Bullfighting is practiced primarily in Spain and to a
lesser extent in Mexico, Central America, South America, southern France, and Portugal. Its existence depends on (1) a large and constant supply of “noble” or
“brave” bulls (i.e., bulls specially bred to charge aggressively in a straight line); (2) a large and constant supply
of young poor men; (3) large numbers of hero-worshipping people addicted to thrilling displays of raw
physical courage; (4) a smaller number of aficionados
obsessed with technical and historical details; and (5)
generations of taurine writers and intellectuals who
consider bullfighting a fine art rather than a sport. In
any given year, approximately 10,000 bullfights are held
worldwide, usually in the context of a local religious fiesta that may also include running bulls or brave cows
through the town streets, as in the famous festival of
Pamplona.
Although bullfighting possesses many ritualistic
aspects, it is misleading to call it a ritual. In a true ritual, such as the Catholic Mass, the officiate and communicants are engaged in deliberately symbolic activity; their every word and action has an agreed-on
spiritual referent; everything is rigidly predetermined,
nothing is left to chance. None of these qualities can be
found in a bullfight. There is no deliberately symbolic
activity, only simple signals such as handkerchief waving and clarion calls. The bullfighter’s actions do not
“stand for” anything beyond themselves, and the spectators are always entitled to disagree about them. A
great deal is left to chance as it is impossible to predict
the behavior of bulls, crowds, or matadors beforehand.
There is always a fair chance that the performance will
turn sour and anticlimactic, or tragic and ugly.
The rules of a typical bullfight call for a four- or fiveyear-old bull to be “picced” in his withers with a long
lance, further weakened by banderillas and risky or
flashy cape passes, then killed with a sword thrust by a
man wearing decorative rather than protective clothing.
Since picadors’ (mounted riders who pierce the bull
with lances during the first stage of the fight) horses
now wear thick padding, the element of cruelty to animals is incidental rather than central to the actual mechanics of the bullfight, more apparent than real. Bullfighting has been a de facto ecological preserve for the
Iberian toro bravo, a species as rare and unique as the
American buffalo, cherished and pampered by ranchers. For another, the archaic concept of manhood that
animates the spectacle requires a worthy opponent at all
times (women toreros exist but they are still regarded as
anomalies, as are midget and comic bullfighters). That
is why Hispanic publics always shout out their disapproval if they perceive that a bull is being mishandled
and mistreated. Nevertheless, the psychology of both
bullfight performers and spectators is thoroughly sadomasochistic, as could hardly be otherwise in a
show that features public killing and needless risk of
human life. For the thoughtful student of world sports,
bullfighting raises questions of a moral or ethical nature much more serious than the ones raised by overwrought animal-rights activists.
History
A predatory species of mammal known as Homo sapiens and a herbivorous mammal species known as bos
taurus had gone forth and multiplied with particular
success in the Iberian peninsula. Mythology tells us
that when Hercules had to steal bulls, he went to what is
now the province of Cádiz in southern Spain. Apart
from being used as food, the bull was in all likelihood a
totemic figure and/or sacrificial victim for the races
that populated Iberia during the Bronze Age. Local
cults were later blended with beliefs and practices common to the entire Mediterranean area—chief among
them the cult of Tauromorphic Bacchus, or Dionysus,
firmly entrenched in the Hispania of Roman days. But
the Visigoths who occupied Hispania when Rome fell
had no interest in animal-baiting, and the grand amphitheaters were abandoned and never used again.
In the hinterlands, however, the bull continued to
play the role of magical agent of sexual fertility, especially in wedding customs that called for the bride and
groom to stick darts into a bull tied to a rope. The object was not to fight the beast—certainly not to kill
him—but to evoke his fecundating power by “arousing” him, then ritually staining their garments with his
blood. This nuptial custom evolved into the rural
capea, or bull-baiting fiesta, which in turn led to
grandiose urban spectacles organized to celebrate military victories or royal weddings. The common people
were permitted to crowd into gaily decorated plazas (one
in Madrid had room for 60,000 spectators) and watch
their lords, mounted on gallant steeds, lancing bulls.
