Vol. 39 No. 14 · 13 July 2017
page 35 | 2216 words

Diary

Duncan Wheeler

I knew very little about Víctor Barrio before, slightly hungover, I was asked by BBC World News on the morning of 10 July last year to comment on his televised death. It was the first time a matador had died in a professional Spanish bullfight since 1985. I’d spent a number of summers going to corridas when I was researching a book on the cultural politics of Spain’s transition to democracy in the late 1970s, and became convinced that bullfighting was an underexplored chapter in this history. Barrio, I hazily recalled, had been a prodigious novillero (an apprentice who takes on younger bulls), but had struggled for engagements since graduating as a bullfighter in 2012. This was just the way things were: the figuras have a monopoly on appearances in the country’s most lucrative bullrings. I kept missing the BBC researcher’s calls and went back to nursing my hangover.

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Vol. 39 No. 14 · 13 July 2017 » Duncan Wheeler » Diary
page 35 | 2216 words

Letters

Vol. 39 No. 15 · 27 July 2017

Reading Duncan Wheeler’s Diary, admittedly with interest but also distaste and even anger, it struck me that the LRB would never allocate space to a comparable meditation on foxhunting by a hunt supporter, this pursuit having none of the high-flown mystique of the bullfight that fascinates a certain kind of dissociative intellect (LRB, 13 July).

Of course I’m not arguing here for a platform for foxhunting, which has arcane justifications of its own anyway, or for any other bloodsport. I’m merely pointing out to my own satisfaction that Duncan Wheeler, though he writes well and coolly, seems, like others, to have ring-fenced a numb area in his sensibilities so as to avoid compromising the affectless integrity of his imaginative freedom.

Others correspondents rightly take issue with what they perceive as textual mistakes and misrepresentations and the like. I write picturing a dazed, crazed and bloodied bull facing certain death, while up in the stands a professor of Spanish, doubtless of fine mind and spotless character, enjoys the subtleties of the matador’s personality and performance, his nonchalance and disdain particularly appreciable by the connoisseur.

John Charlesworth
Clitheroe

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