Seguridad Vial Laboral 5.5.1.1.1 Datos Básicos del Nivel 3

lost on the audience of Time magazine and the authors of the articles written about him and his profession, but they would surely have been under no illusion about his claim to novelty as an outsider to their culture. In this sense Belmonte was the very essence of modern in two separate, and seemingly disparate, cultural spheres. Whilst in America Belmonte was perceived as the poster child of an obscure and archaic practice entering the public consciousness for the first time, in the Spanish-speaking world (and parts of continental Europe), Belmonte was the harbinger of change and a revolutionary heretic.

Notwithstanding its importance as a cultural signpost, Belmonte’s appearance on the cover of Time was doubly important for what it said about the contemporary reception of bullfighting outside of Spain and its former colonies. Although the article inside the magazine still invoked archaic bullfighting terminology, a fact demonstrated most palpably by its title, the appearance of a bullfighter on the cover of a decidedly modern publication spoke to the conceivable relevance of bullfighting to a modern, globalising, technologically advancing world. Indeed, the issue highlighted a central paradox at the heart of the primitive turn in certain branches of modernist creation: the very agent of this turn was modernity itself, without which the frantic cultural exchange that induced such a close focus on the primitive would simply not have been feasible. More tellingly, though, it succeeded in positioning bullfighting as a subject of interest for the type of cosmopolitan reader who might be perusing a copy of Time. There can be little doubt that Time magazine was a break from the established modus operandi of periodical production and publication in its time, and it was a magazine with a distinctly modern ideology and mission. The magazine’s prospectus, composed by co-founders Briton Hadden and Henry Luce during the inchoate stages of its development, made specific reference to the need for a periodical that was suited to the temporal constraints being placed on readers of such publications. Such constraints on the time of individuals were a symptom of modernity: a symptom increasingly aggravated as the spread of that modernity became ever more pervasive. The title of the magazine was a direct and volitional nod to this distinctly modern problem of haste. Quite simply, people no longer had time to keep up with the events that were relevant to them, since the number of events that seemed relevant was constantly multiplying. In an increasingly globalised world, ever more relevant events were occurring in ever more remote corners of the globe. This problem fed directly into the thinking behind the manifesto of Time, the overarching mission of which was therefore to keep its cosmopolitan modern readership well informed of such developments in a succinct fashion. The name of the magazine alone is testament to this fact, but, in a tone and typography reminiscent of the trademark manifestos of modernism, the prospectus stated explicitly that ‘people are uninformed BECAUSE NO PUBLICATION HAS ADAPTED ITSELF TO THE TIME WHICH BUSY MEN ARE ABLE TO SPEND ON

SIMPLY KEEPING INFORMED.’290 _{Time magazine set itself the pressing task of addressing this}

lack of informedness, simultaneously drawing Belmonte and bullfighting into the forefront of the consciousness of cosmopolitan America. The extent to which bullfighting would become embedded into the tapestry of American literary history could not have been anticipated at that moment, but the portentousness of Belmonte’s Time cover would soon become apparent.

Belmonte was not merely a bullfighter after his Time debut, then, but also – and perhaps more importantly – a potential global celebrity. In an era when novelty and spectacle were increasingly prominent in art, bullfights and bullfighters became the events and the people to see; at the same time, bullfights also became the events at which to be seen. The reasons behind this are numerous, but at a most superficial level of interpretation, it might be said simply that something seismic had happened in the world of bullfighting in the early 1920s to make this transition from eccentric parochiality to voguish globalisation possible. The rivalry that had developed between Joselito and Belmonte in the preceding decade, and which ended with Joselito’s tragic death in the ring in 1920, had marked a kind of ‘golden age’ in the practice. Sports historian Andrew McFarland notes that, though bullfighting had been a form of mass entertainment in Spain since the eighteenth century, it reached ‘new heights of popularity’ during the 1910s and 1920s largely thanks to the performances of these two toreros.291 _{This boom in popularity was not limited to Spain, where the art already enjoyed a}

broad and tremendously fervent following. Rather, the boom also began to extend abroad, a process that saw the practice become the subject of increased interest in transatlantic spheres. Though it was both Joselito and Belmonte who were the chief practitioners of this new method, it was specifically the latter’s arrival in the bullrings of Spain that had precipitated that crucial change. Indeed, the unconventional methods employed by Belmonte heralded the arrival of a new form of bullfighting that was distinctly modern in its approach. Heresy was the order of the day, and Belmonte’s torear could be considered nothing short of a revolution in the art form. Though narratives of their parallel careers have them considered as direct rivals, in many respects Joselito simply followed suit in an effort to keep pace with the changing tastes of established aficionados and to appeal to the new audiences being drawn to the plazas. Bullfighting, then, was reaching global audiences for the first time whilst, concurrently, the practice was undergoing something of an aesthetic insurgency. Thus the practice began to seem both ancient and modern all at once. Something of the mystical ritual of bullfighting remained in overseas perceptions of the corrida, but the celebrity of the bullfighter – and, in particular, the manner in which that iconography was beginning to be disseminated – served also to suffuse the practice with an air of the modern. This is notwithstanding the simple fact that

290 _{cited in Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Olivia, Time: The Illustrated History of the World’s Most Influential Magazine (New York:} Rizzoli International Publications, 2010), p. 21. [Original capitalisation retained]

291 _{Andrew McFarland, “Spanish Sport and the Challenges of its recent Historiography”, Journal of Sport History. 38.2 (2011), 211-} 221 (p. 212).

technological advancements in travel were making tourism a more viable and widespread phenomenon. Simultaneously, the development of the publishing industry ensured that information about overseas practices was more readily available to a much wider audience. Put simply, increased access to bullfighting was a direct consequence of the technological conditions of modernity. Whilst on a superficial level the bullfight may have seemed an anachronism, far from being a threat to the practice, in fact early twentieth-century globalisation was popularising the bullfight in an unprecedented manner.

This popularisation was reflected in the literature of the period, culminating in Hemingway’s 1932 bullfighting exegesis, Death in the Afternoon. The fact that the book was a financially viable publication pointed not only to the breadth of the audience to which such a book could appeal, but also to the fact that the practice had gained a foothold in the contemporary cultural consciousness. Indeed, bullfighting itself was in the throes of change and modernisation, a process documented and (to some extent) lamented in Death in the Afternoon. Writing of the change wrought by Belmonte on the taurine world, Hemingway observed that his career was built upon heresy:

He did not accept any rules made without testing whether they might be broken, and he was a genius and a great artist. The way Belmonte worked was not a heritage, nor a development; it was a revolution.292

It is not difficult to perceive here a certain parallel to the popularised and pithy interpretations of modernism in more traditional artforms. Many conventional readings of modernism position it as a cultural revolution rather than a process of evolution; indeed, in many critical works on modernism there is a tendency to want to think about it as a complete break with what had come before it, to envision modernism as a recalibration of the terms of artistic endeavour. Modernists themselves, who ‘asked us to believe in a break with the past, to believe they were writing in a way that was wholly new’, naturally, encouraged such readings.293 _{Even if we think such readings reductive, there}

is a striking resonance between this type of account of modernism as a whole and Hemingway’s analysis of how Belmonte altered the face of the art of bullfighting. There is little doubt that Belmonte – or a least the rivalry he had kindled with Joselito – had helped to engender a process of aesthetic heresy in bullfighting. At the same time that the sovereignty of nineteenth-century aesthetic values was being questioned in both literature and the visual arts on a transnational level, the very same process of subversion was being advanced on a more localised scale in individual national