Until the 18th century, vast herds of aggressive
Iberian bulls roamed freely and bred themselves with
no interference from the human species. When
knightly bullfighting was in flower, the elite sent their
peons into the wilds to round up as many bulls as they
could. But not every wild bull had the right amount of
bravura (focused aggressiveness) to make the aristocrat look good with his lance; thus, large numbers of
bulls were supplied in the hope that enough of them
would act out their roles convincingly.
As bullfighting on foot became more popular in the
1700s, the demand for bulls increased accordingly,
specifically for bulls that could be counted on to
charge, not flee. So the landed blue bloods did the same
thing with the bulls that they had done with themselves
in earlier epochs: They developed techniques for testing bravura, then perpetuated the blood of the bravest
through consanguineous mating. Whether or not we
think that aristocrats were a superior species, it is unquestionable that the animals they bred were and are
amazingly consistent in their power, size, and aggressiveness. Hundreds of brave cattle ranches are now in
existence to supply the roughly 25,000 bulls killed
every year by Spanish matadors. The many brands of
brave bulls that constitute the indispensable raw material for today’s corridas (program of bullfights for one
day, usually six) descend from only five different castas
or bloodlines, all developed in the 18th century. The
prestige of a particular brand of bulls was traditionally
based on the number of horses, toreros, or innocent bystanders they had killed or maimed. On several occasions, bulls being shipped to a bullfight by train escaped from their railroad crates to wreak havoc.
Cossío’s taurine encyclopedia lists hundreds of notorious bulls.
Rules and Play
In a rural fiesta, no one is in a hurry to see the bull
dead; when the time comes to kill him, any method will
do, from a shotgun to a mass assault with knives. In the
urban corrida, however, it is crucial to show efficiency
and know-how; the bull is to be dispatched cleanly (at
least in theory) and in three timed suertes, or acts—
picador, banderillas, and matador. Daily experience in
the slaughterhouse gave certain ambitious plebeians
the necessary knowledge and skill, and the boldest discovered they could earn more money by doing their
jobs in public in the manner of a duel: man against
monster. The guild system then dominant in the
workaday world served as the model for turning bullfighting into a true profession with rules, regulations,
hierarchism, apprenticeship, and seniority.
The first professional bullfighters were men completely immersed in the ethos of the 18th-century urban slum. They detested the effeminate aristocratic
fashions imported from France and proudly affirmed
“pure” native concepts of male honor, along with bold
and insolent styles of dressing, walking, talking, and
killing. Among the rank and file of the down and outs,
the readiness to kill or die with a maximum of nonchalance was the only route to prestige. Bullfighting on
foot appealed chiefly to violent men who had nothing
to lose and something to prove. Ironically, the sport has
always enjoyed enthusiastic support among the same poor masses who would never have chosen bullfighting
as a way to escape poverty; masses who, in other
words, were either resigned to their lowly fate or hopeful that through hard work and daily sacrifice they
could somehow find a better life, but who were willing,
all the same, to deify those few who were neither resigned nor inclined to hard work. Bullfighters were
rebels in a rigidly stratified society, violators of the general law of submission to circumstances. But the violation of one value system implies adherence to another.
The code matadors lived by was called vergüenza
torera or pundonor. Both terms possess a certain connotation of “touchiness” that descends quite directly
from the oldest, most benighted tradition of Spanish
honor obsessions. Simply put, vergüenza torera is a
bullfighter’s willingness to place his reputation ahead
of his own life. This is not a mythical or romantic notion but a genuine code of conduct. Flashy flirtation
with death has both financial and psychological rewards: By all accounts, the heady delusion of omnipotence and heroism that matadors experience is quite
addictive. A retired bullfighter is like a reformed alcoholic, always on the verge of a relapse into his favorite
vice. Sometimes death is the only sure cure. Those bullfighters who best embody the imprudent honor code
receive positive reinforcement from the crowds—rewarded, as it were, for their appetite for punishment.
Toreros who stray from the code are negatively reinforced in the form of jeers, taunts, thrown objects, and
malicious reviews. Readers of Death in the Afternoon
may recall Ernest Hemingway’s witty, catty, and often
vicious disparagement of the bullfighters of his day.
