7 Gyllian Phillips

The Darkening Path
The Hero-Athlete Reconsidered in Angie Abdou’s The Bone Cage

Every sports novel begins with a hero.

Michael Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes

If you continue doing something you’ve done for such a long time, you can’t really grow in other ways.

Hannah Kearney, skier and Olympic Gold Medalist

Spoiler alert: Angie Abdou’s novel about two would-be Olympians does not end with a gold medal. In fact, this novel does not end at all, at least not in any way that we have come to expect from the movies or media coverage of sport. Even in sport literature, we are accustomed to some kind of “win,” though it might not involve a podium or a trophy—Smith’s refusal to cross the finish line in Alan Sillitoe’s 1959 short story “Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” for example (another spoiler!).

Abdou’s novel traces the parallel—and eventually, intersecting—lives of a swimmer, Sadie Jorgensen, and a wrestler, Digger Stapleton, both of whom train at the University of Calgary. Each wins in the Olympic trials and faces the thrilling but daunting task of taking it to the next level, “The Show.” However, Sadie’s plans go drastically awry, and she is left to struggle with her identity as a non-athlete and to support Digger in his “quest for gold.” The novel ends not with triumph or meaningful defeat but with a question mark: How does Digger perform? We’ll never know, since the narrative ends with Sadie seeing Digger off at the airport and then prosaically going home to shave her legs. With its surprise (non)ending, The Bone Cage challenges us to expand our idea of the elite athlete as a lone hero by placing as much importance on the “play” of training and competition as on the end result, and as much importance on building community as on personal excellence.

Abdou’s novel begins with Robert Browning’s 1865 dramatic monologue “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and with that allusion, it draws on a significant interpretive paradigm, but with a twist. The Bone Cage adopts a version of the heroic monomyth—the athlete as hero on a quest for glory and self-knowledge. The heroic monomyth is an archetypal form for the sports novel and its hero, but Browning’s poem presents a variation: it leaves the hero’s fate undecided. Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), emphasizes that the monomyth has a particular structure: the departure from home, with the hero “crossing the threshold” into adventure; the initiation, during which the hero overcomes obstacles and triumphs, thus achieving “apotheosis”; and the return to community with new knowledge, or what Campbell refers to as “the boon.” By referring to a poem that omits the return, Abdou sets up the seemingly incomplete ending of her story and, in turn, emphasizes how the athlete-hero is conceptualized popularly as an individualist. As Michael Oriard argues, this ideal of the athlete-hero represents an immature version of the mythic hero, one that ignores the crucial return to community (1982, 40). Browning’s poem, moreover, focuses attention on the psychological middle ground of the journey, in which the hero goes deep into self-examination to find new resources for coping with impossible challenges. Abdou’s athlete-heroes are represented on the cusp of potential transformation, one that leads them out of the isolated and ultimately self-destructive models of athletic success. Though they have not returned to their communities by the end of the novel, both protagonists represent models of the hero that are more potentially open to community. Leaving the narrative open-ended suggests that this “new” model of athlete might be less inclined to be lured into the entrapment of objectification (in the “bone cage”) and more willing to experience sport in the spirit of play and to bring that spirit back “home.”

Although mythic in structure, The Bone Cage does not read in any way like a fantasy novel; it is grounded in the reality of athletes’ lives and in the commodification of those lives by the culture industry. Hannah Kearney, quoted in this chapter’s epigraph, is an American Olympic medalist who has spoken out about the psychological challenges faced by athletes who are eventually forced to define themselves outside the all-consuming world of sport. Much like Sadie in The Bone Cage, Kearney acknowledges the joy that training and competing has brought her but also points out that she is ten years behind her peers in terms of life, career, and family, and that she has only ever really trained for one thing—skiing (Crouse 2015). For Canadians, the list of national heroes also waxes and wanes with each Olympics, leaving many athletes to pick up the pieces of their lives. One example of an athlete represented as truly heroic in her Olympic win is Silken Laumann, who came back from a catastrophic training injury to win a bronze medal in Olympic rowing in 1992. She was justly praised for her superhuman struggle to medal, but celebrity came with a cost. Having been dogged by scandal during her career, with, for instance, a questionable doping accusation, she published a memoir, Unsinkable (2014), that laid bare some of the realities faced by real-life heroes in the single-minded pursuit of excellence. Karen Hartman has noted the contradictions inherent in a media culture that simultaneously builds an athlete up as “the traditional hero who is understood to display high morals, consummate sporting behaviour, courage, loyalty and bravery” and relishes the celebrity scandals of cheating in sport or criminal behaviour off the field: “These conflicting stories and perceptions of sport and athletes create an interesting dichotomy that cannot be easily assessed or sorted” (2014, 172–73). In fact, the real-life athlete has little time to develop into a well-rounded hero since “athletes may have to be selfish and self-absorbed in order to succeed at sport” (172). While readers and media consumers yearn for athlete figures to be all-around outstanding people, these athletes actually live lives circumscribed by their isolated pursuit of the personal best.

