Shubert - Death in the afternoon: a social history of Spanish bullfighting, 1700-1900

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shubert, Adrian, 1953

Death and money in the afternoon : a history of the Spanish bullfight / Adrian Shubert

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0195095243

1. BullfightsSocial aspectsSpainHistory18th century.

2. BullfightsSocial aspectsSpainHistory19th century.

I. Title.

GV1108.5.S581999

791.8'2'0946DC219828292

To Bill Callahan, for getting me started

Research and writing require money and time. A three-year research grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and two smaller grants from York University permitted me to carry out the research for this book. A fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation allowed me the luxury of spending the 19971998 academic year writing it.

I benefited from the work of three excellent research assistants: Milena Kras in Toronto, Teresa Arboledas Mrquez in Granada, and Gregorio Goyo de la Fuente in Madrid. I am also indebted to the staffs of a number of archives and libraries: in Madrid, the Biblioteca Nacional, the Hemeroteca Municipal, the Archivo Municipal de la Villa, the Archivo Histrico Nacional, the Archivo Histrico de Protocolos, and the Archivo del Palacio Real; in Granada the Archivo de la Cancillera Real; in Sevilla the Real Maestranza, and especially its Hermano Mayor, who granted access to its superb archive; and Manuel Ravina Martn at the Archivo Histrico Provincial in Cdiz. I want to make special mention of Berta Bravo and her exceptionally efficient and attentive staff at the Centro de Archivos de la Comunidad de Madrid.

Many colleagues in the field of Spanish history provided me with references to sources on bullfighting; so, too, did colleagues in French, British, United States, Canadian, and Chinese history. Their contributions made this book richer, and I thank them all. Jos Alvarez Junco, Renato Barahona, William J. Callahan, Jess Cruz, Chris Cunningham, Judy Hellman, Richard Hoffmann, Virginia Hunter, Richard Kagan, Kathryn McPherson, Enrique Moradiellos, Viv Nelles, Adele Perry, Pamela Radcliff, David Ringrose, and Nick Rogers all read and commented on parts of this book at various stages in its evolution. Finally, Antonio Cazorla Snchez read the entire manuscript and was a constant source of helpful criticism and important ideas.

Five in the afternoon,

It was five, sharp, in the afternoon.

So begins the Lament for the Death of Ignacio Snchez Mejas, by the great Spanish poet Federico Garca Lorca. Snchez Mejas was a close friend of Lorcas and a literary figure in his own right as well as a bullfighter, and Lorca cast his death in the ring in August 1934 as much more than just a tragic accident, investing it with a broader, even mythical, significance. Lorca had long seen the bullfight as bearing some deep meaning. In a letter to the Italian writer Giovanni Papini he had described it as a religious mystery... the public and solemn enactment of the victory of virtue over the lower interests... the superiority of spirit over matter, of intelligence over instinct, of the smiling hero over the frothing monster. With this interpretation Lorca joined a long line of people, foreigners and Spaniards alike, who have found the bullfight a mine of meaning about Spain and its people, a privileged window on the Spanish character, if not the Spanish soul. This window has produced a kaleidoscope of revelations, and it is worthwhile having a brief look at a few of them.

From the nineteenth century on, the bullfight was taken up by Spanish intellectuals as part of what they saw as the problem of their country. Csar Graa summarized the process in this way: Spain as a problem is a wounded and traumatized nation speaking through cries and alarms, thirsting for redeeming visions.... The critical higher spirits faced with a society in disintegration, the victim of a great historic shipwreck, seek the rediscovery or resurrection of Spanish nationality, looking to their roots or to the

Many of the eclectic group of writers known as the Generation of 1898 used the corrida

Yet others showed precisely this disdain for indigenous institutions. For Ramiro de Maeztu it was part of the frivolity that had led to the Disaster: What to blame! Our idleness, our laziness... the bullfight, the national chick pea, the ground we tread and the water we drink. Po Baroja saw it as cowardly and brutal, and Azorn attacked it as a frivolity that perverted the ideal of valor and belonged to the Espaa de pandereta, not to the real Spain.

Eugenio Noel (18851936) was the most determined and best-known crusader against the corrida in the early twentieth century. He picked up many of the themes of the Generation of 1898, especially that of national decadence. For Noel, the bullfight was the basic cause of Spains problems, and his list was a long one:

From the bullrings we get the following characteristics of our race: the majority of crimes committed with a knife... pornography without voluptuousness, art nor conscience; political corruption; all, absolutely all, aspects of bossism and godfatherism; the complete lack of respect for a pure idea... the cruelty of our feelings; the desire to make war; our ridiculous Don Juanism... and in sum, whatever has to do with enthusiasm, grace, arrogance, sumptuousness, everything, everything is made negative, corrupted, bastardized, deteriorated, because of those emanations that come from the bullrings to the city and from here to the countryside.

The most sweeping assessment came from the great Spanish philosopher Jos Ortega y Gasset. In his Interpretation of Universal History, published in 1948, Ortega declared that not only is the bullfight an important reality in the history of Spain since 1740... butand I say this in the most express and formal mannerone cannot write the history of Spain from 1650 to our own time without keeping the bullfight clearly in mind. The bullfight was the clearest symptom of what Ortega saw as the prime pathology of Spanish history from the eighteenth century on: For the first time Spain sealed itself off hermetically from the rest of the world, even from its own hispanic world. I call this the tibetanization of Spain.

Ortegas contention that the bullfight embodied Spains rejection of the modern world, and especially its rejection of the Enlightenment, has remained alive and influential. Novelist and historian Carmen Martn Gaite made this claim in her much cited study of the eighteenth century, and American literary critic Timothy Mitchell has echoed it in his works on the

Anthropologists and psychologists have been prolific in uncovering the meaning of the corrida. Garry Marvin sees it as a confrontation between nature and culture, which is worked out in a controlled environment in a stylized and regulated way.