Throughout the 19th century, the popular concept
of bullfighting was that of a martial art. Matadors were
considered to be warriors; their “suits of light” were a
kind of super-uniform, and their performances were so
many episodes of a grandiose national saga. Unlike
other European nations during this period, Spain saw
its colonial possessions shrinking instead of expanding. For many Spaniards, the corrida may have been a
gratifying fantasy of national potency to make up for
the less-than-glorious reality.
The military origins of bullfight music have been
firmly established by scholars. Every change of suerte,
or scene, in a bullfight was, and is, signaled by a bugle
call; the melodies are much the same as those used in
infantry and cavalry barracks. The pasodoble, the stirring music played even today by bullring bands, descends directly from the military march. Over 500 of
them were composed, and the band was always on
hand to set the right tone of militancy. Following the
loss of Spain’s colonies to the United States in 1898, numerous bullfights were organized in which people wore
the national colors and bullfighters made inflammatory speeches. During the Spanish Civil War
(1936–1939), both sides sponsored corridas; bullfighters would parade with clenched fists or fascist salutes,
whichever was appropriate. And in the darkest days of
their country’s isolation under Franco, Spaniards
flocked to bullrings to reaffirm their identity with
something they knew was their own and which they
took to represent their finest qualities. However barbarous its origins, however sordid some of its practices, the fiesta de toros had truly become Spain’s Fiesta
Nacional.
For every successful matador paraded around the
bullring on the shoulders of ecstatic fans, there is an invisible army of forgotten young men who tried and
failed. Like certain marine species that give birth to
thousands of young in the hopes that a few will reach
maturity, the overwhelming majority of would-be
matadors have been eliminated by environmental factors, each harsher than the last. The bull’s horns are the
most basic, physical agent of this process of natural selection. For many Spanish youth, the beginning was the
end. From 1747 to 1995, at least 170 young aspirants
were killed by goring, along with 142 banderilleros, 70
picadors, 59 full matadors, and 4 comic bullfighters.
These statistics do not include toreros killed during
ranch tests or private parties, nor do they include capeas (amateur bullfights), which have arguably been
festal Spain’s major device for maiming young bodies
and crushing hopes. Doctors specializing in taurotraumatología, or horn-wound surgery, are accustomed to
working on the pierced thighs, ruptured rectums, and
eviscerated scrota of bullfighters. When an apprentice
torero recovers from his first goring and reappears in
the ring, his manager anxiously watches for any sign
that his valor or his determination have been compromised. The all-powerful element of luck will still preside over his career. To be successful, a man must meet
a noble and cooperative bull at the right moment; he
must also have padrinos, or godfathers, a good manager, opportunities, a crowd-pleasing personality,
grace, flair, and a whole series of other qualities that are
difficult to isolate but nevertheless mean the difference
between glory and mediocrity.
In view of this brutal selection process, it might well
be asked why any young man in his right mind would
want to be a bullfighter. Poverty is the answer most often given to this question. Many portions of the Spanish populace have been condemned to misery, illiteracy, and lack of opportunity. Harsh as they have been, however, these social conditions are not sufficient in themselves to explain matador motivation. They obviously
do not tell us why bullfighters who were already immensely wealthy—such as Espartero or Belmonte or
Paquirri—remained in the plazas, or why so many men
who had actually found good jobs wanted only to fight
bulls. Additional motivational factors include self-destructive tendencies and unusually powerful oedipal
conflicts. With an activity that has been one of the only
means of advancement in a rigidly stratified society,
whose wellspring is passion and whose lifeblood is the
ritual combat between two animal species, where a
lucky and skillful few succeed where so many hundreds
fail, where so many frustrated men hound their sons
into bullrings to avenge their own defeats, where critics
dip their pens in poison and crowds go from adulation
to mockery in a second, we cannot help but find sadomasochistic behavior patterns. In general, matadors are
men obsessed with insurmountable violent masculine
role models and rivals; their ambition is directly correlated with the obstacles placed in their path. Violence
becomes identified with fullness of being; winning or
losing, brutalizing or arranging to be brutalized, the
bullfighter keeps his buried fantasies of omnipotence
alive. Hemingway idolized masochistic matadors with
adolescent enthusiasm, but in many ways they are like
compulsive gamblers who throw caution to the winds
and unconsciously play to lose all. Unlike gamblers,
bullfighters go for broke in front of huge crowds of people egging them on; so in the last analysis, the taurine
honor code is a matter of mass cultural psychology.
