“Very Sad but Very Fine”: Death in the Afternoon’s Imagist Interpretation of the Bullfight-Text. more

Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 1 “Very Sad but Very Fine”: Death in the Afternoon’s Imagist Interpretation of the Bullfight-Text. He gave emotion always and, finally, as he steadily improved his style, he was an artist . (Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon: 79) For Ernest Hemingway the Spanish bullfight was a source of inspiration. It was spectacular and charged with meanings that were dear to his heart because they were close to the core of his own project to become a modern American writer. Like a son needs to separate from his parents, Hemingway needed distance from his native America in order to become himself. He methodically planned and sought his long stays away from the States. Foreign exposure was his means of gaining knowledge, of shedding off the provinciality of the young man and writer he was at the beginning of his career and of developing into the mature author and artist he was by 1932, the year of publication of Death in the Afternoon. In the act of writing Death in the Afternoon Hemingway was subtly testifying to his completion of a first phase in his artist’s life and career. He was telling his readers, present and future, how long the first learning phase in the artist’s career takes and how hard and necessary the whole process is. In the first pages of Death in the Afternoon Hemingway confesses to his former inadequacy as a writer, when he writes “I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced … the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it” (2). Hemingway uses the past tense “[good writing] was beyond me” because now in 1932 he is a different man and a better writer. The fact that the reader is actually 1 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 2 reading Death in the Afternoon tells her that the author has been successful. Having overcome his initial difficulties, now the writer finally knows what he did not know before. He knows what is important beyond appearances, he sees meaning outside himself because he is now able to know himself. He has learned to differentiate between his own real feelings and the feelings he is supposed to have and has been taught to feel, in other words, he has learned to disregard false feelings and ideas pressed pressed on him by his upbringing in a WASP middle class family and by education in a suitable American institution. After several years spent in watching bullfights and learning from them as much as about them, years devoted to improving his writing skills, Hemingway considers himself to be experienced enough both in the art of the corrida and in literature to start writing Death In the Afternoon. About ten years i have been necessary for him to be able to tell in written form things that he has slowly learnt to understand and appreciate, things that he never knew before he came to Europe and saw the war and the bullfights. They are things that he knows now in 1932 but which have taken him time to see and understand before he has been able to state them ‘purely enough.’ The Spanish bullfight has been one of the things difficult to understand and to write on, but now that Hemingway has managed to write a long book on them, Death in the Afternoon, and tackled well a difficult subject matter, he knows he has passed a test and proved his expertise in the art of writing. Good writing is, for him, the art of ‘putting down’ in paper what one knows well from one’s own real experience. Hemingway elaborates in the passage quoted above a theory of writing as derived from experience which philosophers would like to call phenomenological. Hemingway gives a step by step account of a process that should be more or less consciously followed by every writer : a. exposure to external action : watching, listening, b. internalization : feeling, experiencing, having emotions, liking, disliking…, c. selective recalling : isolating the elements in the external action that provoked the emotion, d. selective telling : stating purely. The process follows a movement from the outside to the inside and to the 2 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 3 outside again: the transmutation of external action into internal experience and then the transmutation of experience into text by means of the art of writing. After reading Death in the Afternoon it becomes clear that Hemingway’s genuine interest in the bullfight experience was always subordinated to a higher interest, his interest in writing about the bullfight, or what is the same, his interest in literature. The difficulty to know the bullfight that Hemingway declares in Death in the Afternoon stems from its radical foreignness, from its generic mixture of drama and spectacle, and from its being a live performance which includes death as part of the spectacle.ii The bullfight represents events that are actually taking place and having consequences in real life. It is crude and true and it is meaningful. Thus the writer needs to make an extra effort both at understanding it himself and also at explaining it to his more or less informed readers. The bullfight is too complex in nature to be readily acceptable or understandable: it is both an event and a sign or symbolic representation of events, it is business and it is art. The aspect of the bullfight which is most difficult to understand to foreigners and most challenging to Hemingway is the one that receives more attention in Death in the Afternoon, the kill that results in the bull’s or the bullfighter’s death. Whatever happens the bullfight seems questionable: the bull’s death is hard to understand and accept because the plaza is not the slaughter house, and the bullfighter’s death is also hard to understand because the plaza is not a war front.iii People tend to consider certain forms of violent death more acceptable than others on the basis of different practical reasons. Quite obviously, the bullfight may seem the less practical and necessary of the mentioned scenarios and therefore the more questionable. In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway puts the unaccrochability of the bullfight in question and gives the reader all the significant information about the bullfight and its context to contradict the idea. Hemingway makes clear that the bullring is not built as a slaughterhouse, the plaza de toros resembles in shape an amphitheatre, it is a a round high building formed by a series 3 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 4 of concentrical circles occupied by different people doing different things while the corrida lasts. If ordered vertically from higher to lower, we notice the president’s seat on the top. The president makes sure that everything happening in the arena is properly done and subjected to rule. Exceptionally, he can suspend the fight and stop the killing. It is his privilege to give the good matador a prize at the end of a good faena. The exceptionally brave bull might earn a prize too, his own life. In that case the bull’s life is spared so that he can breed. Below the president sit the common spectators, those who pay to sit and watch the bullfight. The closer they sit to the inner circle, the arena, the more expensive the seat is. The barrera separates the paying spectators from the arena, but there is one more partition, las tablas, which separates the arena from the callejón, in the callejón the bullfighters and their attendants find protection and a place to stand between faenas. The arena is the stage of action, the central point in the plaza where only bulls and fighters are allowed and where all gazes are attracted. The plaza is designed to allow all spectators to make visual contact with the action taking place low down on the arena. At the same time it is designed so as to prevent the spectators from coming too physically close to the action. The plaza contains the fiesta world of the bullfight within and separates it from the everyday world outside. Walking in through the plaza doors from the city means walking into a suspended time and place, into suspended disbelief, because bullfights mean fiesta time. The way in which the spectators sit is hierarchical too, there are two hierachies, one is a hierarchy of social power classifying the spectators into general public sitting below and presidency sitting at the top to rule over the general public. The second hierarchy is more comprehensive, it classifies all the people in the plaza as belonging either within the group of fighters or within the group of mere watchers. The barrera marks the line of this essential partition between participants in the action and spectators, a line that neither the president nor the general public can cross. The noun ‘barrera’ means barrier and border, it is a 4 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 5 partition which prevents the passage from the fighting to the non-fighting area in the plaza. The partition points to a difference perceived as essential within Spanish culture, the difference between those who live dangerously and those who watch others live from a position of safety. In this overall structure of watching versus fighting Hemingway perceives a similarity with the act of reading versus writing. Readers resemble watchers while writers resemble fighters. In entering the plaza the spectators take a similar step to that of the reader in opening a fiction book, they suspend disbelief. They come to watch a story which is retold with subtle variations through the performance of each new faena. The contents of the bullfight, what the six faenas in a bullfight show to the aficionados, is a tragic story performed there and now by two unlikely actors, a man wearing a traje de luces (lit. suit of lights) and a naked animal. The actors are antagonic and their antagonism is watched by Spanish spectators not for what it is but for what it symbolizes.iv They find a lesson to learn in what they see and bring it to bear on their own lives. As a matter of fact the Spanish people use schemata and idioms from the bullfight jargon to understand and refer to their patterns of behavior or misbehavior. The bullfight jargon is used in order to refer to everyday life, for instance, in Spanish it is more forceful to ask someone ‘to take the bull by the hornsv meaning ‘do not beat about the bush’ than to use other less idiomatic expressions. One very important Spanish idiom, ‘el momento de la verdad’ (lit.