User:JBrown/sandbox: Difference between revisions

Line 64:

'''BOXING AS AMERICAN WAR'''

The boxers in these stories reveal the ways in which seemingly solid distinctions between hypermasculinity and homosexuality, between whiteness and blackness or Jewishness—confront and often threaten to collapse into each other. As Walter Benn Michaels remarks of ''The Sun Also Rises'', “Hemingway’s obsessive commitment to distinguishing between Cohn and Jake only makes sense in the light of their being in some sense indistinguishable” (''Our America'' 27). For all their differences, Robert Cohn and Jake Barnes are both “taken in hand” by Brett Ashley, “manipulated” in a way that recalls the boxer dolls that Jake nearly trips over on the Boulevard des Capuchines (Hemingway, ''The Sun'' 8). There, a “girl assistant lackadaisically pulls the threads that make the dolls dance, while she stands with “folded hands,” “looking away” (32).

America (condensed into American masculinity) was, to use a favorite Mailer word, “schizoid,” and the boxing match—for Mailer much more persistently than for Hemingway—provided a metaphor or structure within which to explore its violently felt divisions. Like a literary Tex Rickard or Don King, Mailer specialized in setting up big matches: an essential masculinity is pitted against an essential femininity; an idealized heterosexuality confronts a mythical homosexuality; imaginary “blacks” encounter imaginary “whites.” The continuing clash of one hero against each other is what constitutes “[e]xistential politics” (Mailer, ''Presidential'' 6), and “form . . . is the record of a war . . . as seen in a moment of rest (''Cannibals'' 370). In fiction then, Mailer’s characters became the embodiments of opposing positions which need to be argued through; in non-fiction, he favored the Q&A, in which he could have “A Rousing Club Fight” with an interviewer (''Presidential'' 125), or sometimes enter the “arena” with an imagined alter ego (Existential 182-90). And sometimes genres—in particular, fiction and history—argue with each other. “[T]he element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed” (''Advertisements'' 342).

@@ Line 64: / Line 64: @@
 '''BOXING AS AMERICAN WAR'''
 The boxers in these stories reveal the ways in which seemingly solid distinctions between hypermasculinity and homosexuality, between whiteness and blackness or Jewishness—confront and often threaten to collapse into each other. As Walter Benn Michaels remarks of ''The Sun Also Rises'', “Hemingway’s obsessive commitment to distinguishing between Cohn and Jake only makes sense in the light of their being in some sense indistinguishable” (''Our America'' 27). For all their differences, Robert Cohn and Jake Barnes are both “taken in hand” by Brett Ashley, “manipulated” in a way that recalls the boxer dolls that Jake nearly trips over on the Boulevard des Capuchines (Hemingway, ''The Sun'' 8). There, a “girl assistant lackadaisically pulls the threads that make the dolls dance, while she stands with “folded hands,” “looking away” (32).
+America (condensed into American masculinity) was, to use a favorite Mailer word, “schizoid,” and the boxing match—for Mailer much more persistently than for Hemingway—provided a metaphor or structure within which to explore its violently felt divisions. Like a literary Tex Rickard or Don King, Mailer specialized in setting up big matches: an essential masculinity is pitted against an essential femininity; an idealized heterosexuality confronts a mythical homosexuality; imaginary “blacks” encounter imaginary “whites.” The continuing clash of one hero against each other is what constitutes “[e]xistential politics” (Mailer, ''Presidential'' 6), and “form . . . is the record of a war . . . as seen in a moment of rest (''Cannibals'' 370). In fiction then, Mailer’s characters became the embodiments of opposing positions which need to be argued through; in non-fiction, he favored the Q&A, in which he could have “A Rousing Club Fight” with an interviewer (''Presidential'' 125), or sometimes enter the “arena” with an imagined alter ego (Existential 182-90). And sometimes genres—in particular, fiction and history—argue with each other. “[T]he element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed” (''Advertisements'' 342).