Jake Barnes is a correspondent for an American newspaper in Paris in 1922. Cohn, a friend who wanders there. Brett, the beautiful divorcee who has turned the French capital into a platform between two trains. Mike, the promised husband you’ve procured in the meantime. And Bill, a friend of Jake’s who only seems to think about fishing.
All of them, and the bullfighter Pedro Romero, a transcript of El Niño de la Palma, are brought together by Hemingway in the Pamplona de Fiesta (1926). That is, in the Sanfermines.
The festival celebrates the co-patron of Navarre, Saint Fermín, son of Firmo, a Roman officer Christianized around the 3rd century by Saint Saturnin, Bishop of Toulouse. According to legend, Fermín would have settled in Amiens and died a martyr. According to the oral tradition in Pamplona, ??this is where the red scarf that is worn around the neck at parties comes from.
The history of the Sanfermines would be long to tell. Over the centuries it has known changes. Between the 14th and 16th centuries there was a dance of dates that made them first autumnal celebrations, later solstitial and finally summer. In 1939 the ritual of the txupinazo was devised, the explosion of a rocket that begins the festival, at noon on July 6.
The best known of the festivities is the running of the bulls, the journey that the six bulls that are going to participate in the afternoon bullfight take at eight in the morning between the stable and the bullring, crossing the old town of Pamplona. Formerly, the bulls were taken by the ranchers. From this custom the current tradition of running in front of the animals until they reach their destination is maintained.
But this custom does not only exist during the Sanfermines. Among the many traditions that constitute them are the mass and the procession of San Fermín, patron saint of Pamplona and Navarra, the encierrillo -in which every day, at ten o’clock at night, the bulls that will participate in the bullfight are brought to the stable. the running of the bulls the next morning– or the “riau riau”, a popular celebration in which the citizens sing and dance a waltz from the 19th century, occupying the streets of the center and preventing the passage of the municipal corporation. The riau riau has been absent from official celebrations for several years, although it continues to take place unofficially.
The Sanfermines are a cluster of traditions and an amalgamation of Christianity and paganism. Hemingway knew how to see it instantly. The bullfight, he states in his novel, is “a tragedy in three acts.” Later, however, he observes that “San Fermín is also a religious festival.”
In fact, it can be said that it is precisely Hemingway’s literary recreation of the Sanfermines that shaped what we know today. A glance at the novel is enough to verify it.
There are several themes in Fiesta. The first is Jake’s drama: his impotence, caused by a war wound, is underlined by the irony that Brett prefers him among the men who want her (Mike, Romero, Cohn) and by the exaltation of virility that it implies. the festival of the bulls Jake is also the narrator, but he does not reveal his ailment to us until very late in the story, and he does so without delving into it, so that the reader can read between the lines.
Thus, Jake’s wound invites a symbolic reading, and indicates an evil that is not exclusive to him. Revealingly, one of Cohn’s sarcasms directed at Brett—he calls her “Circe” because she “turns men into pigs,” like the sorceress in the Odyssey—suggests that, like Ulysses, this group of Americans resists return to their homeland after the conclusion of a war that has demolished all their certainties. Boredom lurks behind the visible hunger for action.
A third theme has to do with that tedium and with Hemingway’s personality. The writer was someone who not only wrote about adventures but turned his own writing into it, someone who liked to hunt crocodiles in Florida, fish for tuna in Cuba or shoot wild beasts in Africa.
That’s what the characters are looking for, a binge of adventure and exoticism with three obvious manifestations: the aforementioned sexual tension, bullfighting and drinking. It should not be forgotten that Fiesta is written during Prohibition and that the author comes from Chicago, a city that has become a center for illegal liquor trafficking.
Well, against that dilemma between abstinence and drunkenness, between illegality and puritanism, what these North Americans find in the Sanfermines is a festive and joyful experience. It is drunk publicly, without remorse and with joy.
Hemingway himself was able to verify this after a long hiatus. During the 1940s he was unable to visit Pamplona (he had declared himself in favor of the Republic and written For Whom the Bell Tolls, a plea against the policy of non-intervention), but when diplomatic relations between the US and Spain were reestablished He didn’t have time to catch the plane.
What he found was something of a boomerang: instead of the local small-town party, he now saw the cosmopolitan tumult brought about by the popularity of his own novel (and the 1957 film adaptation made in Mexico by Henry King).
In short, reality imitated art: the party was now a crowd of foreigners eager to emulate the adventures of Jake, Mike and Brett in a kind of theme park, while the local population added to the traditional red scarf a shirt uniform and white pants that was only unanimous in King’s film, in the kitsch logic of someone who wishes to confirm a postcard typicality in the foreigner’s gaze. And, of course, the more pagan side began to prevail over the religious.
He didn’t like it, they say.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