‘the moment of truth’), is based on the bullfight jargon. The moment of truth in the bullfight is the moment of killing when even a faker of a bullfighter must get real close to the bull to be able to put the sword in. Cowardly and brave bullfighters must meet this inevitable moment of truth when they will be tested and watched by all the people present who will judge them not only as bullfighters but for what they are worth as men. In the Spanish culture the idea of shame matters as much as the idea of honor (91-92) and fame, and the bullfight exposes the social source of these feelings and emotions allegorically. For the writer 5 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 6 the moment of truth comes when he finishes his work and is judged by his readers. When the fight starts, the bull enters the sunny arena from the bottom dark recesses of the Plaza building. The bullfighter is waiting, he has come into the arena in the company of others, forming part of a procession, but the bull comes out into the arena as an isolated individual. Once in, the bullfighter can seek protection in el callejón, but the bull remains exposed to the spectator’s gaze for the whole fifteen minutes that the faena lasts on average. The spectators see the bull dashing out of the dark bullpen like a newborn baby out of the womb, he comes out strong and aimless, innocently rushing into a place of light, hierarchy and order. The bull does not know yet that, rather than breaking free from the bullpen out into the sun, he is getting into a trap which will allow him a certain range of action conducive only to his own subjugation and death. The domination of the bull follows a process that Hemingway names in Spanish when he says: “The three phases of the bull’s condition in the fight are called in Spanish, levantado, parado, and aplomado” (145-146)—This is a calculated process that leads the bull to a gradual loss of his capacity and strength comparable to the deterioration suffered by people when they get old. The process of physical decay of the bull begins at the very moment of its delivery into the arena and takes place in what Hemingway calls the three acts of a faena, in Spanish simply three thirds, los tres tercios de la faena, one devoted to the pases with the muleta, another to the banderillas and pica and the last one to the sword or espada. Pressed by the bullfighter’s moves the bull starts a process of learning to cope with the bullfighter, the banderillero and the picador, he must also learn to take in the punishment inflicted and to foresee other limiting obstacles to his own progress if he is to defend himself. Having suffered the measured amount of punishment inflicted by bullfighter, banderilleros and picadors under the supervision of the president, the brave bull is expected to continue to fight till his very end comes, the moment of truth for both him and the man. Unexpectedly an 6 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 7 intelligent bull might choose to stop attacking and go in the defensive from the place of his querencia. This is considered a sign of wisdom and Hemingway devotes the second half of chapter thirteen in Death in the Afternoon to the idea of the querencia developing in the bull’s brain during the fight. Human life, as represented by the brave bull’s fate, is conceived as short and transitory, a gradual disillusioned process of learning that existence means physical and mental decay and eventually death. In spite of having this disillusioned intelligence, this awareness of the impermanence of life, the bullfight does not shelter defeat : the brave bull may be tired but he attacks till the very last moment when he dies while still attempting to kill. The same is expected of the bullfighter, who cannot give up whatever the circumstances. This world vision contained in the bullfight is woven within Hemingway’s stories with old men as protagonists. Wine of Wyoming, ‘A Clean Well-Lighted place,’ The Old Man and the Sea, or True At First Light are good examples. Hemingway is not an ‘animalarian’ (9) because what interests him in the bullfight is not the bull’s fate but the human fate that the bull symbolizes. It is human fate that Hemingway deals with in his own literature. In this respect he is like the Spanish aficionados who cannot be happy about the bull’s death, because it symbolises their own death, but accept it because death is real, unescapable and true, the only truth in a world of appearances.vi Side by side with death’s truth there is much theatricality in the bullfight. It arises mainly from its being a visual spectacle devised so as to bring man and bull together to a fight in which fair play and the balance of forces are important factors. The bull is strong while the bullfighter has intelligence, training and props to rely on and compensate for the bull’s physical advantage. Both bull and bullfighter are artificially made to resemble one another, the bullfighter is symbolically given the bull’s most characteristic attributes, horns and phallus. The bull’s horns, aesthetic and functional, are mimetized by the bullfighter’s montera and sword. The montera is purely aesthetic, a little black hat whose peculiar 7 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 8 shape resembles the horn stands, while the sword is functional, a defensive penetrating arm equivalent to the bull’s horns. On the other hand the bull is symbolically ‘covered’ with scarapels and banderillas which are a colourful but painful substitute for the bullfighter’s suit. The humanization of the animal is also linguistically managed in the specific jargon of the aficionado: the bull either ‘answers’ or ‘fails to answer’ the bullfighter’s ‘invitation’ to fight. The bull ‘knows’ or ‘learns’ how to take the cape, the bull ‘accepts’ the change of suertes from one third of the faena to the next, the bull is ‘noble’, ‘brave’, ‘insolent’, and so on. Thus the bull is made to seem nearly human and the human nearly bull in ways which are mainly visual and discursive but also factual. I mean, la lidia substitutes man and bull symbolically for each other in all the artificially mimetic situations mentioned above, but at the moment of truth, which is the moment of death in the afternoon, man and bull are substituted for each other literally. Hemingway summarises the point : “that flash when man and bull form one figure as the sword goes all the way in, the man leaning after it, death uniting the two figures in the emotional, aesthetic, and artistic climax of the fight” (247). Death is the same for man and animal, it is the end of a life and the end of a tragic story told without words by the bull and the matador. The six deaths in an afternoon’s corrida are real and at the same time symbolic. The death of the six bulls becomes a representation of other deaths, deaths of human beings who, like the bull, are born and brought to the fight without having been asked; born innocent and strong they must get old and die. The bullfight can be read as an allegory of human existence, on this existential plane the bullfight articulates a disillusioned vision of individual existence which is much in agreement with Hemingway’s own perception of the individual as cast-off from an Edenic womb. It is a Paradise lost which cannot be regained but which can be partially reappropriated by means of total immersion in tasks that require expertise and hard work. Hemingway exploits this idea in much of his literary work but nowhere as exceptionally as in “Big Two Hearted River,” 8 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 9 where the cleansing ritualistic repetition of actions connected to making camp and fishing brings Nick back to a feeling of self, wholeness, and empathy with nature that maybe temporary but is effective in providing him with a surrogate Eden, his querencia. There are other meanings articulated within the bullfight, they are meanings relative to the fact that people are born to live within the norms and conventions of a particular society. Of these social constraints the individual becomes only progressively aware and it is usually later in life that he realizes from his own experience that his freedom is limited. It is not only that he is not the center of the world, what is worse is that he is decentered, losing control and feeling somewhere between subject and object. Modern man knows the tension of feeling subject to natural and civil law, and also to the law of the market’s subtle alienating forces. Analogously, the bull‘s actions in the three phases of the faena show the tension between natural power, instinctual freedom and gradual subjection to the bullfighter’s coercing maneuvers. The bullfighter presses onto the fight the specific system of norms and conventions of la lidia, which are part of and stand for the more general cultural order they belong to. When the bull dies the bullfighter’s victory confirms the supremacy of social man over the purely instinctive ‘natural’ creature, the animal. The bullfighter’s victory also questions the viability of the Rousseaunian ‘natural’ man as represented by the innocent savage bull. In the bullfight, like in people’s life, innocence does not last. After the first minutes of a faena the bull learns quickly, but it is already too late for him and the bullfighter, the bull must be killed even if that means the death of the bullfighter. The outcome of a faena is never totally predictable, either the bull or the man must die, that is one reason why there are six bulls and six faenas in a bullfight. The fifty-to-fifty probability of death for either man or animal, if only one bull and one man were to fight in a corrida, would endanger the moral pattern of the bullfight. The bullfight teaches that the bull’s innocent natural wildness is less powerful than the 9 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 10 bullfighter’s artifice, his measured violence and his tauromaquia schooling. The rationality of the bullfighter is shown by his subjection to system of lidia rules legitimized within an institution, the bullfight, which allows him to dominate a creature stronger than him. The spectators see this in the bullfight and understand the benefits of abiding by the law. The modern lidia exposes the desirability of a legal system and a civil state that can guarantee the subjection of the wild and unruly to order. 