NADIA QARAQRA,
2016
“For heterosexual men, change has occurred
when and where the social as well as the individual possibilities for it have
been greatest.”[1]
U
|
nlike The Deportees and Other Stories, Bullfighting hasn’t received the criticism it deserves in the
literary world as other pieces of art by Roddy Doyle although it has been
published six years ago, four following his first story collection. This might
be why up till today; it has been his last short-story collection.
This research exploits the thought of
masculinity and its presentations in order to interpret the short story titled
as its collection; Bullfighting by Roddy Doyle. In this study, I will
be juicing Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity to achieve a discursive
textual analysis through postmodern binoculars.
The short-story collection joins four
blue-collared class-conscious and wage-dependent Dubliners together for the
protagonism of the collection. They were schoolmates, and up till today each
one of them makes sure his status quo is well maintained; middle-aged,
mid-living, mid-hopeful and standing in the middle of the truth. And noting the
casual meetings they have to contemplate “the nothingness” by the beginning of
the story, you might also think they’re mid-friends too, for they don’t share
personal details or the familiar wife-talk or true fears, the shrug is rather
the answer generally.
Thirteen stories totter between the simplest activities of middle-aged men to
their softest spots in this collection. But by the end of our story Bullfighting, when you start listening
to what each of the characters does NOT say, is when your probable belief of
their mid-friendship is completely refuted.
The fact that the female figure is
hardly presented in the story hit me. I didn’t expect a pink novel having read the
title and the main topic, but I anticipated the wives or daughters as active
and present. For this is Doyle we’re exploring, who granted The Girl Who Walked Into Doors the
strength and relief she longed for. But reading a text that resolved about
middle-aged men in Spain, with little or no mention of female presentation
whatsoever, gave way to my Hemingway phobic alert.
Masculinities:
“The Australian "iron man" surf-sports
champion described by Connell (1990), a popular exemplar of hegemonic
masculinity. But the young man's regional hegemonic status actually prevents
him doing the things his local peer group defines as masculine? going wild,
showing off, driving drunk, getting into fights, and defending his own
prestige.
”[2]
Raewyn
Connell,
one of the important contributors to the modern popularity of the term
“Hegemonic Masculinity” links sports to hegemonic masculinity through the
example of the Australian iron man, suggesting that even when practicing this
hegemonic masculine sport, it somehow draws the sportsmen from evolving into
animal-like “tribal male bonding” as Coltrane[3] might call it.
The dominant framework through which I
can get to the core of the complexities of masculinities in Donal and his three
friends was Connell’s explanation of hegemonic masculinity through sports and
gender activities.
This cry for danger in bullfighting is
notable through the four protagonists each in his way; a gateway into proving a
new masculine and independent male is emerging. Nothing but each one’s self -not
fatherhood nor matrimony, not politics nor music- just the invincible selfness
of each; could define them.
In Valencia, the four men gathered to have
a meal and a couple of drinks in the vicinity of a bullring, where a gripping
foreshadowing takes place; Donal as a
conservative status quo master; drew an analogy to the bull in the fiesta
playing on T.V. The bull who is known to be strong and daring, and who was the
star of the T.V for a while, is what formed the astute token of the moment,
inasmuch as when the young ‘lads’ got closer and tried to provoke a game; the
bull never moved an inch. Hence, he was taken off the screen irreversibly. I
find this a great allegorical subtext of Donal
himself, alerting him to move, battle, and recognize his choices truly, the
reader knows that a revolution is to come, especially by Donal, because he’s the one who noticed and contemplated the show
on T.V the most.
“—It’s the fiesta, said Gerry. The annual
festival. Saint something. Or the Virgin Mary.
—They slaughter bulls for the Virgin Mary?”[4]
Ireland is a country of Catholic and
Protestant Christians, and a church door backed up that bull that lacked the
counterattack. Thus although Donal
could transform into his traditional view of the hegemonic man by facing the burning
of the bull’s horns for pleasure, but we get to know, Donal is a believer in the natural law, and isn’t ready to rebel
against all he knows. Because of all he’s seen, what he ruminated was the host
of the event, the church.
“The commentator was going mad, but all
Donal could see was the door of the church.”
