In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BULLFIGHTING 55
danas." Despite Kessler's best efforts, the distinction between the grace
of the bullfighter's "dancing" movements and the concreteness of the
killing does not quite eliminate his ambivalence. Kessler thus ends up
doing what intellectuals (at least German intellectuals since the days of
Hegel) so often do when they are bothered by ambiguities in their
perception of the world. He switches from a tone of aesthetic and moral
judgment to one of historico-philosophical speculation in which he tries
to explain how cruelty and beauty can both be present in the bullfighting
spectacle: "Harshness and grace, cruelty and beauty are tightly woven
together here, as in ancient Greece. It seems to me that the Spanish soul
is far more similar in structure to that of the Greeks than to that of any
other European people, maybe because they have been formed by similar
geographies and historical conditioning. Both the Greeks and the Spanish
have, in decisive centuries, become border peoples protecting a very
advanced culture whose existence is threatened by the Orient." [see
Center vs. Periphery]
The "structure" of the "Spanish soul," as Kessler calls it, fascinates
artists and their audiences all across the European-American world.
Rudolph Valentino has become an international star with The Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a film based on a novel by the Spanish
author Vicente Blasco Ibanez, and a young actress from Sweden named
Greta Garbo is inaugurating her Hollywood career with The Torrent and
The Temptress, two movies likewise based on books by Blasco Ibanez.
Garbo receives enthusiastic reviews for her performance in The Temptress,
where she enacts "the tragedy of a woman . . . who was being
pursued by men who lusted for her body but did not love her spirit," but
the "bursting desire for life" that she finds in John Gilbert, her costar in
the following productions, inspires her to an even greater level of intensity
in her subsequent work (Gronowicz, 205, 213). A touch of Spain is
thus inevitable in the first real-life date of such a passionate couple: "I
seated myself in Yackie's [i.e., Gilbert's] sports car, and we rode slowly
through Hollywood. Yackie sang some Spanish melodies, and I gazed at
the fields shining under the moon" (221). From Hollywood to Berlin,
concepts such as "desire for life" and "tragedy" invariably become
associated with Spain, and references to them often conclude with evocations
of the bullfight. In a letter of May 13, mailed from Hendaye,
France, where he is living in exile, the Spanish essayist and philosopher
Miguel de Un am uno expresses his radical contempt for Miguel Primo de