The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer's The Fight: Hemingway, Bullfighting, and the Lovely Metaphysics of Boxing: Difference between revisions

To Mailer and Hemingway, the men who prevail within this organized violence transcend athletic excellence and attain the status of aesthetic and artistic exemplars. Mailer begins ''The Fight'' by describing Ali as “our most beautiful man”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=3}}just as Jake says that bullfighting prodigy Pedro Romero is the “best-looking boy I have ever seen”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=167}}{{efn|After Ali’s victory, Mailer suggests that “Maybe he never appeared more handsome”{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=212}}}}Ali was thirty-two when the Rumble in the Jungle took place; Romero is no more than twenty. Mailer was fifty-one in Zaire; Hemingway turned twenty-six in the summer of 1925, when ''The Sun Also Rises'' was composed. If Ali and Romero serve as embodiments of male beauty, Hemingway also uses Romero as a counterbalance to the malaise that had infected the “lost” members of the post-war generation. When Robert Cohn laments, “my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it,” Jake responds, “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters.”{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=18}}Fitzgerald texts like ''The Great Gatsby'' impute an additional intensity of experience to the wealthy; Hemingway ascribes this same quality to the courageous activity of bullfighters. Boxing is precisely the same. In the extended set-piece of the Ledoux-Francis fight that Hemingway sketched in the first draft of SAR, the characters remark on the fight and Ledoux in a way that previews their same awe of bullfighters. Bill Gorton tells Jake, “By God Ledoux is great”{{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=233}}and asks, “Why don’t they have guys like that in my business (that is, writing)"?{{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=233}} Bill later deflects a compliment by telling Jake, “I’m not such a good man as Ledoux”.{{{{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=234}}In the same way, the bullfighter Maera, whom Hemingway kills off in Chapter XIV of ''In Our Time'', is declared by Nick Adams to be “the greatest man he’d ever known".{{sfn|Hemingway|1972|p=237}}Between Maera and James Joyce, Hemingway wrote Ezra Pound in 1924, there is “absolutely no comparison in art...Maera by a mile”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1981|p=119}}Boxing and bullfighters emerge in these texts as ideals, both masculine and artistic.  

The artistic component of the allure of these sports is Mailer’s explicit{{pg|128|129}}reason for attending the Rumble in the Jungle. When Mailer attributes Foreman’s reference to himself in the third person as equivalent to the “schizophrenia” that “great artists” possess,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=56}}it echoes Hemingway’s Romero who “talked about his work as something altogether apart from himself”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=178}}For Mailer, though, the real artist is of course not Foreman, but Ali. “If ever a fighter,” Mailer writes, “had been able to demonstrate that boxing was a twentieth century art, it must be Ali”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=162}}Hemingway writes in ''Death in the Afternoon'' that the only trait separating bull-fighting from its inclusion as one of the major arts is its impermanence. In ''The Dangerous Summer'', Hemingway pointedly compares bullfighting to art: “A bullfighter can never see the work of art that he is making. He has no chance to correct it as a painter or writer has. He cannot hear it as a musician can  All the time, he is making his work of art he knows that he must keep within the limits of his skill and the knowledge of the animal”{{efn|Earlier in The Dangerous Summer, Luis Miguel Dominguín is also compared to an artist: “He had the complete and respectful concentration on his work which marks all great artists”{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=106}}}}.{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=198}}Whether Hemingway is posturing in an intentionally provocative way or not—he surely enjoyed presenting himself as the only novelist who would prefer to be Maera killing a bull than Joyce writing ''Ulysses''—it is sufficient to note that in his career-long characterizations of bullfighters, he saw artistry and exemplary conduct when they excelled during their performances, and displayed high and noble aims in their approaches to their work. The crucial way that bullfighting is instructive to a reading of ''The Fight'' emerges when Mailer captures Ali’s demeanor in the ring and the strategy he uses to dismantle and ultimately defeat Foreman. This exalted strategy is two-fold: in the first round, Ali relies on the enormously dangerous right-hand leads to score against Foreman. The audacity of this means of attack is captured in italicized awe in ''The Fight''. It is not a right, but a ''right''. “Right-hand leads!” Mailer exults, “My God!”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=180}}He explains the technicality that leading with the right “is the most difficult and dangerous punch. Difficult to deliver and dangerous to oneself”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=179}}Hemingway makes the same observation in Romero’s code of performance, which is that he has “the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=172}}Ali might have danced his way to victory against Foreman, but he did not. He deftly took on the punishment of a much stronger man, and attacked in a way that would leave himself vulnerable, all in the hopes of sapping Foreman’s power. These are the qualities which Hemingway and Mailer extol.  

