[For this year’s Opening
Day series, I’ll be highlighting individual baseball stories and
AmericanStudying their contexts and meanings. Play ball!]
On pessimism,
optimism, realism, and baseball.
David Bradley’s
debut novel South Street (1975) is many things, often at the same time: a
tragicomic farce of urban life; a romance; a crime novel; a biting satire; a
raucous celebration. It opens with one of the most well-executed set-pieces
you’ll ever read, features numerous unique and memorable characters, portrays
its slice of Philadelphia with hyperbole and yet (to my mind) authenticity, and
made me laugh out loud on more than a few occasions while keeping me in genuine
suspense about the resolution of its central plotlines. Which is to say, there
are lots of very good reasons to read this under-rated American novel, and lots
of concurrent ways to AmericanStudy it. But among them is the unique and
telling use to which it puts the Philadelphia Phillies games that serve as a
near-constant backdrop in the South Street bar that’s the novel’s central
setting.
On one level, the
baseball games are literally and figuratively another of the novel’s jokes—the
Phillies are always losing, and every new arrival to the bar simply inquires by
how much they happen to be losing on this particular night. On the one night
when they’re actually, miraculously ahead, the heavens refuse to cooperate, the
game gets rained out, and the prospective victory is lost. Yet if these
perennial losers would seem to validate the characters’ (and novel’s) most
cynical and pessimistic views of their world and future, there’s a
complication: the bar owner, Leo, keeps turning the games on, optimistically
insistent that this time might be different. That dance, between pessimism and
optimism, no joy in Mudville and Mighty Casey’s eternal
possibilities, “dem bums” and “there’s always
next year!,” is at the heart of much sports fandom, it seems to me—and much of American history, culture, and identity besides.
So does Bradley’s
novel simply vacillate between the poles, just as it does between comedy and
tragedy, humor and pathos, farce and slice of life? Not exactly, although it
does make all those moves and more. I would also argue that in his portrayal of
those hapless yet somehow still hopeful Phillies, Bradley has created a
powerfully realistic image—not just of sports fandom, or of human nature, but
of the African American community and its conflicted, contradictory, but
sustained and crucial relationship to the nation. Ta-Nehisi Coates has written frequently and eloquently about the defining presence of racism and white supremacy in the American story, and how much such forces have
made America a losing game for its African American citizens. Yet, undeniably
and inspiringly, the vast majority of African Americans have long refused—and
continue to refuse—to give in to the pessimism, have found ways to maintain an
optimism about America and the future that is mirrored in Leo’s nightly return
to the Phillies. There’s always next year, indeed.
Last baseball
story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other baseball stories you’d highlight?
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