The Appeal of Ordeal

By Charles Krauthammer

William Butler Yeats tells of Icelandic peasants who found a skull in a cemetery and suspected it might be that of the poet Egill. "Its great thickness made them feel certain it was," he writes, but "to be doubly sure they put it on a wall and hit it hard blows with a hammer." When it did not break, "they were convinced that it was in truth the skull of the poet and worthy of every honor."

The human propensity to test the worthiness of a thing by seeing how well it stands up to abuse--the instinct to kick the tires on a used car--is an ancient and, if Yeats is to be trusted, occasionally charming habit. It can also be painful. Trial by ordeal, the venerable and once widespread practice by which fire or poison or some other divining element is used to determine a person's guilt or innocence, is the kick-to-test instinct applied to living subjects. It used to be a popular method for deciding whether or not someone was a witch, perhaps because what the practice lacked in fairness (the ancient Hindus tied a bag of cayenne pepper around the head of an accused witch, and suffocation was the only proof of innocence) it made up for in finality.

We have come a long way since those dark days. Or have we? We no longer pick our witches or our poets this way, but that is because moderns have little interest in either. When it comes to things they are interested in--doctors, lawyers, Presidents--they have replaced skull-bashing and suffocation with more subtle ordeals. Aspiring doctors must first survive the pressure cooker of a sleepless year of internship, aspiring lawyers the cutthroat paper chase of first-year law school. And those who aspire to the most exalted title of all, President, are required to traverse a campaign trail of Homeric peril. Its length is ludicrous: three years for any serious candidate; its requirements absurd: giving up privacy, often family and almost always a job ("You have to be unemployed to run for President," says Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker, who leaves the Senate in January and is pondering a run for the presidency in 1988); and its purpose obscure: posing with funny hats has, on the face of it, little to do with the subject at hand, namely, governing.

The ritual seems strange. Things just aren't done that way any more. Not even in Chad, where ten years ago President Ngarta Tombalbaye ordered all high government officials to undergo Yondo, a sometimes fatal initiation ritual combining physical abuse (e.g., flogging, mock burial) with ingeniously gruesome tests of stamina (e.g., crawling naked through a nest of termites). For his pains, Tombalbaye was assassinated within a year, and his people danced in the streets. Americans bear their burdens with better humor. They show no inclination to deal nearly so decisively with, say, the Hubert Humphrey test of presidential toughness. Humphrey once questioned whether Walter Mondale had the "fire in the belly" to run for President, a charge so serious that to meet it Mr. Mondale had to submit to a three-year diet of rubber chicken and occasional crow. Mondale may have other political liabilities, but the absence of a burning belly is no longer one of them.

There is only one point to these trials: to humble. The imposed, often improbable ordeal is a form of payment, dues demanded of people who are about to be rewarded with high position. It is a form of democratic practice, laying low the mighty before we bestow upon them prestige and power. It is, as an Icelandic peasant might see it, poetic justice.

But what of the ordeal not mandated by others? How to understand the current passion for the self-imposed, the recreational ordeal? A marathon, after all, is a voluntary thing, and for 99.9% of the 95,000 Americans who run marathons every year, there is nothing awaiting them at the finish line except a blanket and bottled oxygen. Yet the marathon has become so commonplace that a new sport had to be created: the triathlon, a monstrous composite of three consecutive marathons (swimming, biking and running a total of often a hundred miles or more). And now the upper classes have taken the fun indoors. A few years ago the rage was Napoleon, a silent film 4 1/2 hours long. Then came the stage production of Nicholas Nickleby, 9 1/2 hours, including snack-and-comfort breaks. Now we're up to 15 1/2 hours with Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, shown in either five, two or occasionally one grand sitting of "sheer exhilarating length" (Vincent Canby, New York Times)--and subtitles.

