Standing eye to eye with death
Tristan Garei-Jones, taurine correspondent of The Spectator, on the fascination of the corrida Recently I had reason to open my copy of the collected works of the Mexican poet, Octavio Puz, given to me by Chris Patten. The inscription reads: 'With much affection and a reminder of the world beyond the gates: (A curious) November 1990.'
The curious November in question was the middle of the election campaign for the leadership of the Conservative party following the resignation of Margaret Thatcher. A deep depression had invaded me. The defenestration of a Tory prime minister had not been a pretty sight. Douglas Hurd's campaign (of which I was a part) had stuck stubbornly at around 60 votes. I was (and am) glad that I supported Hurd. But Douglas, in my eyes, was (and still is) a very senior boy. My friend, and the eventual winner, was someone else. In spite of the friendly messages from the soon-to-be prime minister, conveyed to me by Hurd himself, the conflicting emotions and loyalties had got the better of me. Gloom.
But Patten was right. The world beyond the gates has been remarkably kind since I ceased to be a minor public figure, i became a shareholder of Heywood Hill, the bookshop in Curzon Street — the finest bookshop in the world. Next, I was taken on by UBS Warburg who allow me to be a sort of pretend banker. And now, my cup overflows: the editor of The Spectator invites me to be the taurine correspondent of this magazine. I guess I shall be the only taurine correspondent in Britain and I cannot take for granted that British readers will be familiar with terms like volapic any more than Hispanic readers would be with LBW in the event that El Pais were to have a cricket correspondent.
An important semantic point has to be made at the outset. There is no Spanish word for bullfight or for bullfighter. Indeed, those words themselves go some way towards explaining the misunderstanding and antipathy in the Anglo-Saxon world towards the festival.
The distinguished Spanish critic, Manuel Arroyo, points out that even Wittgenstein — whose reputation was largely based on 'ploughing up' the true meaning of language — fails into this trap. In his posthumously published work Culture and Value he writes: 'In a bullfight the bull is the hero in a tragedy.' Arroyo reacts with incredulity. And he is right. Surely, not even Tony Banks would argue that an animal can have any notion of the meaning of tragedy, hero or even of death?
Wittgenstein is on firmer ground when he writes: 'A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just a picture of death.' It was this belief that led him to enlist as a volunteer in the first world war: 'Now I have a chance to be a decent human being for I am standing eye to eye with death. It is only death that gives life its meaning,' Lest we fall into the same semantic trap as Wittgenstein no reference will be made to bullfights or to bullfighters. The bullfight will be a corrida, or a festival or a spectacle. The bullfighter — a matador, a torero or a swordsman. Thus, we shall have some prospect of understanding what the painter Antonio Saura describes as: 'A special dance, face to face with a fighting beast, subject to a strict ritual, which harks back to distant sacrificial rites and is laced with complex aesthetic, mythological and emotional resonances.'
The positioning of these taurine reports is of some importance to your man on the barrera (as it were the front row of the stalls). With due respect to the sainted editor. as Taki calls him, on no account may they appear in the always witty and entertaining section reserved for sport. Ideally, they belong in the Arts section alongside ballet and theatre, but on no account may such sartorial figures as Joselito, Juan Belmonte, Manolete appear alongside David Beckham — admirable and simpatico though he may be.
The editor and I are agreed that even Spectator readers are unlikely to wish for a weekly column. Thus, occasional pieces will report on individual corridas, others portraits of individual matadors. We shall delve into the history of the corrida — the Goddess Europa (so revered by Bill Cash) whose dalliance with a bull produced the Minotaur, the ritual sacrifices of ancient times, the publication of Tauromaquia by Pepe Hillo in 1801. The relationship of artists and writers to the festival (Goya, Picasso, Lorca, Bergamin, Ortego y Gasset) warrants examination. And, of course, we shall keep a watchful eye on the machinations of northern European nations inside the EU to ensure that the festival remains beyond the reach of Euro-regulation and is safely entrusted, under the principle of subsidiarity, into the hands of the interior minister in Madrid.
In his characteristically thoughtful article `Wittgensteinian Tauromaquia', Arroyo draws an interesting parallel between the corrida and other artistic trends. If Joselito was the ultimate result of 19th-century classicism, it was Belmonte who broke the classical mould. In the same year that Joyce's Ulysses was published in Paris, Belmonte fought 100 corridas. While Kandinsky was making his first abstract drawings and Schoenberg was breaking with tonality — it was Belmonte who ushered in a similar break with the classical cannons of Tauromaquia, venturing into the bull's terrain, refusing to move and obliging the beast to move as directed. Belmonte changed the fundamentals of the art in Joycean fashion.
Arroyo's is a thought-provoking proposition. I wholly agree with it. Great art cannot be divorced from its time, We shall consider the gradual democratisation of the festival. From the aristocrat on horseback, wounding the beast, to the emergence of the foot-servant, the matador, as the central figure clad in shining gold, who despatches the animal. The matador now stands, as do the people in a democracy, as the all-important figure and the aristocrat (the picador) is relegated, like our own House of Lords, to a purely secondary role.
It was Manolete (tragically killed in Linores in 1947) who took Belmonte's revolution a stage further. But even then many intellectuals regarded him as something of a vulgarian. Today, the same controversy rages around Julian Lopez, 'El Juli'. Is he simply part of a global cultural dumb ing down? Is the more sober, introverted, less media-orientated Jose Tomas the greater artist? Or is El Juli — like Andy Warhol — simply playing along with the popular images to make a profound — classical — restatement of the lasting eternities of art and of life itself? Is popular democracy necessarily vulgar and cheap? Or do great artists — Warhol, Hockney, El Juli? — pick it up and use it to reinterpret eternal verities?
My next report will be during the 15-day feria in Madrid in May in honour of St Isidore, the patron saint of the Spanish capital. Fifteen days of solid corridas! A Spanish Wimbledon. I shall report on one corrida in which El Juli will take part.
My hope is that as Spectator readers deepen their understanding of the corrida we may, perhaps in two or three years, be able to organise a trip of aficionados to witness one of the greatest artistic spectacles in Europe today — the Goya-esque corrida in Ronda. Founded by the great Antonio Ordoriez, it takes place in September in the magnificent 18th-century bullring. All the participants are clad in 19th-century costumes as depicted in the work of Francisco de Goya. It is comforting to know that, as Tony Banks and his allies bludgeon Blairite Britain into the belief that animals have — what shall we call them, near-human rights? — there remains one corner of our continent where people well understand what Octavio Paz meant when he wrote: 'I was alive and I went in search of death.' A place where our proxy, the matador, looks real death in the face and, in doing so, reminds us, as did Wittgenstein, that only death gives life its meaning.
The fee for this article has been donated to the World Wildlife Fund.
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