The ellipsis of the scenery either on TV
or in the close-by ring, the bulls and the ‘lads’ with their red shirts, and
the music in the street keeps haunting the reader until the end of the story, realizing
that this story hasn’t actually been written to tackle bullfighting, rather to
suggest us as bulls in our own violent rings and our actions accordingly, over
and above the masculine need for dangerous adventure and the middle-age fear
crisis.
Postmodernity is loud in the story, Donal has a set of rules and ethics to
abide by, but in Spain things differ a bit, for what is moral or legal or fun
in Ireland, might not necessarily abide by the same limits in Spain. This moral
relativity is a symptom of postmodernity.
Very similar to the anxiety, suspense,
and pleasure bullfighting breeds in its audience, it’s tantamount to sex in
that aspect. Therefore, readers hungry for bloody pleasure will have to bear
their need for violence till the second half of the story, and anticipate
another self-reflection of pleasure through language instead, yet still within
the borders of physicality.
“—This is the first thing I’ve eaten since
my breakfast, he told her, and she laughed and he could feel that, too,
rippling her skin, lifting her. He’d held her—he told her this years later—he’d
held her hips to keep her on her back, so that none of the melted chocolate
would drop onto the sheet, because it was the only sheet he had and he didn’t
want her to know that. He ate the chocolate, cleaned it all up, and then he
didn’t care what way she ended up. It was up to her.”
After the climax, as everything
fluctuated tacitly, the four men opened up all topics never tackled before.
Supplied by this dose of hegemonic masculinity, personal story to remember, and
a deadly adventure all in their pocket; everything they’ve ever needed was
finally encountered gradually as Connell suggests as the need for hegemonic
dose of sports and their effect on the individual male. Uninterrupted and eager
for more time, they shared ceaseless personal stories, secrets and details of
all types. They’ve found their Dublin in Valencia, their bar and the young
pretty waitress for them to serve. The reason those four men went to Spain
wasn’t to watch the bullfight, the reason why they stopped in the café beside
the bullring wasn’t to live the ambience; it was this fear they needed to scare
away. Although in Spain and adjacent to the bullring, or the musical marching
band out the street; they never went to watch prior to Donal’s smoothing of the path on the celebration day.
Assuming for the analytic sake that bullfighting
is a sport, it would be one of the most commercial “sports” worldwide. Most of
the tourists in Spain or Latin-American countries make sure they’re to enjoy a corrida[5] before they
leave off to their homelands. Connell uncovers the long searched hegemonic
masculinity within each one of our protagonists in this aspect. Depending on
her analysis of confrontational and violent sports, it can be analyzed that this
bullring that constitutes the well of hegemonic masculinity; will quench
Donal’s thirst for novelty and liberty of fear, noting how the violence
bullfighting creates as a confrontational sport is one of a radically hegemonic
nature.
“Commercial sports are a focus of media representations of masculinity,
and the developing field of sports sociology also found significant use for the
concept of hegemonic mascu linity (Messner 1992). It was deployed in
understanding the popularity of body contact confrontational sports-which
function as an endlessly renewed symbol of masculinity- and in understanding
the violence and homophobia frequently found in sporting milieus (Messner and
Sabo 1990).
”[6]
And hence the settings of the story; Doyle
poured his plot in Valencia in the most horrific form of bullfighting; "Toro
Embolado”[7]
was the activity taking place on that night in Valencia, fire was rising and
hailing repeatedly. Dating back to Prometheus, fire has been considered the
official way towards the elimination of sin, cleanliness, and punishment, which
proves the level of alterity Bullfighting bears not only
as a textual evidence, but it also witnesses the hegemonic nature that refutes
bullfighting’s consideration as a sport.
I couldn’t help but wonder what is “Donal” -father of four, kind and giving,
precautious to his children and seemingly kindhearted- doing there? How could
his self-negation and repulsion allow him to become the hegemonic entity he so
long seeks? He exhibited how overwhelmingly content he is; yet still he
maintained an excessive hunger for change and danger punctually as patriarchy
rules.
Through this masculine journey supplied
with many ontological notions of self-challenge, Doyle made sure those
interpersonal relations in between Gerry,
Donal, Seán, and Kin whereupon bullfighting formed the basis for the transcendence
of this climax, placing the bull up the sanctum of
Alterity.
