On Bullfighting
A.L. Kennedy
(Anchor Books)
Because books are written by real people, it’s hard to comfortably criticize a nonfiction work that opens with the writer’s aborted suicide attempt. In On Bullfighting, A.L. Kennedy describes sitting on a window ledge, thinking about jumping. Kennedy is dissuaded not by remembering life’s small pleasures or by the gentle coaxing of cops and loved ones, (nobody comes to her rescue) but instead only by the inanity of a folk song, and her unwillingness to let this particular song be the soundtrack to her death. She doesn’t like the song, so scoots off the ledge and back into her apartment. “And, just in case you’ve wondered,” she writes, “I only mention these things by way of a preamble because this book will be, at least in part, about people who risk death for a living.” The connection between the author and matadors is a thin one, tenuously constructed. It’s relevant in so far as that life is a challenge, and to keep going at times requires resilience and courage.
The book ends with equally despairing words, and no easy transformation: “I sit down and try not to think that I’ve spent so many hours of my life here… inside the vocation which has now closed with me outside. I don’t know what to do.” The vocation is writing. Early on, Kennedy states, “I’m a writer who doesn’t write, and that makes me no one at all. I don’t look very different, but I have nothing of value inside.”
Kennedy, our hopeless and pained tour guide through the world of bullfighting, is of course both relatively young (35) and a successful writer. She’s turned out seven or eight books in the past decade. “The inadequacy of my misery hasn’t escaped me,” she writes, “the fact that I’m literally boring myself to death.” Perhaps the book was edited with a light touch, if only to avoid sending a marketable author back to her window ledge. Otherwise, it seems any editor would advise against proclaiming oneself empty, boring, useless, and a non-writer in the first chapter. “I was simply asked if I would write this and I simply agreed,” Kennedy says, void of passion, furthering her portrait of despair. Depression guides every sentence, down to an awkward favoring of double negatives. The author is often “not unaware,” or “not unfamiliar,” and writes of elements that are “not uncommon,” or “not unacquainted,” while reporting things such as that “sadism rarely fails to thrive.” This construction creates a convoluted, reticent delivery. To use the language of bullfighting, Kennedy may be intellectually cleaving to the comfort of her own emotional querencia (“a favourite spot the bull will always seek to return to for private reasons of it’s own… “). She’s protecting herself by writing a smart, eloquent book in which she claims to have no vested emotional or intellectual interest, while at the same time highlighting her own despair and–if that’s not enough–her “displaced disk,” piling physical torment on top of emotional distress. “I am in extraordinary pain… And there is something almost frightening about this particular hurt, about the recurrent stabbing ache in my shoulders, the presses and twists, the tearing sensation I feel in my arms, and the more general horror of picking up my bag which weighs, I’ve made sure, almost nothing.”
Without the passages of physical grief, readers might mistakenly think the narrator could find pleasure in a deductible working vacation: research in Barcelona and Seville, hotels, plazas, bars, and bullfighting rings, capped with a book contract. Instead, we see her huddled over glasses of water, sitting outside in the rain, taking painkillers, and describing the endless aches.
She writes, “Too many empty hotel rooms can cause depression–if you still count a room as empty with me inside it, which, of course, I do.”
However dutifully, Kennedy has done her research and created a collage of amazing material. This short book touches on a long and varied history of bull worship and sacrifice. It covers elements of religious rituals and their conversion under Christian influence, and the Inquisition. There’s a lovely, scientific look at the biology of taurine ocular structure. All of this is delivered with a sense of obligation, filling the creative nonfiction formula–a calculated mix of esoteric, personal, and historic used to further the discussion of any topic, in this case bullfighting.
The beauty in the writing drifts to the foreground when bullfighting gently informs, highlights, or undermines the author’s own quiet concerns of how to survive in misery and pain. Often though, the connection is allowed to be too casual, subtle, and generalized. Everything works as metaphor when life and death are strongly invoked and all other edges are left hazy.
The secret to the author’s despair is the most submerged though present element in the book: love, like bullfighting, is painful, inexplicable, cruel, and necessary. Love requires faith, and Kennedy has lost all faith. “Because of that one night: the creaking in the hotel corridor and the heavy, small-hours air and the way he kissed me on both cheeks and said it would be all right because he’d be no good, that he would go and have sex with a woman that we neither of us knew, but it would be all right, because he’d be no good and he was sorry, although he didn’t say for what.”
In the stretch of this one sentence, somehow invoking Hemingway’s dialogue in “Hills Like White Elephants,” Kennedy’s passion surfaces. This is what the author really wants to write about–her own broken heart. “Having paid my best attention, I remember this,” she writes. “This, and… the next, much longer period I spent beside the door, the bedroom door, listening to them, to him. Because I knew that I would never believe what was happening unless I had absolute proof and because I have this predisposition to pay the best of my attention, to try to know, to understand. All I found out was that some things have no words for them, so why bother with words.”