We just finished the baseball unit in the course I’m teaching, “Male Fantasy Sports.” The course is a crosslisted English and Gender Studies with 14 students (syllabus | departmental description | photo of books at the bookstore). Most students major in the social sciences, but there are a pair of English majors, and three or four students who focus specifically on gender. The one sentence mission statement of the course is:
We aim to investigate how masculinity (Male), sexuality/desire (Fantasy), and nationalism/community (Sports) are expressed in literary objects about baseball and football (soccer).
Pretty straightforward, no? Anyway, yesterday’s course marked the end of the baseball unit with a discussion (mostly led by me, I fear) about Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe. The novel ends up being far more reactionary than I remembered it, and Kinsella takes a hard line against, among other things, civil rights and urbanization. His dogged pursuing of a mythic small-town America where the only things that matter are wifey, daughter, and baseball insults everyone left out. His America is far too white for my tastes—and far too boring.
Before that, we had a splendid discussion of Malamud’s The Natural. Not content to simply see it as a “heroes fail” narrative or retelling of Arthurian legend, we spent a lot of time tracking Hobbs’s uncontrolled desire, settling on a concentric sexuality for him, where someone like Memo Paris is on the fringes, Bump Baily is a bit closer to the real thing, and, at the middle, is his primary object of desire: Wonderboy. We failed in determining what, precisely, Wonderboy is doing in the novel, but we did decide that whatever it is, Roy wants it very, very much. I am perfectly content to leave our reading to, “if Roy had his druthers, he would just beat off all day.”
With Roth’s Great American Novel, the discussion ended along the lines of imagining an American history and identity fueled primarily—or maybe even exclusively—on hate. Roth’s parodying the Orwellian unity of hate with totalitarianism demonstrates that, in fact, it is a component deep seated in the American psyche itself, such that hate is not just what made American identity, but it is what made it hegemonic.
Tags: baseball, Bernard Malamud, desire, Great American Novel, identity, literature, masculinity, nationalism, novel, Philip Roth, sexuality, Shoeless Joe, teaching, The Natural, University of Chicago, W. P. Kinsella
February 12th, 2009 at 13:27
Just stumbled on this today. While I haven’t read SJ in many years, I certainly have no memory of disparaging civil right, tho I’ve been accused of being anti-semitic for naming my villain Bluestein. I’m delighted to be called reactionary, and I, in all my work take shots at the “Believe in our loving god or we’ll kill you christians.” Care to elaborate on the civil rights thing? Take care, Bill Kinsella
February 19th, 2009 at 2:41
Sure.
The issue mostly came up when briefly discussing the relationship between the novel and “Field of Dreams”–most notably in how Salinger is wholly replaced.
But what stuck in my head teaching the course was a discomfort in how the baseball field has some sort of implicit ending point–players only from a certain era appear, and so on. I asked the class to try to imagine when that line might be, given what we know in the novel, and, further, what had changed in the US since then. We settled around 1940, if I recall correctly, And outside of technological advances, the biggest change: Jackie Robinson.
So the field is this valorized place, a heaven. But Jackie Robinson couldn’t play there. It’s a weird turn, and, to be honest, much of the class wasn’t interested in following this thread this far (the Roth seemed much more involved with civil rights via baseball). Yet the fact remains that in celebrating the past, it must take the bad with the good–and there’s a lot Baseball has to be ashamed of before 1940–not just the Black Sox.
So interestingly enough, if not for the changes in the “reclusive author” character from novel to film, a discussion regarding urbanization and civil rights might never have come up!
Cheers.