The kind of transcendence that is
“ethical” to each of the protagonists is what judges their attitude towards
each other and others in their otherness. It is this transcendence we believe
to be ethical, is what constitutes the core part of us as humans, as Levians
suggests hereby.
“The
ethical transcendence that springs up in the interpersonal relation indicates
that the egalitarian and reciprocal relation is not the ultimate structure of
the human. So it is that the infinity of the face of the other man is the
living refutation of the pretension of the social totality, the economic and
administrative structure, to be sufficient unto itself. “[8]
Behavioral Psychoanalysis:
Conservatism and conformity take over the personas in the
story, while reaching the climax, another face of the first protagonist of the
story Donal is exposed. He is no
longer a father, no longer a longanimous husband abiding by selflessness.
Reordered, he has actively become an initiating hazardous adventurer with no
horizon ahead, observing death with the eye of a dreamer and a seeker, as J, M
Barry suggested in his peerless fantasy:
“Peter was not quite like other boys; but he was afraid at last. A tremour ran through him, like a shudder passing over the sea; but on the sea one shudder follows another till there are hundreds of them, and Peter felt just the one. Next moment he was standing erect on the rock again, with that smile on his face and a drum beating within him. It was saying, "To die will be an awfully big adventure."[9]
The representation of the men is melodic
and interesting. Just like Elaine and the rest of unseen female figures of the
story, it is rather interesting to me how four middle-aged men sacredly get
together every once in a while to talk about “nothingness”. They can be proud
of their kingdoms; their kids, wives or jobs, but they never share extensive
discussions or problems these topics summon. On the other hand there is a
certain fear; the hypermasculinized men with their Irish utopia are actually
afraid, the kind of fear that is constructing an illness, a contagion. As much
as they confine in and trust each other, for them a threat is imposed if
opening up to each other vulnerably declaring their nightmares and trembling angsts;
is it the hegemonic fear of emasculation?
This psychological tension that is felt throughout the
protagonists’ stay in Valencia brings up Freud’s analysis of Pankejeff and his
fear of emasculation. Freud believed that the phallic shape of horses or wolves
(and in our case bulls) might cause a certain fear, the subconscious
preoccupation that sticks to the person until he embraces it, and he owed this
individual and interpersonal anxiety to the perceived repression of one’s
desires.[10]
“…In none
of these cases would we expect hegemonic masculinity to stand out as a sharply
defined pattern separate from all others. A degree of overlap or blurring
between hegemonic and complicit masculinities is extremely likely if hegemony
is effective.”[11]
Connell suggests that sometimes
hegemonic masculinity doesn’t expose itself as in other blunt cases, we’ve seen
and gotten to know Donal and up till the climax he projected a peaceful and
inferior character to feel with, however, the end of the story proves Connell
righteous, as we witness the hegemonic prominence of masculinity Connell warned
about. In fact, Donal and his friends
might be students of Zeno’s philosophical school of stoicism, with their cold
takes on their surroundings and projection of indifference, each in his
epistemological discourse. Even sexual pleasure has been avoided by Donal although at the prime of his
relationship with Elaine, exhibiting an ideal stoic.
“Donal never felt tired on Thursday nights. He’d be away on
holidays—in France, say, or Portugal, or Orlando, in the States—having a great
time. But on the Thursday, wherever, he wished he was at home, on his way up to
the pub.
It had always been like that. There was once, early on with
Elaine, they’d been on the bed, in his flat. She’d just poured a melted Mars
Bar into her navel. And she caught him looking at his watch.
—Have you something more important to do?
—God, no. Fuck, no. This is
brilliant.”
A minor alteration of events takes place
and a character revelation is anticipated when the fatherhood Donal thought he chose for a very long
time proved him wrong by fading gradually once the Valencia-n breeze had its
effect on him. After spending 20 years being a father, lamenting the older
three boys he once had for not being his anymore now that they’re teenagers;
Fatherhood had seemed a ride away, and kids were one SMS away.
“But he didn’t really miss them. He didn’t
think about them. He didn’t ache to hold them as they used to be, their weight
in his arms, their smells under his nose. He didn’t mind being alone in the bed
when he woke. He liked it, just himself, nothing to remember or catch up on. He
stopped hearing the dogs.”