Countless bullfighters have confessed to fearing the
crowd’s reactions more than the bulls themselves. Mass
desire is as potentially sadomasochistic as individual
desire: It will polarize around any expert manipulator
of violence, seemingly autosufficient and untouchable
in his charisma. The dramatic death of a matador in the
line of duty (caused most often by his socially sanctioned suicidal honor), and his subsequent deification
in popular lore, simply carry the whole idolatrous
process to its logical conclusion.
From a historical point of view, bullfighting has
been nothing less than a microcosm of Spain, a nation
built not on individuals but on quasi-familial factions,
where a “strong man” ultimately derived his strength
from the debility of his supporters and the weak got
nowhere without patriarchs, caudillos, godfathers, political bosses, and other men who bestowed rewards
and punishments in accordance with their mood
swings. Until recently, the Spanish political system
served to keep most Spaniards out of politics altogether, instilling in them a fatalistic attitude vis-à-vis
the whims of authority. The office of presidente of a
bullfight still represents this legacy of arbitrary despotism. Fraud and influence peddling were once endemic
on the “planet of the bulls.” Horns were shaved, half-ton
sandbags were dropped on bulls’ shoulders, critics were
bribed. (One of the cruel ironies of bullfighting is that
the most honest and reputable critics are also the ones
most determined to preserve the authentic risk of human life upon which the whole enterprise is founded.)
Beyond tricks and venality, we can see that bullfighting’s personalistic patronage system mirrors that of the
larger society. The provincial fiesta de toros was a cautionary tale about what could happen to people without connections or friends; small-town mayors anxious to please their supporters had no qualms about
acquiring the largest, most fearsome bulls for penniless
apprentice toreros to struggle with and occasionally
succumb to. Sooner or later a would-be bullfighter
must find protectors/exploiters, the more the better, or
he will get nowhere. El Cordobés wandered for years
without such connections, and when he finally found
them they were desperate gambling types much like
himself who were willing to take a chance on a brash
newcomer. The other side of this coin of unfair exclusion is unfair inclusion, young men from the right families, prodigies favored from the beginning by cattle
breeders, impresarios, and critics. Traditionally, the
whole point of a matador’s career was to go from being
a dependent, a client, a receiver of favors in a more or
less corrupt system of personalistic patronage, to being
a dispenser of favors and patronage—the boss of his
cuadrilla, or team, a landowner, a big man in his community, a pillar of the status quo, idolized by impoverished and oppressed people. A whole web of complicities make bullfighting possible—including local
religious belief systems. The fiesta de toros is always
held in honor of a patron saint, a kind of supernatural
protector in touch with an arbitrary central authority
that can be cajoled into doing favors for his “clients.”
Like old-fashioned Spanish political oratory, bullfighting can be seen as a series of dramatic public gestures. Every bullfighter is a potential demagogue, a
man who stirs up the emotions of a crowd to become a
leader and to achieve his own ends. A bullfighter gains
power and wealth only when he learns how to sway the
masses, to mesmerize them, to harness their passion
for his private profit. The matador rides to the top of
society on the backs of mass enthusiasm. But no bullfighter could sway the masses if they were not disposed to be swayed. As soon as we become spectators of the
spectators, we find their mobile and emotional disposition to be intimately related to popular concepts of
power, authority, justice, and masculinity.Without heed
to experts or critics, bullfight spectators evaluate artistic merit or bravery on their own and express their
views instantly and unselfconsciously. The downside of
this refreshing spontaneity, however, is that popular
value judgments tend to be arbitrary, impulsive, and irreflexive. The impulsive evaluations of bullfight crowds
rattle and unnerve bullfighters, sometimes leading
them to commit acts that result in serious injury or
death.At the Almería Fair in 1981, for example, the normally cautious Curro Romero was gored in an attempt
to appease a hastily judgmental crowd. Afterwards the
public was very sorry, of course, as sorry as it had been
in 1920 after hounding Joselito into fatal temerity at
Talavera and in 1947 when it drove Manolete to impale
himself on the horns of Islero. Blood and Sand, the famous bullfighting novel by Blasco Ibáñez, ends with
this description of the public: “The beast roared: the
real one, the only one.”
