booth, douglas. the field: truth and fiction in...

BOOK REVIEWS

Fall 2005 395

REVIEWS

Book ReviewsGERALD R. GEMS, EDITOR

North Central College

NANCY B. BOUCHIER, EDITOR

McMaster University

Straw Men in Imaginary Boxes

BOOTH, DOUGLAS. The Field: Truth and Fiction in Sport History. London: Routledge,2005. Pp. x+342. $30.00 pb.

Doug Booth’s new book is quite a challenge or, as my dazzled-by-Derrida postmodernistcolleagues say, un vrai défi. The French really does fit better than the English becauseBooth is nothing if not defiant. He challenges us—we sports historians—to become self-critically attentive to the work of Hayden White and other exemplars of postmodernisthistoriography. He characterizes us—at least the vast majority of us—as a rather dim-witted lot, averse to considering the epistemological questions that need to be answeredbefore research can properly begin. He urges us to reflect upon our unhappy situation, tobecome theoretically sophisticated, to extricate ourselves, Archimedes-like, from the mo-rass of naive empiricism. Freed from the muck of mindlessness, we might then take a“linguistic turn” and trudge to the high ground where the deconstructionists have pitchedtheir camp.

I’m not quite ready to assent to the doctrines of deconstructionism or to those of anyother version of postmodern historiography, but I’m not unwilling to make a few conces-sions (and occasionally to parody their discourse). Although it seems to me an otiose andnugatory gesture (postmodernists are fond of status-conferring words), I hereby acknowl-edge that my inevitably subjective interpretation of Booth’s complicated book is only oneof innumerable possible interpretations.

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Booth’s main point is articulated in the form of triadic categorization derived fromAlun Munslow’s Deconstructing History (1997). Booth presents three models of history:reconstructionism, constructionism, and deconstructionism. Most sports historians arereconstructionists. The more thoughtful among us are constructionists. A happy handfulare deconstructionists. The various objectives, epistemologies, and preferred presenta-tional modes of these three different historiographical categories are summarized in a twelve-box table.

Reconstructionists scoff at theory. Epistemologically naive, they assume “a strongcorrespondence between words and the world” (p. 2). They imagine themselves to beobjective investigators of a past that exists independently of their investigation of it. Hav-ing rummaged through the archives, they delude themselves with the conviction that thenarratives they write emerge “naturally” from the “facts” that they discovered. Havingdemonstrated to their own satisfaction the inadequacy of previous histories, having de-bunked the myths accepted by the credulous, they foolishly imagine that their interpreta-tions are—or at least approach—some kind of Platonic truth (i.e., Truth). Like the pro-verbial fool who tried to scoop the moonlight from the waves of the sea, they seek torecover the past wie es eigentlich gewesen ist. (The quotation from Ranke comes trippingly—and not at all ironically—from the tongue of reconstructionist historians whose Germanvocabulary barely suffices for a beer-and-bratwurst dinner.) Reconstructionists, who tendto be allergic to any kind of generalization, focus their attention on individuals and uniqueevents rather than on collectivities and patterns of behavior.

In comparison to the reconstructionists, constructionists are relatively enlightened.At least they understand, as reconstructionists do not, that all historians approach the paston the basis of theory. The choice is not between theory and no theory but rather betweentheory credulously accepted as “common sense” and theory critically examined on thebasis of reflexive interrogation. (Postmodernist historians always “interrogate” rather thanask questions.) Constructionists go beyond what happened in order ask how and whythings happened as they did. They tend to study collective behavior and are willing tohazard generalizations.

A few historians have made their way, Dante-like, from Inferno (Reconstructionism)through Purgatorio (Constructionism) to Paradiso (Deconstructionism). Once arrived,they realize, of course, that they are at a mere way station, a provisional approximation ofthe historian’s heaven.

Deconstructionists begin their analysis with “linguistic/discursive elements of histori-cal materials” (p. 8). They interrogate their own epistemological assumptions, and theyare “self-consciously reflexive” (p. 8). Thanks to their philosophical sophistication,deconstructionists realize that truths are multiple and never absolute: “Deconstructionistshave abandoned all pretexts of objectivity” (p. 12). They understand that the past isaccessible only in the form of an infinitely expandable array of subjective interpretations,none of which should be uncritically privileged. (Postmodernists are keen on the verb“privilege,” which suggests the noun “privilege,” which alludes subliminally to the in-equalities of heteronormative, patriarchal, postcolonial, late-capitalistic society.)

