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

Fitzgerald’s objection to Hemingway opening the short story with the boxing anecdote was like his misgivings about the original beginning of ''The Sun Also Rises'', what he perceived to be Hemingway’s “tendency to envelope or...to ''embalm'' in mere wordiness an anecdote or joke”.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|p=142|1995}}As Susan Beegel notes in her discussion of Hemingway’s impulse to include the anecdote, “Thinking takes time, and boxing is a sport in which speed is of the essence”.{{sfn|Beegel|1988|p=15}}Beegel’s point must be extended: life, at times, is a sport in which speed is of the essence, particularly if it is to be lived to its fullest. As we see in Mailer—think of ''The Naked and the Dead'' and certainly ''The Fight''—Hemingway placed all his characters in situations in which a quick, strategic, pragmatic response is more appropriate than contemplation and conceptualization, despite the characters’ natural inclinations to indulge their memories, imaginative speculation, and ruminations. Muhammad Ali, after all, is no mindless slugger; he is portrayed as a genius, a scientist, an artist, or a “brain fighter,” in the champ’s own words. More than a boxer, Mailer considers Ali “the first psychologist of the body”,{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=23}}suggesting that his power is in his mind, as opposed to the brute force, the rage, and the animalistic approach of Foreman and Joe Frazier.  

Fitzgerald and others have misconstrued aspects of Hemingway’s objectives, which Mailer grasped intuitively and intellectually. The central thrust to Hemingway’s literary project was to dramatize the compromised functioning of thought as the modern consciousness is incorporated into the violent activities of the twentieth-century man of action. Hemingway’s portrayal of thinking during war takes this idea to the extreme. In Hemingway’s introduction to ''Men at War'', the anthology of war writing he edited, he writes, “Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire. It, naturally, is the opposite of all those gifts a writer should have”.{{sfn|Hemingway|1942|p=xxiv}}Hemingway’s articulation of this conflict is a revelation: he is disclosing the tension that defines his work, the internal struggle between a man of action and a man of thought. Hemingway is distinguishing between the curse of Ishmael and the curse of Stubb in ''Moby-Dick'': Ishmael cannot turn the thinking off; for him, the sea and meditation are inextricable, even when he is on the night watch; Ahab’s eleventh commandment, on the other hand, is: do not think.  

In Mailer, similarly, the allure of boxing seems to be the formalized structure of a violent situation as an attenuated restatement of war experience. Mailer has suggested as much, saying that boxing presents “a way for a violent man to begin to comprehend that living in a classic situation—in other words, living within certain limitations rather than expressing oneself uncontrollably is a way to live that he didn’t have before”.{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=185}}Mailer’s articulation is anticipated by Jake Barnes himself, who explains the process to Brett so that the bullfight “became more something that was going on with a definite end, and less of a spectacle with unexplained horrors”;{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=171}}in other words, the difference between bullfighting/boxing and war. Just as Mailer differentiates between a championship boxing match between{{pg|127|128}}professionals and a street fight, Hemingway distinguishes between a properly sanctioned bullfight and an amateur bullfight: “The amateur bullfight is as unorganized as a riot and all results are uncertain, bulls or men may be killed; it is all chance and the temper of the populace. The formal bullfight is a commercial spectacle built on the planned and ordered death of the bull and that is its end".{{sfn|Hemingway|1932|p=372}}If the Marquis of Queensbury rules codify violence in boxing and allow it to transcend a back-alley brawl, Hemingway and Mailer are always conscious of this spectrum of violence and its relative level of chaos.  

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.  

*{{Cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |title=A Life in Letters |editor-first=Matthew J. |editor-last=Bruccoli |location=New York |publisher=Touchstone |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |date=1995 |medium=Print |ref=harv }}

*{{Cite AV media |last=Gast |first=Leon |title=When We Were Kings |date=1996 |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Film |url=https://youtu.be/svhnasgxpqs?si=SF1viC9Lbcs401BG |ref=harv }}

*{{Cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |title=The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |date=2003 |medium=Print |ref=harv }}

*{{Cite book|last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |title=The Dangerous Summer |date=1985 |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}  

*{{Cite book|last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |title=Death in the Afternoon |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |date=1932 |medium=Print |ref=harv }}  

*{{Cite book|last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |authormask=1 |title=For Whom the Bell Tolls |date=1940 |location=New York |publisher=Scribner’s |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}

*{{Cite book|editor-last=Hemingway |editor-first=Ernest |editormask=1 |title=Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time |date=1942 |location=New York |publisher=Crown Publishers |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |medium=Print |ref=harv }}