In an attempt to remedy the onset of misanthropy, I have recently been assisting with a West End theatrical reworking of Ernest Hemingway’s break through novel, The Sun Also Rises. Admittedly, my contribution to the production is – at best – very limited, consisting mostly of weekend stage hand dogsbodery. Nonetheless, the experience provides a welcome opportunity to witness the inner workings of the theatrical environment and the chance to interact with an assortment of talented and unusual characters.

Distilling the novel’s direct and hard boiled narrative, the theatrical adaptation of The Sun Also Rises details the ultimately doomed romance between Jake Barnes, an expatriate American bullfighting aficionado, and Lady Brett Ashley, a promiscuous British bon-viveur, as they venture from the bohemian quarters of interwar Paris to the devil-may-care bacchanalia of the Encierro and Plaza Del Toros in Pamplona. Hemingway was famously an obsessive of bullfighting (claiming to have witnessed the deaths of over 1,500 bulls in the arena) and his enthusiasm is palpable in the novel’s vivid and romanticized descriptions of the corrida:

It isn’t just brutal like they always told us. It’s a great tragedy—and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and takes more guts and skill and guts again than anything possibly could. It’s just like having a ringside seat at the war with nothing going to happen to you

In a remarkable intersecting of the artistic and political worlds, the production managed to open within the same fortnight that newspapers reported that protesters in Mexico City had stripped down to their underwear to demand an end to bullfighting in Mexico and it was reported that the Spanish government had acknowledged a petition seeking to have the bullfight formally protected as an asset of cultural interest. Passing such a piece of legislature could thus overturn the ban on corridas de toros, novilladas and rejoneo which came into effect in regions of Catalonia in 2011.

The cries of “One less torero, one less fascist” attributed to Catalonian republican forces as they attacked the ranchers who raised fighting bulls during the Spanish Civil War have passed into the stuff of legend. However, bearing in mind the famous words of Maxwell Scott in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” the purported exclusivity existing between bullfighting and fascism is only half the story. In truth both the Republican and Fascist sides held fundraising bullfights – though it is worthy of mention that Franco gave the spectacle prominent place as a public demonstration of his power, with “Liberation” or “Victory Bullfights” being staged to commemorate his victories well into the 1950’s.

Much like the gladiatorial games, the bullfight interprets themes of war and death as a game in order to preserve an atmosphere of violence in times of peace. Commenting on Hemingway’s fascination with bullfighting, Malcolm Cowley speculated in a New Republic article from 1932 that “bullfighting perhaps could serve as an emotional substitute for war. It provided everything, travel, excitement, crowds like armies watching the spectacle of danger.”

In a talk made at the 2012 Edinburgh International Book Festival, bullfighting advocate and trained matador, Alexander Fiske-Harrison offered an interesting perspective on the morality of the practice, explaining:

In terms of animal welfare, the fighting bull lives four to six years whereas the meat cow lives one to two. What it is more, it doesn’t just live in the sense of existing, it lives a full and natural life.

Citing the horrifying and illuminating revelations of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, Fiske-Harrison makes the very valid point that 78.2 per cent of beef cows in the US are raised on factory farms where they are not only declined an acceptable standard of living but are all too often also denied the dignity of a decent death:

Let’s say what we mean: animals are bled, skinned and dismembered while conscious. It happens all the time, and the industry and the government know it. Several plants cited for bleeding or skinning or dismembering live animals have defended their actions as common in the industry and asked, perhaps rightly, why they were being singled out.

In his pioneering 1975 publication Animal Liberation, the moral philosopher Peter Singer presented a very similar consideration that:

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada, while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apertheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.

While Fiske-Harrison’s lesser of two evils compromise is a considered and commendable argument, it does little to silence the notion that perhaps both Bullfighting and commercial meat production should be both eradicated. “Sometimes” quipped Freud “a cigar is just a cigar.” Well, sometimes death is just death, whether it occurs on the venerated gravel of the plaza del toros or behind the clinical strip-doors of an outback abattoir.

That a species with the ability to eradicate small-pox, split the atom, and map the exactitudes of their genetic sequence could at the same time permit the beastly and prehistoric pageantry of the Bullfight to continue is rather [1] difficult to fully digest. The permittance of Bullfighting points to our myopic and anthropocentric attitude that lesser intellectually refined species are implicitly less significant than our own. “That man is the noblest creature” wrote G.C. Lichtenberg “may be inferred from the fact that no other creature has contested this claim.” If we were to encounter a species more developed than our own, how should we treat these beings? More importantly, how are they to treat us? If we couldn’t even communicate with Wittgenstein’s garrulous lion then what hope is there in connecting with creatures of intellect superior to our own? Neil deGrasse Tyson offers some of his own “fascinatingly disturbing” thoughts:

[1] A review of Fiske-Harison’s Into the Arenal in the Daily Mail noted that “(he) is guilty of some sloppy writing. His use of the word ‘rather’ (‘I must admit to feeling rather humbled by the whole thing’)… can grate.” I have to side with Fiske-Harison on this one. I must hold that such a functional and efficient word as “rather” can never be overused.