Subtlety and Irony, Marco and Jane

By Bart Barry

LAS VEGAS, NV – When he came in the MGM Grand media room late Saturday night, Marco Antonio Barrera was playful. He followed a mariachi singer and joined in a verse that treated the pleasures of remaining a king. And when he was reminded that many of his Mexican brethren had booed him a half-hour before, Mr. Barrera pardoned their indiscretions; they’d apparently wanted something different, and there was no accounting for their taste.

In this way, many of the night’s displeased spectators were like contemporary readers of fiction. Accustomed to speedy plots and flimsy characters in disguised screenplays written to pass hours in an airport hangar, who of such readers, anymore, has time for the subtlety and irony of an author like Jane Austen? Really, who but a writer driving from Phoenix to Las Vegas could possibly enjoy reading or listening to Northanger Abbey?

Oh, not another marriage of pugilism and literature! Afraid so.

The crowd that filled MGM Grand Garden Arena last weekend was there to celebrate El 16 de Septiembre, Mexican Independence Day, a day when centuries ago a Catholic priest launched his country’s first revolution with a shout: “Death to the Spaniards, and long live the Virgin of Guadalupe!” Further incited by refrains from the Mexican national anthem, many of MGM Grand’s ten thousand fans would not have their violence lust easily sated.

They wanted nothing of subtlety. The first fight most of them saw, Jorge Barrios versus Joan Guzman, was long on fistic activity and ineffective aggression. The audience approved. What followed, in the form of Israel Vasquez versus Jhonny Gonzalez, encountered loud disapproval. That is, the MGM Grand crowd routinely booed a brutal bloodletting which saw four knockdowns in fewer than ten rounds – for not being violent enough!

Some of these insatiable folks later found their ways in the crowded postfight media room after Marco Antonio Barrera had defeated, but not beaten-up, Rocky Juarez. They yelled at the podium that Barrera was a runner even while promoter Oscar de la Hoya tried to introduce the night’s combatants. And when Mr. Barrera grinned and said he’d proved he was a champion who could beat Rocky Juarez with one hand – his left – the night’s critics got still louder.

But while Marco Antonio Barrera’s ribbing of Rocky Juarez and his fans was subtle, Mr. Barrera’s frequent mention of his left hand’s effect was closer to irony. Indeed, though it had been Barrera’s left hand which had all but closed Rocky Juarez’s right eye, it was what Barrera did with his other hand that changed the fight.

Irony, that literary device wherein a novelist implies something very different from her words’ meanings, is lost on many of today’s readers, too – and consequently abandoned by our bestselling writers. But there was a time when a master like Jane Austen invented characters who spoke in double and triple meanings, and Ms. Austen’s readers stopped and considered every possible intention of her characters’ words.

Complicated as an Austen character, then, Marco Antonio Barrera promoted his left hand, to Rocky Juarez and three ringside judges and the postfight press corps afterwards, without once treating what he’d done with his right. Remember, it was Rocky Juarez’s job to make the first round of last Saturday’s rematch something like Round 13 of their May bout. Just go forward and maul the old man, Rocky!

But about five minutes into their rematch, when Rocky Juarez got Marco Antonio Barrera in something of a clench and set about roughing-up the veteran, Barrera launched a right uppercut devastating enough to move Juarez a step backwards and change his commitment to infighting for the next half-hour. And while Barrera only landed this same right uppercut a handful of times through the rest of the fight, he threw it repeatedly to remind Juarez of its potency.

And so, like a nineteenth-century novelist, Marco Antonio Barrera used subtlety and irony to create a technical work that pleased him as its creator. But here is where Mr. Barrera and Ms. Austen differ. Where Jane Austen’s works occasionally allow readers to deceive themselves and expect a different outcome from what they’ll later discover, Ms. Austen’s surprise endings are always pleasant for her readers.

Or perhaps it’s better put this way: Jane Austen’s novels do not wear raised and shiny script on their covers, they do not feature portraits of half-naked barbarians with blood-drenched swords, and most importantly, the teasers on their back covers do not promise five hundred pages of explosions and savagery. Marco Antonio Barrera events, and their prefight campaigns, it seems, do assure their potential buyers that something quite different from what happened last Saturday night is in the offing.

Nobody made this point better than Mr. Barrera himself, instants after “Too Close to Call’s” final bell. In a surprising show of hostility, Barrera yanked his mouthpiece out and yelled at Juarez that Rocky had both lost the fight and failed the lesson Marco Antonio Barrera, as his teacher, had given him. This image of Mr. Barrera as the professor and Rocky Juarez as the confounded student also was a repeated theme at the postfight press conference.

But if Marco Antonio Barrera was justified in calling himself Juarez’s master – by virtue of ringside judges’ marks in his favor – so too were Mr. Barrera’s disgruntled fans justified in reminding him that he’d promised to turn MGM Grand into a gladiator pit, not a classroom. Ringside reviews of Mr. Barrera’s lesson also varied greatly, with some on press row scoring the fight 116-112 for Barrera and some scoring it 115-113 for Juarez.

So, perhaps Professor Barrera’s lecture lacked clarity. Or perhaps last Saturday’s fans, like their fiction-reading contemporaries, have let their tastes deteriorate to where only what is at first obvious is pleasant to them. Hard to say – but it should be just the thing to contemplate on a long drive home from Las Vegas, Jane Austen playing in the background.