1932, the year of publication of Death in the Afternoon, and the months before, were critical in Spanish history. The republic was being tested and considered as a replacement for the century-old monarchy. Hemingway was aware of the importance of the conflict behind all the political unrest and left trace of it in chapter twenty of Death in the Afternoon (cf. Mandel, 2001), a book which, being about the Spanish bullfight, was also a book about Spain and, by refraction, also a book about the USA. This state of affairs brought about much disorder and sociopolitical conflicts which resulted in Franco’s 1936 coup d’état and the ensuing three-year-long Spanish Civil War. During the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century the bullfights had great importance in Spanish social life, Hemingway witnessed part of this golden age in person. It was not coincidental that the spectacle bloomed at a critical time of revolutionary upheavals in Europe that had an echo in Spain. There are historical reasons that back the idea that the bullfight has served a political function in Spain since they exist. The history of modern bullfighting, the one that interests Ernest Hemingway, reveals bullfighting to be an institution evolved to legitimise the centralising politics of the Spanish monarchy and, later, the Spanish empire. The changes undergone by the Spanish monarchy run parallel to the changes in the bullfight. The evolution of both the form of the state and the form of the bullfight is motivated by a change in the hierarchy of power relations among the different social groups. The increasing protagonism of the lower and middle classes in the life of the country is mirrored by a similar change in protagonism in the 10 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 11 relations between the different participants in the bullfight. In medieval times, with the first Castilian kings like Alfonso X, bullfighting was an aristocratic kind of sport, a showing off of riding skill on the part of warrior noblemen who celebrated future victory in front of the king with whom they dined and to whom they owed fidelity. Killing the bull was then a menial task left to footmen. When the feudal bond between the nobility and the king against other Christian kings and the Moor grew weaker, the nobility on horse also ceased to act the leading role in the bullfight. And bullfighting became work to be paid for, professional bullfighters on foot killed the bull--the rejoneadores on horse remained as a marginalised decorative element within the event, like the nobility when the king can depend on money lenders and a national army. Consequently, the meaning of the fiesta changed radically from a high culture sport to a popular event and a performance addressed to the people, a paying spectatorship of equals, the aficionados. In the eighteenth century the structure of the modern Spanish bullfight was fixed,vii from then on its three tercios are called “the trial”, “the sentencing” and “the execution” (98). The very term ‘lidia,’ which comes from a latin verb ‘litigare’ meaning ‘to quarrel or dispute through legal proceedings,’ is kept in Law jargon in terms like ‘litigare’ and ‘litigium.’ What this means is that the bullfight was perceived as a surrogate kind of ‘litigium’ or trial in which the bull is substituted for the accused person. This structure propitiated the substitution of the bullfight for the sadder spectacles provided by the public administration of capital punishment. Death by garrote vil was the Spanish equivalent of hanging as capital punishment for offences against the state. Another form of violent death administered in public was the stake for offences against the Roman Church–the Inquisition was strong in Spain till the end of the eighteenth century. Goya left impressive sketches of these ‘disastrous’ scenes of pre-enlightment Spain. He also sketched other violent scenes, this time they were scenes of the war against Napoleon, which are called ‘‘Los desastres de la Guerra.’’ Hemingway mentions this particular collection in the second page of Death in the 11 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 12 Afternoon, which is not a coincidence as it is not a coincidence that Goya had a preference for the bullfight, which at the time was, unquestionably, an improvement on the kind of spectacle then offered to the people. Hemingway praises Goya repeatedly in Death in the Afternoon. There is a basic similarity of vision, an afinity between Goya’s Tauromaquia and Hemingway’s bullfight sketches. There is also an affinity between Goya’s series Los desastres de la guerra and Hemingway’s war sketches and stories. The affinity stems from the crude clarity of vision of the Spanish artist, a quality which Hemingway considered absolutely essential to both Goya’s painting and his own writing.viii It is its capacity to represent the advantages of a modern political system over a feudal one and to reconceptualize the relations of domination between social groups that makes the bullfight valuable to the Spanish artist and also to Hemingway, who uses the knowledge he gains from studying the bullfight to enhance his understanding of the forces at work in the formation of multiethnic empires like the one the USA was becoming since the end of the nineteenth century. ix The modern Spanish bullfight stages the process of cultural assimilation and appropriation of a naturally different creature for profit. The Spanish empire started by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 assimilated a heterogeneous population within the Spanish nation (43). The muslim, the jewish and the roman-visigothic ethnicities were brought under the law of the king and queen and under the law of the Church. It was either that or expulsion, cultural diversity was sacrificed in the altar of national identity. From destruction, creation : the unifying force of a common system of laws applicable to every Christian, no matter the race, was at the basis of the formation of a Spanish national identity. The system was exported to the colonies with Spain’s imperial expansion to The West Indies. Overseas, a second process of domination took place, but this time the process would take longer and it would end up overlapping with other European, and eventually American, powers. The bullfight can be seen as a symbolic representation of processes of domination which took place in Spain between the 12 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 13 fifteenth and eighteenth centuries: national unification and imperial expansion. When seen from an American perspective, the bullfight can symbolise two analogous processes, one which took place after the first white emigrants settled in America and conquered the Native Americansx in their expansion to the West. In reference to this first process the Indian occupies the position of the dominated bull, he is overpowered by a more sophisticated system of laws and a more hierarchically organized culture. But later, in a second historical process, it will be the white man together with the black man that will have to occupy the position of the bull and, in the different guises of the immigrant factory worker, farm laborer or soldier, they will be sacrificed in wars, civil or foreign, or exploited by big enterprises. All these themes had been part of In Our time, Hemingway’s 1925 publication –the loss of a past mythical America, the loss of an image of the land as the land of freedom and achievement– and they recur in Death in the Afternoon. In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway uses an indirect approach to American issues. By focusing on the structure and meaning of the Spanish bullfight as regards the ideology of power, Hemingway can omit redundant explanations about the process of formation of an American national identity and the development of the country from colony into empire. Hemingway’s position on the matter is more explicit in Green Hills of Africa (1935) where he discusses the dynamics of History, the relation between the stream of different peoples coming to America and the stream of time. xi In his 1920s publication In Our Time Hemingway had placed side by side the Spanish and American scenes in his vignettes and stories. In Our Time yuxtaposes the two matters, the American and the Spanish, while Death in the Afternoon makes the American matter practically invisible, the submerged portion of the iceberg-text which Hemingway has omitted from the linguistic surface of Death in the Afternoon. Only within the more visual section of his text, the photograph collection, does Hemingway use yuxtaposition –rather than omission– as the mode of his indirect approach to the American scene: there are two photographs, one following the other, 13 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 14 showing the contrasting images of the fighting bull and the ox. Hemingway incorporates two captions to the photographs. His captions are very clearly focused on the differences between the two animals, the bull he finds admirable and the ox an object of pity because, being raised for beef he is submissive and will be killed at the slaughter-house, just an object of economic exploitation. Hemingway’s comments on the ox seem hard when applied to people, the ox represents the exploited second class citizen, the person who exists mainly to be used and made profit of. Used and then slaughtered at the war fronts, Hemingway says, “most men die like animals” (139). In the bullfight it is the reverse, animals die like men, fighting for their lives. As we know Hemingway’s use of animal symbolism in the thirties was very characteristic and did not escape the attention of critics who felt hurt by the inferences that could be drawn from Hemingway’s “dumb ox”xii in Death in the Afternoon. In Death in the Afternoon the acknowledgement of the truth about the modern times reflected in In Our Time, applies to all the good countries like Spain and Britain and America, which have required the domestication of the individual and his subjection to the higher authority of the State as symbolically represented by the bullfighter in the bullfight. In For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) Hemingway fictionalised some of these ideas, for instance in Robert Jordan’s recollections of his brave grandfather, who fought in the American Civil War, and his cowardly father, who did not know how to fight and killed himself instead. Jordan, a college teacher in the twentieth century much intellectually aware of the past and of the dynamics of revolution, does not really resemble any of his close relatives but he is a fighter, not an ox. Hemingway’s uncompromising clarity of vision matches Goya’s. In both cases vision is gained from a certain degree of proximity to the modern Spanish bullfight. It seems understandable, then, that Hemingway considers the bullfight worth his effort in Death in the Afternoon, which is designed to initiate mainly American and English speaking readers in “the theory, practice and spectacle” (15) of the modern Spanish bullfight. 