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Spectator Transcendence: Response to Kerry Howley’s Thrown
Thrown is wide-ranging and fiercely cerebral, spanning metaphysical transcendence, masculinity, MMA, and the American Dream. Readers follow Howley’s protagonist, Kit, on her search for transcendence through immersion into the savage spectacle of professional cage fighting.
The book begins with Kit stumbling onto an underground cage fight in Iowa featuring a mid-30s fighter named Sean whose lionhearted, if technically unspectacular, performance electrifies Kit into a state of ego-less euphoria. Kit (a philosophy Ph.D. candidate who has clearly read her Sartre) casts aside bad faith and dedicates her life to recapturing this feeling by joining Sean’s fighterly retinue as a “space taker.”
What is original about Howley’s approach to writing about fighting, a subject that has inspired innumerable writers from Norman Mailer to George Plimpton, is her spectator-centricity. The New York Times Book review called Thrown “a ferocious dissection of the essence of the spectator.” Where Howley’s effort sometimes falls short is when her philosophical musings serve to assure us that she is in fact separate from (above) the fighters, rather than taking us deeper into her insights.
She is, in fact, so far removed by inclination from fighting herself that I found myself laughing often as this young…