To be sure, the self-inflicted ordeal was not invented yesterday. The 1920s had marathon dancing, and the Guinness Book of World Records is full of champion oyster eaters and Hula-Hoopers. But such activities used to be recognized as exotic, the province of the down-and-out or the eccentric. The 24-hour underwater Parcheesi game was for slightly nutty college freshmen. Running 26 miles at a shot was for the most hardened athlete, preferably a barefoot Ethiopian. Nowadays, a 26-mile run is Sunday afternoon recreation, an alternative to a day at the beach or on the lawn mower. As for evening recreation, Fassbinder's epic is so popular that the Wall Street Journal dubbed it "the Flashdance of the intelligentsia."

What's new is not the odd individual who rows the Atlantic lefthanded while eating only salted peanuts, nor the collegians perched atop flagpoles for reasons still unknown. It is the midday, mainstream, Main Street marathoner. The modern wonder is to be found on America's heartbreak hills, where it has become impossible to drive without running across (and nearly over) at least one bedraggled jogger drenched in sweat and close to collapse, the very picture of agony. Why do they do it?

The participants will tell you that they go to marathon movies for culture. They run for health. They spend 48 consecutive hours locked in a Holiday Inn ballroom in enforced communion with complete strangers and call it therapy. (Sartre had another word for it: he once wrote a play based on the convincing premise that hell was being locked into a room forever with other people.) But surely there are less trying ways to acquire culture, health or psychological succor.

There are, but the ordeal offers as a bonus two very chic commodities. One is survivorship, the highest achievement of the modern self-celebratory ethic, best exemplified by the I-SURVIVED-THE-BLIZZARD-OF-'77 T shirt. Survivorship, however, is capriciously doled out. Not everyone can live in Buffalo or have a Malibu beach house obliterated by a mud slide. For the average Joe, there is no cachet in surviving the 5:22 to White Plains. How, then, to earn the badge of honor that is survivorship? Create an ordeal. Run the Western States 100 (miles, that is) over the Sierra Nevada (they say that horses have died racing the trail), and live to talk about it. Or attend the first modern showing of Napoleon, held in the Colorado Rockies, outdoors, from 10:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m., and feel, in the words of the man who put the film together, "Like survivors of the retreat from Moscow."

The other modern good greatly in demand is the learning experience. Ordeal is a great teacher. A group of adventuresome souls staged an unbelievable race on New York's Randall's Island last year: a six-day run, the winner being the person who could traverse the most ground and survive. The race was run around an oval track, subjecting the runners not only to blisters, dehydration and shin splints, but to the overwhelming ennui of unchanging scenery. When reporters swarmed around the runners to ask why they did it, many replied that they had learned a lot about themselves. They never said exactly what it was they learned, but they seemed satisfied that it was important. "Because it is there" has become "Because I am here."

Like the ancients, moderns believe that one can learn about something by subjecting it to the ultimate test: beat the skull, and find the poet. Only today we insist on beating our own skulls, and not quite for the pleasure of stopping.

Why, then? The prestige of survivorship and the hunger for learning experiences are only partial explanations. The somewhat misanthropic economist Thorstein Veblen described the larger phenomenon. He hypothesized a new kind of good, demand for which, contrary to economic law and common sense, increases with price. In the end, the recreational ordeal is just the latest example of a Veblenesque status good, periodically invented for the amusement and prestige of the leisured classes. Now that everyone can afford status items like designer jeans, conspicuous consumption gives way to conspicuous exertion. Sheer exhilarating length becomes a value in itself. And the triathlon comes to represent, to quote a winner of the Hawaiian Ironman race (2.4-mile ocean swim, 112-mile bike ride, 26.2-mile marathon run), "the ultimate expression of the Southern California life-style."

Which is why, outside a cluster of easeful lands, the recreational ordeal is not wildly popular. In America, people run for fun. In Beirut, they run for their lives. People there listen not for the starter's gun, but for the sniper's. In some parts of the world, when a man runs 26 miles it's because he's come from Marathon and he's strictly on business.

--By Charles Krauthammer