User:KForeman/sandbox: Difference between revisions

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In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.

More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).

Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.

===Works Cited===

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 In his need to give us the true gen about Mexico and the Corrida with a Hemingwayesque authority, Mailer ends up sounding oddly chauvinistic and strangely at odds with his subject, with too much authority and too little substance. Hemingway knew in Death in the Afternoon when to skewer himself about being too serious, invoking “[. . .] those inner searching Viennese eyes peering out from under the shaggy brows of old Dr. Hemingstein, that masterful deducer [. . .]” (54). And he knew when to admit the precarious nature of his authority. Conversing with his fictitious “Old lady,” invented precisely to lighten up the discussion of gore and death, he commented to her: “Madame, rarely will you meet a more prejudiced man nor one who tells himself he keeps his mind more open [. . .];” only to conclude matter-of-factly: “[. . .] it may well be that we are talking ‘horseshit’” (95); and still not content with his admission, defining the term‘horseshit’ as “[. . .] unsoundness in an abstract conversation or, indeed, any over metaphysical tendency in speech” (95). Mailer could have profited from this observation.
+More obfuscation, this time technical: Mailer attempts to describe a pass with the cape, one he calls a gallicina in these terms: “[. . .] it was an old-fashioned pass of great intricacy which spoke of the era of Belmonte and El Gallo and Joselito. It was a pass of considerable danger, plus much formal content (for a flash it looked like he was inclining to kiss a lady’s hand, his cape draped over his back, while the bull went roaring past his unprotected ass)” (Bullfight 13–14). The practiced aficionado might try to picture from such a contrived description some kind of larga, a pass with one hand, but just when you think you have sorted out what taurine anomaly Mailer is trying to convey, he complicates the issue: “It [the pass] consisted of whirling in a reverse serpentina counter-clockwise into the bull, so that the cape was wrapped around your body . . . but the timing was such that the bull went by at the moment your back was to him and you could not see his horns” (14).
+Hemingway was much wiser in his treatment of this area in Death in the Afternoon: “I will not describe the different ways of using the cape, the gaonera, the mariposa, the farol, or the older ways, the cambios de rodillas, the galleos, the serpentinas in the detail I have described the veronica because a description in words cannot enable you to identify them before you have seen them as a photograph can” (176). One can only wish that Mailer had followed this advice and assembled a volume, like Death in the Afternoon, which combined complementary narrative and photography, instead of the disjunctive collection to which he put his name.
 ===Works Cited===