‘Death in the Afternoon’: Blood, Sunlight, and Bullfighting
A review of ‘Death in the Afternoon’, by Ernest Hemingway; Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932.
Death in the Afternoon is a book about bullfighting in much the same way that Moby-Dick is a book about whaling. On paper, Hemingway sets out to explain the spectacle, its history, and its place in Spanish life. But he ends up explaining something else: life and death, bravery and cowardice, and the transcendence of the self.
Bullfighting is an old, violent thing that Hemingway tackles with the gravity of a scholar and the morbid fascination of an addict. He describes the ceremony, the matadors, the picadors, the bulls. He studies how a bullfighter stands, how he moves the cape, how the bull follows. But matador, Hemingway writes, is an artist because he risks death, and at the moment of death truth is revealed to us. It is not a question of win or loss but dignity in the face of the abyss. ‘A man can be destroyed,’ as he puts it in The Old Man and the Sea, but not defeated.’
It is not a question of win or loss but dignity in the face of the abyss.
So a man who fights well does not just kill a bull; he shows grace under pressure. Bullfighting is cruel, he says, describing how bull and horse can suffer and die in agony, and for no apparent reason. But that cruelty does not matter because it serves a higher purpose, which is the creation of meaning—the provision of insight into life and death—through bloody ritual and sacrifice. As Girard and Kołakowski and others tell us, ritual is the means by which we turn contingency into meaning, fact into myth, and uphold them. To communicate the nature of life and death and its relation to true requires actual death—death, if you like, in the afternoon.
The book is also a kind of travelogue. Hemingway writes of Madrid, the Spanish landscape, the dry heat and long afternoons. There are detours, often odd ones. He grumbles about American tourists, critics who do not grasp bullfighting, and writers who are too soft. He includes a long, wholly made-up conversation between himself and an old woman who argues with him about everything:
Old Lady: Why are you speaking this way? It is not good.
Hemingway: I am speaking this way to teach you. How else are you to learn?
Old Lady: Perhaps, but I don’t like it.
Hemingway: Sometimes you have to dislike something in order to understand.
So it is a peculiar book, full of asides and little anecdotes. At times, it reads like Hemingway is sitting across from you, pouring himself another pernod, telling you what he thinks.
There are detours, often odd ones. He grumbles about American tourists, critics who do not grasp bullfighting.
Beneath all of this, there is that deeper theme: what it means to face death and refuse to look away. This is a book about the metaphysics of bullfighting: about the religiosity of the thing, and how it connects to the writer’s search for meaning and the essence of life. In the best passages, he describes the moment when a matador stands before the bull, the cape held just so, the crowd silent. This moment is one of pure concentration, pure awareness. All is at stake, and that, Hemingway tells us, is the point. In that moment, past and future converge on the present, and life reveals its meaning.
The author Marianne Wiggins said that the sheer passion and intensity with which Hemingway writes of bullfighting is enough to ‘make you like it’ and that, if you read enough and long enough, to ‘make you love it’. You, reader, can be the judge of that. You may find the loose structure, Hemingway’s tendency to get into the weeds and lose himself in technical detail a bit trying. But it is a powerful book, because it is Hemingway at his most honest and unfiltered, trying to convey something deep and important about life that is, for him, disclosed by the ritual killing of a bull for a sport.
