas Hoving's King of the Confessors which loosely fit into a genre I call "scholars' adventures." It serves other more valuable purposes, though. It is a lucid rereading of Huckleberry Finn that leaves the joy and surprise of the work intact for the reader. It addresses the "N" word problem head-on; I appreciate Fisher Fiskin's unwavering commitment to her interpretation. It makes sense of Twain's oddysey from the child of slavery-defending parents to the adult abolitionist. It is a clear-eyed vision of the troubled history of race relations then and now. As life (and literature) affirming as FF's voice is, I remain stunned and angered by the America revealed by the bullwhip episode in contemporary Hannibal. Her observation that the controversy surrounding Huckleberry Finn is tied to how the novel is (not) taught is likewise commentary on our culture. If everyone

What I liked best about this book was that most copies have apparently been dumped cheap on used book sites. This is a sycophantic and simpering paen to anything having to do with black history in general and Huck Finn's staying power as a literary staple in particular. If you might feel in ANY way Twain's novel is maybe not THE Great American Novel---be you, like one disagreeable sort mentioned, an Oxford Don---you are raked over the coals. After all, Hemingway, who didn't ever write THE Great American Novel either, as well as Sherwood Anderson, whose name Fisher Fishkin feels is apparently still a household word simply for agreeing with Hemingway, said it was the greatest thing since seedless watermelon. The author takes cheap shots correcting any other [obviously to her racist] dissenting opinions; a more qualified literary historian than Ms. Fisher Fishkin, who wonders if Uncle Tom's Cabin, which likely began the Civil War, might also be worth reading, is said thereby to be keeping the wonders of Twain and Huck from her children, who apparently will accordingly grow up to be racists as well. While there is an occasional glimmer of interesting reportage here [the favored souvenir in Hannibal when this was written, the 'citizen journalist' author reports, was a small bull-whip for children], this book is totally embarrassing to read, and I think much worse to have written. In one particularly odious passage, a major black novelist is said once to have asked the ever so clever author if she's tenured---the implication being that she must be, after all, since she's ever sooooo politically correct. [And we can be certain she has been tenured by now.] I have read the work of this black novelist, and met him once, and feel strongly that if he EVER actually found himself pandering to a white woman/professor in this fashion he certainly would slash his own wrists. The Lighting Out author is also the author of another sainted volume wondering if Huck was Black too. Had Fisher Fishkin worked up her act in the 1950s, it'd have been "Was Huck RED?". [I await, with baited breath, her ground-breaking sequel proving that Huck was, unbeknownst to the rest of us, probably Latino as well.] Finally I note that the so-called Industry Review of this Lit. Crit. Masterwork suggests that occasionally a literature professor gains such vast clout that he or she can move on and write "something other than literary history". Surely Fisher Fishin has produced something other than literary history here, and she should surely move up the social food chain to writing stand-up monologues for someone like Al Sharpton, or shoved-down-your-throat policy for Obama. Leave this book in the remainder bin, unless it is very very very cheap and you have a table with one short leg the missing micrometers of which exactly match its thinness.

I ordered too quickly, apparently, and didn't check author, etc. I didn't want this book, but the newer one by the same title by Morris.

A remarkable book that unlocks the elusive "humorist" with every tool in the locksmith's kit.

I was disappointed with this book. Shelley Fisher Fishkin seemed enter with a bias against Hannibal and everything traditional. After reading the book, I traveled to Hannibal and visited with people there about it. They were less than enthusiastic about it and one man claimed the bull whip incident was "completely made up". There are mistakes as well. Fishkin claims that Joe Douglass's name on his grave is misspelled. For example, she says that on his wife's gravestone the name is spelled differently. The stones are next to each other and they are spelled the same. If your goal is to blast small town America then this book is for you, but if you are looking for the whole story, read Twain's autobiography.