On the basis of Munslow’s triadic taxonomy, which I have—inevitably—simplified,Booth classifies the work of his professional colleagues. When I published From Ritual toRecord (1978), I was a constructionist; six years later, when my biography of Avery Brundage

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appeared, I relapsed into reconstructionism. Deconstructionist work is quite rare, butthere are encomia for—among others—Pamela Grundy’s Learning to Win (2001), CatrionaParratt’s More Than Mere Amusement (2001), and Daniel Nathan’s Saying It’s So (2003).(Let there be no mistake. Without packing them in taxonomic boxes I, too, greatly ad-mire these books—and Booth’s Australian Beach Cultures [2001] as well.) Booth’s highestpraise goes to Synthia Sydnor’s avowedly postmodernist historiographical essay, “A His-tory of Synchronized Swimming,” read aloud at a North American Society for Sport His-tory conference and published (with qualms?) in the Journal of Sport History. Booth notesapprovingly that Sydnor called the essay her finest work. “At the time,” states Booth, “thisseemed hyperbole, but from the perspective of 2005 . . . it can only be concluded thatSydnor was at least a generation ahead of the field and ahead of the great majority in thediscipline” (p. 295).

The reconstructionist-constructionist-deconstructionist triad is not the only adven-ture in taxonomy. In a chapter entitled “Narratives, non-narratives and fiction,” Boothpays homage to Hayden White, whom he quotes with apparent approval: “‘History as aplenum of documents that attest to the occurrence of events can be put together in anumber of different and equally plausible narrative accounts’”(p. 12). (The unfortunatephrase “equally plausible” is the sort of loose language that gives rise to the charge thatpostmodernist historians are radical relativists for whom all interpretations are equallyvalid.) Booth’s presentation of White’s model of historical explanation takes the form ofanother twelve-box table in which four kinds of trope (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche,and irony) are associated with different forms of emplotment, argument, and ideologicalimplication. Metaphor, it seems, is romantic, “formist,” and anarchist. Metonymy istragic, mechanistic, and radical. Synecdoche is comic, organicist, and conservative. Ironyis satirical, contextualist, and liberal. None of this makes sense to me.

It seems, however, to have made sense to Murray Phillips. Booth writes that White’smodel, although “virtually ignored by historians of sport,” has been applied productivelyby Phillips in an essay devoted to his (Booth’s) work on Australia’s Surf Life Saving Asso-ciation (p. 73). Booth asserts that Phillips’ essay is “one of the most creative and innovativestudies produced by a sport historian” (p. 74).

The second half of The Field is devoted to seven “explanatory paradigms,” defined,according to David Hackett Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies (1970), as “‘interactive structure[s]of workable questions and the factual statements which are adduced to answer them”’(p.13). They are, in what I take to be an ascending order, from least to most nearly satisfac-tory, as follows: traditional narrative, advocacy, comparison, causation, social change, con-text, and new culture. Needless to say (but I say it anyway), Booth’s account of eachparadigm is quite complicated. “Context,” for instance, is a paradigm to which Booth,following Arthur Marwick, attributes four principal components: major forces and con-straints, events, human agencies, and convergences and contingencies. Each is discussed.Booth concludes that Elliott Gorn’s The Manly Art (1991) incorporates all four.

The paradigm labeled “New culture” is unquestionably the winner, by a length, ofthis seven-horse methodological race. Under the tutelage (or patronage?) of Michel Fou-cault, a handful of sports historians have come to realize that “language determines con-sciousness” (p. 195). They “employ linguistic analysis as a scientific method to extracttruths” (p. 202). (To his credit, Booth, unlike like many literary postmodernists, does not



denigrate the natural sciences or sneer at “Enlightenment values.”) Sydnor’s essay onsynchronized swimming, avowedly influenced by Walter Benjamin, exemplifies the “newculture” paradigm. Booth offers an exemplary quotation from the essay:

“Archimedes’ Principle of Buoyancy”; “Newton’s Law of Intertia”; “Newton’sLaw of Acceleration”; “Newton’s Law of Action and Reaction”; “Center of Grav-ity”; “Centre [sic] of Buoyancy”; “Static Equilibrium in the Water”; Bernoulli’sPrinciple; “Hydrostatics”; “Fat and Air”; “Water Pressure,” “Ear Trouble,” “Ana-tomical Differences”; “Theoretical Square Law”; Labanotation; Sports Medi-cine (p. 206).

