For today’s blog, please respond to anything that particularly interested you in the first 9 chapters of Death in the Afternoon.
- What do you think of the book so far? Do you find it interesting or boring? You might consider what Hemingway wants to accomplish in the book–how he depicts the bullfight and the matadors; what he says about morality or about ritual, etc.
- Why do you think Hemingway starts by talking about what happens to the horses? Why is it not tragic when bad things happen to the horses? This topic came up in The Sun Also Rises as well as being a recurring theme in this book. You might look at some of the reactions to the bullfights Hemingway notes at the end of the book (pp. 465-471) and discuss these as well.
- The first pages of the book contain a famous Hemingway line about writing: “I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action.” Comment on this statement.
- Or perhaps comment on some other statement Hemingway makes about writing, such as when he talks about “erectile writing” on pp. 53-54. What does he mean when he says on p. 54 that “If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes”? How is writing similar to bullfighting in this respect?
- For Hemingway, why is bullfighting not a sport int he Anglo-Saxon sense of the word? What, in his view, is bullfighting all about?
- What do you think about the character of the “old lady” that Hemingway introduces in Chapter Seven? What role does she seem to serve in the book?
Hemingway’s Death In The Afternoon is a bit dense for my taste. In simpler terms, I didn’t find most of it to be appealing or interesting. His language and sentence structure is very wordy, and all over the place for me. I found it hard to follow along and keep focus while reading. Especially compared to the storytelling novels we’ve read before in this class. Compared to The Sun Also Rises, I felt as though every single sentence he included was meaningful to the story, but in this novel, he is merely trying to state facts on a subject he doesn’t know like a professional. Of course, he even states it so within the first few pages. His argument for why he wanted to write this novel is understandable, but I enjoy his fiction more than his nonfiction.
However, there were things that I did find interesting in this novel, such as his discussion of morality in the novel. Sometimes it seems unnecessary, but always understandable. As well, his famous line “I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action,” was just glossed over by me upon first reading. Now that I am rereading it and trying to truly understand it, I think it just also just another sentence that is wordy and could be changed for the better. But it’ Hemingway, and I can’t argue with that or say much else. One of us is a famous author who reshaped literature for the 20th century, and the other is a very tired college student.
To contradict Sara a bit, I find the book interesting so far. I do agree that it is very dense at times, with long drawn out sentences and repetitive language, but I think if one wanted to read a book about bullfighting this is a great book to read. I was taken aback by the first pages; I had to get used to Hemingway writing about himself and his opinions rather than short and dry sentences. The book gives new ideas to bullfighting that a tourist or outsider wouldn’t consider when going to a bullfight. He reiterates the immoral aspects of bullfighting frequently, but talks about the types of death in bullfighting. The death of the horses for example as being almost comical in comparison to the rest of the novel is interesting. I don’t think of a horse dying as funny, and neither does Hemingway, but he explains it is far from tragic during the whole event. For one he explains the way the horse dies, or falls to the ground ungracefully. It looks awkward “like a dead pelican does.” The main tragedy of the show is between the man and the bull, and the horse is almost an afterthought of the whole thing. I think he sums this up well by saying “I believe that the tragedy of the bullfight is so well ordered and so strongly disciplined by ritual that a person feeling the whole tragedy cannot separate the minor comic-tragedy of the horse so as to feel it emotionally” (8). He explains how people view the bullfighting and have a completely different reaction than what he thought. A 9 year old boy found the horses dying funny. I suppose the normalization of death in the bullring and the expectancy of it allows you to enjoy the aspects of it besides the tragedy of death.
While reading Hemingway’s Death In the Afternoon, I found myself dragging a bit. The novel differs in many ways compared to his previous works that I have read, (and happily indulged in!). However, I did find the first nine chapters of this novel to be enlightening in regards to the way Hemingway is so brutally honest with how he will operate within this piece of literature. For example, I was struck by the first page of chapter one. It was so unlike all of his other works in they way in which he acknowledges the conflict of morality when discussing bullfighting. He uses a strong voice and an unwavering confidence that work beautifully to pull the reader into this personal narrative that is accompanied by his experiences to portray his side of things. He writes, “To do this I must be altogether frank, or try to be, and if those who read this decide with disgust that it is written by someone who lacks their, the readers,’ fineness of feeling I can only plead that this may be true” (8). By starting the novel out with such directness, I feel it sets us as readers up for an analysis that is necessarily not our own. There are cons to this as Sara explores in her blog post. They can be seen in the way he jumps from one idea to another quite rapidly and uses a plethora of intricate wording. However, I look forward to uncovering more of his writing style within this novel.