Laurel and Thorn
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Laurel and Thorn

The Athlete in American Literature

Robert J. Higgs

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Laurel and Thorn

The Athlete in American Literature

Robert J. Higgs

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About This Book

To examine the social and cultural significance of the athlete hero in American literature, Robert J. Higgs turns to the works of Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams.

Higgs views the athlete in literature not as an artistic creation but as one who reflects the tastes, attainments, beliefs, and ideals of his society. The athletes he describes as Apollonian are the know-it-alls, of whom Lardner's Busher Keefe is an example; the Dyonisian, as exemplified by Irwin Shaw's Christian Darling, worships his body as an end in itself. The Adonic seeks knowledge for the sake of self-realization and lives in a world of tension, pain, struggle, and hope. Such a figure is Wolfe's Nebraska Crane. Higgs finds in contemporary American literature a clear rejection of the Apollonian and Dyonisian models and an acceptance of the Adonic.

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1. Game Plan

Body & Self

A study of anything must begin in dissection; before a new understanding of the whole can be reached there must be an analysis of the parts. An examination of the athlete or, more specifically, the athlete in American literature is no exception. Who is the athlete? In Greek and Roman antiquity, he was “one who competed for a prize in public games,” especially games requiring strength and stamina, and the definition is as relevant today as in classical times. There are a number of key words in this definition, but none more important than the word one. Who is this one? He is one, like all men, with a body and a self; and when he competes publicly, he places himself, literally “him” plus “self,” before spectators for judgment and evaluation with all the consequences involved for the self.
A natural and understandable tendency is to regard the athlete principally as a body. Even Paul Weiss, one of the leading speculative philosophers of our time, has made the statement in Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry that “the athlete comes to accept his body as himself.” This of course is not wholly true. The athlete accepts the importance of the body in relation to self but he never equates the two unless he becomes hopelessly narcissistic. Weiss himself realizes this since he devotes much attention to the athlete’s pursuit of physical excellence and concludes his work with a “metaphysical excursus” on the significance of sport. The body is always an object to be overcome by the self, as Ernest Becker has so brilliantly shown in The Denial of Death, and it is in this agon that the athlete becomes what Weiss calls “a representative of all.” He achieves this symbolic significance not because he “accepts his body as himself” but because he knows instinctively that the body is the natural enemy of self. Though there have been many notable victories by the athlete, the battle is inevitably a losing one since the body eventually deteriorates and dies. Nevertheless, the athletic endeavor is heroic for both winner and loser.
It is the heroism inherent in the transcendence of the body that underlies the philosophical limitations of a study of sport and of the athlete in his athletic role. The heroics of the athlete simply cannot be confined to the playing field since the self manifested in the physical struggle is the same self that directs the body in activities off the field.
Whatever that mystical force is that moves the sprinter in the hundred yard dash to overcome the inertia of his body is the same force that directs all other aspects of the athlete’s life. In other words, an athlete is an athlete off the field as well as on. Sport is but one way of “partializing” life so that nature or the body can be reshaped in a more pleasing image. This “partializing,” however, has significance for the person not only when he is intensely engaged in the game but, just as important, when he is not.
The first and most crucial question of all in a study of the meaning of the athlete in literature is this: What is the self? There is a tendency to equate it with what has traditionally been called “the soul,” but Ernest Becker warns against such simplistic analogy. Michael Murphy in Golf in the Kingdom seems to like the phrase “inner body” in his discussion of the flamelike mystery of man, but, after citing Madame Blavatsky and other theosophists, he leaves the reader in essentially the same state of confusion as others have in discussing the soul. What is the soul? Who knows? No one, but by way of a feeble attempt at definition I will refer to Socrates, who is the first speaker in the following dialogue, the other being Glaucon.
“And as there are two principles of human nature, one the spirited and the other the philosophical, some God, as I should say, has given mankind two arts answering to them (and only indirectly to the soul and body), in order that these two principles (like the strings of an instrument) not to be relaxed or drawn tighter until they are duly harmonized.”
“That appears to be the intention.”
“And he who mingles music with gymnastic in the fairest proportions, and best attempers them to the soul, may be rightly called the true musician and harmonist in a far higher sense than the tuner of the strings.”1
