Keepers of the faith : sports from the wilderness to the space age in selected modern American novels

There is a growing realization among critics, readers, and thinkers that twentieth-century American novelists have used sports as a vehicle for serious thought. The truth of the notion is undeniable. Virtually every major American novelist--and most of the minor ones--have written serious novels that treat sports or athletes. The depth of treatment varies from casual to profound.

A realization that is not keeping pace, however, is that the American novelist's attitude toward sports is not one of unabated enmity. Rather, it is widely assumed that novelists--being thinkers--bear a natural antipathy for athletes. While modern American novelists give a clear-eyed rendering of the bad in sports--the corruption, the at times gratuitous brutality, and the obsessive and mistaken belief that sports go life one better-those novelists also leave room for the good. In fact, the modern American novelist might be characterized as a wary but convinced admirer of sports.

Not all major American novelists, of course, can be called admirers of sports--Sinclair Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and Philip Roth, for instance, have little patience with either sports or sports fanatics. To counterbalance this view, however, are major novelists who have written significant novels that are basically structured by sports and that represent more clearly the attitudes the modern American novelist has toward sports.

This study treats a large selection of novels--by both major and minor writers--but focuses on five significant American novels: William Faulkner's The Bear, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Bernard Malamud's The Natural and John Updike's Rabbit , Run along with its sequel, Rabbit Redux. These central novels reveal a quite consistent set of attitudes toward sports and athletes. Each novel uses sports as a basic ideal against which modern society is measured and found wanting. In other words, sports are represented as sources of order and stability in a world of galloping change.

But since sports are grafted to the larger society they change, too. In fact, each of these novels presents a sport that is besieged by change and the view is that normally change equals decay, a falling away from an earlier ideal. Also, each novel centers on a Player who is confused by society and threatened-along with his Game--by corrupting change. The elements that represent corruption include an assortment of parasites--zealous fans, profiteers, journalists, gamblers, and femme fatales--who attach themselves to the Player and thus threaten his Game. Lending support to the Player are his mentor, coach (the decayed mentor), or aficionado. But the Player is too naive and his allies too weak to offset the strength of the corruptors. Thus the Game falls prey to the modern insistence on change. Faulkner's Ike McCaslin lives to see his woods overrun by sawmills and superhighways; Hemingway's Pedro Romero struggles to save bullfighting from postwar decadence; Malamud's Roy Hobbs, a basically honest and innocent

iv man, joins his corruptors in fixing a playoff for the league pennant; Updike's Rabbit Angstrom seeks momentary peace in a simple game of driveway basketball, while everyone else watches a simulated moon landing on television.

Implicit throughout this pattern of decay is, in each novel, a basic sympathy toward the innocent and confused Player and the beleagured Game. And though both are inevitably changed, sophisticated in a sense, the Game continues to offer the Player momentary refuge from modern confusion. From novel to novel the refuge becomes increasingly less secure, but it endures. It is thus that these novels represent what might be seen as the American novelist's tendency when viewing sports--the tendency to treat them as a source of order in a time of disorder, as a momentary stay against modern confusion.