Among those personal-social
intersections, there rises a political atmosphere in the short story that can’t
be left uncanvassed. The political atmosphere of Ireland at the time is
fundamental to comprehend the characters profoundly. The masculinity and the
anxiety found in those characters especially the sentimental situation of Donal’s fatherhood can be analyzed in
terms of the political status of the Irish state at the time, the recent
condemning of the bloody Sunday by the British state post-liberation from
England, Queen Elizabeth II as the first monarch to visit the Republic of
Ireland, and the end of Mary McAleese’s. The Irish belief in the necessity to be
defended against a threat for their liberation after a long dispute is
reflected through the ascending metamorphosis of Donal inside the bullring, and the compulsive exposure to danger.
There existed the belief that he can have power over the community by aiming at
it, and that staying on the safe side with no interaction with fear or
challenge whatsoever would make him the scapegoat, a position he’s trying to elope
from.
Language
Confrontation could be the subtitle for
the climax in the story; each one of the protagonists faced a certain
confrontation with his fear in this hegemonic apparently unitary masculine trip.
That fear is projected through the different semiotic representations of the
same character as the husband, the father and the friend. Correlated, the
semiotic relationship that women took from the linguistic representation
implied an ideological manipulation, and sometimes irony.
“—Poor oul’ Benazir.
—What a place.
—Mad. Would you have given her one?
—Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
—Too late now, an’anyway.
—She was a fine thing. I liked her head scarf.
—That’s the thing, though, said Donal. Women don’t wear them
here anymore.
—Not even at Mass.
—They’ll make a comeback, said Ken. Wait and see. Abercrombie
& Fitch or somebody will bring back the head scarf.
—Benazir but, said Gerry. She
was a lot better-looking than any of the women politicians in this country.”
In the previous quote and many other
long conversations among the protagonists, Doyle does not identify the speakers
for us, this plurality of opinion and being, this ontological mindset of the
four characters along with the plurality of women as wives, and of children as
a source of life and death at once; all bundle up to construct a postmodernist
atmosphere.
The language possesses the ideological
power to unmask Donal and his
friends; every action in the story and every character revelation during their
stay in Spain are clearly metaphorical and symbolic in deconstructing the
persona of the characters but most of all that of Donal. On the surface he discloses the applauded monogamist utopia,
that perfection of the steady, fatherly, and masculine middle-aged man, but nestles
a vulnerable truth. Interestingly enough, each one of the characters displays a
different charisma and representation of masculinity, but substantially, they
all share the same personal crisis. Each injects the definition of strength and
manly power in a distinct manner.
The complexity of Donal can also be understood through the lens of competition, Donal’s vocalization which represents
his view of everything in the story, is controversial. He is a result of the
social system that causes this constant fight for living. Therefore after being
a spectator, he forms part of the collaboration of identities we are allowed to
gaze at by the time we reach the climax as readers, to witness these
confrontations. He feels passion to his friends even if that wasn’t projected
as well by the beginning of their trip, but they all share the same sense of
adventure, literatim what he needed. Actually, part of his traumatic escape of
rejection and fear might have given way to him being a father always, hence
being there with a flock of people irritating the bull, was a life-changing
experience in all senses. All of the characters represent well the middle-age
crisis, and they fall into the trap of stereotyping in many occasions, in their
conversations about youth, drugs or the Spanish scenery.
“And Donal knew. One day soon he’d open his
hand for Peter’s, and it would stay empty. And when that happened he’d die;
he’d lie down on the ground. That was how he felt. After twenty years.
Independence, time to himself—he didn’t want it.”
Donal presents a relatively
ambiguous character belonging with the minority group of middle-age, yet still
he has a repulsion of everything that implies it, probably because he connects
it with his own vulnerability. Somehow he projects that vulnerability with his
son Peter, who manages to be a young yet civilized character in the story. Donal is a problematic character for the
weakness he projects, and this is the sad aspect about him; he is looking for
relief of what he pretends to be utopia. Uncomfortable and exposed, his
reaction is to become as aggressive as he can to achieve the type of
masculinity that fills any voids he has. It is sad because he has the potential
to be a perfectly independent individual on his own without the need to put
himself in danger for self-assurance. He could have led the best career for
example, choosing to advance and be an explorer. But he prefers to play on the
safe-side of sociality, in defense of something he feels is out there gaping.
