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

For the purposes of Mailer’s and Hemingway’s intertextuality, boxing and bullfighting are virtually synonymous. Each sport affords the spectator an opportunity to witness violence in a largely—but not completely—sanitized outlet. ''In The Sun Also Rises'', a novel that essentially introduced the bullfight to mainstream American consciousness, boxing and bullfighting are explicitly compared. In addition to the scapegoat Robert Cohn’s dubious (but eventually demonstrable) boxing background, Jake Barnes and his friend Bill Gorton attend the Ledoux-Kid Francis fight in Paris less than a week be- fore their excursion to the Pamplona bullfights. Later, during the ''desencajonada'', or unloading of the bulls, however, Jake constructs the simile of bullfighting to boxing. He tells Brett Ashley, “Look how he knows how to use his horns . . . He’s got a left and right just like a boxer.” As Brett confirms, “I saw him shift from his left to his right horn”{{sfn|Hemingway|1926|p=144}}. The two activities are clearly appealing to Hemingway: one man, by himself, confronting his own limits as he encounters an attacker with his skill, knowledge, courage, and mind control. Both activities are ritual performances, yet both flirt with the possibility of death, danger, crippling injury, as well as murder.  

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” (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.