14 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 15 Hemingway discriminates between bullfight theory and bullfight practice. What a bull should be like in theory is one thing, what the bull is like in actual practice is a different thing: the bull maybe brave or not, graceful or not, strong enough or not, he might develop a psychological querencia for a place or not, these different responses in the face of the bullfighter’s pressure are never predictable. For this reason Hemingway repeatedly studies the measure of “grace” under pressure (212) that the best bulls and the best bullfighters show in the best bullfights. Hemingway learns from them, the brave and beautiful as well as the less brave, what kind of situations can his fictional characters find themselves in and what kind of roles they can play. Most importantly he learns what kinds of situation he, like the artist bullfighter or great matador, can find himself faced with. The bullfight may seem unaccroachable like life may be unaccrochable and like Hemingway’s In Our Time had seemed unaccrochable to his prudish mother, Grace, that real-life “old lady,” or to Gertrude Stein, another perhaps more significant real-life Old Lady in Hemingway’s life and career story—Hemingway ironises on the hypocritical prudishness of these ladiesxiii by introducing an “the old lady” in anonymous fictional character called chapters seven to sixteen in Death in the Afternoon. Her role as the explicit addressee of the narrative is to represent a stereotyped reader, a reader whose understanding and potential enjoyment of the bullfight is suppressed on the false grounds that the bullfight is a celebration of cruelty. The fight between bull and bullfighter can also be ‘read’ as a representation of the war of the sexes. This is a further layer of meaning that the Spanish culture weaves within the bullfight, a thread that Hemingway picked up in his own narrative. The other characterizing attribute of the bull, besides horns, is the phallus. The bull quite naturally stands out as the most visible male in the couple formed by bull and bullfighter. And opposingly, the bullfighter looking smaller, dressed in tight-fitting gold embroidered clothes is a symbolic feminine figure engaged with the bull in a dance with death; 15 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 16 ideally the bullfighter is a fine young man, slender and delicate of movement, an adolescent dressed up in light colours and in a fashion that brings out the line of his leg, hip and waist. It is the gaze of the public (cf. Mulvey, 1975) that feminizes the bullfighter’s body by his mere exhibition and also by contrast with the muscular dark figure of the bull. In real life bullfighters are seen as purely male, very much desired by the women around. When the bull enters the arena and opposes the bullfighter he is also a symbol of man confrontig woman through an interplay of culture-bound roles which are social rather than natural in nature. He comes out of a dark womb, male, bound to penetrate another womb as mate if he wants to become father. It is to be remembered here that the exceptionally brave bull can win a last-minute reprieve by the president. It is a case of cultural rather than natural selection of the fittest, or in this particular case, of the wildest. The quality of being brave and wild is nurtured and tended to through careful genetic selection. Having one bull that carries the gene in a pure form makes him more valuable alive and breeding than dead. But reprieval is very exceptional, normally the bull meets death, the final womb, at the end of the faena. In the fifteen minutes that he has on the arena the bull can either dominate or be dominated by the bullfighter, likewise a man might dominate or be dominated by the women in his lifetime. The bullfight takes for granted that active vs. passive gender roles are always negotiated in the interaction rather than totally fixed by convention, the bull “being dominated if the bullfighter works him properly, and dominating the bullfighter if his work is deficient or cowardly” (126-127). In this sense the bullfight is close to Hemingway’s preoccupation with shifting gender roles and adrogyny. The idea that either of the sexes can choose to take on the masculine or the feminine roles in gender interaction is present in many Hemingway stories like “The Sea-Change,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and The Garden of Eden especially. It is a conflict between the sexual and the generic identity of a human being that is also pursued in Death in the Afternoon in 16 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 17 chapter eleven when Hemingway compares the male and the female of the species, the bull calf and the cow calf, and sees no differences in behaviour or intelligence between them. Which means that the cow is as brave and as intelligent as the bull of the species and viceversa. The gender-relevant symbolism of the bullfight is exploited in Hemingway’s ironic allusion to Virginia Woolf’s defense of the “innate superior intelligence in the female” (106) of the human species. Again, a similar comparative approach to gender issues appears in the closing section of Death in the Afternoon entitled “Some Reactions of a Few Individuals to the Integral Spanish Bullfight” (495-501). When Hemingway explains the individual reactions of different people to the bullfight, he does not provide a gender-biased interpretation of their reaction: there is no simplistic stereotyped version of the women fearing vs. the men liking the bullfight. In the same vein of thought, in Death in the Afternoon Hemingway is careful to stress the rarity rather than the impossibility of symmetrical monogamous liaisons both in the animal and the human kingdoms. About the latter we read: “There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it” (122) and also “All those who have really experienced [love] are marked, after it is gone, by a quality of deadness” (120). Again, these bullfight themes and sub-themes had served Hemingway in writing A Farewell to Arms (1929). An idea that he revisits in his 1932 book on the Spanish bullfight because it belonged in it. Women who are stronger than men, we have a few in Hemingway’s fiction besides Cat and Lady Brett, women bullfighters who kill their bull, there are some in the history of the modern Spanish bullfight. The difference created by having either a woman in the role of the killer is not an essential one, neither in the bullfight nor in Hemingway’s fiction. It is rather a difference in emphasis that they make: a male killer as protagonist of the bullfight calls the spectator’s attention in a balanced manner to the three fundamental conflicts represented in the 17 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 18 bullfight, the existential conflict : Why does one need to be born and why should one keep living and fighting? the socio-political conflict: Why should one freely accept social norms and a particular political system ? and the generic conflict, Why should one be either male or female and behave accordingly? These questions are brought up to the minds of the Spanish spectators of the bullfight, and they are answerable. The answers are, like the questions, part of the bullfight’s meaning and part of the meaning of Hemingway’s fiction. All moral questions, in the bullfight as in real-life and also in Hemingway’s fiction, make sense because they are asked within the horizon of mortality. In his work Hemingway questions why is it that there is so much aggresion and violent death in our time when, as the Spanish people well know and others should know too, “death is the unescapable reality, the one thing any man may be sure of; the only security [...] life is much shorter than death” (266),xiv This is the ultimate question adressed by the bullfight, one which is at the root of the other moral issues mentioned, ethical questions which both, the bullfight and Hemingway’s writing raise. Like the bullfights, Hemingway’s fiction probes into the sources of aggresion and destructiveness in the life of the individual and in the group. In the bullfight aggresion is partly the consequence of fear –the fear of someone who might be dangerous and cause our death– and partly the consequence of confinement within a trapping circle, the arena. The bullfight shows that aggression is the best defense, and also that domination is the obvious way to avoid being dominated when there is no other way out: entrapment and the fear of suffering violent death engender violence. The Spanish bullfight exposes the causes and the consequences of the ideology of domination. Rather than a sacrifice the bullfight is a lesson and tells truths that make spectators wiser and stronger. The public is taught that conflict and violence exist necessarily and mainly as the result of the fear of domination and death. But they are also taught a bigger ironic truth. The bullfight teaches that whatever inessential differences separate the opposing creatures there is an essential sameness between them that 18 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 19 should be the cause of their seeking peace and understanding rather than violence. All creatures are the same in their being equally mortal, “death uniting the two figures” of bull and bullfighter. It is interesting to observe that the complexity of the bullfight can only address the spectators’ rationality. Like Hemingway, when they have been to a good corrida, they come out thinking that it was “very sad but very fine” (4) –theirs is a rationality that paradoxically ends up questioning the very spectacle that brings it up. It is a spectacle without teams and without winners. Uwsually, the death is the bull’s death but it represents human death. The symbolic value of the bull’s death makes spectators feel one with others rather than against others. Hemingway says that this feeling of togetherness is communal and catharticxv because it produces a feeling of transcendence in the spectator. The bullfight leads spectators, and Hemingway was one of the best possible spectators, to explore the tension between rationality and irrationality in social life and in the life of each individual: also to address conflicting tendencies in human nature. It acknowledges man’s paradoxical “craving for freedom but also escape from responsibility [...] a need for creativity, but also powerful destructive drives; a readiness for self-sacrifice [...] but also a strong lust for personal power and domination; a need for love [...] [and] a need to inflict pain and suffering on both the hated and the beloved ones” (Marcoviç 1974: 239). In placing both a human and an animal as equals on the arena the bullfight exhibits the instinctual (natural) drives and the social (cultural) forces that trigger violence. Hemingway’s interest in the Spanish bullfight was triggered by his dissatisfaction with mainstream explanations of human nature. The Freudian and Darwinian approaches popular at the time explained human destructiveness and aggression as regressive impulses, as a descent to animal instinct, the instinct of survival. In a Marxian line aggressiveness is only a disposition produced by specific historical and social conditions. The bullfight, old and wise, obeys to a theory of violence based on a more comprehensive theory of human nature. 