Nash Memorial Lecture

Brutal Embrace: Wrestling with Heroes
Thurs., March 21, 2024 at 7:00 pm

(This lecture is not published in booklet form.)

Scholars of antiquity claim that ancient man wrestled to honor the gods, become a hero, and prove himself a champion. I will suggest another, more modern reason: early cultures needed a way to indulge and contain their urge for violence. I begin with two ancient Greek cases, first the mythical battle between Heracles, the “civilized” hero, and Antaeus, the “primitive” giant. Despite Heracles’s plan to contain himself while wrestling, he lets his rage get the best of him and kills Antaeus. The second match features Odysseus and Ajax the Great – in Homer’s epic, The Iliad. During a break in the Trojan War, in front of a crowd of soldiers, Odysseus and Ajax engage in a thrilling, close fight. No one gains the advantage, and they slam sideways into the dust. Achilles intervenes and does something un-Greek: he calls the match a draw. The Greeks are here violent to each other in front of each other, affirming to themselves that they no longer kill each other out of anger. They have learned the art, and sport, of wrestling. The Greeks generated this theory on their own. It has often been proven wrong, among the Greeks and other peoples, including us. Wrestling’s brutality indeed sometimes spreads beyond the ring, as anyone watching the WWE can attest. But wrestling nonetheless retains a role in containing violence, preserving its defining aspect from antiquity: two bodies embrace in a battle not meant to end in serious injury. This play-fight explains wrestling’s enduring relevance and popularity. Two people brutally hug yet do not kill each other, reminding us of the ambivalence at the heart of what makes us human: our civility and our discontent.

John Zilcosky is a German and Comparative Literature professor at the University of Toronto. He teaches and writes about modern European literature, psychoanalysis, the art of travel, and the history of sports. His books include Kafka’s Travels (MLA prizewinner for best book in German Studies), Writing Travel, Uncanny Encounters, The Allure of Sports, The Language of Trauma, and Alternative Temporalities. The Times Literary Supplement and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung have reviewed his work. He has received grants from SSHRC, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the US National Endowment for the Humanities. The German government awarded him the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize for outstanding achievements in research. He recently won a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, supporting research on his book, Brutal Embrace: The Story of Wrestling, which is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press.