User:JBrown/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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America (condensed into American masculinity) was, to use a favorite Mailer word, “schizoid,” and the boxing match—for Mailer much more persistently than for Hemingway—provided a metaphor or structure within which to explore its violently felt divisions. Like a literary Tex Rickard or Don King, Mailer specialized in setting up big matches: an essential masculinity is pitted against an essential femininity; an idealized heterosexuality confronts a mythical homosexuality; imaginary “blacks” encounter imaginary “whites.” The continuing clash of one hero against each other is what constitutes “[e]xistential politics” (Mailer, ''Presidential'' 6), and “form . . . is the record of a war . . . as seen in a moment of rest (''Cannibals'' 370). In fiction then, Mailer’s characters became the embodiments of opposing positions which need to be argued through; in non-fiction, he favored the Q&A, in which he could have “A Rousing Club Fight” with an interviewer (''Presidential'' 125), or sometimes enter the “arena” with an imagined alter ego (Existential 182-90). And sometimes genres—in particular, fiction and history—argue with each other. “[T]he element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed” (''Advertisements'' 342).

If all relationships have a comparable dialectic structure, then it makes equal sense to use the language of sex to describe boxing—the first fifteen seconds of a fight are equivalent “to the first kiss in a love affair”—and the language of boxing to describe sex (Existential 29). For the narrator of “''The Time of Her Time''” (1959), for example, the ''dialectic'' of sex stages conflicts between Jewishness and non-Jewishness, high culture and low culture, and even the competing therapeutic claims of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich (''Advertisements'' 495). If conflict is the model for the relationship between men and women, men additionally face an internal battle between heterosexuality and homosexuality (Mailer does not think that women have this problem). So the brutal outcome of the 1962 fight between Emile Griffith and Benny (Kid) Paret is said to dramatize the ''biological force'' with which men disavow their inherent homosexuality (''Presidential'' 243). Paret had taunted Griffith with homophobic remarks at the weigh-in and during the fight, and Griffith responded by beating him to death. For Mailer, this is an example of the ring not doing its usual job of containing and controlling (or sublimating) sexual desire.

The boxing ring also enacts, and thus mostly contains, another conflict that Mailer saw as fundamental to American culture of ''our time'', one between blacks and whites (''Time'' x). Again, the challenge is to foreground and disrupt familiar stereotypical dichotomies: between whites, who are civilized, sophisticated, cerebral, literate, and literary; and blacks, who are primitive, illiterate, attuned to the pleasures of the body, and fluent in its language (''Advertisements'' 341). James Baldwin (and many others) complained about Mailer’s tendency to see “''us as goddam romantic black symbols''” (Weatherby 78). But Mailer saw everyone and everything symbolically. For Patterson vs. Liston, therefore, read Art vs. Magic, Love vs. Sex, God vs. the Devil.

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 America (condensed into American masculinity) was, to use a favorite Mailer word, “schizoid,” and the boxing match—for Mailer much more persistently than for Hemingway—provided a metaphor or structure within which to explore its violently felt divisions. Like a literary Tex Rickard or Don King, Mailer specialized in setting up big matches: an essential masculinity is pitted against an essential femininity; an idealized heterosexuality confronts a mythical homosexuality; imaginary “blacks” encounter imaginary “whites.” The continuing clash of one hero against each other is what constitutes “[e]xistential politics” (Mailer, ''Presidential'' 6), and “form . . . is the record of a war . . . as seen in a moment of rest (''Cannibals'' 370). In fiction then, Mailer’s characters became the embodiments of opposing positions which need to be argued through; in non-fiction, he favored the Q&A, in which he could have “A Rousing Club Fight” with an interviewer (''Presidential'' 125), or sometimes enter the “arena” with an imagined alter ego (Existential 182-90). And sometimes genres—in particular, fiction and history—argue with each other. “[T]he element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed” (''Advertisements'' 342).
+If all relationships have a comparable dialectic structure, then it makes equal sense to use the language of sex to describe boxing—the first fifteen seconds of a fight are equivalent “to the first kiss in a love affair”—and the language of boxing to describe sex (Existential 29). For the narrator of “''The Time of Her Time''” (1959), for example, the ''dialectic'' of sex stages conflicts between Jewishness and non-Jewishness, high culture and low culture, and even the competing therapeutic claims of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich (''Advertisements'' 495). If conflict is the model for the relationship between men and women, men additionally face an internal battle between heterosexuality and homosexuality (Mailer does not think that women have this problem). So the brutal outcome of the 1962 fight between Emile Griffith and Benny (Kid) Paret is said to dramatize the ''biological force'' with which men disavow their inherent homosexuality (''Presidential'' 243). Paret had taunted Griffith with homophobic remarks at the weigh-in and during the fight, and Griffith responded by beating him to death. For Mailer, this is an example of the ring not doing its usual job of containing and controlling (or sublimating) sexual desire.
+The boxing ring also enacts, and thus mostly contains, another conflict that Mailer saw as fundamental to American culture of ''our time'', one between blacks and whites (''Time'' x). Again, the challenge is to foreground and disrupt familiar stereotypical dichotomies: between whites, who are civilized, sophisticated, cerebral, literate, and literary; and blacks, who are primitive, illiterate, attuned to the pleasures of the body, and fluent in its language (''Advertisements'' 341). James Baldwin (and many others) complained about Mailer’s tendency to see “''us as goddam romantic black symbols''” (Weatherby 78). But Mailer saw everyone and everything symbolically. For Patterson vs. Liston, therefore, read Art vs. Magic, Love vs. Sex, God vs. the Devil.