Knowledge and Art in Ernest Hemingway’s Vision of Bullfighting

Introduction

Since the early 1920s, bullfighting became one of main topics in Hemingway’s literary career, and this is to such an extent that nowadays it is impossible to fully understand his work ignoring his love for Spain and its most renowned tradition. It could be said that the topic of this book reinforces the stereotypical vision of Ernest Hemingway as a writer who spent most of his time traveling from one Spanish town to another seeing bullfights and indulging his desire for drinking and eating almost relentlessly. Perhaps, the most representative of these places was Pamplona, particularly during the San Fermín festival in July. After the American writer Gertrude Stein had talked to him about Pamplona and its bullfights, Hemingway visited this town in Navarra almost every single year before the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, accompanied by his first wife, Hadley Richardson, and several friends, such as Harold Loeb, Pat Guthrie, Bill Smith, and John Dos Passos, among others. His experiences in Pamplona, where he not only witnessed bullfights and visited the most popular cafes and restaurants of the town but also fought cows in the morning after the Running of the Bulls, were fodder for the creation and development of his stereotypical image that popular culture has been spreading ever since. Indeed, it did not take long for Hemingway to plunge into the carnivalesque atmosphere of debauchery and excess that surrounded the city during the festival. Although these assumptions are true, some aspects must be clarified. The first visit of the writer to Pamplona in 1923 meant much more than just attending bullfights, taking part in some of them, eating, and drinking; it meant a radical change in his preconceptions of Spain, realizing that there was not only one Spain but many “Spains” and many different Spanish people, and, more importantly, it meant his conversion to bullfighting, almost with a religious fervor.

On the other hand, this book explores the way in which Ernest Hemingway knew and conceived bullfighting, which, along with modern art, shaped his way of perceiving reality and fiction as well as his way of understanding life and death; bulls and art were closely interwoven in Hemingway’s work as early as 1925, when he was already speaking of writing a book about bullfighting with photographs and illustrations by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, among others. Although the project was not materialized by then, it was clearly the first step toward the creation of a book for uninitiated readers, mostly English-speaking, to be able to understand what bullfighting was about. Many other foreign writers had tried to deal with this topic, but, perhaps due to religious prejudices or moral squeamishness, they failed to show toreo bullfighting, wholly. Richard Ford, one of Hemingway’s favorite authors on Spain, admitted that “we turn away our eyes during moments of painful detail which are lost in the poetical ferocity of the whole” (quoted Stanton 1990, 91). Even Spanish writers did not pay enough attention to bullfighting until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Blasco Ibáñez, García Lorca, or Rafael Alberti, among others. Death in the Afternoon (1932) was the definitive response to the blurred and uncompleted representation of bullfighting projected by previous foreign writers, becoming the best book written by Hemingway to understand his views on bullfighting, Spain, art, life and death, and writing. Although the relationship that the American author held with bullfighting and modern art has been extensively studied by some of the main scholars of his work (Watts 1971; MacDonald 1972; Grebstein, 1973; Hagemann 1979; Johnston 1984; Plath 1993; Gaillard 1999; Stanley 2004; Berman 2004, Narbeshuber 2013, among others), this monograph deals with two aspects never treated before which are closely linked to Hemingway’s vision of bullfighting; on the one hand, the way avant-garde pictorial techniques, particularly impressionist and cubist, influenced that vision and, on the other, the origin and development of his conception of bullfighting, a process in which cognitive faculties play a key role.

Bearing this in mind, the book is divided into two main parts. Part I, made up of two chapters (1 and 2), sheds light on the relevance that knowledge has in Hemingway’s representation of bullfighting; more specifically, chapter 1 highlights the early stages of the process by which he deeply knew and comprehended the fiesta, as he would show later in some of his works, whereas chapter 2 concerns the importance of knowledge in his way of understanding this tradition. Moreover, it is important to consider the fact that the first of these aspects is treated from an innovative point of view, since it is studied through the analysis of the letters the author wrote in the 1920s, the period in which he started to see and understand bullfights. Part II, which consists of three chapters (3, 4, and 5), deals with the esthetic dimension of Hemingway’s vision of bullfighting. At this point, the study focuses on the influence that impressionism and cubism had on the representation and interpretation of the fiesta in some of the works of the American writer.

Chapter 1 discusses the possibility of finding in Ernest Hemingway’s letters concerning bullfighting the origin of some of the main ideas that shaped his conception of this tradition. Hence, letters are shown as a relevant primary source to track down the genesis of such a vision. Considering this, the analysis carried out deals with Hemingway’s early bullfighting experiences as the background in which his way of seeing the so-called fiesta was present in an embryonic state. To evidence this aspect, the chapter establishes a relationship between those ideas underlying the narration of certain episodes in the letters and their later development in Hemingway’s published works, such as the stories “The Undefeated” (1927) and “The Capital of the World” (1936), and the treatise Death in the Afternoon, among others.