User:KForeman/sandbox: Difference between revisions

It’s not just the Indians Mailer goes after: “The intellectuals and the technicians of Mexico abominate their national character because it is always in the way” (2). He rails against every level of Mexican society: “To the vampires and banshees and dried blood on the curses of the cactus in the desert is added the horror of the new technology in an old murder-ridden land” (3). Where is all this eloquent vilification headed? To the bullring, of course: “And four o’clock on Sunday is the beginning of release for some of the horrors of the week” (3). In what Hemingway would probably have called dubious sociology—a notion to which I would subscribe—Mailer blinds us with his insight into the national character of Mexicans: “If many come close to feeling the truth only by telling a lie, so Mexicans come close to love by watching the flow of blood on an animal’s flanks and the certain death of the bull before the bravery and/or humiliation of the bullfighter” (3). The operative word here is humiliation, not truth, not lie, not blood, not death— humiliation.

Why? Mailer eventually divulges that it was a humiliated matador who led him to his initial understanding if you can call it that—of the corrida. The nameless matador in question (not Amado Ramírez, we haven’t gotten to him yet), whom Mailer variously describes as “a clod,” with a “nasty build,” with“spindly legs,” with“a butt which was broad and stolid, real peasant ass,” and with“a vulgar worried face with a gold tooth” (4), this wretched torero was not having a good day: “I got a look at the bullfighter who was the center of all this. He was not a man I could feel something for. He had a cheap pimp’s face and a dull, thoroughgoing vanity. His face, however, was now in despair” (5). The description puts me in mind of Hemingway’s overtly and overly negative description of Domingo Ortega in Death in the Afternoon: “All the rest of him was ignorance, awkwardness, inability to use his left hand, conceit, and attitudes [. . .]. In appearance, he had one of the ugliest faces you could find outside of a monkey house [. . .]” (169). In any case, whence Mailer’s angst, this existential horror, above and beyond the problems the matador was having with an uncooperative bull and a cantankerous, piss-slinging crowd? “Something was going on for him more humiliating than humiliation [. . .]”. The final verdict: “I was watching the despair of a profoundly mediocre man” (Bullfight 5).