19 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 20 The bullfight acknowledges both explanations of violence, innatism, the theory that posits violence to be innate, and the Freudian / Marxian theories that defend that violence is a learnt / acquired answer to external and internal conditioning forces, the trap. But the bullfight acknowledges these explanations as valid only to a certain extent for neither can fully address the complexity of human behavior. These mainstream explanations overlook those instances when men kill out of joy, a case which is of the outmost interest to Hemingway. When Hemingway says “it is [...] true enjoyment of killing which makes the great matador” (233), he is clearly bringing to the fore the association between killing and joy but the association works against a specific background, the greatness of the matador. Hemingway insists that it is the great matador that feels the joy of killing. Obviouslyxvi Hemingway does not want his readers to think the bullfighter is a sadist, therefore if we are to understand him properly on this point we need to remember that for Hemingway the ‘great matador’ is “a complete bullfighter who is at the same time an artist” (86). The feeling of joy which overcomes the artist when he is successfully immersed within the process of creation is, in the particular case of the bullfighter, the joy of killing well; his artistic faena is inseparable from a process of destruction. Hemingway understands the synthesis that the bullfighter makes of contradictory feelings, joy and sadness, rising from the tension between the destructive and constructive drives in him, the man and the artist. The sadness of the man for the death of a living creature, the bull that is brave and beautiful, is also one ingredient of the fight and Hemingway comments on this sad aspect of the faena “the tragedy is the death of the bull” (Hemingway, 1967: 116). For Hemingway the coexistence of sadness and elation in the bullfighter is correlative to another mixed feeling in those who watch the corrida and come out thinking that what they watched was “very sad but very fine” (4). The bullfighter’s joy in the creation of an artistic faena comes together with pity, sadness for the destruction of the “transient wave of life,” the wild bull, on the altar of art, 20 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 21 and the emergence in its place of a quiet “fixed model”xvii, the slowed down bull or ‘toro parado’ that shows the “loss of the free, wild quality [the bull brings] with him into the ring” (98). In a good faena there is creation and destruction, or better, there is creation within destruction, an idea which Hemingway synthesises calling it the matador’s “joy of killing.” Hemingway acknowledges the paradoxical nature of the bullfight as art, its mixture of beauty and joy on the one hand and death and sadness on the other. The paradox is that “the matador must dominate the bulls by knowledge and science. In the measure in which this domination is accomplished with grace will it be beautiful to watch” (21). The creativity that is invested in the performance of a good faena operates, like all creativity, by way of transmuting raw everyday matter into meaningful pattern. What was formless and meaningless before the bull and bullfighter meet on the arena, grows in the afternoon into a structure addressing the essentially ethical issues of learning how to live and die like human beings, not like animals. This is ‘what’ the bullfight is about and what Hemingway considers moral about it, “the meaning and end of the whole thing” (8). But Hemingway is also much interested in the ‘how’, the aesthetic way in which the structure of the bullfight and the personal style of a great bullfighter will transform a fight into art. The bullfight obeys to a theory of spectacle based on a very general theory of art which appeals to Hemingway greatly for its truth and simplicity. In the bullfight Hemingway sees a living reminder that all creativity and all art rely on destruction in a more or less obvious manner. The bullfighter’s art clearly “deals with death and death wipes it out.”xviii The bullfighter kills the bull to make art. Then the monosabios come for the spoils and the plaza sweepers wipe out the traces of the fight which remain printed in the arena. The artistic effect remains in the memory of the spectator. Like the memory of beautiful castles which were once built in the sand. In the case of literary writing, a permanent art, the association between art and destruction exists as essentially, though perhaps less obviously, than in the bullfight. In Death in the Afternoon 21 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 22 Hemingway stresses the important role that the desire for permanence plays in literature and more specifically in his own writing. It is the desire not to lose anything that was once experienced and loved and treasured as memories are treasured before they can be recalled in the writing. Hemingway writes: “We’ve seen it all go and we’ll watch it go again. The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after” (278, my emphasis). He alludes to a process that goes from the impermanence of experience to the permanence of the written record. The written record, the literary text, springs from the artist’s memory of past emotion and depends on his ability to verbalise his reminiscence. Hemingway clearly associates the need to write to an awareness of the passing of time that brings with it our own passing. The desire to make it last, to make permanent what is impermanent by nature is the trigger of art and of his own literature. But the question whether the artistic replica can supplant reality still remains. Chapter twenty in Death in the Afternoon is a perfect example of the workings of memory, desire and literary imagination in Hemingway’s text. In this memorable chapter we perceive the artist’s awareness both of his success and at the same time failure at having managed to make Death in the Afternoon “enough of a book.” (278) There is no contradiction here. He is telling his readers that he is nearly over a book that he only dared to write after he felt he was ready, a book he is proud of because it has been difficult to write. He knows he has nearly completed a book which he has written following the rules of his own theory of art, a good true book on the bullfight. He also knows how difficult and rare it is to write one true sentence. In Hemingway’s theory “Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life he has and how conscientious he is, so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.” (Hemingway, in White, 1967: 215). Hemingway’s theory of literature uses high standards to measure what good writing is like. As he puts it, the artist writer must sacrifice all he 22 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 23 has, time and experience, at the altar of writing, “[good writing] must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him [...]. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. [...] There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring” (191-192). But Hemingway is bigger than his theory when he acknowledges the limits of all theory, included his own. He shows his readers that life is bigger than art in the last chapter in Death in the Afternoon. Chapter twenty contains precisely his very explicit lament at the impossibility to “make it all come true again” (272) while writing about the past. For Hemingway life and love are beyond art.xix For him the truth of art is inferior to experiential truth because art gives only a representation of ‘reality,’ a translation of it in the written medium which lacks immediacy but which should ‘feel’ like ‘reality.’ This ‘effect of the real’ is what Hemingway calls ‘true writing.’ Hemingway’s is a disillusioned theory of literary truth, he is aware that it is by means of the writing as much as in spite of the writing, that the writer as artist must achieve self-expression and communicate with his readers. Writing gives him plenty of reasons to feel both fine and sad. He is aware of the possibilities and also the limitations of his métier, xx written language is his means of creation and his means of destruction. Hemingway knows that all fiction, even his own true writing, can only create an illusion of reality for the reader. It is a creation that relies on destruction, it destructs the transient wave of life by fixing it in a verbal textual model. This is a reason for sadness. But this disillusioned vision of his art does not prevent him from enjoying the fight while he is striving to achieve the impossible and inventing new ways of telling and writing. Like Hemingway, who felt “very sad but very fine” (4) not only after watching the artistic bullfight, but also while practising his own art, Hemingway’s readers can feel both sad and fine after reading chapter twenty. It is a poem in prose, a piece of writing exceptional within Death in the Afternoon. 23 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 24 It displaces bullfighting from the center of attention, it even displaces Hemingway’s theory of art from our contemplation to let us contemplate love. Hemingway reverts to himself and the residual feeling of nostalgia arising from finding himself absent from places and separated from faces once loved and now gone. The movement of memory and writing makes present what is already past and brings Hemingway back in time bringing him also in touch with a past version of himself. Chapter twenty is therefore about Hemingway, the man he was years before and the artist he had become then at the moment of remembering and writing Death in the Afternoon, when he was older, wiser and finally able to write his book on bullfighting, a book which had been too difficult for him to write the first time he came to Spain and saw a bullfight. Chapter twenty is also exceptional for the change in tone and the mood in which it is written. The joyful mood that characterises the great maestro while he is in the process of creation permeates the first nineteen chapters of the book. Hemingway tackles his faena confidently and openly telling all the relevant details on the bullfight and on his own art, but he changes his approach in the last chapter in the book. Hemingway lets chapter twenty be exceptional, he approaches it as if it were an exceptionally brave bull which does not deserve to die like all others, a bull whose rare perfection grants him reprieve, an exceptional bull that manages to come out of the plaza alive. Hemingway considers his experience of things and places in Spain too good to receive the same literary treatment as the rest of his book. The artist wants to spare them, to leave them untouched like butterflies which he would rather watch alive than pinned down, beautiful but dead, in a box. For that reason Hemingway allows some of his Spanish memories flit through the textual space of the last chapter in his book, chapter twenty. They are not totally a part of the book and they are not totally left out. They are insinuated and then omitted, in other words they are considered for a moment and then transferred to the submerged part of the iceberg-text he called Death in the Afternoon. The submerged part is less visible and less readable but truer and more alive than the rest of the book, 24 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 25 as Hemingway puts it : chapter twenty “is what the book is about but nobody seems to notice that. They think it is just a catalogue of things that were omitted” (Hemingway, in Baker 1981: 