Lacking confidence and identifying
himself with reference to others –his children in this case- allows us to view Donal as an inferior part of a minority
group; he’s a father, he lost his feeling of life as if it was escaping, he’s
getting old and he’s aware and attentive to that, he quit school early and
therefore his job isn’t exactly what he had aspired for, and his three older
boys weren’t his anymore. He doesn’t want to accept this visualization of
monotony and rejection of the system if he is not the ‘father’ at times.
Consequently, we find a bold projection of hegemonic masculinity at the end of
the story. It might be totally absurd of his persona; nonetheless, it forms his
defense mechanism inasmuch as way of combating that connection with middle-age
monotony.
It is being himself is what Donal
evidently avoids repeatedly through his verbal and bodily language, it is
having to answer and to be speaking as a first person about himself and opening
up to the world with his fears, insecurities and everything that constitutes
him, even if it renders him into an other sometimes, as Levians suggests:
“Having to answer.
The birth of language in responsibility. Having to speak, having to say /,
being in the first person. Being me, precisely; but from then on, in the affirmation
of its being me, having to answer for its right to be.”[12]
Bullfighting is written by one of the
legendary contemporary Irish authors who supplies us every so often with a valuable
text, and the story explores many horizons that are yet to evolve in the modern
Dublin post-independence. The personas in the story appeal to masculinity
firstly through my research, but to humanity superlatively and vitally. I
always remind myself how it’s essential to not criticize a certain gender or
sex based on those mere orientations in a text; it is humanity that we
criticize, with all its negative tendencies, and granted by an already
middle-aged cup of hope!
[1] Segal, Lynne. Changing
Men: Masculinities in Context. “Theory
and Society”, Vol. 22, No. 5, 1993, p. 630. JSTOR. Web. www.jstor.org/stable/657987. Accessed 12 Dec 2016.
[2] Connell, R and James W. Messerschmidt. Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept. “Gender and
Society”, Vol. 19, No. 6, 2005. p.838. SAGE PUBLICATIONS. Web. www.journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0891243205278639. Accessed 10 Dec 2016.
[3] For more read: Coltrane, Scott and Neal Hickman. The Rhetoric of Rights and Needs: Moral
Discourse in the Reform of Child Custody and Child Support Laws. “Social Problems”, Vol. 39, No. 4,
1992, pp. 400–420. JSTOR. Web. www.jstor.org/stable/3097018. Accessed 10 Jan 2017.
[4]
All my quotations of the short story are from:
Doyle, Roddy. Bullfighting. “Viking”, 2011. Print.
Doyle, Roddy. Bullfighting. “Viking”, 2011. Print.
[6] Connell, R and James W. Messerschmidt. Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept. “Gender and
Society”, Vol. 19, No. 6, 2005. p.833. SAGE PUBLICATIONS. Web. www.journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0891243205278639. Accessed 10 Dec 2016.
[7] A
custom celebration in the Valencian autonomous community of Spain, consisting
of setting fire to flammable balls tied to the bull’s horns.
[8]. Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence. Translated by Michael B Smith. “The
Athlone Press”. 1999. Print. Preface P. xxii
[9] From Ch.8, “The Mermaids' Lagoon”:
Byron, May C. G, Shirley Hughes, and J M. Barrie. J.m. Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy. “Sevenoaks: Knight Books”. 1993. Print.
Byron, May C. G, Shirley Hughes, and J M. Barrie. J.m. Barrie's Peter Pan and Wendy. “Sevenoaks: Knight Books”. 1993. Print.
[10] Check out: Long-Innes, C. Power, Meaning and Persuasion in Freud's "The Wolf-Man": A
Response to Stanley Fish. "Minnesota
Review”, Vol. 34 No. 1, 1990, pp. 118-134. Project MUSE, Web. www.muse.jhu.edu/article/429203/pdf. Accessed 8 Jan 2017.
[11] Connell, R and James W. Messerschmidt. Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the
Concept. “Gender and Society”, Vol. 19, No. 6, 2005. p.839. SAGE
PUBLICATIONS. Web. www.journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0891243205278639. Accessed 10 Dec 2016.
[12] Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence. Translated by Michael B Smith. “The
Athlone Press”. 1999. Print. P.22.
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