Miguel Delibes

• Born: October 17, 1920
• Birthplace: Valladolid, Spain
• Died: March 12, 2010
• Place of death: Valladolid, Spain

Other literary forms

Though primarily a novelist, Miguel Delibes (deh-LEE-bays) published several books of travel impressions, including Por esos mundos (1961; round about the world), Europa, parada, y fonda (1963; Europe, stops, and inns), USA y yo (1966; U.S.A. and I), and La primavera de Praga (1968; springtime in Prague); shortnarratives, including the collections La partida (1954; the departure), Siestas con viento sur (1957; siestas with a southern breeze), and La mortaja (1970; the shroud); and books on hunting and fishing, including Aventuras, venturas, y desventuras de un cazador a rabo (1977; adventures, good and bad luck of a small game hunter) and Mis amigas las truchas (1977; my trout friends). He also published miscellaneous books of articles, commentary, and essays, as well as newspaper articles and comments and impressions written in diary form. Asked by the Spanish government to write a tourist guide of Old Castile, Delibes produced Viejas historias de Castilla la Vieja (1964; old tales of Old Castile), a work that for its narrative-descriptive passages of lyric force is one of the author’s most memorable and revealing books (though it was unacceptable as a travel guide); it is sometimes classified as a novella.

Achievements

Miguel Delibes is without doubt one of Spain’s most significant novelists to emerge since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. His first novel, La sombra del ciprés es alargada, published by the Barcelona publisher Destino in 1948, won the prestigious Eugenio Nadal Prize in 1947. Though probably his worst novel, it was decisive in influencing him to continue his efforts at writing fiction, efforts that he realized while working simultaneously for many years as a professor in the School of Commerce in Valladolid and on the editorial staff of the newspaper El norte de Castilla, serving as its director from 1958 to 1963.

As a novelist, Delibes’s work was marked by a steady growth and progression in style and content, causing the critics to observe that each new Delibean book was better than the last. In general, Delibes progressively moved away from a traditional and detailed realism reminiscent of the nineteenth century to a more poetic and symbolic realism, experimentation in structure and techniques, and a more economical, direct, and unaffected style. However, his direction toward simplicity was broken somewhat in some later works, such as Five Hours with Mario and The Hedge, in which his more complex and convoluted syntax serves the purpose of making style reflect content, especially, according to Janet Díaz, the “troubled psychological atmosphere and torment” of the protagonist. Delibes’s novels have been widely translated into the leading European languages. Numerous doctoral theses on his work have been completed in American and European universities.

A strong and independent voice in contemporary Spanish fiction, Delibes adhered to no group or movement inside or outside Spain, though he absorbed from them whatever he saw as beneficial to his own character and temperament as a man and as a writer. Though neither a regionalist nor a novelist of customs (costumbrista) in the traditional sense, he continued to live in Valladolid until his death in 2010 and continued to portray what he knew best: the rural people and landscape of Old Castile. In particular, his distinctive use of rural Castilian speech won him high praise; notable also was his creation of rural Castilian atmospheres and characters.

Biography

Born Miguel Delibes Setién on October 17, 1920, into a bourgeois family in Valladolid, a provincial capital in Old Castile, Delibes was reared as a strict Catholic. Though his father was liberal in his views, his mother was very conservative; in his childhood and adolescence, her orientation seemed to dominate; in adult life, his father’s Catholic liberalism prevailed. By the time the Spanish Civil War began, the future novelist, though not yet seventeen years old, had graduated from high school. A year later, he joined the Nationalist navy and served on a cruiser patrolling the Cantabrian Coast.

After the war, Delibes, having been refused reenlistment in the navy because of nearsightedness, took specially provided accelerated courses in both law and business, obtaining degrees in both areas in 1941. In 1943, he took an intensive three-month course in journalism in Madrid. In 1945, through competitive examinations (oposiciones), he won the chair of mercantile law in the School of Commerce in Valladolid, succeeding his father. Later he changed his subject to the history of culture. In 1946, he married Angeles de Castro. In 1947, he wrote his first novel-manuscript, partly in an attempt to rid himself of his obsession with death—an obsession he had had since childhood. Submitted to the Nadal competition, the manuscript won its prestigious prize, and it appeared in 1948 as La sombra del ciprés es alargada.

