The Jester and the Sages: Mark Twain in Conversation with Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx by Forrest G. Robinson, Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr., and Catherine Carlstroem (review)

The Jester and the Sages relates Mark Twain to three other influential nineteenth-century men: Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. The point of this exercise, as Forrest G. Robinson—one of the book’s three authors along with Gabriel Brahm Jr. and Catherine Carlstroem—wastes no time in explaining, is “to highlight the many significant ways in which the American humorist’s leading questions, ideas, and assumptions overlap with those of his much more solemn and systematic continental contemporaries” (2). As he recognizes from the outset, the primary question is “why?” What is special about these three sages, or what is it that they reveal about Twain; why should we take the time to compare the American novelist to these three Europeans in particular?

To its credit, The Jester and the Sages is revealing in regards to Twain. Through a comparison with Freud, Robinson draws out how “Twain’s central preoccupation with guilt, and most especially with guilt about race-slavery, is obliquely inflected with repressed memories of formative sexual experience” (60). While the intersection of guilt, sex, and race continues to show itself throughout the essay, however, it fails to become a central theme, leaving any assessment of its relevancy up to the reader.

The same problem occurs later, when Robinson and Carlstroem use A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to demonstrate how Twain was concerned with the same issues of modernization and the improvement of the human condition that troubled Marx. The two contrast sharply in their vision of progress, however, as for Twain the problems of the sixth century cannot be alleviated by the advances of the nineteenth (129). This insight ends the second chapter, and questions such as how it might influence our understanding of history in Twain’s other novels, or how Twain’s response to the “durability” of social structures compares with Marx’s followers remain unanswered.

Both of these moments left me wondering if it would have been more revealing to build on previous Marxist or Freudian readings of Twain or to engage in an extended comparison of form with Nietzsche, who like Twain was neither “solemn” nor “systematic.” The best moments of the book take place when the authors move away from biographical comparisons and offer textual analysis, but not enough time is spent on the latter. This has the effect of obscuring the overarching themes that The Jester and the Sages attempts to bring out; while the book is filled with interesting tidbits and details, all of which I’m sure would be useful for future Twain scholars, it still cannot answer the question of “why?” I’m left at the end still asking why should we care about these brief similarities? What do these three sages reveal about Twain?