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(I fixed everything in the sandbox and copied it onto the main article. It will be finished by tomorrow night.) |
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reach in his argument. It lands persuasively between his contradictor’s eyes.” | reach in his argument. It lands persuasively between his contradictor’s eyes.” | ||
What writer wouldn’t want to have such a reach? | What writer wouldn’t want to have such a reach? | ||
Joyce Carol Oates, for one, expresses impatience with the sort of “hellish-writerly metaphor” in which boxing serves to stand for something else. She concedes that skill, courage and intelligence can all be observed in a boxing match. She even “can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for | |||
boxing.” However, boxing itself is, quite simply, “the most primitive and terrifying of contests.” Her On Boxing does not offer extravagant assertions of fighters as avatars of artistry or as unrecognized geniuses. She briefly surveys other writers’ writing on boxing and is impressed by little of it. She dislikes Liebling and does not think Ernest Hemingway’s boxing stories rank | |||
among his best. She admires aspects of Mailer’s work on the subject, but | |||
concludes that in the end he gets it wrong. “It seems clear to this reader at | |||
least that Mailer cannot establish a connection between himself and the boxers: he tries heroically but he cannot understand them,” she writes. Whereas Camus likens boxing to an argument, Oates stresses its wordlessness, its lack of language. Whereas he sees fighters carrying on historical disputes, she | |||
counters that men fighting and those watching them belong “to no historical time.” For Oates, boxing is not like something else. It is certainly not like writing, as it was for Mailer, Newfield and others. Instead, “boxing is only like boxing.” If she finds truth in boxing, it is of a much more diminished and melancholy sort. | |||
Rendell fell into the Johnson camp, the camp that sought truth in the sport, only to conclude that viewing boxing as expressive of some deep meaning can only lead to disappointment. In ''This Bloody Mary'', his memoir of experiences in the boxing world, he recalls being a teenager looking at the photos in ''Ring'' magazine of ritualistic post-fight events—the announcement of the decision and the victor consoling the vanquished— | |||
and thinking: “It was as if all of them, the winners and losers and the managers and trainers, had touched something that only they could know about, something big, like truth.” Later, when the romance was gone and | |||
he’d seen enough of the fight game, he concludes that its connection to the | |||
truth was very different than he’d initially thought. “Boxing had been leading me to a truth after all, but only to the truth about boxing. And the truth | |||