The construction of athlete as hero is a constant motif in The Bone Cage; it is an ideology unconsciously reinforced by parents, coaches, and media and ultimately absorbed by the athletes themselves. The fantasy of personal triumph cancels out almost any sacrifice made along the way: “As Digger falls off to sleep, he sees himself in Sydney on the middle podium (a Cuban to his right and an American to his left), the Canadian flag rising high above the rest and everyone clapping” (67). By combining the modern-day story of Sadie and Digger with the (possibly) failed and primarily psychological quest of Childe Roland, Abdou’s novel implicitly challenges the popular cliché of athlete as hero.

IN THE BELLY OF THE WHALE: TRANSFORMATION FROM “CHILDE” TO HERO

The first allusion to “Childe Roland” comes in the epigraph to the novel:

       I had so long suffered in this quest,

Heard failure prophesied so oft [. . .]

And all the doubt was now—should I be fit?

This quotation sets up the analogy between Roland’s quest to find the Dark Tower and the athlete’s quest for Olympic glory, implying that the athlete, comparable to Roland, “suffers” in training and competition. Here, “to suffer” means not only to feel inflicted pain (as in “no pain, no gain”) but also to endure, to go through, without necessarily having a positive outcome. “Suffer” can mean pure experience for both Roland and the athlete. As well, athletes are on a quest, meaning that they will have to overcome obstacles to achieve a goal and that the achievement will mark a rite of passage to maturity: since the word “childe” originally meant untested knight, perhaps Roland achieves knighthood. Athletes, like the knight, persevere in spite of the odds against them. And finally, once athletes are completely committed to their journey, with no turning back, all that is left to motivate them is the thought that they, like Roland, might miss something—might lack that little edge of fitness to be just that much better than the competition or than those who have failed before. As Sadie and Digger embark on their journeys from the trials to the Olympics, they ask themselves if they are fit—not just physically, but mentally—for this final test of athleticism that will (they hope) help them pass from trainee to mature hero.

Simply by alluding to Browning, the novel immediately generates a critical context for the athlete’s quest since the poem is notoriously open-ended. In A Map of Misreading (1975), Harold Bloom identifies Childe Roland as having failed in his quest for maturity and self-understanding. Other scholars have read the quest as successful, if it is seen as a trope of writing, since Roland’s final triumphant act is to “sound” the title of the poem itself (e.g., Strickland 1981, 301). Or they have read Roland’s quest as mythic, suggesting that his “failure” to return home indicates that the poem focuses on Roland’s middle stage, after the hero enters what Joseph Campbell calls “the belly of the whale” (e.g., Williams 1983, 28-29). This reading is most compelling for my understanding of the poem’s function as an intertext in The Bone Cage. In Campbell’s reading of the archetypal function of mythology, the hero, in order to attain new knowledge, leaves behind the old certainties—hence the departure from home and the journey. To achieve full maturity, self-knowledge, and self-mastery, the hero must pass a threshold into nothingness, into the annihilation of ego, in order to be reborn: “The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died” (Campbell 1949, 90). In Browning’s poem, we never see the speaker’s departure from home; we only see the point at which he crosses the threshold. When Roland takes the road to the Dark Tower, he has a moment of panic when he looks back, “pausing to throw backward a last view / O’er the safe road, ’twas gone, grey plain all round” (Browning 2003, lines 51–52). There is no way to return on the “safe road”; he can only move forward.

