436 Charles Bukowski, “Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way” in Portions from a Wine-stained Notebook, ed. David Stephen Calonne (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2008): 128-134 (p.129).
bullring as the model for his own style – indeed by providing an alternative, comparable model in the racetrack – Bukowski consciously distances himself from the purview of Hemingway’s writing. Of the three American authors under discussion in this chapter, Bukowski had perhaps the easiest task in his rendering of bullfighting in his work. On a fundamental level this simplicity comes down to the question of formal choice, namely that Bukowski chose to render the bullfight in his poetry rather than his prose. Bullfighting, and indeed Hemingway himself, became a dominant leitmotif in many of Bukowski’s poems, as he returned to them at numerous points in his career. However, considering Bukowski’s bullfighting poems contextually, with recourse to biographical detail, is difficult if not impossible given the sheer labyrinthine nature of his poetic output. Despite a plethora of collections bearing his name, much of Bukowski’s poetry was collected in a rather haphazard manner, if it was collected at all. The material that has been collected is often duplicated across several compilations, and there is little consistency within collections with regard to the period in his life during which the poems were produced. It is not uncommon to find a Bukowski collection containing poems written twenty years apart produced side by side with no dates to support them. This is due not least to the erratic nature of the way Bukowski submitted poems to magazines and journals, often doing so without keeping either copies of the poems themselves or records of when and where he had submitted them.
Nevertheless, Bukowski’s bullfighting poems, like Carver’s short story, seem able to set up allusive frameworks that recall or echo Hemingway’s writing on the subject without being derivative. Perhaps the key to this achievement lies in the ability to, as Hutcheon puts it, ‘confront’ the work being parodied, whilst maintaining critical distance from it. Mailer was clearly advocating this type of confrontation in his call for every ‘major and macho’ writer to ‘give a faena which borrows from the self-love of a Hemingway style’, but in his case, this confrontation is not one in which he confronts and opposes the Hemingway bullfighting text. Rather, because Mailer cannot move away from the metaphorical equation of bullfighting and writing, he misguidedly interpolates bullfighting into the thematic fabric of his writing, using the topic in much the same metaphorical way that the modernists already had. In contrast, however, if the relationship between Bukowski’s bullfighting texts and Hemingway’s could be characterized by any single adjective it would likely be ‘reactive’. A case in point is a poem that seems to respond directly to Death in the Afternoon and the section of that work in which Hemingway writes that ‘the sun is the best bullfighter, and without the sun the best bullfighter is not there.’438 Published first in
the literary magazine Evergreen in February 1969 and collected in The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses
Over The Hills in December of the same year, Bukowski’s poem ‘even the sun was afraid’ seems to
represent a direct riposte to this pronouncement whilst simultaneously undoing Hemingway’s panegyrical treatment of the bullfighter.439
The opening of the poem is marked by a direct identification with the bull, the speaker observing that ‘They’d stuck him in the shoulder and/he came out/pissed’. This in itself, the direct identification with the bull as a victim of the actions of the men, is contrary to the precedent set by Hemingway’s writing on the corrida. By elevating the bull in this manner, to the point when ‘it seemed that even the sun was afraid’, Bukowski subverts the mythologization of the bullfighter in Hemingway’s writing since ‘even the sun’, the best of all bullfighters, is afraid. Since the sun is afraid and is the best bullfighter, it follows logically that the human participants should also be afraid also. The mere mortals of the arena, the
matador, the picadors, and the banderilleros, are thus rendered as figures of cowardice. The former attempts
some passes with the cape but does ‘not get very close’, whilst the picador sits astride his horse working the neck muscles of the bull with his ‘chickenshit/lance.’ The banderilleros do not fare much better in Bukowski’s reading of the bullfight, and are implicitly criticised in the poem as their actions are deemed only to ‘appear/dangerous’ [original emphasis retained]. This disparity between appearance and reality underpins the poem’s critical framework. The bull ‘does not any longer look like the/ bull who first ran into the ring’, and only when the neck and back muscles are ‘severed, shredded’ is the bull ‘properly ready for the matador to be/brave.’ The bull no longer appears to be the same bull that first entered the ring, but both the speaker and the reader know that it is. Indeed, part of the poem’s function is to illustrate the cause of this apparent metamorphosis. Moreover, the enjambment splitting the linguistic unit in the preceding lines creates a sense of ambiguity. Not only does the bull’s preparedness make way for the matador ‘to be’, that is to fulfill his existential purpose of being a matador, but the appendage of the adjective ‘brave’ to this unit in the following line creates a sense of discord in the mind of the reader. There is little brave about facing a bull which has had its neck and back muscles so grievously lacerated. The ironic mobilisation of the adjective ‘brave’, therefore, serves to highlight the polarity between his own cognizance of the real workings of the bullfight and the ignorance of ‘the drunken Americans in the/ shade with good jobs and subnormal wives’ who ‘didn’t know anything’ and ‘rooted for the bull.’ Presumably these drunken American tourists have not read their Hemingway, since they are not aware that ‘it took guts/ to even do a bad job with the bull,’ a sentiment made eminently clear in Death in the
Afternoon. However, Bukowski does not really endorse this sentiment either. Instead he situates himself
outside of both camps: he is neither for the bull or for the matador, neither one of the drunken American tourists who hope ‘the mat gets gored’ and ‘go/ home happy and/ fuck all night’, or an aficionado who has had his response dictated to him by a bullfighting exegesis. This latter rejection is made clear in the
