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

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|p=162|1975}}. 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.  

Just as Ali is positioned as an artist, a craftsman, and a scientist, Mailer describes him in the same way that Hemingway describes matadors. During the first round of the fight, after Ali has tagged Foreman with a scoring punch, Foreman “charged in rage” {{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=178}}, a raging bull whose strength must be absorbed, reallocated, frustrated, and then eliminated by the more intelligent foe. After another exchange, in fact, “Foreman responded like a bull. He roared forward. A dangerous bull. His gloves were out like horns”{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=178–79}}. Even the collection of declarative sentences, uncluttered by punctuation marks, recalls the way Hemingway captures Romero’s style in the ring. After Ali’s strategy of absorbing punches against the ropes emerges, Mailer writes that Foreman “had the pensive expression of a steer being dogged to the ground by a cowboy”{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=184}}, continuing the juxtaposition of Ali’s savvy with Foreman’s depiction as an animal, a beast of the same variety that charges mindlessly and dies inevitably in Pamplona. A brilliant depiction of Ali using his facial expression to deceive Foreman furthers the comparison: Ali, against the ropes, is  

Hemingway is introduced into the narrative when Mailer arrives in an unappealing Kinshasa with a stomach ailment, and immediately name drops Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway: Conrad for his iconic depiction of the Congo, and Hemingway, about whom Mailer wonders, “Was it part of Hemingway’s genius that he could travel with healthy insides?”{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=22}}, ignoring the overwhelming catalogue of incidents and accidents that Hemingway suffered during his lifetime of travels. When Mailer hears the mighty roar of a lion, he begins a reverie: “To be eaten by a lion on the banks of the Congo— who could fail to notice that it was Hemingway’s own lion waiting down these years for the flesh of Ernest until an appropriate substitute had at last arrived?”{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=92}}. If the sound of the lion causes Mailer to fancy a lofty reenactment of Francis Macomber’s paranoia, or Mary’s quest for the lion in ''Under Kilimanjaro'', he does well to confess that the joke is on him: Zaire has a zoo. In Mailer’s description of a drunken balancing act on a balcony outside his hotel room, he speculates on the possibility of dying in this way. “What could be worse than accidental suicide?” he asks rhetorically. “A reverberation of Hemingway’s end shivered its echo”{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=123}}. These three examples indeed position Mailer as an “appropriate substitute” for Hemingway, both in his ambitious writing project in Africa, his encounters with the beasts of the jungle, and the courting of his own death, with Hemingway’s 1961 suicide still hovering over Mailer’s behavior, his thoughts, and his writing.  

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.  

In ''Death in the Afternoon'', Hemingway defines ''Recibir'', “to kill the bull from in front awaiting his charge without moving the feet once the charge has started”{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=442}}. This definition is nearly a precise restatement of Romero’s {{pg|133|134}}triumph in ''The Sun Also Rises'', his feet firm, waiting for the charge. Hemingway refers to ''recibiendo'' as the most “difficult, dangerous and emotional way to kill bulls” {{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=442}}. In ''The Dangerous Summer'', Hemingway refers to the technique as “the oldest and the most dangerous and the most beautiful” manner of killing{{sfn|Hemingway|1985|p=202}}. By employing the ''recibiendo'' technique, Antonio Ordóñez in ''The Dangerous Summer'' and Pedro Romero in ''The Sun Also Rises'' impress their observers and impress the writers recording their accomplishments.  

{{cquote|The bull charged prematurely, and Amado, determined to get the kill, did not skip away but held ground, received the charge, stood there with the sword, turned the bull’s head with the muleta, and the bull impaled himself on the point of the torero’s blade which went right into the proper space between the shoulders, and the bull ran right up on it into his death, took several steps to the side, gave a toss of his head at heaven, and fell. Amado had killed ''recibiendo''. He had killed standing still, receiving the bull while the bull charged. No one had seen that in years.{{sfn|Mailer|1967|p=n.pg}}}}

Mailer and Hemingway mimic the matadors they lionize in two significant ways. For Hemingway, the ''corto y derecho'' style of bullfighting that he describes in “The Undefeated,” another story from ''Men Without Women'', is so closely associated with his own “short and straight” writing style that the reference is almost transparently self-referential and was so already by its publication in 1927. In the same way that Jake’s attention to Romero is revelatory of what he values in a man, Hemingway’s own characterization of Romero is crucial for what Hemingway values in art. When Romero’s performance is summarized as “not brilliant bull-fighting . . . only perfect bull-fighting”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=221}}, and that Romero’s style contained “no tricks and no {{pg|134|135}}mystifications” {{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=223}}, Hemingway is separating his own novel from modern masterpieces of the previous few years like ''Ulysses'' or ''The Great Gatsby'' or ''Mrs. Dalloway'' and even anticipating the experimentation of ''The Sound and the Fury'', which would come a few years later.  

All of these similes are Mailer’s own flourishes, the passes that he links together, striving to express his enthusiasm and awe, seeking to get the reader more intimately involved with the experience, culminating with one final comparison, not of Ali or of Foreman, but of his own reaction: our narrator was “like a dim parent who realizes suddenly his child is indeed and indubitably married”{{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=209}}. The figurative rope-a-dope that Mailer employs is unlike Hemingway’s description of the bullfight, but identical in that the scene he is attempting to capture must be described according to the terms of the action being rendered.  

===Notes===