"The Jester and the Sages" approaches the life and work of Mark
Twain by placing him in conversation with three eminent
philosophers of his time--Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and
Karl Marx. Unprecedented in Twain scholarship, this
interdisciplinary analysis by Forrest G. Robinson, Gabriel Noah
Brahm Jr., and Catherine Carlstroem rescues the American genius
from his role as funny-man by exploring how his reflections on
religion, politics, philosophy, morality, and social issues overlap
the philosophers' developed thoughts on these subjects. Remarkably,
they had much in common.
During their lifetimes, Twain, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx
witnessed massive upheavals in Western constructions of religion,
morality, history, political economy, and human nature. The
foundations of reality had been shaken, and one did not need to be
a philosopher--nor did one even need to read philosophy--to weigh
in on what this all might mean. Drawing on a wide range of primary
and secondary materials, the authors show that Twain was well
attuned to debates of the time. Unlike his Continental
contemporaries, however, he was not as systematic in developing his
views.
Brahm and Robinson's chapter on Nietzsche and Twain reveals
their subjects' common defiance of the moral and religious truisms
of their time. Both desired freedom, resented the constraints of
Christian civilization, and saw punishing guilt as the disease of
modern man. Pervasive moral evasion and bland conformity were the
principal end result, they believed.
In addition to a continuing focus on guilt, Robinson discovers
in his chapter on Freud and Twain that the two men shared a
lifelong fascination with the mysteries of the human mind. From the
formative influence of childhood and repression, to dreams and the
unconscious, the mind could free people or keep them in perpetual
chains. The realm of the unconscious was of special interest to
both men as it pertained to the creation of art.
In the final chapter, Carlstroem and Robinson explain that,
despite significant differences in their views of human nature,
history, and progress, Twain and Marx were both profoundly
disturbed by economic and social injustice in the world. Of
particular concern was the gulf that industrial capitalism opened
between the privileged elite property owners and the vast class of
property-less workers. Moralists impatient with conventional
morality, Twain and Marx wanted to free ordinary people from the
illusions that enslaved them.
Twain did not know the work's of Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx
well, yet many of his thoughts cross those of his philosophical
contemporaries. By focusing on the deeper aspects of Twain's
intellectual makeup, Robinson, Brahm, and Carlstroem supplement the
traditional appreciation of the forces that drove Twain's
creativity and the dynamics of his humor.
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