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

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-{{dc|dc=A|LTHOUGH NORMAN MAILER’ S THE FIGHT IS OSTENSIBLY REPORTAGE}} about the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman championship heavyweight boxing match in Zaire on 30 October 1974, we learn more about Mailer and his aesthetic and artistic values than we do about either fighter. We also learn far more than Mailer’s thoughts on boxing; we glean a broader metaphysical and philosophic notion of action and danger, and the writer’s own role in recording it in prose. One of Mailer’s methods for capturing his Zaire experience is to employ Ernest Hemingway as a ghostly father figure, a doppelgänger, both an inspiration and a nagging reminder of his own inadequacies. Hemingway, whose suicide was thirteen years before the fight, is still active in Mailer’s text, who was enjoying a consciously Hemingwayesque project in Africa.
+{{dc|dc=A|LTHOUGH NORMAN MAILER’ S THE FIGHT IS OSTENSIBLY REPORTAGE}} about the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman championship heavyweight boxing match in Zaire on 30 October 1974, we learn more about Mailer and his aesthetic and artistic values than we do about either fighter. We also learn far more than Mailer’s thoughts on boxing; we glean a broader metaphysical and philosophic notion of action and danger, and the writer’s own role in recording it in prose. One of Mailer’s methods for capturing his Zaire experience is to employ Ernest Hemingway as a ghostly father figure, a ''doppelgänger'', both an inspiration and a nagging reminder of his own inadequacies. Hemingway, whose suicide was thirteen years before the fight, is still active in Mailer’s text, who was enjoying a consciously Hemingwayesque project in Africa.
-In Chuck Klosterman’s recent assessment of Norman Mailer as a boxing writer, he writes that “there is nothing metaphysical about getting punched in the face” (56). This assertion suggests that Klosterman either has never been punched in the face or was concentrating on the wrong sensation when he was. Mailer and Hemingway represent the boxing ring and the bullfighting arena as possessing such metaphysical possibilities that they invite us to appreciate each of their values in human behavior and the qualities they demand their artists to possess. In The Fight, Mailer’s conspicuous comparisons of boxing to bullfighting, Hemingway, and to art further invite comparison to Hemingway’s earlier texts. In all instances, we see Mailer and Hemingway with their incisive, intellectual evocations of men of thought (that is, Ali, and any quintessential Hemingway Hero, such as Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls or his short story alter ego Nick Adams) in moments of peak activity. So, if Klosterman limits the transcendence of boxing simply to “primordial reality” and the “base qualities of being alive” (56), he sharply diverges from Mailer and Hemingway, who find in the maelstrom of a boxing match or the murderous possibilities of a bullring, life’s truest, most elevated and aesthetic moments. “Every wound,” Mailer observes in The Fight, “has its own revelation” (214), both promising the importance of chronicling the defeated and the damaged and signaling his own fascination and debt to the warriors and athletes and even artists of the Hemingway canon. While Mailer may be overly epigrammatic, this aphorism accurately synopsizes the “wound theory” of criticism that defined (and later encumbered) Hemingway Studies for decades.
+In Chuck Klosterman’s recent assessment of Norman Mailer as a boxing writer, he writes that “there is nothing metaphysical about getting punched in the face” {{sfn|Klosterman|2008|p=56}}. This assertion suggests that Klosterman either has never been punched in the face or was concentrating on the wrong sensation when he was. Mailer and Hemingway represent the boxing ring and the bullfighting arena as possessing such metaphysical possibilities that they invite us to appreciate each of their values in human behavior and the qualities they demand their artists to possess. In The Fight, Mailer’s conspicuous comparisons of boxing to bullfighting, Hemingway, and to art further invite comparison to Hemingway’s earlier texts. In all instances, we see Mailer and Hemingway with their incisive, intellectual evocations of men of thought (that is, Ali, and any quintessential Hemingway Hero, such as Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls or his short story alter ego Nick Adams) in moments of peak activity. So, if Klosterman limits the transcendence of boxing simply to “primordial reality” and the “base qualities of being alive” (56), he sharply diverges from Mailer and Hemingway, who find in the maelstrom of a boxing match or the murderous possibilities of a bullring, life’s truest, most elevated and aesthetic moments. “Every wound,” Mailer observes in The Fight, “has its own revelation” (214), both promising the importance of chronicling the defeated and the damaged and signaling his own fascination and debt to the warriors and athletes and even artists of the Hemingway canon. While Mailer may be overly epigrammatic, this aphorism accurately synopsizes the “wound theory” of criticism that defined (and later encumbered) Hemingway Studies for decades.
 To Hemingway, boxing might have been important for more complex reasons than many readers ever understood. A celebrated example of this tension offers a useful illustration. The sordid history behind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s revisions to Hemingway’s short story “Fifty Grand” is relevant not as a salacious biographical anecdote or to provide retrospective textual minutiae. Instead, this conflict’s enduring controversy is itself the issue, one that reveals a major facet of Hemingway’s approach to character, and the larger importance of boxing to Hemingway and writers that would follow, primarily Mailer.