The Horrifying Dantesque Reality in Miguel Delibes's El Hereje

Abstract

In 1998 the last novel of Miguel Delibes, El hereje, came out and one year later the work received the Premio Nacional de Narrativa. Contrary to all his other novels, El hereje deviates from the modern era and transports the reader to a horrendous moment in the history of the peninsula: the years of the Inquisition, this time, however, against the Lutherans. This narration, the most voluminous and historical of the author, shows the terrible circumstances of hatred against that heterogenous religious group of the Christian faith that distinguished itself from orthodox Catholicism of the period. Delibes places his novel, time wise, in the Middle Ages and presents the religious hatred of the epoch, incorporating classic literary elements to show the predominance of anti-pathy due to religion itself, a resentment that never ceases to exist or to control the people. To make the reader understand the gravity and terror of that irrational hatred, the author incorporates images from The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri’s master-piece. Moreover, the author shows with clarity the panic it produces in the future victims, those who hid their beliefs from the State and the Church to protect themselves from the horrors. Delibes exposes the indifference and the silence of the general popu-lation as well as, in particular, the complicity of the Crown and the Church.