Booth is quite enthusiastic about this “tableau.” “Sydnor’s style,” he writes, “is deliberatelypoetic and literary; her text shies away from descriptions and explanation, and avoids allanalysis and (arguably) context.” Booth cites Sydnor’s explanation of her intentions: “Shewants readers to ‘swim in circles, above and below, without having to gulp linearargument’”(p. 206). Booth is exhilarated by Sydnor’s invitation to dive into her stream ofconsciousness. I am not. He swims, I drown. I am as dismayed by Sydnor’s essay as I amby the idiosyncratic verbal vortices of James Joyce’s Finnigans Wake.

In lieu of comments on each of the other paradigms, I’ll take advantage of my (privi-leged) role as reviewer in order to respond—defensively—to Booth’s criticism of FromRitual to Record, which occurs as part of his discussion of “social change.” The criticismreads rather like an intellectual obituary, and I want to announce, like the badly injuredErnest Hemingway staggering out of the African hinterland, that I’m not dead yet.

Booth does not quarrel with my descriptions of premodern and modern sports, buthe is quite critical of my attempt to explain the formal-structural characteristics of thelatter. I acknowledged in 1978 that my explanation was informed by Max Weber’s para-digm of modernity. In fact, I called my explanatory effort “A Weberian Interpretation.”Rejecting the interpretations of Marxist historians and of the German sports sociologistGunther Luschen, I argued that the emergence of a new way to conceptualize sports wasbetter explained by reference to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century thanby references to capitalism (the Marxists’ one-size-fits-all answer) or Protestantism (Luschen’shypothesis). Booth is not impressed. He points out that my interpretation was “scant ondetail and silent about the international diffusion of this scientific Weltanschauung”(p.163). I regret to say that he is correct. I should have admitted that the evidence I adducedwas suggestive rather than definitive. I should have—no doubt-labeled my effort as specu-lation. Mea culpa.

Booth also scoffs at my repeated assertions that I did not and do not see the emer-gence of modern sports as an inevitability. Despite all my subsequent disclaimers, FromRitual to Record is, he asserts, the work of a determinist who envisioned the quest forrecords as a telos. Booth’s argument that I was (and perhaps still am) a determinist restsmostly on my allegedly teleological account of the quest for records and on my use of theword “must.” Not so fast. Despite his talk about language-as-discourse, Booth seemsuncharacteristically insensitive to my language. On the relationship of the quest for recordsto the other characteristics of modern sports, I wrote, “We might even invent a (false)teleology and assert that, in order to achieve records, the other characteristics were neces-sary” (From Ritual to Record, p. 54). This does not look like determinism to me. Indeed, tome it looks like—and was intended as—mockery of teleological discourse. As for the

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allegedly revelatory word “must,” I used it as “ordinary language” rather than as a philo-sophical signifier. The distinction is important. Consider the word “must” in a veryordinary context. Words painted on roads say that drivers in the left lane MUST TURNLEFT, but the Highway Department understands (“must understand”?) that drivers arefree to ignore the imperative if it suits their purposes. If I was insufficiently clear in FromRitual to Record, I should have thought, nonetheless, that my account of the diffusion ofmodern sports, in books such as Games and Empires (1994) and Sports: The First FiveMillennia (2004), was in itself quite enough to disprove allegations of determinism. In-cluded in these books are discussions of individual agents (e.g., the Hogg brothers ofBuenos Aires) as well as analyses of collectivities (e.g., businessmen, soldiers, the YMCA).In these books I describe resistance to modern sports and the not wholly unsuccessfulefforts of folklorists to swim against the current of modernity and to revive premodernsporting practices. I don’t know what else needs to be done to unstick the inappropriatepejorative label. I feel especially aggrieved that the label was pasted on me by someonewho seems to endorse the deconstructionist proposition that “language determines con-sciousness” (p. 195; my emphasis).

Booth concludes The Field with a plea for reflexivity. “Reflexive historians,” he writes,“are not only highly conscious and self-critical of their assumptions, theoretical outlooksand practices, but they also make explicit references to them in their work” (p. 211). Iquite agree that we should all be highly conscious and self-critical, but I am ambivalentabout the demand that we be more explicit about our assumptions. Editors, concernedabout a national epidemic of Attention Deficit Disorder, have warned me that today’sreaders, socialized into a sound-bite world, are deaf to discussions of theory. Editors havesuggested that I eliminate, or at least reduce, my comments on theory. I’ve resisted theirsuggestions—only to discover, like a hapless rape victim in a misogynist courtroom, that Ididn’t resist enough.

