Ultimate Fighting

Extreme Cage Fight War (photo: Ticketmaster)

Prize fighting is a metaphor for life. At least it’s one of the metaphors and it’s probably the metaphoric quality that accounts for its popularity. The same can be said about mixed martial arts, a sport which takes place in cages (the Ultimate Fighting Championship is significantly the name of the company that promotes many of these events) and jiu jitsu. Of  course other sports like football offer the same possibility for enticement through their potential to create empathy. How may times have you heard someone who is going to undertake a challenge refer to “carrying the ball?” But fighting requires an especially high level of preparedness and the combat is the most individual (outside tennis or mountain climbing) and brutal. You fight to the finish with a win sometimes rendering the opponent senseless. A prize fight is not like a cockfight since it’s ultimate goal is not the death of the loser, but annihilation is certainly on the table. The victory exhausts the defeated party and breaks his or her will. But if there is an animal quality to fighting it also exhibits some of highest elements of the human spirit to the extent that it represents an aspiration of the consciousness to overcome bodily limitations. It’s no accident that writers like Hemingway, A. J. Liebling, Mailer and most recently Joyce Carol Oates have all exhibited a fascination with boxing since those who are prone to articulate the lot of the creative artist frequently equate it with over the top challenges, which sometimes involve the sacrifice of life. Whether it’s the marlin in The Old Man and the Sea or the great white whale in Moby Dick, the person who attempts to emblazon his inner life on reality faces a Herculean and sometimes Sisyphean task. The only difference between the fighter and the artist is that the battle the artist is waging is more solitary. His or her opponent is the self. But the whole fascination with fighting as a metaphor poses still other questions. Is all of life a battle? Should people fight for the things they want the way some patients fight against cancer. And is full-fledged combat the best way to fight cancer--or depression for that matter? Leni Riefenstahl’s film was Triumph of the Will and it was a consummate piece of Nazi propaganda.

Mourning, but Not Melancholia

In Wednesday’s Times “Arts, Briefly” column, Charles McGrath reports on the controversy surrounding Joyce Carol Oates’s memoir, A Widow’s Story (“Joyce Carol Oates Updates Her Widow's Story,” NYT, 5/11/11). The book, which was excerpted last year in The New Yorker, describes the demise of her husband, Ontario Review editor Raymond Smith. Apparently Oates, whose memoir can been compared to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, about the loss of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, had already remarried by the time A Widow’s Story appeared. McGrath quotes the acclaimed English novelist Julian Barnes as saying, “Some readers will feel they have a good case for breach of narrative promise.” But the controversy begs the question of how one mourns the loss of a loved one—a subject that is dealt with in two other memoirs, one by Meghan O’Rourke, who wrote about the death of her mother, and another by Francesco Goldman, who wrote a memoir in novel form about an incident at a Mexican resort that brought his wife’s life to an end. Matthew von Unwerth addresses the subject of mourning in his book Freud’s Requiem, which examines Freud’s essay “On Transience,” a work inspired by a walk Freud took with Lou Andreas Salome and Rainer Maria Rilke in the summer of 1915. Like the Oates memoir, both O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye and Goldman’s Say Her Name were serialized in The New Yorker (which is probably setting some sort of record for publishing accounts of this kind), but von Unwerth’s tome about Freud most closely addresses the substance of the controversy surrounding Oates. Following von Unwerth’s line of thought in his analysis of the Freud essay, one might say that it was in fact Oates’s ability to effectively mourn her husband, in part through her writing, that allowed her to let go of the past and find love again.