378). Hemingway warns the reader that he is not just making a list of omissions, that chapter twenty summarises Death in the Afternoon’s central concerns: impermanence, change, loss, the passing of time and death. Hemingway personalises these feelings saying “Pamplona is changed, of course, but not as much as we are older. I found that if you took a drink that it got very much the same as it was always. I know things change now and I do not care. It’s all been changed for me. Let it all change. We’ll all be gone before it’s changed too much … We’ve seen it all go and we’ll watch it go again. (278) Melancholy results from awareness of the passage of time and the changes --external and internal-- it brings about: the ” loss of past experience, the dulling of emotion, the not-caring, the unreliability of memory, “Memory, of course, is never true” (100). And joy springs from the artist’s creative answer to loss, from his work and his ability to recreate the past and bring it back to life for the little while that the reading lasts. Sad but fine is the modernist writer’s ambivalent emotional answer to the paradoxical nature of art, which is creative and destructive. But paradox is not the main problem of the artist. His main problem is that it is not only life that is ephemeral, art itself is ephemeral, time wears it out like it wears out a man. Fighting mortality by writing an immortal work is Hemingway’s métier, his own version of a great faena, his language-fight. It is a fight with language and it is a fight between the maestro and the tradition. Hemingway’s search for the discovery of a new narrative style seeks to bury the past, to improve on the traditional narrative forms that were dead because with the passing of time they had become trite, worn out formulae. Hemingway worked hard on his narrative to differentiate it from nineteen century patterns. Because of his conviction that language, if used trivially, eliminates the immediacy of the actually felt, and also because words mediate human experience 25 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 26 and often betray it, it becomes a matter of first necessity for the author to use language sparingly, “accepting the principles of good writing that had been contained in the early imagist document, and applying the stricture against superfluous words to his prose, polishing, repolishing, and eliminating” (Pound, 1930: 700). Pound perceives Hemingway’s effort to renew narrative language by applying the imagist principles of good writing to his prose. Two years later, in Death in the Afternoon Hemingway answers Pound by rewriting the imagist principles of good writing à la Hemingway. Hemingway agrees with Pound on the need of “making it new” but places novelty in a moderate perspective: “the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave” (192). He wanted to make his work memorable, to create a style that would last, if not for ever, at least enough to survive him and be passed as a heritage to future generations. He is a man and an artist. As a man he is humble, as an artist he is not, he knows that when he dies his artistic findings will be valuable to the young, who will carry on writing “because in all arts all improvements and discoveries that are logical are carried on by some one else; so nothing is lost, really, except the man himself” (99). Hemingway articulates a modernist version of the idea of tradition and fame. Others before him, Hemingway knows, have fought to seek mastery in the art and failed, others achieved temporary acclaim and only very few have become the great influential masters, maestros whose work is still valid in our time. This knowledge is associated in Hemingway to the need to dominate the literary scene and, as it often happens with all strong artists, this need prompts a rejection of his immediate predecessors except Pound. Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Scott Fitzgerald all were friends and then enemies. Death in the Afternoon’s list of derogated authors includes Waldo Frank, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, Jean Cocteau, Aldous Huxley, Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman. Others are only impersonally alluded to by mention to their schools: “all schools only serve to classify their members as failures” (100). Death in the Afternoon plays witness to Hemingway’s acute awareness of the 26 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 27 need for him and his generation of overcoming the readers’ prejudice, the older generation’s prejudice patent in the famous old lady Stein’s words “You are all a lost generation” and, directly to Hemingway, your work is “unaccrochable.” In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway defends not just the bullfight, he defends his own writing from misunderstanding. Doctorow (1986: 1) summarises well both aspects, the innovative and the confrontational, in Hemingway’s craft: “when writing anything he would construct the sentences so as to produce an emotion not by claiming it but by rendering precisely the experience to cause it. What he made of all this was a rigorous art of compressive power ... His stuff was new. It moved. There was on every page of clear prose an implicit judgment of all other writing. The Hemingway voice hated pretense and cant and the rhetoric they rode in on.” Doctorow describes Hemingway’s achievement in terms of its novelty of style, and its reliance on emotion and truth. All this was new and has been passed on to new generations of writers. Hemingway knew what he was doing and left it said in written form in Death in the Afternoon, where he explains in his own terms, rather than Pound’s, the principles of good writing that he is following. From the vantage point of his particular kind of imagism, Hemingway articulates Pound’s idea that it is necessary to eliminate superfluous words as follows: “No matter how good a phrase or a simile he may have if he puts it in where it is not absolutely necessary and irreplaceable he is spoiling his work for egotism. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the baroque is over”(191). Like Pound, Hemingway recommends laconism and the stripping of inessentials, but Hemingway’s statement on textual economy is more radical than Pound’s when it comes to the idea that good texts are like icebergs: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being 27 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 28 above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.” (192). In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway clarifies what he is trying to achieve in his innovative texts: he wants to bring his verbal narratives to a minimum of verbosity so that linguistic distorsion is minimised, and the images of his memory and imagination can be recovered on the basis of the sameness of experience and kowledge between reader and writer. Hemingway´s assumption is that “Nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me” (Hemingway, in Baker, 1961: 39). Intersubjectivity, the human bond, allows empathy, anticipation and participation in the feelings and things that are not explicitly described but which the reader is able to recover inferentially from the pregnant gaps that the writer has carefully left in the text. In a way Hemingway is striving to bring his literature closer to the bullfight, which is a visual-image text and a wordless art. He is asking his readers to collaborate and accept a writing which challenges them to read between the lines, to rely less on the said word and more on the images of memory and imagination that experience leaves printed in the mind. From this perspective, Hemingway’s iceberg-text theory casts a revolutionary perspective on reading and writing. It is a a reconsideration of the centrality of words to literature, an art built on words. The iceberg-theory entails a reconceptualization of literary narrative which I like to call Hemingway’s fictional turn. The bullfighter tells a fictional story with materials which are not verbal, and Ernest Hemingway understands that he can do something similar by writing iceberg-texts in which the unsaid is as important as the said. It is in Death in the Afternoon that we find the first written statement of Hemingway´s iceberg-text theory of narrative. The iceberg-text entails both visibility and readability, the invisibility of the seven-eighths of ice submerged under water parallels the unreadability of “most of the matter” not linguistically articulated on the surface of the text. The unsaid, the invisible, the part omitted from the linguistic surface of the text is truer to life than the 28 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 29 actually said. In other words, like invisibility, unreadability does not entail inexistence. It is the watcher and the reader’s imagination that is activated by an incomplete form. The submerged part of the iceberg cannot be seen but it exists and can be imagined or inferred. Death in the Afternoon instructs Hemingway’s readers in his writing strategies so that they can trust in the existence of meanings which cannot be located in the visible part of text but somewhere between the lines. In other words, Hemingway’s iceberg-theory of writing is also a theory of reading, and as a theory of reading It encourages readers to reappropriate the text through personal interpretation. Hemingway seeks to engage readers in a creative kind of reading that matches his own creativity as a writer. Hemingway’s iceberg metaphor exposes the illusory nature of widely accepted commonsensical notions about meaning. Hemingway affirms that both the said and the unsaid articulate a text’s meaning, which is to be interpreted by a reader who knows how to read between the lines. This view of meaning is not restricted to language. Hemingway sees meaning in the bullfight. He also sees meaning in the world surrounding him which are beyond the realm of the actually said. The iceberg is more than you can see, and as such, it becomes a very powerful image for both Hemingway’s literary work and his native country. It is Hemingway’s metaphor for the invisible meanings of his text as well as for the invisible men and women of his country. Invisible, some hidden and dark but as true in their truth at second light as the more obvious truths to be seen at first light. As I see it, in Death in the Afternoon Hemingway was opening his readers’ eyes to a modern world, a world that called into question old sets of beliefs which considered insignificant too many significant people and too many significant facts. They were beliefs deeply rooted in the ideology of domination. Paradoxically he used an Old-World institution, the bullfight –a literal exercise of bull domination and a non-literal representation of other domination processes-- to enlighten his WASP American-English reader. 