On his journey, Roland discovers a geography that is more mindscape than landscape: rather than encountering enemies who must be vanquished, he must confront his own doubts, fears, and failures at every turn. Once he reaches the Dark Tower, he can do nothing but contemplate those who have failed before him:

            Names in my ears

Of all the lost adventurers my peers,—

How such a one was strong, and such was bold,

And such was fortunate, yet each of old

Lost, lost! (lines 194–98)

In the end, all Roland can do is blow his trumpet, from which issues the last line of the poem—which is also its title. The poem focuses on the middle ground of the knight’s attempt to lose his status as “childe” in order to contemplate the process by which a man might achieve maturity—by confronting and overcoming the psychological barriers of ego. The fact that the poem ends where it began signals, perhaps, that becoming a “hero” is more properly process than product.

Both Sadie and Digger, in their different ways, recognize that their focus on elite athletics inadvertently generates a state of prolonged adolescence, where they are in between child and adult. Sadie still lives at home, trying to minimize her intrusion into her parents’ lives and feeling that it is “enough that they put up with a grown daughter in their house at all” (Abdou 2007, 5). Digger still depends on occasional handouts from his parents to get by. After Sadie, like the knight overcoming his trials, wins her Olympic trials, she realizes that this victory is also a trap; she imagines “herself a late-twentieth-century incarnation of Childe Roland, the black line at the bottom of the pool her own darkening path” (9). Seeing no way back, she turns inwards, not conquering or absorbing the “threshold” but dissolving her own ego in order to find a new self. This dissolve happens literally and figuratively in a number of ways. Not long after the win at the trials, Sadie’s grandmother dies. Since she is closer emotionally to her grandmother—interestingly, also the one who cares least about her swimming career—than anyone else in the narrative, this death has the effect of severing Sadie further from herself as a person in the world, from her ego. The loss drives her into a cocoon of sleep where she sinks into a womb-like state of mourning:

During the three days before the funeral, she conducts her life largely from the confines of her bed. Its warm darkness envelops her, holds her. From her cave of blankets she hears what goes on beyond her little realm—muffled condolences, flower deliveries, meetings with the pastor—but she has no desire to participate in any of it. [. . .] [C]losing her eyes and pulling the covers far over her head lets her ride out those waves of anxiety, ride them straight back to deep sleep. (85)

Although this retreat into sleep is a natural response to overtraining and powerful emotional loss, it also carries obvious womb-like connotations: the dark, warm cave; the muffled sounds of life; and of course, for Sadie-the-swimmer, water imagery, riding the waves. When she emerges, Sadie does not achieve a miraculous rebirth, but her former single-minded focus on swimming has certainly broken down, and she begins to question her identity as solely an athlete.

However, this crisis of transformation is simply a precursor to the major event that sends Sadie into “the belly of the whale”—the car crash on the way to Fernie. In this moment, and during the trials that follow, Sadie is literally shattered and has to rebuild herself anew: “[T]he pain has only whispered to her from a distance. You’re hurt. You’re wrecked. You’re broken” (164). In a more conventional novel—definitely in a sports film or even in the popular media representations of “real life,” as with Silken Laumann—the catastrophically injured athlete would triumph by rebuilding her former self, go back over Campbell’s threshold, and return “home.” However, Abdou does not allow us that tantalizing comfort. Instead, Sadie has to put aside her massive ego-investment in being an Olympic athlete and cast about to find a new way of being. Even more than winning the Olympic trials or losing her beloved grandmother, Sadie’s accident signals the painful transformation of growing up and coming into maturity as a fully developed hero. Like Childe Roland, once she goes down that road, there is no way back. By the end of the novel, Sadie completes her final act of rebirth when, after dropping Digger off at the airport for his flight to Sydney, she goes home to have a bath and shave her legs. Whereas before the accident, she had planned to shave her body in preparation for her Olympic swim, this moment of personal grooming, mundane for most women, takes on the symbolic resonance that Sadie is ready to enter life again as a transformed adult. In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye points out that many heroes, such as Moses or Perseus, are generated by or conducted through a watery environment. While Campbell focuses on the womb-like rebirth from the belly of the whale, both critics highlight that the hero is born or reborn in water or a water-like space, signalling transformation and transfiguration, as the origin of the word “protean” suggests (Frye 1957, 98). Sadie, as a swimmer, is perhaps naturally prone to a protean transformation. While she does not leave swimming behind, she realizes that she has more to offer the world than simply being a vehicle to a gold medal.