During the next several years, Delibes worked on the editorial staff of El norte de Castilla, Spain’s second oldest continuously operating newspaper, and held his professorial post in the School of Commerce while continuing to write novels. His second novel, Aún es de día, appeared in 1949; according to Díaz, it resembles his first novel in its “rather ponderous, rhetorical style.” Critics generally agree that Delibes found his proper style in his third novel, The Path, published in 1950, a work that, unlike his first two novels, almost instantly became an unqualified critical success. In 1955, Diario de un cazador was awarded the Miguel de Cervantes Prize. While continuing his increasingly successful career as a novelist and writer of short fiction, Delibes fulfilled his journalistic duties with distinction, rising to be assistant director of El norte de Castilla from 1952 until 1958 and director from 1958 until 1963 (when political pressures from the Franco regime forced his resignation).

A Catholic, though liberal in his views, a faithful husband and father of seven children, a passionate lover of nature and an avid fisherman and hunter, Delibes disclaimed all pretensions to intellectualism. Gonzalo Sobejano aptly describes Delibes’s whole career as a search for authenticity, a search for his own proper path. Delibes traveled extensively, including in the United States. He had a broad cosmopolitan view and concern for the problems of contemporary humanity, not only for the people of Spain. In 1975, he was admitted to the Royal Spanish Academy, primarily in recognition of his achievements as a novelist.

Analysis

Critics generally divide Miguel Delibes’s novels into two periods or types. Written in the first manner are the author’s first two novels, La sombra del ciprés es alargada and Aún es de día, and his fourth novel, Mi idolatrado hijo Sisí (my adored son Sisí), published in 1953. With the publication of The Path in 1950, his third novel, Delibes inaugurated his second manner, which implied a definite break with his earlier rhetorical, rather sluggish, analytical, and traditionally realistic style. After 1950, with the exception of his brief reversion to traditional realism in Mi idolatrado hijo Sisí, a novel that advances an anti-Malthusian thesis, Delibes evolved in the direction of freer artistic expression, of what has been called poetic realism (as against his former “analytic realism”).

During his second phase, Delibes experimented freely with new techniques and structures. Plot all but disappeared and a third-person narrative point of view was replaced with the author-narrator merging his voice with that of the protagonist to form a central narrative consciousness with a double perspective: that of the narrator and that of the protagonist. Though the two perspectives coalesce, they can be distinguished by the alert reader. Technical and structural innovations made by Delibes are expressive of his search for his own most authentic mode or path of novelization (although he was sometimes suspected of following current literary vogues in pursuit of critical acclaim). Novels of his second period are generally characterized by a reduction in time and space and by single-minded, simpleminded protagonists; what the works lose in complexity they gain in unity and concentrated force. The action on the primary plane in The Path occurs in one night, in Five Hours with Mario also in one night, in The Wars of Our Ancestors in seven consecutive evenings, and all occur in a single house or room.

In ideology or thematic content, one finds little if any real changes between the author’s early and later periods. An intensified anguish over the dangers to humankind’s freedom and dignity, inherent in modern technological paternalistic societies, and the growing lack of communication or human solidarity in today’s world, however, especially mark some of his more recent novels, notably Five Hours with Mario and The Hedge. His main motifs, as pointed out by Díaz, remain as constants in his work: the shadow of death, the importance of nature, the life and landscape of rural Old Castile (with its severe socioeconomic problems and abandonment by the Central Spanish Government), a preference for child protagonists (The Path, Smoke on the Ground, El príncipe destronado) or elementary, abnormal, or “primitive” characters (the Rat Hunter in Smoke on the Ground, Pacífico Pèrez in The Wars of Our Ancestors), and the individual in his difficult relationships with others and with society at large (The Wars of Our Ancestors). His more recent novels include biting satire of the Catholic Church’s apparent impotence in effecting a genuine spiritual-moral transformation of the Spanish character. From childhood on, Delibes occasionally suffered from periods of pessimism, a mood that seemed to have intensified in his later novels.

