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“Ali Even Motivates the Dead”: The Pursuit of Sovereignty in Norman Mailer's The Fight

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Michael Collins
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Abstract

Norman Mailer was haunted by the specter of social death—a specter created for him by living as a Jew between the parentheses created by the Holocaust and the prospect of nuclear Armageddon. As an antidote to social death, Mailer sought its opposite—sovereignty within and beyond his writer's sphere. In the boxer Muhammad Ali, Mailer found an exemplar of the seizure of sovereignty within and beyond a sphere. The Fight chronicles the heavyweight championship battle between Ali and George Foreman in Zaire, a country treated like a private bank account by its dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko. I argue that Mailer regrettably failed to emphasize fully the fact that Zaire was exhibit B (the Vietnam War being the writer's inevitable exhibit A) in the case Mailer passionately made that the Cold War brutalized the American psyche.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 128 , Issue 2 , March 2013 , pp. 322 - 336
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by The Modern Language Association of America

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