DEFINING THE ATHLETE-HERO: SELFISH OR MYTHIC?

In popular culture and in representations in the media, the athlete-hero is often represented as courageous, honourable, and fighting for a larger cause, such as national glory or the spirit of teamwork. However, the labour and measure of the athlete’s triumph are always located in the individual performing body. In Dreaming of Heroes, Michael Oriard traces the development of the American sports novel from its inception in the early twentieth century with the juvenile sports story. Using the paradigm of Campbell’s monomyth to understand the cultural relevance of the sport-hero figure, Oriard notes that these early athlete protagonists often suffer from a kind of arrested development:

The prototypical athlete-hero celebrates unlimited human achievement and potential, but at the point at which his virtues should transform him from a pedestrian “star” to a mythic, god-like hero, he fails. His accomplishments are self-directed and not other-directed as are those of the heroes of myth. Thus he represents the potential of the athlete hero to be a genuine hero and his too-frequent failure to be one. (1982, 40)

As Oriard notes, Campbell’s critical model of the monomyth understands the transformation of the hero through “the belly of the whale” and the trials that follow as one of complete loss of the “old” child-like ego and of movement into full maturity. Mythic heroes are destined to return to their community with “the boon” that they have achieved—metaphorically, a wisdom that looks to others rather than to themselves. However, the narratives of the early sports novel usually end with the personal triumph of the athlete (“apotheosis”) and not with the mythic model—the loss of ego, the transformation into a mature and powerful self, and the return home to benefit the community. Oriard notes that it is tempting to dismiss these stories as naïve, childish fictions that appeared early in the development of the genre, and indeed, he goes on to make the case that contemporary American sports fiction dramatically complicates the figure of the athlete. However, this vision of the athlete-hero has stayed with us through popular culture and embodies “the major hero for American adults as well” (40).

Though Oriard’s book was published in the 1980s, this vision of the hero is still the predominant one in sports media, as Karen Hartman points out when she notes that, fan desires aside, “the athlete is not a free agent like the old fashioned hero—he or she is a created product (in huge numbers) by an industrialized process” (2014, 181). The currency of this idea is a problem represented in The Bone Cage with Digger’s trials-by-TV. With the media coverage of Digger as an Olympic hopeful, the novel overtly underlines the connection between the heroic ideal in the popular imagination and the work of the athlete. Just before Ben’s breakdown over his own loss of status, the three friends—Digger, Fly, and Ben—gather to watch the “Digumentary,” a CBC profile on Digger called “Quest for Gold.” Unlike Digger’s other media experiences, this profile is positive and even tries to be realistic when Digger downplays the glamour of being an Olympian. In the end, however, it seems false, and Digger “feels exposed, as if they [his friends] have just caught him masturbating” (Abdou 2007, 98). The analogy of being discovered masturbating highlights the self-centred qualities of this kind of immature (as Oriard would describe it) hero-building. Heroes who are only focused on their own narrow accomplishments are implicitly engaged in narcissistic self-pleasure, which is better suited to adolescent fantasy.

Digger’s other media encounters reinforce not so much the self-absorption of the competitive athlete as the way in which sport is overdetermined by popular culture. As a “knight” of sport, Digger’s first trial is the Olympic trials, which are held not in a wrestling venue but in a television studio: “CBC said they’d only televise if the wrestlers came to them. Now they’re supposed to bus to downtown Toronto tomorrow to wrestle in a cramped studio, just so CBC can pre-tape the matches and plug them in to some dead TV spot on a Sunday afternoon three or four weeks from now” (22). This relocation of the competition has an obvious practical effect on each athlete’s performance: there are fewer amenities for the wrestlers, and their focus is bound to be compromised by the change in routine. The language of this passage also emphasizes the metaphoric element of this media-driven competition: the studio is “cramped”; the taped matches will be “plugged” into some “dead spot”; their rooms are “close and dank” (23). The language conveys a feeling of entrapment because the wrestlers are confined by the media construction of their sport. Their performance and identity is determined not just by their own rules of training and competition but also by the requirements of the “industrial process” of culture (Hartman 2014, 181). The absurd bookend to the novel’s opening is Digger’s final visit to the TV studio before he leaves for Sydney, during which he is eclipsed by other athletes whose sports are more easily translated into spectacle; his battle-scarred body is “edited” for the camera, and the host of the show misnames him. In other words, his identity is managed, or mismanaged, to suit the narrow requirements of the medium.

