Literature and/of Sport

Perhaps we should begin by focusing on the conjunction, and, rather than the preposition, of. As mimetic practices designed to produce pleasure, literature and sport are culturally analogous. Both appear to be rooted in the play-instinct which, disproving Friedrich Schiller’s maxim that ‘Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays’ (Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man, XV), is common to all animals. One strain in European philosophy, from Schiller to Nietzsche and perhaps even through Gadamer and Derrida, sees play as fundamental to, or even preceding, the social manifestations of culture. Johan Huizinga began his classic study Homo Ludens (1938) with the statement that ‘Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for men to teach them their playing.’ Huizinga went on to argue that play is distinguished by certain characteristics: by freedom, by separation and boundedness (in that it is marked off from ordinary life by limits of time and space), by order, and by secrecy. But despite the power and persuasiveness both of Huizinga’s argument and its critical re-reading, in the context of modern capitalist culture, by Roger Caillois in Man, Play and Games (1958), I think it is important to maintain some critical distance at the start from the discursive and ideological compulsions of the philosophy of play.

Let’s start, then, with the obvious analogy between literature and games as mimetic forms, reproducing or imitating human activities – such as hunting, fighting, war, and so on – without incurring damaging physical costs. In fact this lack of real-life expenditure, if we may so call it, might direct us towards the Kantian proposition that the distinctive feature of aesthetic pleasure is the absence of interference from interests. There is a great deal of neo-Kantianism in European aesthetic theory generally, and in the ideals of art for art’s sake and of true sport as a voluntary amateur activity. Huizinga, like Schiller before him and Caillois after, reposes extreme faith in play as an essentially free activity. This confidence is at the root of what turns out to be an invidious and largely untenable distinction between the amateur and the professional, a distinction that lends itself to manipulation by class interests (ie the opposition between gentlemen and players). Caillois states unambiguously that in the true game, property is exchanged, but no goods are produced:

As for the professionals – the boxers, cyclists, jockeys or actors who earn their living in the ring, track or hippodrome or on the stage, and who must think in terms of prize, salary or title – it is clear that they are not players but workers. When they play, it is at some other game. (Man, Play and Games, p. 6)

Is it possible, whether in the context of the sports of classical Greece and Rome, where athletes were separately maintained and paid an opsonion for their services, or in the context of the huge monetary investments in modern sport, to sustain this distinction between players and workers? This really is why I continue to be somewhat suspicious of the privileging of ‘free play’ as the source of all creative endeavour, and of efforts to demarcate this space for literature and the other arts on the one hand, and sports on the other. Both literature and sport are in our own time very largely commercial pursuits, by no means free from economic interests and practical ends, and it is extremely difficult to maintain the ideological purity of either. At the same time, it is clear that there are some compulsions within the space of play itself that tend to override financial or other interests. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham characterized certain types of gambling, where the gains cannot in any way outweigh the losses, as deep play, and in a seminal essay, Clifford Geertz applied this notion to the Balinese cock-fight.

Following Aristotle’s classification of forms of mimesis per differentiam, we might be tempted to see literature and sport as distinguished by their choice of medium. Literature uses verbal representations, while sport often – though not always – uses bodies as its medium. Would it be right, then, to think of literature as addressed to the mental, and sports to the physical realm? But not all games are physical pastimes (in fact many are verbal) and a more general theory of play, or of games, could function as a useful corrective to the mind-body distinction often employed to produce a Cartesian split between mental and physical culture, or between the arts and sports. Wittgenstein compared language itself to games-playing:

We can easily imagine people amusing themselves in a field by playing with a ball so as to start various existing games, but playing many without finishing them and in between throwing the ball aimlessly into the air, chasing one another with the ball and bombarding one another for a joke and so on. And now someone says: The whole time they are playing a ball-game and following definite rules at every throw. (Philosophical Investigations, 83)

So instead of seeing literature and games as parallel cultural forms, we could see literature itself as a kind of game, which is what certain kinds of games theory, or the philosophy of play, would want to do.

Caillois builds on a throwaway reference in the fourth book of Plato’s Republic to institute a distinction between ludus and paidia, game and play. Play, paidia, is spontaneous, exuberant, joyful, and potentially anarchic. Game, ludus, is rule-bound, promotes skill, calculation and difficulty, and is productive of social discipline. Plato abhors ‘the lawless play of others’, but approves an educational programme, paideia, which begins by training children in music and gymnastics, to regulate and instill harmony in bodies as well as minds. The distinction between paidia and ludus is still employed by games theorists to set the putative freedom and anarchy of play – in all forms of art – against the systems and rules that regulate games. Thus just as one might contrast the free play of children with a rule-bound game like cricket, one might also contrast the joyful abandon of the ‘naïve’ artist, or the spirit of creative freedom itself, with the rules of genre or laws of form. Indeed genres might be seen as equivalent, in literature, to games. Unfortunately, it is difficult to push this contrast beyond the purely notional realm of theory. For even with children, we see that the transition from play to game is quick and imperceptible: rules are invented almost immediately to structure what seems to be aimless, random activity (as in Freud’s example of his grandson Ernst playing fort!-da!). So too, contra Derrida, it is difficult to speak of art, and literature particularly, as manifesting the nature of pure play, or free play: intention, will, and social conditioning always-already intervene to regulate artistic and textual expression, so that even where the ‘rules of the game’ are constantly being broken, they operate as frames of reference. More interesting is Caillois’s attempt to classify games into four categories: agôn, games of contestation; mimicry, games of simulation; alea, games of chance, and ilinx, games of vertigo. Within these broad categories, we can see the notional opposition of ludus and paidia as operating in the form of a tension, a two-way pull, rather than as a clear structural division.

Isn’t there the same kind of two-way pull in literature too? Which brings me to my first question – is there really any point in reading the literature of sport if the more interesting issue is whether literature is like sport, or like a game? Of course the latter possibility is one that we must always keep in our minds, but the reason why we’ve chosen the subject we have is that it allows us to focus on sport and its cultural representations in a way that asks many other interesting questions as well. Beginning by asking whether literature and sport are alike, we might go on to find out in what ways they are not alike: so that reading the literature of sport will enable us to focus on a deeply ambivalent preposition.

Reading
Plato, The Republic, Books III and IV
Friedrich Schiller, Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man, at http://www.bartleby.com/32/501.html
Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955)
Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press,2001)