ABSTRACT
According to sport literature specialist Pierre Charreton, the interwar period in France witnessed the culmination of fictional writings dedicated to sporting disciplines, part of which is the genre of boxing fiction. Through the examination of two recovered novels, Henri Decoin’s Quinze Rounds (1930) and Alfred Menguy’s Gueules Aplaties (1933), I demonstrate that boxing fiction complicates ideas of heroism, violence, and suffering, thus operating as an unexpected outlet for the traumatic experiences suffered by French society during World War I. After establishing meliorative connections between boxers and soldiers based on their shared heroism and courage, the two authors recast the idealized perception of masculine strength usually typified by both figures. Soon undermined by suffering and trauma, the fictional pugilists of Decoin and Menguy begin to mirror the wounded soldiers of the Great War and expose the taboo surrounding trauma and masculinity post-WWI. In Quinze Rounds and Gueules Aplaties, the presence of fallen pugilists echoes that of fallen soldiers and challenge the reader to face what can be seen as French society’s larger coping mechanisms, those of avoidance and amnesia, when faced with the memories of the Great War and its distressing aftermath.