Pío Baroja and Camilo José Cela appear to be two of the principal influences upon Delibes as a writer of fiction. His irony and his dry, laconic description of gruesome scenes as well as his use of nicknames and repetition of descriptive phrases or tag lines, often ironic, to identify characters (for example, the priest “who was a great saint”), especially recall Cela.

The Path

Through the memory flashbacks of Daniel, the eleven-year-old protagonist of The Path, on the night before his expected departure—for further schooling in the city—from the Castilian village in which he was born and has lived all of his life, the reader enters into the “world” of the protagonist. In that “world,” Daniel’s personal life is projected outward toward the collective life of the village; the individual and his society in this work fuse into an artistic unity. Past and present are also interwoven through Daniel’s memory flashbacks, though the narrator often intervenes to provide his own perspective on the events and situations being recalled. The narrator interjects without destroying the reader’s illusion that the central narrative consciousness is that of the child-protagonist; in fact his added perspective subtly contributes to the narrative’s sense of reality or verisimilitude.

Essentially plotless, a series of anecdotes given unity primarily by the protagonist himself—he is telling his personal story—the work simultaneously draws a vivid portrayal of village life in Spain while elaborating upon the author’s favorite themes: death, childhood, nature, and neighbor (or humankind’s relationship in society). Daniel, enamored of his life as the son of a poor cheesemaker in the village, believes that his “path” or “way” in life should be to remain where he is. His father, however, wants his son to develop his possibilities to the fullest, and to achieve that end he believes that it is imperative that Daniel acquire a higher education than that available in the village. At great sacrifice, Daniel’s father is sending him to the city. Through the opposing views of father and son, important differences between Spanish rural and city life become visible, leading some critics to regard the work as in praise of country life and scorn of life in the city; it can be more accurately described as simply an effort to present the realities of each. Though without a double time dimension, Smoke on the Ground, published almost twelve years later, bears close thematic and structural resemblance to The Path. In the later work, however, the reader is made much more painfully aware of the cultural, moral, and economic deprivation of life in a Castilian village.

Five Hours with Mario

Five Hours with Mario will undoubtedly remain one of Delibes’s most perfectly constructed and important novels. When it appeared in 1966, critics almost universally commented on its seemingly radical break from the novelist’s former, more conventional patterns. In a recent study, however, Luis Gonzalez del Valle demonstrates that in structure, narrative techniques, and themes, it bears a marked resemblance to The Path. In Gonzalez del Valle’s opinion, it constitutes a partial return to the earlier work.

The book opens with a full-page reproduction of an announcement of funeral arrangements for Mario Collado, a professor and unsuccessful writer, who died unexpectedly at the age of forty-nine in March of 1966. Though not named, the setting is a provincial Spanish capital strikingly similar to Valladolid. Following the obituary notice is an untitled chapter, followed by twenty-seven numbered chapters and closing with an untitled chapter, a kind of epilogue. In the untitled introductory chapter, Carmen, Mario’s widow of Spanish bourgeois mentality, in her mind and in conversation with her close female friend Valen, reviews the day, which began with the discovery of Mario’s death, funeral arrangements, visits to express condolences, and so on. It is now midnight, and she prepares to spend the morning hours by her husband’s corpse. The rest of the novel, except for its last short chapter, consists of her interior monologue or unilateral dialogue in which she addresses Mario’s corpse in the familiar second person (tü), reviewing in flashbacks their life together.

In her harsh, spiteful, and uncomprehending criticism of Mario—a post-Vatican II Catholic who championed the cause of social justice—she gives full vent to her frustration. In a free association of ideas, reiterating certain obsessions, she sometimes rants and raves. In the process of accusing her dead husband of what she perceives to be his many shortcomings, however, she reveals herself to the reader as an ignorant, self-centered, addle-headed hypocrite and thus condemns herself. At the same time, by implication she condemns (unconsciously, of course) the middle-class Spanish society whose values she so faithfully mirrors and of which she is a product. In the final chapter, the couple’s oldest son, Mario, thinking that he has heard his mother talking aloud to the corpse, enters the room. By what he says, the reader gathers some hope that the wounds of a divided Spain—as represented by Mario and Carmen—may eventually be healed.

