“reality” in quotes, no disclaimers, no reset function, no replaceable avatar to start over with. It just hurts. And if you’re watching, there’s no way to pretend it’s not happening. That kid’s nose really is pouring blood, his neurons really are scrambling.
But wait. That’s exactly the Fight Club story. Didn’t Pitt and Norton and Palahniuk do all this already? Isn’t the idea that fighting is particularly “authentic” just another lame Maileresque, patriarchal cliché? Really, what’s real about scrapping? And what’s so great about “real” or “authentic” anyways?
At first glance, I’d say it’s pain, the threat of pain, the inescapable physicality that sharpens a poignancy in fighting. It has always been the ostensible realness of boxing that attracted me—I don’t think boxing has anything to do with violence. Violence is coercive by definition; it’s done to someone against their will. You step into the ring voluntarily. It’s painful, risky, dangerous, scary, often damaging, and probably not a great idea on balance, but it’s not violence. Capitalism generalizes intrinsic and extrinsic violence throughout our social and cultural relationships, and boxing is one more site for that expression. The act of fighting is scary, thrilling, and potentially damaging absolutely, but the same can be said for ballet, skateboarding, mountain climbing, scuba diving, riding a horse, mountain biking, and playing hockey. There is danger in varying degrees inhered in nearly every activity, risks to be taken and compromises to be made. Everything has a cost. If you don’t like boxing, if it makes you squeamish, if you think that’s not a risk you’re comfortable with, I totally understand. But that’s an aesthetic choice.
Well-earned physical pain and suffering, whether it’s from grappling, walking all day, or digging dirt is sweet relief for those of us who sit on our asses too much, and that materiality promises an encounter with trust and solidarity. Maybe that’s why I’m standing ringside after a long, immobile day writing emails, finishing an article, and applying for a grant. I’m vertical, and there are real people, real sounds, and real action around me. There is a physical encounter here that’s soaking into the immateriality of my day. There is immediacy, instead of a-temporality. It’s right here in front of me, and I flinch as a young man gets his elbow dislocated.
A more just and equitable world is one where we are willing to encounter the consequences of our actions and make ethical individual and collective choices. Capitalism insists that it is reasonable for an old-growth watershed to be sacrificed or workers to be downsized or land to be colonized in the name of growth and efficiency. A better world requires us being able to resist that logic and claim that some things are incommensurable: they do not adhere to market logic.
If we abandon or condescend to sports, we lose a valuable and fertile route to a world where people are more than industrial inputs: a world where people can trust and rely on each other. Sports are hardly the only way we can bodily encounter trust, but they are a specific and irreplaceable one, in no small part due to their physicality. Fighting, like all sports, requires trust, without which larger notions of solidarity and community are impossible. Why is it that after almost every bout combatants gratefully and effusively hug each other, check to make sure each other is alright, and give thanks that no one was really hurt?
The immediacy of these physical encounters forces us to face the consequences of our actions, putting our ethical choices into living color. Every time you agree to fight someone, you are placing a huge amount of trust and faith in them. There is the very real possibility that they can damage you, maybe badly. In any fight, you have to take care of the other, and pull up before anything ugly happens: you have to believe that when you tap they’re going to stop. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes that trust is misplaced. Overwhelmingly, though, that trust is validated. In team sports there is another layer of mutual aid involved, when you not only enter a series of agreements with your opponents, but with your teammates as well.
WITHIN STRIKING DISTANCE
The lived experience of giving and granting trust is a precondition for mutuality, or in a more abstracted, politicized rendition: solidarity. There are lots of other places to encounter this kind of mutuality, say doing work with others, but sports are one highly accessible and joyful route. Trust is necessarily bound up with the possibility of suffering, and in an antiseptic and duplicitous era, that’s an attractive commodity to many—ergo the phenomenon of fake memoirs. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is the flag-bearer for this genre—but there is a boatload of these clowns. Frey is a rich-kid frat boy who claimed a life of unbelievable drug and alcohol abuse, violence, Mafia relationships, and general chaos so extreme that it turned his “memoir” into a critically-lauded bestseller. Pretty much none of it was true and he got famously flogged for it.
But he is hardly alone. Over the course of multiple celebrated Oprah appearances, and in a book intended for publication in 2009 (but cancelled), Herman Rosenblat claimed that he met his wife through the fence at Buchenwald. He actually is a concentration camp survivor, but his love story and many details of his book are fantasy. In 2008, Margaret Seltzer, a rich, white suburban girl pawned off Love and Consequences, a memoir of growing up as a half-white and half-Native foster child, living a bad-ass life of drugs and violence as a Blood gang member. She even faked a thug accent in radio interviews, until she was exposed and the book pulled.
Then there’s the weirdness of JT LeRoy who has written a bunch of books, articles, and screenplays as a once-homeless, transgender, sex-working, oft-abused drug addict. But LeRoy is a middle-aged straight woman named Laura Albert who was eventually outed (and now sued) after a long investigation. Michael Gambino published The Honored Society in 2001, pretending to be a full-on Mafiosa who spent significant time in jail for murder, pimping, money laundering and all the rest. None of it was true. In 1997, Misha Defonseca wrote a massive European bestseller about being a Holocaust survivor, killing a German soldier, and living with a pack of wolves (!). It was B.S. In 1995, Binjamin Wilkomirski wrote a similar Holocaust survival story that was hugely popular and won plenty of literary awards. Also total B.S.
There are tons of other examples of memoir-deception, both recent and historical, many of them prominent hoaxes. The thread that runs through these stories is the presumption of authenticity in describing a life of trauma and pain. These fake memoirs are all characterized by their “gritty realism” and their witness to “horrifying reality.” A huge proportion of fake memoirs are written by people pretending to be indigenous or Holocaust survivors.
Nasdijj, for example, wrote three acclaimed and awarded books, starting with 2000’s The Blood Runs Like A River Through My Dreams, about growing up Navajo, his brutal childhood and abusive parents, eventually adopting an FAS kid, then an HIV+ child. Esquire reviewed it as an “authentic, important book.... Unfailingly honest and very nearly perfect.” Except it was a total lie. He’s a white guy from Michigan named Tim Barrus.
All these books claimed authenticity on the basis of suffering. Misery lit is a boom sector of the flailing publishing world, and from Frank McCourt to Dave Pelzer to Augusten Burroughs, offering up personal grief has made for good business, so it’s hardly any wonder that a few folks with less-than-traumatic lives have given it their best shot, reality notwithstanding.
It’s not just books either. Memoir is a fluid genre, and much of the hiphop I listen to is predicated on streetness. I love 50 Cent, but how would I feel if all his bravado and macho bullshit was a total lie? He got shot like I got shot but he ain’t fuckin’ breathing. I presume that thug rappers are habitually full of shit about their heroics, but at least I know it’s coming and love them for it. I don’t mind too much when my hiphop bleeds fiction and non-fiction a little: talking trash is part of the package. But I made no such deals with Frey before I read a Million Little Pieces and most everybody hates being lied to. Including Sherman Alexie, who isn’t real fond of Nasdijj either: “His lies matter because he has cynically co-opted as a literary style the very real suffering endured by generations of very real Indians because of very real injustices caused by very real American aggression that destroyed
