Teaching Mark Twain in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s

Monthly Review, June, 1984 by David Herreshoff

Life imitates art, but since the situation of a teacher changes with the concerns of students, the teacher must show life imitating art in different ways at different times. Unless the focus changes with shifts in the consciousness of students, the teacher will be more hindrance than help in opening students to that shock of recognition which can occur when art is seen to anticipate life. What follows is an account of some attempts to be helpful to students who have read Mark Twain with me in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s at a large urban university.

Let me start with a point about class consciousness in my locale. In the 1960s there were obvious differences between the concerns of students on the Motor City campus where I teach and the concerns of students in the Ivy League and the large residential state universities. To make a convenient comparison, the number of students attending Wayne State University is near the number who go to the University of Michigan. But in the peak years of student activism in the 1960s the Wayne State chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was about one fifth the strength of the Michigan chapter. Why? Being in this case determined consciousness. Students who went to Michigan were people for whom college seemed a hereditary right. But the parents of Wayne State students usually had not gone to college, and their children were in college to emancipate themselves from the working-class status of their parents. They were motivated no doubt partly by parents driven by the American Dream which in one of its versions says: "Though we haven't realized the Dream ourselves, surely our children will." The drive to make it in capitalist society checks generous impulses, with underdogs prevented by systematic intimidation, exploitation, or neglect. And the sense of secure possession of unmerited privileges sometimes gives spur to those impulses.

So the offspring of the privates in Detroit's industrial army tended to keep their distance from the children of the captains of industry in nearby Ann Arbor when the latter demonstrated their solidarity with the movements for civil rights in Mississippi and national self-determination in Vietnam. And when the Ann Arbor chapter of SDS--in the initial phase of its metamorphosis into the Weather Underground--renamed itself the Jesse James Gang, I was able to connect that event for a Wayne State American literature class with the qualifications for membership in Tom Sawyer's band of robbers. Applicants, you may recall, were required to come from respectable families and be willing to have the band kill the respectable families of members who might betray the band's secrets. The offspring of a white-trash vagrant, Huckleberry Finn, was initially disqualified for membership in the band until a way was found to fudge the membership rules for him. There is no fun in being an outlaw, Mark Twain suggests, unless you have the sanctuary of affluence behind you. I suspect my Wayne State students were better situated to see the humor in this than were the founding members of the Ann Arbor Jesse James Gang.

But if Wayne State students at the end of the 1960s might see a connection between Tom Sawyer's robber band and the SDS, their current successors would not. How many current undergraduates in the United States of Amnesia know what SDS was? How many Wayne State students this year would see the Ann Arbor Jesse James Gang with its cult of Bonnie and Clyde as a case of life imitating page one of Huckleberry Finn? Few, I imagine, in the quiet despair of

Detroit as it is, where to think about anything on campus beyond getting a degree in accounting, nursing, criminal justice, or computer science and then quitting the scene must take extraordinary stamina. So the Jesse James Gang has become as useless an instructional aid as it ever was as a means to social justice. I wouldn't bring it up in class discussion now. Besides, in general, it is getting harder to make and take jokes about nihilism in Detroit, where heroin pedlars of Tom Sawyer's age have recently been killing customers who switched brands in front of a housing project a mile from the Wayne State campus.

Americans sense--perhaps Detroiters more than others--that we have entered upon one of our explosive decades, one that may resemble the 1930s more than the 1960s but which will produce scenes reminiscent of both. There was a sense of economic security or at least hope in the 1960s which is now collapsing but which has yet to result in that utter disillusionment with laissez-faire capitalism which came to prevail in the 1930s. College students grimly pursue their studies as a way to personal economic salvation as they increasingly did in the later 1970s. Some who could once afford Michigan now come to Wayne State. Some who could once afford Wayne State are dropping out of college. Their dropping out of course is unlike the blissful tuning in and dropping out associated with Timothy Leary in the 1960s. It is involuntary. The supply-siders in government do not regard education as a supplier of anything worthy of being subsidized. As if determined to verify predictions of Marx, they promote a class polarization of American society with a fanaticism unparalleled by efforts in behalf of the rich of any administration in living memory. Bitterness goads the victims; the energies for massive protest collect. As the themes of frustrated movements reemerge in new patterns, connections between life and art are being rearranged in the perceptions of both teachers and students.