Bullfighting
Rings of fire
September 14, 2006 9 comments
Hugo Williams’s ever-genial “Freelance” column in the Times Literary Supplement last week was about a novelist, A L Kennedy, doing stand-up comedy badly at the Edinburgh Festival:
One of her best books is about bullfighting – an art form not dissimilar to stand-up, with its seductions and ‘moments of truth’.
Perhaps because I haven’t read Kennedy’s book, nor actually seen a bullfight (please comment if you have), I find it difficult to imagine how the systematic torture and killing of a dumb beast for the purposes of entertainment can quite qualify as an “art form”. No doubt there are “artistic” aspects to it, just as we may imagine a sniper stylizing and aestheticizing his use of the rifle, but that does not make his shooting an “art form” either. As for “seductions”, I am really at a loss.
This led me to wonder whether the term “bullfighting” itself is Unspeak. It speaks of heroic combat, while Unspeaking the fact that the bull is repeatedly lanced and harpooned by the supporting cast – the fluffers of the bullring, as it were – in order to weaken it and render it less dangerous before the matador reaches his climax. Well, I suppose no one ever called it “bull-fair-fighting”.
If they drug the bull, it is not combat. But the thrill of bullfighting is probably like the thrill of car racing and tightrope walking–the excitement is caused by the possible death of the human participants, not the death of the bull. And traditionally, bullfighters lost their lives very regularly. This probably makes it more disturbing, not less.
Possibly, “bullfighting” evolved from some earlier practice where it was more like fair fighting, with a smaller supporting cast guaranteeing victory.
Even with guaranteed victory, bullfighters do occasionally get gored. The Spanish director Almodovar has a beautiful film called Talk to Her in which a female bullfighter is a central character. For that matter, Picasso has many beautiful images of bullfighting in his works.
I think you are right though in doubting the sport itself is an “art form”. Entertainment, as in NFL football — something that satisfies the sadism of the multitude — might be a better word for it. Or ritual– a manhood, or womanhood initiation rite. I’m remembering some pre-Christian, maybe Cretan, artwork that depicts young men vaulting over bulls.
BullFIGHT is about the same level of unspeak as No Child Left Behind. One clear word (bull, child) makes the rest sound plausible. War on Terror is a more dangerous level of it: it’s double unspeak, where both terms are undefined, and the result is deception squared.
do the spanish call it “bullfighting”? what does “corrida” mean? maybe “bullfighting” is a mistranslation which projects onto the ritual a past-times cricket-esque element of good old british fair play — ie it is how WE would do it, providing bulls went to the right public school obviously
I’m remembering some pre-Christian, maybe Cretan, artwork that depicts young men vaulting over bulls.
Minoan Crete is correct. The images IIRC were on the walls of palace at Knossos that was excavated in the first part of the 20th century.
Thanks, Paul. I might have some other questions for you, later!
BLT — corrida means 1)run, dash; or 2) bullfight, according to my dictionary. Nice try at re-entymologizing it, though.
bobw – your dictionary tends to confirm rather than refute belle’s suggestion. The presence of “bullfight” in there is an example of the misleading translation of “corrida” she suspects.
Well if corrida means “run, dash”, then it is arguably even more Unspeaky than “bullfight”, since it implies you’re just going to see some nice athletic movement, with no mention of tortured animals at all.
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