Hemingway and bullfighting: the young man and death

ABSTRACT

Ernest Hemingway became fascinated by bullfighting after attending his first bullfight in Pamplona in 1923. This sport would hold a unique place his all his subsequent work and until the end of his life. This paper aims at showing that this deep interest in bullfighting may be explained by the fact that seeing and writing about bullfights were an attempt, on the part of the American writer, to go back to the war trauma he experienced during the First World War, and which meant an encounter with death. This trauma meant becoming aware of the death that may end life at any moment but also of the death that lies within life, and it led to a double nostalgia: on the one hand, a nostalgia for the time before trauma, that is for a continuous time, synonymous with self-consciousness and confidence in language, and, on the other hand, a seemingly paradoxical nostalgia for trauma itself, in which language is radically mistrusted, in which the narrator takes shape in the description of the character's self-absence, a nostalgia for a trauma that makes one experience death within life.

KEYWORDS:

• Bullfighting
• death
• trauma
• nostalgia
• modernism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Claire Carles-Huguet holds an Agrégation in English (most competitive national French exam that allows to teach in high school and colleges), a Master’s degree in American and British Literature from New York University and a Master’s degree in American Literature from the Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III). She has been teaching American History and Literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, outside Paris, for 14 years. She is the language teachers’ Coordinator for the Humanities Department. She is in charge of International Relations for 9 highly selective degrees. Her research bears on Modernist authors and the Modernist movement as a whole. It more specifically focuses on the themes of temporality, nostalgia and trauma. She is currently completing a PhD at the Sorbonne University (Paris IV). Its title is “Nostalgia and Trauma in Ernest Hemingway’s Works”.

Notes

1 R. L. Duffus, ‘Hemingway Now Writes of Bullfighting as an Art’, The New York Times, September 25, 1932, http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway-afternoon.html.

2 Ibid.

3 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (London: Arrow Books, 2007), 165.

4 Ibid., 84.

5 Ibid., 228.

6 Ibid., 85.

7 Ernest Hemingway, ‘Bullfighting is not a Sport – It Is a Tragedy’, The Toronto Star Weekly, October 20, 1923, http://ehto.thestar.com/marks/bullfighting-is-not-a-sport-it-is-a-tragedy. Hemingway developed this idea in Death in the Afternoon:

The bullfight is not a sport in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word, that is, it is not an equal contest or an attempt at an equal contest between a bull and a man. Rather it is a tragedy; the death of the bull, which is played, more or less well, by the bull and the man involved and in which there is danger for the man but certain death for the animal. (Death in the Afternoon, 14)

8 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (London: Arrow Books, 2007), 78.

9 Ibid., 2.

10 Ibid., 3.

11 Ibid., 2.

12 Ibid., 2.

13 Ibid., 17.

14 Ibid., 204.

15 Ibid., 226.

16 Ibid., 161.

17 Ibid., 79.

18 Ibid., 219.

19 Ibid., 120.

20 Ibid., 236.

21 Ibid., 117.

22 Ibid., 119.

23 Ibid., 183.

24 Ernest Hemingway, interview by George Plimpton, Conversations with Ernest Hemingway, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 115.

25 Sarah Wood Anderson, ‘Readings of Trauma and Madness in Hemingway, H. D., and Fitzgerald’ (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2010).

26 Natalie Carter, ‘“Always Something of it Remains”: Sexual Trauma in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls’, War, Literature and the Arts 25.1 (2013): 1–40.

27 Kathleen T. Robinson, ‘Testimony of trauma: Ernest Hemingway's Narrative Progression in Across the River and into the Trees’ (PhD diss., University of South Florida, 2010).

28 Dori Laub, ‘Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle’, in Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 65.

29 Cathy Caruth, ‘An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton’, in Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 128. Lifton nevertheless admits that ‘confrontation in the sense of letting in the death encounter is never total’. He thus speaks of ‘some ideal of absolute confrontation, which none of us is capable of’ (Explorations in Memory, 136).

30 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (London: Arrow Books, 1993), 44.

31 Ernest Hemingway, Men at War (New York: Crown, 1942), xiii–xiv.

32 Sigmund Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Sur les névroses de guerre (Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2010), iii.

33 Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 94.

34 François Lebigot, Le traumatisme psychique (Bruxelles: Fabert, 2011), 8–9.

35 Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 87.

36 Ibid., 95.

37 Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (London: Arrow Books, 2007), 104.

38 Ernest Hemingway, The Short Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 124.

39 Ibid., 227.

40 Ibid., 143.

41 Ibid., 181.

42 Ibid., 207.

43 Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters 1917-1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner Classics, 2003), 128.

44 Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), 76.

45 Ibid., 74.

46 Sylviane Agacinski, Le passeur de temps (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 23–4.

47 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 292.

48 William Boelhower, ‘Avant-garde Autobiography: Deconstructing the Modernist Habitat’, in Literary Anthropology, ed. Fernando Poyatos (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1988), 274.

49 Ann Banfield, ‘Remembrance of Tense Past’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel, ed. Morag Shiah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 58.

50 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html.

51 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2002), xviii.

52 Ibid., xviii.

53 Ernest Hemingway, ‘A Paris Letter’, in Byline: Ernest Hemingway, ed. William White (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967), 158.