Although I sometimes disagree with Booth’s detailed critiques of specific books andessays, I am impressed by the thoroughness of his research—his bibliography is immense—and by his determined (sic) effort to get to the bottom of whatever it is that interests him.Although I fail to see what is gained by Booth’s boxes-within-boxes taxonomic approachto the world of ideas, I am ready to concede that I am not a philosopher. (I’ve struggled,twice, through Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and I still don’t see what all the shouting’s about.)My main criticism of The Field is not that Booth “gets it wrong” philosophically, butrather that the reconstructionists against whom Booth campaigns are an army of strawmen. I don’t know any sports historians who believe “that they can discover the past as itreally was” or “that history exists independently of the historian and that discovering thepast is an objective process” (p. 9). As for absolute truths, I abandoned Platonism at theage of eighteen, when I read John Dewey, and I have yet to encounter a member of NASSHbold enough (dumb enough?) to claim that his or her interpretation of the past is the onlyone possible. Booth admits as much when he writes that “mainstream reconstuctionism[now] broadly accepts the ‘provisional nature’ of historical interpretations and concedesthat absolute ‘proof and truth do not exist in history’’’(p. 41).

The sentence that I’ve just quoted exemplifies another problem. The words thatappear in single quotation marks are not from a representative of reconstructionism, as anendnote-aversive reader might think but rather from Munslow’s Deconstructing History.



Quoting Munslow as if he were speaking for rather than about reconstructionism is not anisolated example of mediated representation. It seems to be symptomatic, a necessaryweapon in Booth’s assault on straw men. In other words, what troubles me most aboutBooth’s critique of reconstructionism and constructionism is that he all too frequentlyquotes naive assertions as if they were written by reconstructionist or constructionist sportshistorians. In most cases, they are not. After he has roughed me up with some good jabsand some hard left(ist) hooks, Booth implies that I do not believe that society depends onhuman agents for its reproduction. He concludes his account of my historiographicalfailures with an ironic quotation implying that I believe that society “‘just is and persists asa reified abstraction’”(p. 163). But I never wrote anything remotely like that. The wordsin single quotation marks are from Christopher Lloyd writing in quite another context.Similarly, after a discussion of an essay by Ali Mazrui, Booth writes, “Systematic compari-sons have not escaped critical attention. Conservative reconstructionism views compari-sons as ‘wrong in principle because history is about unique entities and, as a consequence,nothing in the past can be compared with anything else’” (p. 136). Here, too, the problemis that the untenable nonsense that Booth quotes is not the opinion of a conservativereconstructionist but rather an opinion attributed to conservative reconstructionists byone of their critics. (It is difficult to say which critic because Booth’s endnote citationrefers to two different works by two different historians.) There are other examples of thisform of misrepresentation. I don’t know whether it’s a reconstructionist, a constructionist,or a deconstructionist tenet, but I believe that people should be damned by their ownwords and not by someone else’s polemical paraphrase of them. Is this a trivial point? Ithink not. I’d be far more sympathetic to Booth’s criticism of current practice if he citedhistorians, other than Geoffrey Elton, who actually believe what Booth asserts they be-lieve.

One final criticism. Although Booth calls upon us to drop the pretense of objectivityand to acknowledge that we are emotionally and intellectually involved in our inevitablysubjective interpretations of the past, he refers to us in the staidly conventional manner, byour first and last names, as if we were merely the disembodied authors of books and essays,as if we were not—in many cases—also his friends and colleagues. I am bored to distrac-tion by sports historians who begin their books with detailed accounts of their mediocreathletic careers or with confessions of sexual harassment at long last overcome, but, to beperfectly consistent, Booth really should have provided more in the way of disclosure. Ithink it’s relevant that Murray Phillips and I are both among Booth’s innumerable sports-historian friends.

This review is the longest I have ever written. I believe that the importance of TheField justifies the length of the review. I hope that sports historians will read the book andtake it seriously. If it signals a new era in which good friends can be severely critical of eachother’s work, I’ll be delighted. After all, are we not mere pilgrims questing for Truth?

—ALLEN GUTTMANN

Amherst College

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