Boxing and literature, boxing as literature

Deemed one of the most dangerous and controversial sports, boxing presents a concentrate of life, of violence, that still manages to fascinate us. Faced with the suffering pugilists, the blood gouging, the grunts of pain, we cover our eyes but cannot help but look through the crack between our fingers, waiting for the unbearable jab, the devastating hook. It is thus unsurprising that this strange and paradoxical fascination has also prompted authors to write about this sport.

            

      We live in a society where violence is considered to be immoral, primal and almost taboo. It is therefore not shocking to admit that boxing could almost be considered to be taboo, in some way; if we can admit there to be an aesthetic principle to boxing, it is an aesthetic principle, that is, idiosyncratically masculine, and where violence is ritualized. But we could divert our attention for a second from the violence itself. There are many other facets to boxing. If I used the word “primal” before, it is not because boxing reduces men to animals (that would be too simple to say), but on the contrary, because boxers are reduced to the root of their humanity. Boxers, in a ring, are in a way, pure and unfiltered. There is almost a sort of voyeurism involved for the audience; in the intimacy of the skin touching, of sweat dripping onto bear skin, of being so exposed, so vulnerable. We love it.

               Joyce Carol Oates in On Boxing uses a formulation that I adore in regards to boxing: she explains that while watching a boxing mtch, we are placing ourselves in a sort of antiworld : “Slyly teasing antiworlds”. Oates goes on to explain in this book of essays, basing  on historical boxing matches, how alienating boxing can be, how "the great world with its moral and political complexities, its terrifying impersonality, ceases to exist". She also dramatically declares that "Boxing has become America's tragic theater". This book is truly a treat for those who are interested in the history of boxing as well as its literary and philosophical potential. 

              If boxing fascinates writers, it is due to the conjunction of its paradoxical nature and its undeniable theatrical aspect. As Normand Berlin says in his essay “Traffic of Our Stage: Boxing as Theater” (Berlin, Normand. "Traffic of Our Stage: Boxing as Theater." The Massachusetts Review, vol no.1, 2006) : “Theater is a fuzzy concept. It seems to take in everything, from a Shakespeare play to a trapeze act, from Kabuki to ballet, from the verbal arguments in Shaw to the pantomime of Marcel Marceau”. For those who want to argue and denounce boxing’s lack of literary quality (even if rhythm, exactly like in lyrical texts is essential in this sport), we come back to the very complex question of how it is that we want to define literature (which is a delicate and subjective matter that I would like to write a post about!).

               It is theatrical in the most basic sense because it “puts on a show”; there is an audience, its essential function is to entertain, and the “unscripted” part that improvisation plays is debatable: boxers spend hours studying their opponents and at times, instinctively, mechanically, know how to counter a move. This cathartic nature, in the Aristotelian sense, of this “mise-en-scène” can be linked to Antonin Artaud’s concept of a “theater of cruelty” which he elucidates in “Theater and its double”:

                  “Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all.” 

By applying this idea to boxing, we could also consequently say that boxing almost serves as a sort of reminder of our own mortality. 

                       If there was one boxing novel that I would recommend, it would be the grimly realistic 1969 Fat City by Leonard Gardner, that circles around the theme of boxing but is about the psychological struggles that one has to endure in the world of boxing. 

And that is it for today’s post! I hope that you enjoyed it; don’t forget to share it and to leave a comment below! See you next time for another blogpost! o(*^▽^*)o