But Mailer is not through. When he puts forth Ali’s quandary once the fight is under his control, that he must choose between a victory by either a lethargic decision or the flourish of a spectacular knockout, he is compared to “a torero after a great faena who must still face the drear potential of a protracted inept and disappointing kill,” while Foreman remains “a bull”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=200}}In the sixth round, by which time the bout’s fate is foretold, Ali sizes{{pg|132|133}}up Foreman “the way a bullfighter lines up a bull before going in over the horns for the kill...a fair conclusion was that the bull still had an access of strength too great for the kill”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=202}}In a sequence where Mailer would make dozens of comparisons, frantically seeking metaphorical images to convey the magnitude of the scene, his clinging to bullfighting imagery is striking thematically and strategically, even if the image might only resonate with a specialist, with himself, or with a fellow aficionado of ''Death in the Afternoon''{{efn|Cf. Advertisements For Myself, when Mailer writes, “I used to compare the bed to the bullfight, sometimes seeing myself as the matador and sometimes as the bull”}}.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=495}}When Mailer compares Foreman’s clumsiness to “a street fighter at the end of a long rumble”,{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=204}}the reader does not require any special base of knowledge to access the comparison.  

The dynamic set up between Foreman and Ali leads to the rope-a-dope strategy that is ultimately Foreman’s undoing and proof of Ali’s ingenuity. Parodying his own proclivity towards “Germanic formulation,” Mailer teases that he might characterize this approach as “the modal transposition from Active to Passive”.{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=221}The serious point about Ali’s strategy, though, is that he did not overpower Foreman (because he could not), and did not even use superior skill. He outsmarted him, outclassed him. Ali kills ''recibiendo''. His technique is the boxing equivalent of the bullfighter’s choice to kill by receiving the bull, to allow the bull’s aggression to work against itself by charging into the sword, rather than attacking the animal. Just as Ali’s technique is legendary, both Mailer and Hemingway have extolled the ''recibiendo'' style as, on several levels, the most sublime way to kill a bull.  

Mailer shares Hemingway’s fascination with a matador killing ''recibiendo''. His miniaturized version of ''Death in the Afternoon'', published in 1967, called simply ''The Bullfight''{{efn|Mailer’s introductory remarks in that text are titled: ''Footnote to Death in the Afternoon.''}}, describes this classic style of killing with a sense of awe, and is worth quoting at length:  

By leaning back against the ropes and inciting Foreman’s charge, Ali displays the same bravado, courage, and panache in dominating his opponent as these matadors who Mailer and Hemingway laud with such emotion{{efn|One of the ways Mailer praises Ali in ''When We Were Kings'' is by saying, “What a classic performance,” suggesting the classic style of defeating an opponent that parallels a heroic matador.}}. 

Just as Hemingway mimics Romero’s clarity, classicism, and linearity in prose{{efn|The first draft of ''The Sun Also Rises'' originally began in medias res, beginning in Spain, then flashing back to Paris. The change to linearity transcends a narratological decision to achieve thematic importance. For the essential study of ''The Sun Also Rises''’s composition and its implications, see Svoboda.}}, Mailer links the passes of his narrative, endeavoring to reach a narrative climax just as the fight reaches its dramatic climax in the eighth round. Unlike Hemingway, who did not cling to figurative language in a conspicuous quest to have the reader understand perfectly a situation which he might not have ever seen before, Mailer’s sequence of comparisons rises to the task as the most memorable writerly performance in his account of the “Rumble in the Jungle.”