Obviously, the dichotomy that Socrates identifies is “mind and body,” and the soul is that mysterious and unknowable entity which insists on some sort of truce between the two. A lost soul would be one who either indulges his animal nature excessively or is hopelessly entrapped in airy abstractions; in short, one who has lost a sense of limits and the saving knowledge of the golden mean, which, incidentally, does not equate with mediocrity. Socrates implies a distinction between mind and soul but for purposes of this study I would like to place both of these abstractions under the broader abstraction of self. There is the body and the self. If the soul is that which drives us toward wholeness or holiness, the two having the same root meaning, what is the mind, the other part of self? As far as I know, no one has the slightest idea. We are surrounded by utter mystery in an effort to determine who we are as thinking beings. All we know is that we are more than bodies and that we are driven toward self-esteem and joy. Michael Novak in The Joy of Sports writes:
The root of human dissatisfaction and restlessness goes as deep into the spirit as any human drive—deeper than any other drive. It is the human spirit [or soul]. Nothing stills it. Nothing fulfills it. It is not a need like a hunger, a thirst, or an itch, for such needs are easily satisfied. It is need even greater than sex; orgasmic satisfaction does not quiet it. ‘Desire’ is the word by which coaches call it. A driveness. Distorted, the drive for perfection can propel an ugly and considerably less than perfect human development. True, straight, and well-targeted, it soars like an arrow toward the proper beauty of mankind.” (p. 27)
The soul is the holy (or wholly) spirit; to deny this is death though the body may live on.
If the soul is the impulse toward order, toward a healing of the cosmic crack, the mind appears to be that side of self which is conscious of the crack or flaw in the first place. It is also the side of self which envisions things “nearer to the heart’s desire.” It is the generator of “eidólons,” to use Whitman’s term, but it is both more and less than that. If a mistake is made in assuming that the athlete accepts his body as himself, a mistake of equal magnitude lies in the myth that athletics constitute a “mindless” endeavor. The athlete uses his mind as much as a scholar or scientist; he merely uses a different part of the mind. Essentially, he uses intelligence while the intellectual uses intellect. It is impossible to separate the two completely, but Richard Hofstadter has provided us with the “nub of distinction.”
Intelligence is an excellence of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate, and predictable range; it is a manipulative, adjustive, unfailingly practical quality—one of the most eminent and endearing of the animal virtues. Intelligence works within the framework of limited but clearly stated goals, and may be quick to shear away questions of thought that do not seem to help in reaching them.
Intellect, on the other hand, is the critical, creative, and contemplative side of the mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, reorder, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole. Intelligence can be praised as a quality in animals; intellect, being a unique manifestation of human dignity, is both praised and assailed as a quality in men.2
The equation of intelligence with “the endearing quality of animals” is an important consideration here. The less intelligence required in a sporting endeavor, the more the tendency to regard the participant in that activity as an animal. Hence, linemen in football are often referred to jokingly as “animals,” “beasts,” “neanderthals,” while quarterbacks, for example, are considered more intelligent.
Sports require intelligence though not necessarily intellect. In any event, the athlete has both, and he has a soul, all of which make the self. It cannot be overemphasized: the athlete is like everyone else, but he is different. In his youth he relies on intelligence to overcome the body, but when the body has made its inevitable counterattack and forced him to retire, he then begins to rely on intellect in order to discover new ways of transcending nature. In fact, everyone in the world is an ex-athlete, since somewhere along the line, if only during childhood, we engaged in games or exercises seeking approval of witnesses, usually a parent or a friend. We tried to “show off’ and we continue showing off for the rest of our lives. What many, if not most of us, discover is that sports is not our interest or talent, and we turn, often sadly I suspect, to more abstruse endeavors. This is why growing up is difficult, and so is growing old, because most of us have neither mind nor body to do anything spectacular during our three score years and ten. What is there left for us? Transference. We pay tribute to those who have overcome. Man, said Dr. Johnson, is “a worshipping animal.” Hence, we watch, imitate, render praise, and strive to do the best we can. We want wholeness and when we cannot achieve it, we admire others who can.
The wholeness we seek is the mastering of nature by the self, by the created self, by the artificial self. What we want is wholesome artificialness in which we can rejoice, directly or vicariously, in the victory over nature or death while we are in the “magic circle” of life. Nature is our eternal foe and what is needed in our world is a sense of good sportsmanship and fair play in the contest. There is in fact only one contest, man against nature, and to rape the earth in the manner we do is no different from kicking an opponent in the groin in a boxing match—hence, the obvious universal significance of sports.
