Notebook: Black Farce, White Lies

...After a while, apparently confused by what was happening and not wanting to rest too long, he stood up and, quite efficiently, began ducking a very fast punching Clay, who kept missing...

...That is why the lower race, the inferior sex, the lower class cheat so well and, in their very physical movements, satirize so skillfully, even when the penalties are high...

...Liston, for example, is compared to a bear, Patterson to a hare...

...When the lower order, race, class, person, sex, animal, treated as an object, responds as treated, that is, by acting other than he is, attempting to survive in the absence of good faith, the higher order is locked with the lower into a circuit of mutual distortion...

...How can one know persons who are treated as objects, for, on the part of the master, in order to maintain the heady position of exploitation, the lower person must be regarded as an object, as in the case of the Negro slave who saw his mistress naked but was not conceived as having eyes...

...The take at the gate was of no con sequence...

...The code is about as subtle, and as hard to decipher, as pig-latin, or, better, pig-latin spoken by adults in the presence of children, not difficult, but difficult enough...

...a well known sporting journal tried to photograph it as such...

...Liston likewise remained faithful to his role, except that his expression was now relaxed...

...Since no one was capable of describing events, much less their meaning, as they actually occurred, they had to be reconstructed, which immediately converted all observers into historians...

...But that was part of the farce...

...their live audience was miniature...

...And he accepted the victory by hopping around the ring, shouting about his secret powers, acting out, almost over-acting to the end...

...what domineering husband, a wife...

...the crudity of Liston's performance may have bruised even Clay's aesthetic sensibility...

...One might not have expected Fetchit to appear in the camp of the Black Muslims, unless we are aware that the man who responded to that signal could not possibly have been the per sonality projected...

...rabbit-Patterson, the trickster who disguises himself after two defeats by "the bear...

...It comes to this...

...With due consideration for themselves, they refused to batter each other into the ground for the pleasure of a predominantly white audience, according to white rules of the game, for prizes which they had already achieved by other means...

...At first, no one, not the referee, nor Clay, nor the various announcers and ringsiders knew what had happened...

...Who's the greatest...

...Were Negroes to speak to us directly of what they know, not in exhortation, nit in threat, but about our shared cultural fraudulence, I think we would laugh until our throats rattled...

...The affair began under a flood of extremely powerful and hot television lights and was over about two minutes later...

...The upper must be and is anesthetized by viewing the lower as an object, and fears to take responsibility for its own social role, lest the social mechanism which it commands come to a stop...

...In such a cultural universe, emotions are tactics Our relations with Negroes, as a pivot of our social pathology and our magical rage to command others, condemns us to ordering our experience in one particular way—not tragically, not comically, not even satirically, but farcically...

...Farce is not profoundly comic, a laughing at, not a laughing with...

...When Liston collapsed, the referee, Walcott, who had been a poor, famished, and desperate fighter in his own right, failed to count, obviously because he had failed to see the miraculous little punch, and did not believe that anyone had been knocked down...

...But the partial ownership of Clay by Liston, or later, more technically, by a member of Liston's family, is a type of interlocking control that is encountered in our society generally, and should not be regarded as the necessary prelude to an actual "fix...

...The Governor, prolonging the minuet, declared the fight authentic...

...The end of the game was profit...

...and then it seems inevitable...

...Liston is an ex-con and scofflaw, at ease, like most lower class Negroes, in the underworld...

...Appropriately enough, Clay had been a United States Olympic champion boxer, and understood what it meant for him to fight in the name of our country...

...He can do this because he is young, rich, and has, by means of his new religion, apparently withdrawn from the phantom circle of statuses conferred by whites...

...In retrospect, it appears as a near-perfect burlesque of a heavyweight championship fight...

...What master knows a slave...

...He even managed to fail the Draft Board intelligence test, twice...

...originally, Liston had been the major breadwinner, but at Lewiston the principals split their percentage of the receipts from television and radio coverage...

...Moreover, a secret return match clause seems to have been part of the initial contract...

...We will insist that the affair was either a fix, or a mysteriously authentic fight (one veteran white sportswriter described the perfect punch in detail...

...it is quite the same as other social rationalizations in the service of personal gain...

...There was no visible punch, no bruises, no count...

...The actors knew their audience...

...These details had the effect of exiling the principals to Lewiston, Maine, where the performance took place in a small hall that became, in effect, a stage for the positioning of the apparatus of mass communications, including a relay through the near reaches of outer space via the Early Bird satellite...

...Joe Louis, afterwards sounding like a spokesman for the B'nai Brith, said he was sorry that it had to happen in Maine...

...no precise battle plan was necessary...

...Aftet all, if he had gone down for no visible reason, he had aesthetically outwitted Clay, the showboat, also...

...Liston, in the interim, lay prone for a few seconds, and then got up on one knee, as if listening for a count...

...What we will resist seeing is that two physically tremendous men put on an entertainment for a society in which they do not believe...

...Liston simply plays it cool, speaking astringently and tersely when questioned, uninterested even in appearing interested in the conventional opinion of mankind—the three of them champions, arrived, glorified puppets of the white crowd, but puppets who have learned to pull their own strings, each in his peculiar way...

...It was only later that he offered a logistic analysis of the power of his punch (he was moving in so it was like a he-ad-on collision, etc...

...It took several days before the confusion at Lewiston, compounded by millions of listeners and viewers, and by additional information from the principals and other interpreters, dissolved into a more or less transparent image...

...Born in the South, Clay had successfully turned himself into an Aesopian, a fabulous character...

...His famous rhymes and manufactured rages against opponents have a bowdlerized folk quality...

...As usual, we will ascribe to the Negro behavior which fits our assumptions...

