Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth (review)

254Reviews Westbrook, Deeanne. Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth. Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1996. 348 pp. Cloth: $49.95. Paper: $19.95. I speak from experience: one's tendency in teaching about sport, in literature or cultural studies, is to insist that one is really talking about larger issues: society, politics, culture, race, class, gender. Deeanne Westbrook does not insist that she is talking about larger things than baseball in Ground Rules, because she assumes that there is nothing "larger" than baseball. It is the American myth; it centers our psyches, our souls, and our communities. Everything else, as the T-shirt goes, is just details. Westbrook's strongest critical argument gives a sense of the scope of Ground Rules. It comes when she is discussing Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association. Critics have always seen this novel about a man obsessed with dice baseball as presenting analogues to Judaeo-Christian myth; its protagonist J. Henry Waugh is like the Jewish God and his world is like our world. Westbrook claims, in a disorienting, exciting move, that we should see the novel instead as metaphor: the Universal Baseball Association is the world, and Coover's way of talking about the world and its God is no different in kind from Milton's. At a stroke, Westbrook changes Coover's genre from black comedy to epic. It is a convincing reassignment. Another word for Coover's novel might have been "allegory," but Westbrook avoids that word, probably because "allegory" suggests a neat and articulated correspondence of fictional elements to real things. Metaphor is messier, and myth is messier still. Following the main direction in myth criticism set by Claude Levi-Strauss, Westbrook sees the myth-maker—and hence, the baseball writer—as bricoleur, assembler of whatever pieces come to hand. Westbrook's other major influence is Lacan; her bricoleurs conscious narrative is structured like the Lacanian unconscious—like a language, that is, that obeys the uncanny insistence of the letter. Structuralism via Lacan allows Westbrook to develop rich insights about Bernard Malamud's The Natural. Among Malamud scholars and sport literature critics alike, The Natural has acquired a reputation as a static and turgid collection of symbolic references. Westbrook revitalizes Malamud's novel by reading its myths as things in process and structured like the unconscious . The Natural after Westbrook's reading is less clear, more confused, adrift, vital and dangerous; it may well become more readable again. Ground Rules is above all a text in myth criticism, and an outstanding, learned contribution to myth criticism of fiction. I think that Westbrook's approaches work best for dense, unrealistic texts like Coover's and Malamud's; she is less able to bring alive a comparatively realistic text like William Kennedy's Ironweed (or reveals, perhaps, how Kennedy is less able to use the myth of baseball creatively). Westbrook herself might not agree. In a difficult Studies in American Fiction255 closing chapter called "Baseball, Bricolage and the Beautiful," she argues that an imaginative reworking of myth makes for the best baseball stories; paraphrasing T. S. Eliot, she says that the best baseball fictions "steal" rather than "imitate" their models in literature and in sport. The highest echelon of her baseball literature canon includes August Wilson's Fences, Kennedy, Coover, and Malamud; for her, writers like W. P. Kinsella and Nancy Willard fall just short of the fusion of myth and artistic purpose reached by those writers. At some level, they import baseball motifs to dress up ordinary fiction rather than surrendering totally to the mythic impulses of the game. Ground Rules will appeal to anyone interested in baseball literature; it is the most substantial book ever devoted to the subject. In the scope of this review, I cannot begin to address its readings of archetypal narrative, the dwarf figure, the Oedipal struggle, Babel and the "gap" (between word and thing), or crisis art. It will be very interesting to anyone working on myth, American studies, or postmodern fiction. I'd like to recommend Westbrook's study most of all to people who teach literary theory in upper division or graduate courses—especially those teachers whose Fall students begin to...