The athlete, like his admirers, seeks wholeness, and the manner in which he seeks this wholeness makes all the difference. After the athlete has retired, he then makes one of three choices. He places his athletic accomplishments in perspective and with the rest of us comes to live in what Freud called “the common misery of mankind.” Or he adds to his normal misery and that of others by becoming paranoid in one of two ways: he retreats into the past and thrives on the glory of yesteryear or, overestimating his intellect, capitalizes on his heroic achievements in sport in an attempt to extend self in other directions. The self always wants to expand but to ignore one’s limitations is to become neurotic or self-deceived. Northrop Frye has called this character in literature the Alazon and his besetting sin is hubris or pride. In one way or another he engages in self-glorification and establishes himself as a model of wholeness. Hence the long and familiar parade of bromides of every stripe, the all-round man, student athlete, the muscular Christian, the booster alumnus, the sporting gentleman, and so on, in short he who has not achieved distinguished wholeness but only the shadow of it. In his own eyes this true believer sees himself as a splendid representative of a sound mind in a sound body and, like Apollo, begins to render laws and prophecies that establish platitudinous cultural attitudes affecting the entire course of history.
What is emerging is a picture of the athlete as a human being with, like everybody else, mind, body, and soul, the mind and soul constituting the self. Once more, where he differs from others is in the manner of transcending the body. Generally speaking, the athlete in his efforts of transcendence relies on intelligence which, as Hofstadter said without reference to sports, “lies within the framework of limited but clearly stated goals.” The immediate goal for the athlete is simply winning the game. If he wins, he gains self-esteem and recognition, which must eventually be subjected to self-evaluation. The consequence of this evaluation is that the athlete will either choose or not choose to join others in the other various routes to self-worth: making high grades, writing good books, raising nutritious vegetables, erecting beautiful buildings, making money in order to engage in philanthropy, running for public offices, fighting holy wars, saving souls, and building “a better world” in which to live. We know the varieties of tunes, but the theme is always the same: the conquest of nature. It is not so much versatility that the athlete and nonathlete alike are seeking as what we all must seek through either intelligence or intellect or both, and that is the transcendence of the body. Mens sana in corpore sano (sound mind in a sound body) is neither an archaic nor a trivial epithet; it is, as Juvenal tells us, the one goal worth praying for and what it means requires emphasis at the expense of redundancy: mental sanity and physical health, a health that in addition to whatever role luck may play derives from control, direction, care, and rational concern for the body.
I hope, then, to have established at this point that the athlete is not merely a body performing but a self engaged in heroic transcendence of the body. With this in mind, we can now move to the major theme with which this book is concerned: the quality of athletic heroism in American literature. I would like to qualify this immediately by saying that the real subject is the quality of athletic heroism in life since literature, like sport, does not exist in a vacuum. It invariably reflects the Zeitgeist of a society in much the same manner as sports and games and the heroes emerging from those events. What, then, is quality? It is, says Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the coming together of mind and matter, the third event in the universe, and it is also the goal of all heroic action.
Man, Ernest Becker shows, is either a hero or a hero worshiper, or, by implication, a vegetable, a nonbeing. I have been aware for many years of D. H. Lawrence’s dictum “Give homage and allegiance to a hero and you yourself become heroic; it is the law of men,”3 but it remained for Becker to confirm for me Lawrence’s intuitive proclamation with his stunning survey of psychoanalysis and religion. Perversity is averted as much as possible by acceptance of both the body and the need for transcendence; thus is implied a sort of middle way analogous to Robert Pirsig’s synthesis of nature and art. Quality, the third event, the union of energy and form, Pirsig equates with the Greek term AretĂȘ, or excellence, a pervasive concept applicable to every aspect of life. I propose here to examine the manner in which athletic excellence or heroism is transferred from the playing field to AretĂȘ in society. According to the poet Wallace Stevens in “The Pure Good of Theory,” “There is always the thing and the version of the thing.” As a student of literature, I intend to examine the version of the thing, the myths of the athlete, principally in his nonathletic role.
The basic questions in regard to athletics in the modern world come down to these: what is the quality of athletic heroism, not in terms of mere physical accomplishments, in numbers of passes thrown, home runs hit, or feet jumped, or in terms of isolated parts, health, speed, strength, and endurance, but in relation to the whole social mythos? What does the athlete hero expect for his accomplishments and why and what praise by hero-worshipers is rendered him and why? These are formidable issue...

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