The novel constitutes a study of an absolutely incompatible marriage, but it is more than that. On an allegorical level, Mario comes obliquely to represent an open and democratic Spain, post-Vatican II Catholicism, love and human solidarity, and the abolition of social and economic inequities, while his widow represents a closed and traditional Spain, a dogmatic pre-Vatican II Church, the preservation of social classes, and an unauthentic, materialistic mode of living. By presenting Mario as a corpse and making Carmen express concepts acceptable to the Spanish political regime of the time, Delibes adroitly avoided official censorship while at the same time improving the novel’s artistic quality, a masterpiece in irony. The author wisely avoided painting Mario as a hero; he is seen as an ineffectual and impractical idealist and as a mediocre writer. In presenting him in human proportions, often ambiguous, the novel gains in artistic power. It has been adapted for the stage, and it enjoyed a long and successful run in Spanish theaters.

The Hedge

Reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s Der Verwandlung (1915; Metamorphosis, 1936), Eugène Ionesco’s Le Rhinocéros (1959; Rhinoceros, 1960), and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), The Hedge portrays in anguished, nightmarish sequences the slow but certain metamorphosis of Jacinto San José, a symbol of the contemporary human in a technological and increasingly uniform and paternalistic society, into a ram, a sacrificial victim of an all-pervasive collectivity that has extracted from him the last vestiges of his individuality and personhood. Some critics saw in the work a radical new direction, an attempt to join the vanguard in novelistic innovation, especially to emulate the latest in Hispanic novels. In reality, however, The Hedge, though a parable rather than a realistic novel, with a setting and atmosphere more European than strictly Spanish, is consonant with the nature of Delibes as a man and as a novelist. It once more demonstrates his profound concern for the dignity and freedom of the individual and his relationship with contemporary society. Its unconventional techniques are in accordance with the author’s openness to experimentation and are, as Sobejano has indicated, artistically essential to the work as a whole.

Jacinto, a humble and timid bookkeeper working for the gigantic organization presided over by the rotund Don Abdón, dares one day to ask the meaning of what he is doing, whether he is adding zeros or the letter O. His lack of total conformity to the organization thenceforth is suspect and leads to his being sent to a rest home in the country where in helpless isolation he is metamorphosed into a ram, having lost his long, desperate, and tormented battle to preserve his human personality. All is experienced by the reader from inside the anguished consciousness of Jacinto, an effect primarily achieved through interior monologues of the protagonist but further reinforced through a series of autodialogues in which Jacinto speaks in second person familiar to his image in the mirror and through the tone and perspective of the narrative sections.

A much noted (and irritating) technique is the use through much of the novel of the verbal designations for punctuation rather than their conventional signs; thus comma, period, semicolon, open parenthesis, close parenthesis, and so on, are all spelled out in the text. The effect on the reader is that of listening to a colorless, impersonal office dictation, which thus heightens the sense of alienation experienced by Jacinto. Much of the book is concerned with the degradation of language (as a parallel to the degradation of man), through which Delibes sought to make form reflect content while at the same time parodying some contemporary novelists who propose the destruction of language as one of their missions.

The Hedge is a mixture of realism and fantasy, appropriate to a parable. It constitutes a powerful metaphor of the plight of contemporary humans in a slowly disintegrating, impersonal society, and in its success in communicating the author’s (Jacinto’s) deep anguish lies its greatest merit.

The Wars of Our Ancestors

In The Wars of Our Ancestors, Delibes employs what Díaz calls a “retrospective-reconstructive technique,” a technique by which a whole novelistic world is created indirectly through introspection or conversation during a very short period, a technique employed in The Path and in Five Hours with Mario. The technique is not at all uncommon, though it has many variations; Ramón José Sender, for example, used it with notable effectiveness in Mosén Millán (1953; better known as Réquiem por un campesino español; Requiem for a Spanish Peasant, 1960). In effect, nothing much happens except introspection and conversation in the present, the primary plane of action, while the major action of the novel is that which is evoked from the past, the secondary plane of action and of time.

