Literary greats should be properly viewed in context
Objectionable stuff. Hate speech. Anyone who wrote that today would be hauled before one commission or another. And imagine the wailing of social media.
I am reading a book on animal torture. Not a condemnation you understand, a celebration.
The necessity of horses being gored in the bull ring. The practice of wearing down the bull through the placement of banderilla. The killing of the bull with the sword.
As Ernest Hemingway explains clearly at the outset, bull fighting is neither sport nor fair contest. Though he may inflict damage upon the matador or even kill him, the beast does not have an equal chance of survival.
In fact, he is always slaughtered, be it in the ring or outside it. Everything is weighted against the animal, whose ritualised death is the reason for the spectacle.
I can imagine today’s response to Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. Unless you hail from certain parts of Spain or Spanish America, you would likely find it distasteful. Bull fighting presents a particular problem for modern sensitivities.
On one hand, it is undeniably a cultural practice and is defended by law as such, something that persists to this day, albeit to an increasingly shrinking audience.
On the other, it involves an exploitation of dumb animals that is, in a literal sense, barbaric. Even if it’s no more so than nature itself – comparable to a cat playing with its prey, or maybe the rodeo or aspects of chicken, pig, cattle and dairy farming.
Even if the book’s bull-baiting can be endured, there’s also some passing homophobia to be getting on with. At the end of chapter 17, during a discussion of the relative merits of the painters El Greco and Goya, Papa’s machismo leads him astray.
An assumption that the former is a homosexual – or ‘‘maricon’’ – segues into savage criticism of authors of the same bent.
Hemingway condemns the ‘‘prissy exhibitionistic, aunt-like, withered old maid moral arrogance’’ of Andre Gide – admittedly, a self-confessed pederast – to ‘‘the lazy, conceited debauchery’’ of Oscar Wilde, who somehow ‘‘betrayed a generation’’ and ‘‘the nasty, sentimental pawing of humanity of a [Walt] Whitman and all the mincing gentry’’.
Objectionable stuff. Hate speech. Anyone who wrote that today would be hauled before one commission or another. And imagine the wailing of social media.
Even quoting it could get me into trouble. Yet Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature. So did Gide, for that matter, a full seven years earlier. One was a homophobe, the other something far worse.
What’s my point? Well, it’s certainly not to defend the moral position of either man. Artists of their time should properly be seen in context and if judged, then judged against the mores of their respective eras.
If some aspects of their work does date badly, does it necessarily follow that the totality be rejected out of hand? Do we adhere to current logic that reduces artistic villains to the sum of their transgressions, ignoring the rest? Arguments to the contrary tend to be read as apologies for prejudice.
Today’s Western culture, which nominally prides itself on tolerance and inclusiveness, in practice is anything but. Such is the rigidity, arrogance and humourlessness of the current age that it is presupposed we now have all the answers and should begin to revise the work of our forebears to hold them to account.
Legitimate questioning and criticism – the stock and trade of academia, by any lights a social good – gives way to historical amnesia and censorship. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is struck off the school curriculum because it uses a certain word, ignoring the fact that its author’s aim was to decry the inhumanity of slavery.
Fawlty Towers is cut or removed from screens because its critique of British pomposity briefly embraces the same vernacular.
Even something as innocuous as The Simpsons comes under fire because a character who hails from an ethnic minority is ridiculed with the same degree of rigour as those from the mainstream. It’s a measure of respect I would have thought, and fundamental to the nature of satire, an art form clearly beyond the intellectual comprehension of many, no matter how ubiquitous and long-running the show.
But we are straying away from Ernest Hemingway. Death in the Afternoon is far from Hemingway’s best book, but not his worst.
Ironically enough, it is because its subject matter is so foreign, if not objectionable, that his style comes into focus all the more. I’m not sure the modern mind is equipped for an argument that foregrounds style over substance.
What luck I’ve got an old fashioned one, anchored in last century.