...When Clay was asked, immediately afterwards, what punch knocked out Liston, he allowed that it was either a left-hook or a right-cross, but refused to commit himself before he saw the video-tape...

...We owe candor only to those whom we respect and those who respect us...

...For we and the Negroes, locked in each other's grip, have been acting out this farce for three centuries...

...It is their functions, not their persons that count—the function of a lower class is after all, to sustain an upper class...

...Clay, "the greatest," the Negro as "superman...

...are well paid, well traveled, from Wichita to Moscow, and they always defeat their foil, an all white team, the Washington Generals,* no matter aow funny the game is...

...Like Liston, he is unschooled, * The Generals recently recruited a Negro player, who plays it straight...

...Farce encompasses the fixed and limited gesture in the minuet of statuses, and also the quicksilver, meaningless shift in posture, meaningless in the sense that such posturing reveals an internal vacuum of meaning, which we seek to fill by our mere tactics, by appearances...

...The characters fight among themselves but they always outwit the man (bearListon with the obliterating look...

...The only thing clear was that Liston had fallen to the canvas...

...Neither becomes angry...

...They have known it for generations...

...Upper and lower are linked, throughout civilized history, in a hellish minuet, but only the lower know the meaning of the steps...

...Clay embraces them all and draws them into his fabled world, precisely because, he, alone, in his exuberance, exposes the absurdity of their professional lives in white society...

...After viewing the tape, which was shown him immediately, he explained that the curious little punch which did the ostensible damage had been taught him by 'Step'n Fetchit,' who had learned it, as a boy, from the great Negro heavyweight boxer, Jack Johnson...

...Doesn't the fury of the white southerner flow from a feeling that he knows he doesn't really know "our niggers...

...Patterson lives, ridiculously, as a worthy bourgeois in a white suburb, an unhappy man who has it made, muttering about honor where there is and can be no honor...

...The criticism is the more devastating because it is in the doing—not cerebral, but spontaneous, mimetic, issuing out of the ambivalent experience that every actor ;as of the act and of reality...

...In this the Negroes have been more inventive than we...

...The lower prefers to go through the fires of hell rather than reveal the self which the upper has denied...

...It merely helped to generate a warm climate of mutual interest in which events unfolded...

...The white audience roars with laughter, but the Harlem Globetrotter...

...Negroes caricature Negroes, disdain to take seriously a sport in which they have developed a tradition of skill, not one of the more socially exclusive sports, and defeat whites within the confines of a game whose rules they reinvent, w;iile entertaining a white audience—the sum of these involuted elements is farce of a high order...

...we can imagine that, not hearing one, he collapsed again, waiting for the rule to take hold...

...He became a central fig ure in the Iittle myth into which Clay was turning the Lewiston affair...

...You're the greatest...

...This need not be a conscious process...

...Clay (Muhammed Ali), the star performer, is a Black Muslim who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and a celebrated trip in Africa...

...Fetchit, the movie actor, who had made a fortune out of, and immortalized, the stereotype of the shuffling, "yes, boss," slow-thinking, but sly, Negro, had been Clay's con stant companion in training...

...Observe, for example, the Harlem Globetrotters improvise basketball, the perfect exercise in patterned evasion...

...Let us tr1 laughing at one of their more obvicus cultural double-entendres, the heavyweight championship affair bettieen Sonny Liston and Cassius Clay...

...So far as their behavior on stage was concerned, intuition, improvisation, and mutual interest provide the clue...

...responded the press in chorus...

...First of all, both men are self-ackr.owledged professional outsiders, members of what one might call the "establishment of the outside...

...Note how skillfully they fake, feint, shuffle, break every rule and make a mockery of the game, and with what finesse they burlesque the Negro as athlete, and how they run through the whole gamut of Negro stereoty)es...

...While Liston was down, Clay had refused to retreat to a neutral corner, but had called him a bum and demanded that he get up and fight...

...The vicious cycle of dependent and reciprocal identities begins in treating persons as objects...

...although obviously clever, and manifestly rejects the white world...

...what colonial administrator, a native...

...On the part of the mastered, when one is perceived as an object, the reflex is to behave in ways that mask rather than reveal the self...

...It is a socio-pathic world in which any emotion can be imitated and therefore, any emotion can shift to its opposite in order to meet some imperative of social etiquette...

...This is the mechanical technique of magic, of animal command, of words that have degenerated into mere signs, standing for an extinct universe of things...

...In the interview, afterwards, he appeared cool, poised, mild, satisfied, successful, and unmarked...

...It was therefore assumed that Liston had nothing to lose from Clay's continued success...

...The so-called "theater of the absurd" is, of course, a theater of farce, not so new after all, but enlarged in our time to the point where one is ready to conclude that life follows art...

...The personification of traits in the guise of animals is, of course, an aspect of farce—the form of each creature is frozen by the role played...

...The audience will fill in what it pleases...

...The question remains why the whole affair was executed so unimpressively, so transparently...

...The timekeeper, who later insisted that the affair had lasted for only a minute, which would have made the state of Maine the locale for a record, had to inform an unbelieving referee that Liston had been knocked out...

...seventeen seconds later activities were halted...

...The event was banned in Boston, and elsewhere because it turned out, after Liston's first defeat, that he owned a substantial part of the corporation that staged the affair and owned the right to promote a rematch...

...In this minuet then, there are no selves, only statuses waltzing with statuses, only the simulacrum of self...

...One senses a kind of reverse "Uncle Remus" in Clay's act...

...the new champion shouted in his dressing room...

...Following his first successful affair with Liston, he was even able to bring hitherto skeptical reporters into his act...