29 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 30 In reading Hemingway’s iceberg-texts we, readers, meet a wise man and artist whose ironic gaze is turned on his own native country and on his profession. Death in the Afternon is designed as a super iceberg-text, the bullfight is its prominent tip. But the tip has Spain underneath supporting it: the country, its history and institutions are embedded in the meanings of the bullfight and kept just below water-level in Death in the Afternoon. The bullfight occupies central textual space; it is exhaustively spoken about in chapters one to nineteen, while Spain just manages to appear briefly above water-line in chapter twenty in Death in the Afternoon. Totally submerged below Spain and the bullfight, America and the American literary scene are kept below water level, unspoken about, invisible but bearing most of the iceberg’s weight. When he writes Death in the Afternoon Hemingway’s design responds to his desire to stress the difference between other American writers and himself rather than the difference between himself and the people of Spain. In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway makes clear that the radical difference between people is not one of origin or race, it is rather a difference of quality or genius that makes an artist recognize another artist across all kinds of circumstantial barriers. Hemingway writes Death in the Afternoon and in the writing he establishes himself as an author and an authority in two fields, the art of bullfighting and literary art, and in two countries, Spain and America, that he “loved very much.” (277) Death in the Afternoon’s design allows the inattentive or literal-minded reader to wander away from unaccrochable truths about modern America –modern American writing included– and modern Spain to concentrate instead on the spectacle of the modern bullfight. And conversely, the book’s design pushes the more attentive or more daring readers into a more active role regarding the book they read and the life they live. The combined application of laconism and the iceberg principle lends a quintessentially metonymic –or pars pro toto– character to Hemingway’s texts. The last lines in chapter twenty of Death in the Afternoon summarise the essence of this idea as follows: “any part you make will represent the whole 30 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 31 if it’s made truly.” (278). On the other hand, Hemingway’s combined application of laconism, iceberg-theory and metonymy introduces a level of difficulty which in the particular case of Death in the Afternoon is high because in it Hemingway simultaneously states his theory and practices it by writing his book in the form of the super-iceberg mentioned above. Michael Reynolds (2000 : 32) says that Death in the Afternoon is “a book before its time; unclassifiable, it was and remains largely ignored as a text by Hemingway critics but is pilfered freely for its pithy quotes.” The pithy quotes Reynolds talks about are quotes on how to write well and truly, metaliterary comments on the writer’s métier, on how to produce representations which strive to minimize the presence of language, to reduce the distance between representation and the represented to a minimum. Here lies the core of Hemingway’s aesthetic, and fundamentally modernist, inquiry: the investigation of the status of the literary phenomenon regarding the real. For centuries this relationship has been contemplated by philosophy and literary aesthetics in relation to the issues of realism and the truth of mimetic representation. Modernism brings this contention to the fore not only in the work of theoreticians but within the creative writing of the modernist author. The artist Hemingway feels “very sad but very fine,” an ambivalence between dissatisfaction and joy, the former resulting from the consciousness of the powerlessness xxi of semiotic presentation to eliminate mediation between the living matter and its dead literary representations. The latter, joy, is born from the individual’s power to invent new rules and thus increase the force of his art work: “It is because (the poet) realises the inadequacy of the usual that he is obliged to invent” (Hulme, 1987: 167). Hemingway dares to invade the territory of the theoretician in Death in the Afternoon and he also dares to invent a style and invade the territory of the preceding literary tradition. Hemingway explains that words are neither essential to the bullfight, a visual art, nor to literature, the so-called art of the word. For him verbosity is a liability and understatement an asset. 31 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 32 Hemingway asks his readers to correspond him by behaving like aficionados to his texts, like involved interpreters daring to fill in the gaps left open in his narratives as well as in the narratives of their lives. WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah.On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1969. Baker, Carlos. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917-1961. New York: Scribner’s, 1981. ---, Hemingway and His Critics: An International Anthology. New York: Hill and Wang, 1961. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: The Free Press, 1973. Beegle, Susan F. “‘That always Absent Something Else’: ‘A Natural History of the Dead’ and Its Discarded Coda.” New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Ed. Jackson Benson. Durham: Duke UP, 1990. 73-95. Benson, Jackson. Hemingway, The Writer’s Art of Self-Defense. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P, 1969. Doctorow, E. L. “Braver Than We Thought.“ The New York Times Book Review, 18 May 1986: 1, 44- 45. Eliot, T. S. “Hamlet.” 1919. In Selected Essays. 3rd. Ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. 141-46. Fiedler, Leslie A. The Return of the Vanishing American. London: Granada – Paladin, 1972. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Giger, Romeo. The Creative Void: Hemingway´s Iceberg Theory. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1977. Hemingway, Ernest. “Bull Fighting a Tragedy” The Toronto Star Weekly, 20 October 1923. Rpt. in By- line: Ernest Hemingway. Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades. Ed. William White. London: Grafton / Collins, 1989. 111-18. ---. Death In The Afternoon, New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1932. ---. Green Hills of Africa. 1935. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. Hermann, Thomas. “Quite a Little About Painters: Art and Artists in Hemingway’s Life and Work.” Tübingen: Francke, 1987. Hotchner, A.E. Papa Hemingway : a personal memoir by A.E. Hotchner. London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966. Hulme, T. E. Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. Levine, George, ed. Realism and Representation. Madison: U. of Wisconsin P, 1993. Lewis, Robert W. “The Making of Death in the Afternoon.” Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context. Ed. James Nagel. Madison: U. of Wisconsin P. 1984. 31-52. Lewis, Wyndham, 1934, “The Dumb Ox: A Study of Ernest Hemingway.” In Men Without Art. London: Cassel. 17-40. 32 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 33 Limon, John. Writing After War: American War Fiction from Realism to Postmodernism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P, 1984. Mandel, Miriam, 2001, ‘‘Realidad, historia y poesía: el arte de Ernest Hemingway,’’ at the Conference on Hemingway : 75 años de Fiesta (Universidad Pública de Navarra), Pamplona, Spain, July 2001. Marcoviç, Mihailo. “Violence and Human Self-Realization.” Violence and Aggression in the History of Ideas. Eds. Philip P. Wiener and John Fisher. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1974. 234-52. Mc Carthy, E. Doyle. “The Sources of Human Destructiveness: Ernest Becker’s Theory of Human Nature.” Thought. 56. 220 (March) 1981: 44-57. Meyers, Jeffrey, ed. Hemingway:The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (Autumn) 1975: 6-18. Penas Ibáñez, Beatriz. Análisis semiótico de los aspectos taurinos de la obra de Ernest Hemingway (PhD dissertation). Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de la Universidad de Zaragoza/Instituto de Estudios Riojanos, 1990. Microfiche. ---, “Looking Through The Garden’s Mirrors: The Early Postmodernist Hemingway Text.” NDQ. North Dakota Quarterly. 65. 3, 1998: 91-104. Pound, Ezra. “Small Magazines.” The English Journal. 19. 9 (November), 1930. 700. Raeburn, John. Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Reynolds, Michael. The Young Hemingway. New York: Blackwel, 1986. ---. Hemingway : The Paris Years. New York: Blackwell, 1989. ---. “Ernest Hemingway 1899-1961. A Brief Biography.” In Linda Wagner-Martin. Ed. A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000: 15-50. Scafella, Frank, ed. Hemingway. Essays of Reassessment. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway: A Reconsideration. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1966. When considering dates, we have Hemingway’s allusion to a 1923 bullfight that he watched ‘‘I remember a corrida of Villar bulls in Pamplona in 1923. They were ideal bulls, as brave as any I have ever seen.’‘ (161). Between 1923 and 1932 Hemingway saw many bullfights, which was precisely what he needed before he could write Death in the Afternoon. In 1923 he had written ‘‘Bull Fighting a Tragedy,’’ for The Toronto Star Weekly, 20 October, but he was not happy with the result as we know from his testimony in Death in the Afternoon ‘‘In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion …; but the i 33 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 34 real thing …, was beyond me and I was working very hard to try to get it’’ (2) ii What was so new and unacceptable in Hemingway´s storytelling? Partly the exotic subject, bullfighting, partly the taboo topic, death. For example, Hemingway’s critic Philip Young (1966: 96) misunderstands Death in the Afternoon when he says “All of the author’s tortured theories of art and tragedy and bulls --though not entirely silly-- do very little to hide the fact is this fascination with highly stylized dying which primarily accounts.” Of course dying is the fact that primarily counts but for different reasons from those the critic suspects. Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973: ix), his late study of violence and the nature of man, stresses that “the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity --activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.” It is within this rational perspective on mortality as the problem of man that Hemingway focuses his work on killing and death in the afternoon. His awareness of death never was far from his awareness that, in the meantime, he should write. iii In Death in the Afternoon the context of war is an important though submerged part of the textual iceberg. After all Hemingway explicitly draws the connection between wars and bullfights and points out his interest in the bullfight is derivative from his interest in war. Watching death and learning how to die from seeing others is the essence of the Spanish corrida and bullfight and of Hemingway’s intellectual interest in it: “the only place where you could see life and death, i.e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bullring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it” (2). From this quotation it is possible to learn not only of the already mentioned surrogate role the bullfight plays in relation to the war as the scenario of violent death, but also of the narrator’s attitude, which is one of analytical interest in violence and vuolent death. iv In a similar way Hemingway wants his readers to read the void in his text for what a void is but for what it symbolises. Reaching beyond the explicit and visible is what Hemingway recommends to his readers if they want to come up with readings above pedestrian level. v In Spanish, ‘coger el toro por los cuernos’. vi “[The people of Spain] know death is the unescapable reality, the one thing any man may be sure of; the only security … life is much shorter than death.” (266). Hemingway is here alluding to a cosmovision typical of the Spanish Baroque. The great theatre of the world as vanity fair in Calderón de la Barca´s El Gran Teatro del Mundo can illustrate the point. These baroque ideas are pursued in Death in the Afternoon too, but in a novel way, an unbaroque style because, as Hemingway ironically says, ‘’the baroque is over’’‘(191). vii In Death in the Afternoon Hemingway insists that he is explaining the modern Spanish bullfight. By modern he means the bullfight as it has been fought from the end of the eighteeenth century onwards: ‘‘Ronda was one of the cradles of modern bullfighting. It was the birthplace of Pedro Romero, one of the first and greatest professional fighters and, in our times, of Niño de la Palma … The bull ring at Ronda was built towards the end of the eighteenth century’‘(43). Obviously there were bulls and bullfights before the eighteenth century, otherwise there would not have existed a precedent for Romero nor a need for the plaza building, but they were different in form and function. Hemingway mentions professionalism as one of relevant difference. viii ‘‘if these very simple things [an execution by a fire squad, or a hanging] were to be made permanent, as, say, Goya tried to make them in Los Desastres de La Guerra, it could not be done with any shutting of the eyes.”(3) ix Between 1870 and 1898 the USA went through a period called ‘the gilded age’ which was characterised by a great expanding economy and the emergence of plutocratic influences in government and social structure. In Death in 34 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 35 the Afternoon Hemingway speaks in derogation of the bullfight’s Golden age (68-70) which he places between 1913 and 1920, seven years of competition between Joselito and Belmonte, great matadors whom the breeders wanted to please and for whom they brought the size of the bulls and the horns down. Hemingway criticises this emphasis on specialization, ‘‘the decay of a complete art through a magnification of certain of its aspects’’ (70). What he says about the decadence of the bullfight in chapter 7 can be applied as well to the decadence of American Frontier ideals precisely in the middle of the so called gilded age, which ended at the time of the Spanish-American war: ‘‘bullfighting for seven years had a golden age in spite of the fact that it was in the process of being destroyed.’’ (69). x Leslie Fiedler (1972: 19) reminds us that concerning Hemingway “not everything is what it seems to a superficial scrutiny”. Looking hard at Hemingway’s characters Fiedler sees in his Spanish peasants crypto-indians. The interesting factor is that in Fiedler’s reading between the lines of the Hemingway text there results a homology between the Spanish folk and the Native American which is contrastive with the late American scene. xi ‘‘If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to yourself, you exchange the pleasant, comforting stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself. That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly […] and when , on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things that you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans … are all gone.” (Green Hills of Africa, 1966 :126-127) xii See Wyndham Lewis’ April 1934 Life and Letters article ‘‘The Dumb Ox: A Study of Ernest Hemingway’’(republished in Meyers, 1982:186-207). W. Lewis makes an excellent critical evaluation of the meaning of the ox in DIA and more generally, within Hemingway’s pattern of action, the ox as the passive modern American to whom things are done. Nevertheless W. Lewis is partial when he forgets that the pattern is incomplete without the active bull, and becomes insulting when he compares Hemingway to the ox for his lack of political commitment. Malcolm Cowley’s criticism (New Republic 73 [November 1932], 76-77, republished in Meyers, 1982: 164-169.) is more careful and does not deprive Death in the Afternoon of its sociopolitical implications. The caption to the photograph “the Ox” that accompanies the text in an unnumbered page reads: “While here we have the ox built for beef and for service who might have been president with that face if he had started in some other line of work. He differs from the fighting bull in this, as well as in his general shape... He may work hard all his life or he may be made into beef early in his career, but he will never kill a horse. Nor will he ever want to. Hail to the useful ox; a friend and contemporary of man.”(unnumbered page) xiii Mike Reynolds (1989: 35) records Hemingway’s negative feelings towards Grace Hemingway, his mother, and the way he voiced his resentment by calling her ‘‘All-American Bitch.’’Moreover, Reynolds interprets Gertrude Stein’s role in Hemingway’s life as that of a surrogate Paris mother –after all Gertrude Stein was only two years younger than Grace and a lesbian. Ernest accused her mother of androgyny (Reynolds 1986: 81), which would be a further factor of comparison between the two old ladies, together with their tendency to consider Hemingway’s fiction ‘unaccrochable.’ Reynolds recalls that Gertrude Stein once told Hemingway that his short-story ‘‘Up In Michigan’’ ‘’was ‘un-hangable’ like a painter’s private erotica.’’ (Reynolds 1989: 37). 35 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 36 Hemingway’s quotation in full reads: “As [the people of Spain] have common sense they are interested in death and do not spend their lives avoiding the thought of it and hoping it does not exist only to discover it when they come to die” (264). “They know death is the unescapable reality, the one thing any man may be sure of; the only security [...] life is much shorter than death” (266). In these lines Hemingway interprets the Spanish cosmovision to be based on the idea that the impermanence of life contrasts with the permanence of death, which is an idea that recurs in Hemingway’s vision of art as (deathly) artificial permanence imposed on the natural wave of life xv ‘‘the faena that takes a man out of himself and makes him feel immortal while it is proceeding, that gives him an ecstasy, that is, while momentary, as profound as any religious ecstasy; moving all the people in the ring together and increasing in emotional intensity as it proceeds, carrying the bullfighter with it, he playing on the crowd through the bull and being moved as it responds in a growing ecstasy of ordered, formal, passionate, increasing disregard for death that leaves you, when it is over [...] as empty, as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you’’ (206-207). xvi Exposure to the dual nature of the bullfight experience, painful as well as pleasurable, subordinates the a priori unacceptable cruelty of some parts of the corrida to the overall pattern where pain makes sense and death is articulated as functional and therefore necessary to life as well as to the narrative pattern of the bullfight: “There is no manœuvre in the bullfight which has, as object, to inflict pain on the bull. The pain that is inflicted is incidental, not an end” (195). xvii In allusion to T.E. Hulme, imagist, philosopher and ideologue of modernism, who acknowledges the influence of Bergson’s theory of art on modernism when he writes: “The artist by making a fixed model of one of these transient waves enables you to isolate it out and to perceive it in yourself. In that sense art merely reveals, it never creates” (Hulme, 1987: 151-152) xviii the quotation in full reads “(bullfighting) is an art that deals with death and death wipes it out. But it is never truly lost, you say, because in all arts all improvements and discoveries that are logical are carried on by some one else; so nothing is lost, really, except the man himself” (99) In stating that bullfighting, even if minor, is an art like the others, especially in its forming part of tradition and inherited convention, Hemingway establishes a common ground for comparison between the lidia and literature: Hemingway’s writing aspires to relative permanence. Death in the Afternoon explicitly associates art to death and the desire to overcome impermanence. xix Hemingway shows at the beginning of chapter seven that he discriminates between different kinds of facts and things, the important and the unimportant ones. When‘‘the fact is of enough importance in itself” … ‘‘it is impossible to make come true on paper’’ … ‘‘it being always an individual experience’’ (DIA 61, ch 7) xx In his book of memoirs Hotchner (1966: 110-116) recalls a 1954 conversation that took place a May night in Aix-en-Provence between Hemingway and himself. Over dinner at the Vendome Hemingway, whom Hotchner reports to have been drinking more wine than usual “spoke steadily” (110) about books and writing and the past. In the Hotchner-Hemingway conversation there are recurring allusions to the métier triste, which is first brought up in association to war/death and then to writing. “‘You know what the French call war? Le métier triste (115) [...] You know the real métier triste?’ He asked. ‘Writing. There is a métier triste for you.’” (116). The original source for these words may be found in one of Hemingway’s letters to Scottt Fitzgerald dated 13th September 1929 (Baker, 1981: 306). At the time, less than a year since his father’s death, Hemingway was sad for his own loss but he was sad too on account of Scott. He was aware that Scott’s depression, which he called ”The Artist’s Reward” (Baker, 1981: xiv 36 Beatriz Penas Ibáñez 37 306), was typically associated to a paralysing fear of becoming barren as creative writer. xxi the theoretician of modernism, T. E. Hulme (1987: 162) explained the root of this dissatisfaction: “Language, being a communal apparatus, only conveys over that part of the emotion which is common to all of us. If you are able to observe the actual individuality of the emotion you experience, you become dissatisfied with language.” 37