SADIE’S MESSAGE

Digger is, to some extent, caught in a Childe Roland–like fixation on the “quest for gold” as the marker or proof that he is ready to drop the “childe” status and become a fully fledged mature hero. He is caught, however, because the terms of this proof are defined purely through personal achievement. Sadie, in contrast, seems to be undergoing a transformation from personal achievement to genuine mythic hero. The difference between them lies in the relationship between personal identity and achievement, on the one hand, and responsibility for community, on the other. In addition to being herself a hero-in-training, Sadie also functions as something of a guide to Digger, since she seems a little further down the road to self-understanding. Her directions for Digger take the form of both warning and encouragement. As a guide who is also a former English major, Sadie expresses her wisdom in the form of literary allusions to not only “Childe Roland” but many other texts. For example, when they are on the road to Fernie, just before her accident, Sadie, in true English major mode, takes Digger through an interpretive exercise with a reference to Ray Bradbury. She compares the athlete to the astronaut in the story, who triumphantly lands on the moon with no means of return: “Countries take their athletes to these great heights in the name of glory,” she says, “but when they’re done with them—” (159). The hero in Sadie’s metaphoric reading is stranded, reflecting Oriard’s reading of early American sport fiction and contemporary pop culture. If the identity of an elite athlete is entirely invested in personal achievement, he or she is incapable of a measure of maturity.

Digger recognizes the warning in this story and also feels the tension, on a practical level, between the requirements of his sport and the pull of relationships. After the accident in which Sadie and he are involved and from which he emerges unscathed (not ready for growth perhaps?), he has an unconscious confrontation with his own need for transformation: “Digger doesn’t know why being badly hurt and recovering in a hospital makes Sadie so inexplicably terrifying, but his head feels detached from his neck and his hands far away from his body, everything disjointed and out of control” (169). While Sadie is literally broken apart and has to rebuild or rebirth herself, Digger expresses his terror of a similar fate with this strange fantasy of dismemberment, a fantasy that is not just about his fear of losing bodily integrity—when having a perfect body is so necessary for his identity as an athlete—but also expresses an anxiety about the pull of Sadie’s need for him. His responsibility to his friend—and potential lover—is directly at odds with his need to be entirely selfish if he is to win gold. In other words, he is not ready to take on the true mythic hero role in returning to community. This unfortunate reality of the single-mindedness required of athletes is reinforced when Saul, Digger’s coach, tells him that he is “spending too much time with the crippled girl” (209). This is, of course, part of the deliberately tough talk that coaches sometimes engage in to motivate athletes with anger, but it also reveals, perhaps, that the bodily integrity seemingly required for perfection in physical achievement is aligned with the solipsism required for psychological strength in competition. To be a great athlete, it seems, one has to cut oneself off from other people and go it alone.

So what are the alternatives? If being a hero-athlete is not a fully mature expression of heroism, does Sadie reveal another path? Does the novel? The beginnings of an answer to these questions can be found in the novel’s last references to “Childe Roland.” After Digger cuts himself off from contact with Sadie to focus on his training, she sends him a greeting card to wish him well in the Olympics. The card Sadie picks for Digger says, “Life is a journey. [. . .] Enjoy the road, wherever it ends” (227). In a sense, this message is an indirect allusion to Browning’s poem in that it redirects Digger’s focus to the process of training and overcoming rather than the product. In “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” the knight-to-be struggles with his own internal demons throughout the entire poem, only realizing near the end of the poem that he is already “there”:

For, looking up, aware I somehow grew,

’Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place

All round to mountains—[. . .]

