In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

58 ARRAYS
tions of bullfights (e.g., Montherlant, 206), a newspaper article on the
championship bout between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey [see Boxing]
compares Dempsey to a bull whose potentially lethal strength has
to be controlled at every moment by his opponent's accomplished technique:
"Tunney not only standing fearlessly before the bull-like rushes
of Dempsey, the killer, but meeting this attack flat-footed and dealing
out his blows with a marksman's accuracy ... , or dancing away and
pecking at the charging human in front of him (New York Times, September
24). Both boxing and bullfighting celebrate the presence of death,
and from the presence of death comes the feeling that something irreducibly
"real" is at stake in these rituals. [see Authenticity vs. Artificiality,
Uncertainty vs. Reality]
The movements of the corrida become a continual oscillation between
immobility and aggression. This is why bullfighting often looks like a
dance or like a strictly choreographed ritual (Montherlant, 217; Kracauer,
9). [see Dancing] Whereas moments of immobility expose the
body of the toreador and the body of the bull to the danger of death,
their movement embodies their lethal threat. It is this contrast between
death-defying immobility and death-bearing movement which Montherlant
tries to capture in a series of drawings that depict the naked body
of the bullfighter Juan Belmonte exposed to a bull's furious attack
(Sipriot, 117ff.). Based on the same convergence of immobility and
movement, the final moment of the corrida comes close to staging death
as an experience of presence. The clean lethal blow of the bullfighter's
sword creates a visible contrast between the last moment of the bull's
life-and the following moment, in which the bull is already dead: "The
beast staggered on its hind legs, tried to straighten itself, and at last fell
back on its side, fulfilling its destiny. For a few seconds longer it blinked
its eyes, and its breathing could be seen ... It arrived ceremoniously at
the height of its spasm, like a man at the height of his pleasure, and, like
him, it stayed there, immobile" (Montherlant, 225). Trying to make
death present by assigning death a place within life is a crucial matter in
a world whose belief in the traditional religious conceptions of transcendence
has largely vanished (Heidegger, 246ff.).
A final element in the complex chain of associations that characterizes
the experience and the discourse of bullfighting is a longing for an
impossible conflation of destruction and union. From the perspective of
such longing, the relation between bull and bullfighter becomes one of