There are books that come not to explain anything, but to restore a difficulty. Alfonso Verdoy Blanco's belongs to that rare species: it does not seek to settle the problem of bullfighting, but to return it to its natural place, which is conflict. In a time that demands immediate answers, Verdoy introduces a delay. And in that delay something begins to happen.
Because bullfighting —this the book knows and explains— is not an object that can be resolved by argument, but a form that resists being translated. Hence its insistence on thinking it simultaneously as art and as myth: two words that sound worn out today, but that in this context recover a strange precision. Art as that which gives form to a limit-experience; myth as that which makes it legible without exhausting it.
The decisive thing, however, is not in the thesis, but in the displacement. Verdoy does not dwell on the corrida as fact, but on the lidia as structure: a space where the human gesture measures itself against a force that does not belong to it. There is no celebration here, nor condemnation, but an attempt at understanding that demands something ever rarer: to look without haste.
The problem is that looking at bullfighting —really looking at it— requires accepting a discomfort that contemporary discourse tends to avoid. The bull is not an available symbol. It is not a metaphor we can domesticate at will. It is, rather, what dismantles any attempt at a calm reading: a presence that introduces into the space of art something that art, in principle, should not be able to contain.
And yet, bullfighting exists.
There the first short-circuit occurs. If modernity has tended to separate aesthetics radically from violence, bullfighting insists on their impossible conjunction. Not as provocation, but as remainder. As the survival of an ancient form of relation with the world in which beauty was not exempt from danger nor ritual from blood.
Verdoy formulates it with prudence, perhaps even with an excess of prudence. He speaks of symbol, of tradition, of cultural heritage. But beneath that more or less conciliatory language beats a more uncomfortable intuition: that bullfighting is not only a cultural phenomenon, but an anomaly. Something that does not quite fit into the categories with which we organise experience today.
That is why the book is more interesting when it approaches, even laterally, what we might call the irreducible core of the lidia: that instant in which the gesture can no longer be explained by technique or by intention. The moment in which everything is at stake without guarantees.
The emboque.
Not as a technical term, but as a figure of time. A time that neither advances nor accumulates, but contracts. An absolute present in which the form appears or fails without mediation. At that point, bullfighting ceases to be discourse and becomes event. And it is there that any attempt at interpretation becomes necessarily insufficient.
Verdoy's merit consists in not closing that insufficiency. In keeping the question open. Against the contemporary temptation to reduce bullfighting to a moral problem —legitimate, no doubt, but not the only one—, the book insists that there is something more at stake. Something that has to do with the way a culture thinks itself through its most extreme forms.
Because bullfighting, seen thus, is not only a debatable practice, but an uncomfortable mirror. In it are reflected not only courage or violence, but also a certain idea of form: the possibility that man may give form, figure and outline, if only for an instant, to that which overflows him.
It is not a matter of justifying anything. Nor of saving anything. Perhaps not even of fully understanding.
It is, rather, a matter of holding the gaze.
And of accepting that there are forms —like bullfighting— that cannot be integrated without loss into the world we have built. Forms that, precisely for that reason, still say something. Not because they are right, but because they do not quite disappear.
In that sense, Verdoy's book offers no answers. It offers resistance. And that, today, is far less frequent and far more necessary.
Alfonso Verdoy Blanco, El toreo. Arte y mito. Editorial Renacimiento, Seville, 2023.