Ernest Hemingway's Conservative Parody of "Ferdinand the Bull" Isn't As Bad As It Might Have Been

It’s very difficult not to be tiresome about Ernest Hemingway, for me at least.¹ He has been pretty thoroughly criticized by now, in addition to being safely dead, and I don’t mean to belabor any well- and repeatedly-made points in talking about The Faithful Bull, his reactionary answer to the 1936 children’s book The Story of Ferdinand. Almost any children’s book that gets popular enough grows culturally overdetermined², and usually attracts parodies right away.

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Of course there is something funny, and especially Hemingway-like, about getting angry about a single children’s story about one bull who doesn’t care to fight. Somebody’s got to tell the children about regular bulls who do like fighting. It’s particularly funny because his own version cannot seem to decide on its own relationship towards anger. Does the Faithful Bull fight because he is gloriously indifferent? Or is he angry all the time? Is the bull, in a word, triggered?

It’s a very short story; 729 words if you count the total and the byline (Ernest Hemingway, who liked cats, another animal whose relationship to both violence and indifference has been meticulously documented over the years), and yet it manages to claim that the Faithful Bull is not angry, does not care about what anybody else thinks, fights without ever getting upset or ruffled or offended.

One time there was a bull and his name was not Ferdinand and he cared nothing for flowers. He loved to fight and he fought with all the other bulls of his own age, or any age, and he was a champion.

His horns were as solid as wood and they were as sharply pointed as the quill of a porcupine. They hurt him, at the base, when he fought and he did not care at all. His neck muscles lifted in a great lump that is called in Spanish the morillo and this morillo lifted like a great hill when he was ready to fight. He was always ready to fight and his coat was black and shining and his eyes were clear.