The Wars of Our Ancestors opens with an untitled brief introductory section or untitled prologue in which a psychiatrist, the fictitious Dr. Burgueño López, tells of his association with Pacífico Pèrez, a convict in a penal sanatorium, and offers to the reader a faithful transcript of taped conversations he had with Pèrez during seven consecutive evenings, May 21 through May 27, 1961; each conversation makes up a chapter. The book closes with a kind of epilogue (slightly more than a page in length) in which Dr. Burgueño López relates the death of Pacífico Pèrez on September 13, 1969. Before dying, Pèrez gives the psychiatrist permission to publish the transcript of the seven conversations. Through the indirect device of presenting the conversations as taped and transcribed by Dr. Burgueño López, Delibes sought to distance himself as author from the text and to lend to it an illusion of a document placed in the hands of the reader without intermediaries.

The novel is a reconstruction in conversations, guided gently by the psychiatrist, of Pacífico Pèrez’s upbringing in a small, poverty-stricken Castilian village and his subsequent life in prison. Pèrez speaks in the language of the Castilian peasant, attesting once again the importance Delibes attaches to this element in his work. The book’s title refers to humankind’s deep propensity for making war on neighbors. Pacífico was brought up by his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father, each of whom had fought for Spain in a war; they regarded it as inevitable that Pacífico would have “his war” and consequently set about educating him for violence. For great-grandfather Pèrez, it was either “sangra o te sangrarán” (“bleed them or they will bleed you”); Pacífico found this philosophy repugnant and turned inward in deep distress. When the brother of his girlfriend surprises Pacífico half naked with his sister, Pacífico impulsively kills the brother—without fear or hate. Refusing to defend himself in court, he is imprisoned. In prison he finds freedom; he would rather live out of society (or at least on its margin) than pay the terrible price of participation, “bleed them or they will bleed you.” The conflict between the individual and society remains unresolved for Delibes, just as it did for Baroja before him. In its despairing tone and atmosphere, The Wars of Our Ancestors recalls The Hedge. Indeed, with advancing age, the author’s pessimism seems to have deepened.

Bibliography

Agawu-Kakraba, Yaw B. Demythification in the Fiction of Miguel Delibes. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Agawu-Kakraba examines several of Delibes’s novels, including Five Hours with Mario, The Stuff of Heroes, The Path, The Hedge, and Smoke on the Ground, to demonstrate how Delibes’s fiction criticized the myths of heroism, stoicism, progress, and other elements of Francisco Franco’s totalitarian ideology.

Boucher, Teresa Claire. Existential Authenticity in Three Novels of Spanish Author Miguel Delibes. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. Boucher seeks to determine if Delibes has been correctly characterized as a “novelist of authenticity.” She analyzes his work in terms of existential philosophy and examines the “existential inauthority” in his novels Five Hours with Mario, Señora de rojo sobre fondo gris, and Cartas de amor con un sexagenario voluptuoso.

Díaz, Janet W. Miguel Delibes. New York: Twayne, 1971. One of the few English-language books about Delibes aimed at the student or general reader. Provides a biography of Delibes and analyses of his works. Includes chronology and bibliography.

Dinverno, Melissa. “Dictating Fictions: Power, Resistance and the Construction of Identity in Cinco horas con Mario.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 81, no. 1 (January, 2004): 49-76. A study of Five Hours with Mario, describing how Delibes’s novel charts the fundamental economic, cultural, social, and political changes that were occurring in Spain when the novel was published in 1966.

Meyers, Glenn G. Miguel Delibes: An Annotated Critical Bibliography. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1999. Meyers has compiled an extensive annotated bibliography listing literary criticism of Delibes’s work. The book also includes a biography tracing Delibes’s origins and development as a writer and an analysis of trends in Delibes’s criticism.

Schwartz, Ronald. “Delibes and Parabola del naufrago (1969).” In Spain’s New Wave Novelists: 1950-1954: Studies in Spanish Realism. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1976. Delibes’s novel The Hedge is one of the books examined in this study of Spanish realism. The book also includes a chapter defining the characteristics of the “Spanish new wave novel” and another chapter placing these novels in their broader literary and historical context.