How thus they had surprised me,—solve it, you! (l. 163–67)

In other words, rather than attaining some marker or achievement of heroism, Roland finds his destination, his achievement, to be the very process of overcoming. In spite of fear, he is fit, but he is fit because he forges on, not because he wins some thing in particular. Sadie’s message to Digger sounds a little like the one his friend Ben receives from his (non-athlete) doctor: “‘[The doctor] says I need to focus on the process rather than the end,’ Ben tells Digger, ‘says that I need to recognize the value of my experience in sports was in the process’” (143). This is part of Sadie’s message too, but she and Ben’s friends are justly suspicious of the ease with which Ben converts to some version of mindfulness practice. There is achievement in the process of high-level training, but high-level training cannot take place without an “intense burning desire” for an outstanding performance (84); otherwise, this experience of the “journey” would be recreational fitness, keeping in shape.

The message from Sadie is more complex than just a greeting card or a mindfulness maxim, and it is more completely expressed by her last direct allusion to Browning. The significance of this gift, for Sadie, is signalled by her embarrassment. A platitudinous greeting card is one thing, but an actual poem, especially one as cryptic as “Childe Roland,” is a much more intimate gesture:

She feels heat sliding up her neck. Poetry? Not your usual pre-Olympic gift for a wrestler. Her first instinct had been to highlight the lines near the end of the Browning poem: How such a one was strong, and such was bold / And such was fortunate, yet each of old / Lost, lost! Fortunately she’d fought off that instinct. Too dark. [. . .] Instead, she’d highlighted the very final lines where Childe Roland knowing what he knows, eyes wide open, forges on, raises his trumpet to his lips and blows. (231–32)

Sadie’s initial but rejected choice is part of her message too, but it’s a message for us, not for Digger. He will have to make the discovery himself that he, the “he” he is now, is “lost” no matter the outcome of the games. His ultimate task is to leave the self-focused identity of the athlete-hero, just as it is everyone’s task to leave youth or even life. As the poem suggests, facing self-doubt is the hardest obstacle to overcome. The result of overcoming that obstacle is a renunciation of illusions and an acceptance of self-knowledge. The message from Sadie to Digger, however, suggests a triumphant ending to the poem and to Digger’s quest, regardless of the outcome of the games. The triumph is simply to be there and to be ready to risk everything, to risk “losing” the gold medal but also losing his old, familiar self.

PROCESS AND PLAY: ANOTHER WAY OF THINKING ABOUT SPORTS

The Bone Cage retrains our focus, as readers of narrative, on the process of the story rather than its goal, and in so doing, questions the conventional assumptions about the value of sport, training, and competition. The conventional values of winning as the end goal and of the narrowly focused athlete-hero, rather than the expanded mythic hero, are supplemented if not replaced by other values: achievement in the very processes of overcoming; the athlete as a properly mythic hero, as community-centred rather than self-centred; society’s appreciation of the mythic qualities of athletes and the whole person, not just the athlete or goal as object; and finally, the embracing, as a sport-loving culture (in which a majority of people are overweight and out of shape), of the spirit of play as much as competition. The Bone Cage clearly works against the overdetermination of the athlete in isolated glory. The simple fact that the novel has two protagonists instead of one tells us that an athlete not only cannot do anything alone but also should not. Sadie, pushed by the accident, more quickly appreciates her full capacity as mythic hero than does Digger, but both will need to let go of their ego investment in the athlete identity and bring what they have learned from the experience of being an elite athlete, from those trials, into the world of other people. Sadie’s first “boon,” it seems, is to be Digger’s support and guide as he follows her through the process of maturation. But the potential for Digger to bring his boon to a community is clear from early in the novel. In fact, Digger’s success in wrestling can partly be attributed to the strong friendships he has with his teammates; these friendships are tellingly stronger than those of Sadie with her peers on the swim team. Those friendship bonds support Digger—for instance, when Fly prompts him to call Sadie: “‘I’ll say it again,’ Fly sighs dramatically. ‘I don’t know how you’ll manage without me’” (229). However, they also make him into a supporter, as when he and Fly look after Ben during his breakdown. All of this shows the potential to bring good into whatever community Digger and Sadie develop as they move out of becoming into full adulthood.

