BOOKS

Rape in the afternoon

Raymond Carr

BLOOD SPORT

by Timothy Mitchell

University of Pennsylvania Press, £25.60, £9.95, pp. 244

More tosh has been written on bull- f ghting than on any other human activity. There is some fine technical and historical writing by Spaniards: the standard bull- fighting encyclopaedia runs into nine ex- haustive and exhausting volumes. But most Spanish writers have been concerned to justify or condemn the survival of the killing of bulls before a mass audience in a modern European society and to explain what that survival tells us of the supposed national characteristics of Spaniards.

It is with this philosophising that the tosh begins. Its main purveyors, however, are now social anthropologists who have been exposed to Freud. Their explanations leave me gasping for fresh air and wondering whether Freud has contributed anything to our understanding of man as a social being.

Here are some recent offerings. The corrida is an Oedipal drama in which the matador defeats and kills his father — the bull. The superego (i.e. the conscience) condemns the matador for torturing and killing his father; the ego (that censors the primitive drives of the id) replies it has been a fair fight; after all, the bull-father tries to kill the son but is defeated by the son's valour and skill. For others the corrida is a projection of the basic conflict between the id (the bull) and the ego and superego (the matador); with his victory, repression and sublimation triumph. Many — and not only social anthropologists — have argued that the corrida is a religious ritual rooted in a long tradition of bull sacrifice, going back perhaps to Crete and Mithraism, and brought to Spain by Ro- man legionaries who had served in the Middle East — a supposition that cannot be supported by evidence. But Timothy Mitchell points out that the bullfight is not a ritual in the strict sense: neither those who act it out nor those who watch it attach symbolic meaning to what goes on in the bullring. Participants in a Catholic Mass do not take as significant the skill and grace with which the priest elevates the Host whereas it is precisely the skill and grace of the matador that is central to the bullfight. . Finally there is the straight sexual analy- sis. The matador at the outset of the fight is feminine — and it must be acknowledged that he is seen as such in popular ditties. As the fight goes on the roles are reversed. The matador becomes a man, dominating the bull and finally 'raping' it as he kills it with his final sword-thrust. This breaks the taboo against intercourse with a menstruat- ing woman by penetrating the 'vaginal wound' (the bull's shoulders are bloody after the picadors' lances have been driven Into the muscles) with his sword-penis. One asks the simple layman's question that for a social anthropologist would be consi- dered out of bounds: does the matador — or anyone else for that matter — have any inkling that he is raping a menstruating woman? I am reminded that I am told by psychologists — American psychologists who couldn't tell a vixen from a dog fox if they saw one — that in hunting foxes I am pursuing 'sexy beasts that live in holes'; that I am acting out a 'masturbation fantasy' dressed in fancy `ritual' clothes. There's not much time for fantasising when one's main concern is to stop falling off one's horse.

Timothy Mitchell describes these ingen- ious theories but, to his credit, rejects them. He is concerned with the rela- tionship of bullfighting to Spanish society, past and present. He argues that it is rooted in the capea: the small town fiestas where itinerant young hopefuls test their skills as a first step towards making the big

time as matadors. These local fiestas are gruesome affairs — burning pitch attached to bulls' horns, communal slaughterings — but are (or were) genuinely popular. Buried in provincial obscurity, they emerge in the later 18th century as the basis of the national sport: bullfighting on foot. Bull- fighting had been a concern of mounted aristocrats armed with lances. But in the Age of Enlightenment aristocrats became infected with 'effeminate' French fashions.

It was the urban lower classes who staged a return to traditional Spanish values of honour and vengeance as they appear in the plays of the Golden Age. The conspi- cuous proponents of this popular patriotic

reaction were the Majos and Majas of

Goya's paintings: city Teddy boys and their mistresses noted for their arrogant be- haviour and their — supposedly traditional

— flashy clothes. It was members of this sub-class that took over the corrida as a

fight on foot. Ever since then the majority

of matadors have come from the margins of society especially in the poverty-stricken

rural south; they are its folk heroes. Hence the attraction of bullfighting as a form of social mobility for the underprivileged; millionaire matadors like El Cordobes, the star of the 1960s, took the rags-to-riches trail now trodden by professional footbal- lers and pop stars. Mitchell is especially informative on the cruel struggle for sur- vival that the underfed village boy must endure on the way up from the obscurity of the provinces to the rings of the great cities.

