From November to February, I can pretend that bullfighting doesn’t exist. From February to April, it begins to appear on the periphery of my consciousness in the same way that an AFL football pre-season always filled me with feelings of impending gloom. But come April and the months that follow, I can no longer ignore it, particularly in Madrid, where a festival dedicated to the city’s patron saint—San Isidro—marks the pinnacle of a bullfighting season that lasts until November offers some respite.
And yet, my discomfort is not what I would like it to be. My problem is the uncomfortable feeling that I cannot entirely condemn Spain’s most infamous national tradition.
Morally, it is easy. Bullfighting is a cruel blood sport, a primitive orgy of death that appears to have no place in modern Europe. A Plaza de Toros—the beautiful arena where bullfights are held—resembles the amphitheatres of Rome, filled with spectators baying for the blood of a frightened wild animal which faces certain death. A British friend and long-time resident of Spain cannot abide bullfighting and likens it to bear-baiting and other brutal pursuits where animals are sacrificed for the entertainment of man. I cannot argue with him.
And yet, there is something, in the words of the bullfighting aficionado otherwise known as Ernest Hemingway, ‘elegantly archaic’ about the whole spectacle. It is the drama of a man dressed in a traje de luces (suit of lights) pitting himself against a 500kg animal that is revered by spectators. It is the strutting interaction between a man with a red cape eager to choreograph his own survival with a statuesque grace and theatrical purity of line and a crowd of highly knowledgeable and sceptical spectators. It is the vividness of death, the compelling sense of absurd tragedy, the duel within me between being unable to watch and unable not to.
I have never been entirely convinced by the moral relativism of Hemingway’s defence of bullfighting, whereby he argues that, ‘I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after and judged by these moral standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very moral to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality, and after it is over I feel very sad but very