Word: bullfights
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...FAMILY OF PASCUAL DUARTE, by Camilo Jose Cela. Another novel on the Spanish national theme, incest and blood hatred, with the central Spanish symbol, the bullfight. Cela's version excels both in bitterness and narrative control...
...discovery comes neither easily nor early. In the novel-ending bullfight scene, Thornhill perceives that man is as mesmerized by delusion as is the bull by the cape. At the moment of revelation-when he first sees behind the cloth of illusion-the sword is halfway home...
...fraud is worked this way: Celestino returns to Madrid to settle a will, and there he attends a mediocre bullfight. He comes to understand that a certain ill-favored bull, badly killed with four clumsy thrusts of the sword, represents Man. "More and more wary and more and more duped, more and more vicious and more and more mocked, more and more both impotent and dangerous, ineluctably doomed to die and yet still capable of killing: such was the bull at the end of its life, and such is man." Deeply troubled, Celestino returns to his hotel, lies down, experiences...
Killed by the Nonexistent. There is an inflexible rule that in a novel about Spain the death of any male character over the age of five must be made to parallel the ritual of the bullfight, and a reader assumes that Celestino's four pains are merely Montherlant's notion of a heart attack. Not so. The police come, flip poor Celestino over, and discover "four thin clean holes which might have been made by a knife or sword." Has Celestino been murdered in some highly symbolic fashion? Apparently not; nor is there any hint that the supernatural...
...beautiful at the fair, suggests the courtyards of Castile and the filigreed palaces of Andalusia. To it, Spain brought the best she has: priceless paintings by Goya, El Greco, Zurburán and Velásquez, three prize Picassos, as well as folk dancers who perform in the gardens, bullfight movies and three fine restaurants...