Death in the Afternoon - Hemingway and the author
The blurb on the back of the book tells me this:
'Here, spelt out between the lines of his famous book about bullfighting, is the outline of the whole of Hemingway's philosophy of life and art. For those who would understand the man Death in the Afternoon is the key.'
I think there is some truth in this statement, but not in the way the text suggests. What this book does is give un a fantastic insight into the writer, but not Hemingway himself. It is an account of a character engaging interest in a hobby to an almost pathological extent and then, like the worst of whores, jumping into a new existence until the knowledge of this fully consumed.
Hemingway is the ultimate example of this charcter, in letting something consume him to the point where his life is his writing, and his characters are his character. Can there be any other author less distinctive in his work yet so multi-faceted at the same time? And yet Hemingway is still just a writer, he is not the characters who leap out of the page, he is certainly not the great matadors that he depicts, yet his style is such that we feel his previous works here, sitting in the stadium, watching the greats - Joselito, Belmonte, El Gallo - admiring how they risk their lives at every stage, and do so with a grace and skill that others can only dream of. They are Hemingway protagonists, and it is through his thoughts and descriptions as a narrator that they come alive to us, the same as Robert Jordan, Jake Barnes and Harry Morgan.
It is imprtant then, to remember what this is as a book, an exploration of a sport, a lifestyle and an ethic, through the eyes of a narrator who binds it together with thoughts and opinions. It is written in a way to best show the world of bullfighting, and enable us to share in an enthusiasm for it. Whether this is or is not, an 'ethic of Hemingway' seems irrelevant to me, in the way that writing should be entirely separate from the personality of the author. While the fact that it does not entirely succeed in this, is perhaps the writer being unable to create without reference to the ‘myth of himself,’ his ‘personage,’ and also a weakness of ourselves as readers at the same time. Reading a book on bullfighting is like reading Einstein writing on the history of the universe - it is a subject inescapably close to the man that we cannot think about it without reference to the man himself. However, the feeling I get with Death in the Afternoon, is that this is Hemingway using his persona to take us into the world about which he writes - a very different thing to writing about yourself. To think otherwise is to incorrectly understand what Hemingway is all about.
One may not find Heimngway's world to their tastes, but one cannot argue with the way he traps the interest of the reader and makes them not want to leave until they know all - much like watching a man fighting a bull - and it is this that is his great achievement as a writer, not the personality that lies beneath.
'Here, spelt out between the lines of his famous book about bullfighting, is the outline of the whole of Hemingway's philosophy of life and art. For those who would understand the man Death in the Afternoon is the key.'
I think there is some truth in this statement, but not in the way the text suggests. What this book does is give un a fantastic insight into the writer, but not Hemingway himself. It is an account of a character engaging interest in a hobby to an almost pathological extent and then, like the worst of whores, jumping into a new existence until the knowledge of this fully consumed.
Hemingway is the ultimate example of this charcter, in letting something consume him to the point where his life is his writing, and his characters are his character. Can there be any other author less distinctive in his work yet so multi-faceted at the same time? And yet Hemingway is still just a writer, he is not the characters who leap out of the page, he is certainly not the great matadors that he depicts, yet his style is such that we feel his previous works here, sitting in the stadium, watching the greats - Joselito, Belmonte, El Gallo - admiring how they risk their lives at every stage, and do so with a grace and skill that others can only dream of. They are Hemingway protagonists, and it is through his thoughts and descriptions as a narrator that they come alive to us, the same as Robert Jordan, Jake Barnes and Harry Morgan.
It is imprtant then, to remember what this is as a book, an exploration of a sport, a lifestyle and an ethic, through the eyes of a narrator who binds it together with thoughts and opinions. It is written in a way to best show the world of bullfighting, and enable us to share in an enthusiasm for it. Whether this is or is not, an 'ethic of Hemingway' seems irrelevant to me, in the way that writing should be entirely separate from the personality of the author. While the fact that it does not entirely succeed in this, is perhaps the writer being unable to create without reference to the ‘myth of himself,’ his ‘personage,’ and also a weakness of ourselves as readers at the same time. Reading a book on bullfighting is like reading Einstein writing on the history of the universe - it is a subject inescapably close to the man that we cannot think about it without reference to the man himself. However, the feeling I get with Death in the Afternoon, is that this is Hemingway using his persona to take us into the world about which he writes - a very different thing to writing about yourself. To think otherwise is to incorrectly understand what Hemingway is all about.
One may not find Heimngway's world to their tastes, but one cannot argue with the way he traps the interest of the reader and makes them not want to leave until they know all - much like watching a man fighting a bull - and it is this that is his great achievement as a writer, not the personality that lies beneath.
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