439 Charles Bukowski, “even the sun was afraid”, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1969): 179-185.
poem’s depiction of the latter stages of the bullfight, as the matador goes in for the kill. Subjective opinion ought, it seems, to be suspended at this point, since both the speaker and his companion know ‘the plot, the hero, the whole/ fucking thing.’ But there is a certain degree of uneasiness about accepting this version of events. After the sword goes in it becomes clear that events are not yet over; the bull refuses to fall, refuses to follow the plot. The toreros come up and ‘[flick] their capes at him. [punch] him on the nose’ all the while trying to ‘push him into death’. The matador tries again with the
estocada and fails, before the scene turns into farce as someone takes one of the bull’s legs and kicks him
over. At this point the puntillero enters the ring seeming ‘quite angry’, and wearing ‘a little white butcher’s cap.’440 The process undertaken by the puntillero is supposed to sever the bull’s spinal cord in
order to provide a quick death after a failed estocada, but here it ‘appeared that he was chopping at the/ bull’s head, his/ brain.’ The apparent excessive brutality in this action is placed under scrutiny here. It may appear that the puntillero is chopping at the bull’s head and brain, but the speaker knows that this surface appearance needs to be questioned. This questioning is reflected in the way in which the appearance of the matador’s artistry in the opening of the poem is rendered deceptive. What appears to be happening in the bullring and what the observer sees are rarely contradictory, but there is nonetheless a questioning and critical subjectivity in Bukowski’s poem that simply doesn’t exist in Mailer’s writing about the bullfight.
Indeed, at the end of the poem the speaker insists that ‘you could SEE the bull/ die’. The capitalisation of the verb ‘SEE’ in this section is interesting, suggesting, perhaps that the only truth in the bullfight, the only firm meaning that can be extrapolated from the event by a subjective observer, is the death of the bull, or rather, the fact of the observer seeing the bull die. This capitalisation is doubly curious when considered in tandem with the only other capitalisation employed in the poem, which occurs when the speaker states that the bull ‘finally stood/ disgusted and doomed/ looking/ LOOKING.’ The bull is both doomed-looking and looking for meaning, attempting to understand its condition, searching for the source of its pain. The crucial distinction between these two verbs lies at the heart of the poem’s treatment of the bullfight, and at the heart of its response to Hemingway. Everything else that the bullfight can supposedly mean, all of its metaphorical associations and reflections, everything that it can
say to an observer, can only be found by actively looking for it. To look, after all, is to search, and it
implies the existence of something that is being looked for. We might return again to A.L. Kennedy’s
440 The puntillero is responsible for ensuring that the bull is dead after it has been felled by the estocada by severing the bull’s spinal cord. In the majority of cases this is purely a formality but, if a matador runs out of time and/or is unable to successfully dispatch the bull in the time alloted, the employment of the puntillero to carry out the job for him is a sign of disgrace, an emasculation and a professional catastrophe. Usually the individual appointed puntillero is either a member of the matador’s cuadrilla or someone hired for the specific role by the corrida organiser. In some arenas, the puntillero is simply a local butcher or slaughterman and will thus be dressed accordingly in their work attire. This would seem to have been the case in the bullfight on which this poem is based.
postulation that the corrida is ‘a blood search for meaning in the end of a life’.441 For Kennedy the death
of the bull or the matador is the metaphorical touchstone from which meaning can be derived in the bullfight. She, like Bukowski, cannot comprehend the meaning of any aspect of the bullfight except in its direct relation to death. Seeing might be read as being a potential result of looking, whilst at the same time looking can also result in a failure to see. To see, on the other hand, may be a recognition not searched for: we do not have to look in order to see. For Bukowski the bullfight is a visual field in which the poet has been conditioned to look for something, for some deeper meaning. This conditioning may be seen as being borne out of the ubiquity of the allegorical import with which Hemingway invested the corrida: an investment subsequently disseminated each time Hemingway and bullfighting were invoked separately or together. As John Berger wrote in his now seminal popular work on art criticism, Ways of Seeing, ‘[t]he way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.’442 We might extend this idea to incorporate what we read, since what we have read can certainly
be said to constitute much of what we know or believe. This, it would seem, is central to Bukowski’s interpretation of the bullfight. He wants to see for himself and not to look through the eyes of his forbears. That is, he does not want to follow the route taken by Mailer in searching for the same metaphorical resonances that Hemingway assured an entire generation of readers and writers they could find in the plaza de toros.