Even if I think that Mitchell occasionally falls into the romantic trap he seeks to avoid — he argues, for instance, that

Napoleon was defeated by guerrillas, Majos in arms — he is correct in arguing

that the proletarianisation of the bullfight is an indication of the decline of the Spanish aristocracy as a social and political force. This `absence' of a functioning aris- tocracy is the key to Ortega y Gasset's analysis of Spanish society — hence his assertion that the history of Spain cannot be understood without the history of the bullfight. Aristocrats held on to their land and they came back into the bullfight as breeders of fighting bulls, as entre- preneurs, as patrons and hangers-on but not as participants. But land ceased to be the basis of aristocratic power and influ- ence as it remained in Britain until the 1880s. A man could be made a duke by Queen Isabella in the 1860s without an acre to his name — something which would have appalled Queen Victoria.

The greatest statesmen of 19th-century Spain came from the middle class. These

bourgeois worthies could not impose the political institutions of a bourgeois liberal- ism on a rural, illiterate society; they perverted imported liberal parliamentar- ianism by wholesale electoral fraud. Mitch- ell argues that the bullfight reflects the enduring vices of Spanish political life: its corruption (bullfighting journalists were notoriously venal and fights were fixed); its familial nepotism; its reliance on patronage networks (a bullfighter needs the 'recom- mendation' of a patron if he is to make the grade); its authoritarianism (the matador is the absolute master of his cuddrilla and his jokes must be applauded by the toadies that every bullfighter picks up on his road to the top).

But what of the fatal attraction of the corrida for the spectators? Of course there are genuine aficionados who profess to appreciate the art of the matador. Yet surely it is the possibility that the matador may be killed that gives the frisson — Mitchell connects it with the violence of sex — the tingle factor? It is the gored matador who makes the headlines and it was Paquirri's death in 1984 that, as Mitchell says, sent Spain into shock and converted all who knew him into media persons overnight and his wife into 'the widow of Spain'. Almost every bullfighter has confessed that it is the crowd that drives him to take unacceptable risks. 'Now I've got it. Now you've given it to me', Hemingway's matador cries to the crowd as he is carried bleeding to the infirmary to die four months later.

Mitchell draws a necessary but uncom- fortable parallel with the Roman amphitheatre. The matador's art relieves the obscene Roman mass bloodletting. But, like the matador, the gladiator was a marginal man on the rags-to-riches trail; the folk hero (or villain) of the crowd; celebrated by poets and pictured on vases, he enjoys the bullfighter's transient fame and his success with women. Gladiators, as Tertullian observed, were lower-class thugs `to whom men surrender their souls and women their bodies'. Like bullfighters, Mitchell maintains, they had the attraction of the forbidden in their proximity to 'blood, death and pollution'. In the gla- diators' barracks at Pompeii excavators found a woman's skeleton adorned with rich jewellery.

Hardly surprisingly, it is the less attrac- tive sides of the national fiesta which have led liberal-minded Spaniards to argue that the bullfight is the symbol, if not the cause as Unamuno believed, of Spain's failure in the past to become a modern, tolerant society on the European pattern. For conservative traditionalists it embodies those national virtues that have enabled Spain to stand out against the decadent democracies. The Spanish Church has an abysmal record; bulls, like all animals, were created by God for man's purposes, to be used or abused. To object to bull- fighting on grounds of cruelty was 'sickly

sentimentalism', a Spanish Jesuit argued in the 1960s. The bullfight preserved Spain from the 'theosophical (sic) materialism' of the democratic West. After a good bull- fight, he concluded, the crowd would have 'no inclination for political rallies or social disturbances'.

In the 1950s, thinking of writing a book on bullfighting, I must have seen hundreds of corridas. I am now sickened by the whole business. At 'the moment of truth', that final sword-thrust, the bull can still kill the matador; but by that stage he is a poor brute, his 'nobility', which for aficionados constitutes his essence, knocked out of him. I rejoice that football is now the spectator sport of most Spaniards. When Franco, who never missed a Match of the Day, wished to mask a political crisis he showed repeats of the World Cup on TV. He knew what was the opium of his subjects. Spaniards were no longer hooked on the corrida.