In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BULLFIGHTING 59
erotic desire: "Then without taking a step forward, he became one with
the bull" (Hemingway, 229). Standing next to the bull's dead body
which, only a moment before, was a lethal threat to his own body,
Montherlant's bullfighter hero experiences killing and sexual desire as
indistinguishable: "He knew now that he had loved it, this monster, that
all of his life had been focused on it from the moment when he had left
the girl, that everything that troubles the consciousness is but a single
trouble, that his terror and his hatred were nothing but forms of his
love" (Montherlant, 225). [see Mountaineering, Murder] As a sexual
combat, the corrida causes continual shifts in gender roles between the
bull and the toreador. [see Male = Female (Gender Trouble)] In the initial
stages of their "ritual dance," according to Siegfried Kracauer, the young
bullfighter becomes the female object of the bull's male desire-a "little
doll," a "tall heroine," an "orange female" (9). But in its analysis of the
final moment of lethal destruction, Kracauer's "Bewegungsstudie"
("study of movement") abounds with symbols of maleness attributed to
the toreador: "The boy unfurls a cape as red as a cock's comb. The blade
which he hides behind this curtain is so long that he could use it to climb
into the air ... It is one single, gleaming, fleeting stab which pierces the
wall" (10). [see Male vs. Female]
Bullfighting inspires the awe of a religious ritual because it promises
to make present objects of transcendental experience. Death and desire
are supposed to become visible. But ultimately bullfighting cannot keep
this promise. The final stage of the corrida comes infinitesimally close to
making death present, while the moment of death remains that of an
imperceptible transition. Likewise, the desire floating between the bull
and the toreador finds only an indirect articulation in the deconstruction
of the culturally constructed gender binarism. Such multiple ambiguities
and oscillations in bullfights elicit an endless interpretive discourse
among the spectators, a discourse which never quite manages to overcome
the resistance of its object to any stable conceptual constructions.
On March 16, Henri de Montherlant organizes a public event in Paris,
at the Velodrome d'Hiver, which is announced under the title "Tauromachie
... et Litterature." In front of five thousand spectators, Monther­
Iant inaugurates his program by reading a text on "the cult of the bull
through the ages." But eager for the presence of death rather than for a
mediation through words, the crowd interrupts the poet in the rudest
possible way: "Shut up! ... The bulls! The bulls!" (Sipriot, 122f.). Since