The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Fighters and Writers: Difference between revisions

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 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.