In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BOXING
One of the literary figures dealt with in El tamaiio de mi esperanza (The
Size of My Hope), the first collection of critical essays by Jorge Luis
Borges, a young author of growing renown in the literary circles of
Buenos Aires, is George Bernard Shaw. Toward the end of the year, Shaw
first rejects and then finally accepts the Nobel Prize for Literature
(Chronik, 184, 194). Borges characterizes Shaw's work, with a paradoxical
time-metaphor, both as a "reinvention of the Middle Ages" [see
Present = Past (Eternity)] and as comparable in style to modern boxing:
"Shaw, without stained-glass windows or relics and in an English that is
contemporary with Dempsey, invents the Middle Ages" (95). How can
Shaw's work be compared to boxing? It is indeed difficult to see what
exactly motivates those countless intellectuals who, like Borges, use boxing
as a metaphor. This tendency is all the more puzzling as there seems
to be hardly any kind of experience or value which boxing may not
occasionally represent. At first glance, the only relevant trait is the predominant
(although certainly not exclusive) association of boxing with
whatever and whoever appear invincibly strong. It is precisely in this
sense that an Austrian journalist calls Robert Musil "champion of the
spiritual boxers" (Fontana, 383). The Catalan painter Joan Mira must
have a similar meaning in mind when he says in an interview, "I wouldn't
enter the ring unless it was a championship bout. I don't want a friendly
sparring match-now [is] the time to go for the title" (New York Review
of Books, 16 December 1993,45). In the Soviet Union, Victor Shklovsky
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