Subjectivity and temporality in literary narratives about sports

Abstract

This article explores the concept of embodied subjectivity in literary narratives about sport. While embodied subjectivity has been central to the methodology of sociologists of sport in recent years, it is also manifested in complex and fascinating ways in a special kind of literary sports narrative. Using narrative strategies developed by novelists in the early twentieth century, the authors discussed here aim to do more than simply describe sporting experience. They recount the deep physical, emotional, and psychic transformation of the self through athletic training and competition. They represent the sporting self as a construct layered over time through inclination, repetition, and habit. They characterize competition as a felt, embodied, and even sometimes disembodied experience. The lived experience of sport cannot be captured in simple narratives. The literariness of these narratives enables their authors to portray convincingly that lived experience.

Notes

1. For broad commentary on the use and promise of embodied subjectivity as a method of understanding sports, see, for example, Ravn and Høffding (2017), Allen-Collinson (2009) and Hockey and Collinson (2007).

2. Saul Steinberg’s famous cartoon, ‘View of the World from Ninth Avenue,’ appeared on the cover of The New Yorker on 29 March 1976. It shows Manhattan as the centre of the world.

3. In his sociological study of boxing, Loïc Wacquant describes the ‘mutual imbrication of corporeal dispositions and mental dispositions’ achieved in training. ‘In the accomplished boxer, the mental becomes part of the physical and vice versa; body and mind function in total symbiosis’ (95, 96). He notes that experienced boxers can continue to fight after being knocked out, or knocked into semi-consciousness: ‘the body continues to box on its own, as it were’, until the boxer regains his senses (96).

4. To offer another very specific example, Ambrose Bierce in his 1890 short story, ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, focuses on a main character who is being hanged by the Union army. In the split second between being dropped from the bridge with a noose around his neck and the moment when his neck is broken, the character imagines his escape and then his improbable return to his wife and family. Lived experiential time expands, through the imagination, into a rich, long narrative time.

5. The third part of Body and Soul was published in French in a French journal 10 years before the book-length study itself was published (Wacquant 1991). His use of narrative to analyse sporting experience is an early example of a sports research methodology developed by Andrew Sparkes and others. See, for examples, Sparkes 2001; and Smith and Sparkes 2009.

6. Miller (1995) argues that all narratives have three basic elements: characters with agency, an initial situation that changes, and repetition. Sporting events share those same three elements and thus are, by their very nature, narratives.