While Abdou’s novel builds a more positive and fully developed notion of the athlete as mythic hero than more conventional sport discourses do, it also leaves us with the possibility of sport as having value beyond the outcome of a game. Oriard notes that many contemporary sport novels examine the darker elements of sport in society, and The Bone Cage certainly adds to that genre. However, as Oriard also points out, these novels ultimately celebrate sport: “Although the reality of sport culture can be brutal or dehumanizing, in their essence the games celebrate life, the vitality of the spirit, and human potential; the best novels understand both sides well” (Oriard 1982, 21). Often, when I teach Abdou’s novel, students are drawn into the critique of a society that essentially treats athletes as disposable; however, I end this chapter by pointing to the novel’s expanded understanding of what it means to participate in sport. This too is a celebratory novel. One of the elements of it that I personally love is that it eloquently describes the feeling of pure physical power and accomplishment in doing a sport: “Sadie belongs in the water. Only here, her body performs as trained. Heat tickles her neck, mingles with the cold fluid enveloping her. She’s near the end, should be exhausted, but today she feels she could swim forever, motoring full speed at the water’s surface. Hot, cold, pleasure, pain” (4). This is the moment just before Sadie’s triumphant win at the trials, and while that win feels wonderful for her, I would argue that this moment during the race is perhaps the greater victory. The pleasure-pain of accomplishment, of pure physical power, is precisely the “process” that should be the focus of the experience of sport. As with Childe Roland, the athlete’s pure engagement with the trials, overcoming and transforming the barriers of the self, is as much the goal as the medal is.

The feeling of swimming as joyous effort is more properly defined as play than sport, and it is the spirit of play that Abdou’s novel gestures towards as a solution to the problem of extreme goal-orientation in sport. In writing about sport fiction written by and about women, Michael Oriard identifies this shift in focus from competition to play as a specifically feminist narrative strategy. He shows how Dorey, the main character of Water Dancer (1982), by Jennifer Levin, moves through a kind of existential crisis as a competitive long-distance swimmer, shifting from being obsessively goal-oriented to coming back to a love of swimming for its own sake: “In surrendering herself to the water, in dancing in her element, Dorey discovers a different kind of strength, an intense feeling of being alive. Not competition or mastery but surrender becomes a new kind of freedom. . . . To be a water dancer is neither to dominate nor to be dominated but to live in one’s body in the world” (Oriard 1987, 18). Although he does not quite put it in these terms, we might describe Oriard’s characterization of this feminist reappraisal of excellence in sport as “play.” For Christian Messenger, the idea of play is in powerful tension with the structures that contain and delimit the identity and activity of the athlete; consequently, the critique of culture in sport fiction is partly a yearning for the return to play. He argues that “we need a structural model in which play and sport may co-exist in a full field of relations where play may be seen as the basis for sport but also as its implied opposite and critic in many ways” (Messenger 1990, 11). The Bone Cage explores something like this structural model as it shows the creation of the athlete in isolation but within the structures of the narrowly defined cultural hero. Abdou shows the single-mindedness and internal struggle of the mythic hero-in-training in tension with the need to serve a community. And she shows that athletic excellence grows out of the pleasure in pure physical mastery, which then is often distorted and cramped by the external requirements of competition and results.

CONCLUSION

I hope I have made a convincing case that Browning’s poem about that ambiguous quest helps to lend structural meaning to some of the unconventional narrative elements and some of the central problems raised in the novel. While “Childe Roland” is a central intertext in The Bone Cage, it is not the only literary reference by any means (and, in fact, a discussion of all the literary allusions could generate a productive understanding of the novel). Sadie’s last allusion in the novel is to another questionable hero, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby, “a man at the pinnacle of such an acute limited excellence that everything afterward will savour of anti-climax. Win or lose. And she has promised to bring him [Digger] back from that?” (233). This reference to Gatsby’s lonely—and ultimately empty—hero reinforces the importance of community for high-achieving individuals: the hero can be tragic and glorious but should not have to journey alone. It might also be noted that this reference, along with discussions of the athlete-hero in Oriard, Messenger, and Hartman, all refer to American fiction and culture. I would argue that Abdou gives her critique a specifically Canadian character by ending with an emphasis on community and a challenge to the supremacy of ego. But that may be a topic for another paper.

WORKS CITED

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