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· 69 ·· CHAPTER 3 · Boxing—Stuttering—Graffiti What generates the sensation of presence and immediacy in the sport of boxing? Is it the flirtation with death (and murder) that excites both boxer and boxing fan? If so, is the possibility of death in the ring required for that excitement? Does boxing need an occasional sacrifice to maintain its truth value? Joyce Carol Oates confesses (as do many others) that she is drawn to this descendent of gladiatorial battles with deep, conflicting emotions about her complicity in the injuries that result.1 The allure of the sport may be as simple as a desire to see a human life end in spectacle—which may not be as ugly an impulse as it seems if it is ultimately a drive to rewrite knowledge of the more typical banality of death and the way it dovetails so seamlessly into the flow of everyday life. Is this sport a sample of pure violence, held just within the limits of legality? It can look like sanctioned assault, brought to the edge of murder— or at least a simulation of murder in cases of a clean knockout, the unconscious boxer felled like a tree in the ring, rendering the score and all the judges irrelevant with the winner upright and the loser prone on the mat. Boxers may seem more alive because of this tangible risk of death, and the sport may be appealing because the audience can participate vicariously in that affirmation of life and will of the winner exchanged for the denial of life and will of the opponent. This may be a structure at work in generating the sport’s appeal, and if so, it creates a zero-sum system that requires not only death but also occasional homicide in order to generate the perception of human life. Boxing, however, may appeal less for its reality effect than for its fictionality . The sport is filled with simulation: shadowboxing against imaginary opponents, knockouts that in another context would be murders, punches driven by fear of failure rather than anger. It fascinates because it stands in the liminal space between the upper limit of civil society and the bottom limit of war culture. It may be this insight into human nature—the ability to will transitions between brute and compassionate behavior—that 70 BOXING—STUTTERING—GRAFFITI creates the fascination with the sport. The “reality” of boxing, then, may have something to do with this mixture of real and fictional elements, and it may appeal to fans and others because it parallels the mixture of direct and imagined events within our everyday experience. Terayama spent much of the 1960s fascinated, along with much of the world, with boxing and the problems it forced viewers to face. The sport encapsulated a debate between self-determination (let ’em fight) and interventionism (call off the fight) that would resonate with Third World independence movements, civil rights, and the students behind the barricades . Terayama’s spin on this discourse, however, would be to position boxing in a cluster of formations, including stuttering, graffiti, jazz, and gambling, which, in their ad-libbed style, enhance a sensation of presence and a feeling of being in the now. Death in the Ring The ethical dilemma of death in the ring—letting the boxers fight with the goal of a knockout versus the obligation of intervention by authorities (doctors or referees) to protect the prizefighters from themselves—would become the dominant boxing narrative of the 1960s. But Terayama’s first boxing piece, a screenplay called Jūkyūsai no burūsu (The nineteen-yearold blues, 1959) also opens with this very problem: Scene 1: In a boxing ring. A middle-aged boxer is continuously punched by a younger boxer, Shōji. Pushed against the ropes, he can no longer put up a fight. Next, faces of the crowd laughing hard, cramming hotdogs into their mouths, drinking Coca-Cola, hooting, and whistling. Suddenly the crowd quiets. The middleaged man is dead.2 The scene that follows depicts another middle-aged man, accompanied by a young sidekick, running up to the top of a building with a chicken in his arms. They have apparently made a bet about whether chickens can fly, the older man claiming that the bird will manage to slow itself down enough in the panic of free fall to land safely on the pavement and the boy demanding cigarettes if his own prediction, that it will fall like a rock and die, turns...

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