At the very least, the public judges the taurine performance in an arbitrary, capricious, and personalistic
manner. Since the decisions of the bullring presidente
form part of the entire affair, they too fall under the
scrutiny—and often the vociferous condemnation—
of the spectators. Like old Spain itself, the bullfight is a
mise en scène of an authoritarian power in an uneasy
relationship with a blasphemous and rebellious underclass. For many Spanish writers, the crowd’s impulsive
style of reacting to duly constituted authority was the
worst evil of bullfighting, one that reconfirmed
Spaniards in their submission to the despotic whims of
the powerful. As the very embodiment of arbitrary
might, the presidente possesses total immunity and his
decisions cannot be appealed. The public’s only recourse is to whistle, hoot, or insult. Thus, in much the
same manner as the old African monarchies described
by anthropologists, the corrida de toros permits a ritualistic contestation of power that is momentarily gratifying but essentially without consequence. In his own
way, of course, the matador polarizes the crowd’s criteria of dominance and submission: Whatever power he
has must be seen in terms of popular concepts of
power (who deserves to have it and who doesn’t)
worked out long ago during Spain’s traumatic history
of civil conflicts. According to one Spanish sociologist,
“The bullfight spectator believes in certain qualities inherent in a man that constitute manliness, and precisely because he believes in them he goes to see bullfights.” It would be correct to picture the bullfight as a
dramatization of machismo, as long as we remember
that machismo is primarily a psychological mechanism of compensation that provides a fantasy image of
superiority in the absence of real sociopolitical power.
Perhaps a bullfighter’s manly hyperbole serves to mediate between personal and national inferiority complexes. In any event, the evidence would seem to be on
the side of those who argue that bullfighting is the
legacy of obscurantism, that it is emblematic of the
manipulability of the people, their gullibility, their irrational hero-worship, their civic immaturity. It would
surely be an exaggeration to see bullfighting as the
“cause” of Spain’s former political backwardness, but it
was certainly no cure.
The bullfight is a spectacle of killing and gratuitous
risk of life. It is extremely difficult for human beings to
gaze upon such transgression without being aroused in
some way. Even reactions of horror and nausea confirm
that violent spectacle is inherently erotic. Properly defined, disgust is nothing but negative arousal, caused
by the fear of degradation that accompanies the desire
to give way to the instincts and violate all taboos. In reality, most people do not transgress one taboo after another and set off on the primrose path to ruin. Culture
(whether in the form of Spanish bullfighting or American “slasher” movies) is there to provide official fantasy gratification as a safe substitute for the real thing.
Order must be preserved even as desire requires some
sort of release. The majority of Spaniards and many
foreigners enjoy the titillating taurine spectacle without guilt or moral qualms of any kind. The group
norms that hold sway at a bullfight enable each spectator to feel his or her physiological arousal as entirely
appropriate. Intense stimulation actually increases
commitment to the group’s rationalization of it. This is
the sociopsychological mechanism that has permitted
Spaniards to experience titillation at bullfights and associate it, at a conscious level, with patriotism, manly
ideals, integrity, honor, art, and so on. What happens to
this happy group consensus when a goring occurs and
the transgressive nature of bullfighting is fully manifested? Community norms are already in place that will
provide cognitions appropriate to the intense arousal
spectators experience. These stand-by norms quickly
forge a new group consensus whose conscious elements are pity, grief, forbearance, resignation, and ultimately, reaffirmation of all the heroic qualities that led
the matador to risk his life in the first place. The normative emotionality that takes shape around the fallen
bullfighter goes far beyond the bullring in its sociocultural implications and lasts for many years after the
tragedy. There is still plenty of cultural debris left over
from the emotional explosions that accompanied the
deaths of star matadors.
—TIMOTHY MITCHELL
Bibliography: Hemingway, Ernest. (1932) Death in the Afternoon. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Mitchell, Timothy. (1991) Blood Sport. A Social History of Spanish Bullfighting. Philadelphia and London: University of
Pennsylvania Press. Tynan, Kenneth. (1955) Bull Fever.
New York: Harper & Bros.