From the Baedeker to the bull ring and the boxing ring: spaces of sport in Death in the Afternoon (1932)

ABSTRACT

Through his work, Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ernest Hemingway provides access to international cultural heritage that States-side readers might not have otherwise. In crossing inquiries regarding space and sports together, the intimate relationship between the two comes to the forefront, emphasising Hemingway’s passion for both. Readers may ask themselves if Hemingway uses sports to write about Spain, or if he uses Spain to write about sports: the two topics are intrinsically linked, especially in this work of non-fiction dedicated to the sport of bullfighting. In this analysis based on a geocritical approach and literary cartography, I am going to study the relationship between narrative spaces and sports to pinpoint how and to what extent Hemingway exploits Spanish geography and the sport of bullfighting as representative of a system of sportsmanship values. More precisely, this analysis will identify Hemingway’s spatial intertextuality of bullfighting Spain, the multiplicity of geographic scales, and the stratification of sports spaces. By aligning the Spanish ‘art’ with athletics known to the American audience, Hemingway renders the unknown ‘knowable’, without requiring readers to be ‘always looking at map’.

KEYWORDS:

• Ernest Hemingway
• Spain
• bullfighting
• geocriticism
• sportsmanship
• Death in the Afternoon

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Amy D. Wells holds a double PhD in American Literature from Texas Tech University and the Université de Limoges. Associate Professor at the Université de Caen Normandie since 2012, she teaches American Literature, Civilization, and English for Digital Humanities. Her research interests are Women’s Studies, Geocriticism, Modernism, and Craftivism. Recent publications include ‘Feminist Geocritical Activism: Natalie Barney’s writing of women’s spaces into women’s places’, The Routledge Handbook of Literature and Space, Robert Tally, ed. (Routledge 2017). She is co-editor of the essay collection Déclinaisons des espaces féminins de l'après-conflit (PULIM 2016).

ORCID

Amy Dawn Wells http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3317-3998

Notes

1 A few examples of this criticism include the mid-1980s Sports Illustrated special edition, ‘Ernest Hemingway – A New Story’ (May 5, 1986); Hemingway’s own collected writings on fishing edited by Nick Lyons: Hemingway on Fishing, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000; collected hunting stories edited by Sean and Patrick Hemingway, Hemingway on Hunting, Simon and Schuster, 2012; Silvio Calabi, Steve Helsley, and Roger Sanger, Hemingway's Guns: The Sporting Arms of Ernest Hemingway (Camden: Down East Books, 2010); and more recently, Ashley Oliphant’s, Hemingway and Bimini: The Birth of Sport Fishing at “The End of the World” (Sarasota: Pineapple Press, 2016).

2 Hemingway’s geography is a topic that receives regular attention. See for example, Linda Gruber Godfrey, Hemingway’s Geographies (New York: Palgrave, 2016); H.R. Stoneback, Reading Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2014); Mark Cirino and Mark P. Ott, Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2011); and Stuart B. McIver, Hemingway’s Key West (Sarasota: Pineapple Press, 1993).

3 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner, 2005 [1932]).

4 In their article “Sport Versus Bullfighting: The New Civilizing Sensitivity of Regenerationism and its Effect on the Leisure Pursuits of the Spanish at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century”, Antonio Rivero Herraiz & Raúl Sánchez-García clarify how bullfighting was not considered to be a “sport” by the Spanish during the first part of the twentieth century. Indeed, the authors retrace the introduction of English-style sports such as football and boxing as part of the Regenerationist movement. These types of sports, in which death was not the end game, contributed to the civilization of rural and urban Spanish communities. For the purposes of this analysis, the term “sport” is used from an Anglo-Saxon perspective as espoused by Hemingway himself.

5 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 74, 75, 78.

6 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 20.

7 Linda Wagner-Martin, A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (New York: 2000), 32.

8 Bertrand Westphal, La Géocritique Mode d’emploi (Limoges: PULIM, 2000), i.

9 Godfrey, Hemingway’s Geographies, 5.

10 Bertrand Westphal, La géocritique: Réel, fiction, espace (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2007), 200.

11 Westphal, La Géocritique Mode d’emploi, 21.

12 Godfrey, Hemingway’s Geographies, 6.

13 Aaron Blake, Molly Maguire, Aaron Silverman, and Jay Strabala, ‘The Ernest Hemingway Adventure Map of the World’ (Aaron Blake Publishers, c. 1986), Michigan University Library, http://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu/Record/000946945 (accessed July 6, 2018)

Mr Blake confirmed that the Hemingway mapping project was part of a series of literary maps that began with the Raymond Chandler ‘Mystery Map of LA’ and that the series also includes an Ian Fleming ‘Thriller Map’. As the Hemingway map portrays places in fictional works, it does not cover Death in the Afternoon.

14 McIver, Hemingway’s Key West, 105.

15 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 1.

16 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 1954 [1926]).

17 The Spanish Earth, directed by Joris Ivens (New York: Contemporary Historians, Inc., 1937).

18 Ernest Hemingway, The Fifth Column: And Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939).

19 Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940).

20 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 172; Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 1, 22, 39–40.

21 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 175; Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 159, 11.

22 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 176; Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 128.

23 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 216; Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 8, 34, 39–40.

24 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 177.

25 Miriam B. Mandel, ‘Subject and Author: The Literary Backgrounds of Death in the Afternoon’, A Companion to Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon (Camden House: Rochester, 2009), 81.

26 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 22.

27 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 12.

28 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 152.

29 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 19, 29.

30 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 29.

31 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 23.

32 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 24.

33 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 74.

34 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 71.

35 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 75.

36 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 8.

37 Karl Baedeker, Baedeker’s Spain and Portugal (Leipzig: Baedeker), xxxi.

38 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 1.

39 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 2.

40 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 11.

41 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 4.

42 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 8, 13, 18, 129, 166.

43 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 53, 94, 136.

44 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 9.

45 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 9.

46 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 12.

47 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 12.

48 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 59.

49 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 60.

50 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 107.

51 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 154.

52 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 51.

53 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 164.

54 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 111.

55 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 160.

56 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 16.

57 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 28.

58 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 91.

59 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 89.

60 Ben F. Meyer, ‘Hemingway Novel of Venice Completed at Home in Cuba’, Conversations with Ernest Hemingway (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1986), 56.

61 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 103.

62 Godfrey, 118–19.

63 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 30.

64 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 20, 24.

65 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 255, 256.

66 The Sun Also Rises, 239

67 The Sun Also Rises, 249

68 The Sun Also Rises, 108, 122.

69 The Sun Also Rises, 243–51.

70 The Fifth Column, 3, 4, 76, 93.

71 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 9, 54, 173, 203, 236, 239–41, 243, 247, 251, 255, 258, 261, 264, 346–7, 355–62, 370, 415, 416, 481, 483, 488–9.

72 The Sun Also Rises, 100–232.

73 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 312.

74 The Sun Also Rises, 237.

75 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 245.