‘Hemos ido a redimir al redentor’: The Old ‘Paleto’ As Mentor in Miguel Delibes’ El disputado voto del Señor Cayo (1978)

Abstract

El disputado voto del Señor Cayo (1978), a novel by Miguel Delibes, is constructed around a road trip, in which a candidate for a political party in the 1977 Spanish elections and two militants travel to a remote Castilian village in order to gain Mr Cayo’s vote. In this article I provide a reading of the candidate’s journey into ‘deep Spain’ as an example of the ‘Hero’s Journey’ monomyth, and focus on the character of the old ‘paleto’, a naturally ‘wise old man’ whom the politicians try to ‘redeem’, only to find that they are the ones to be redeemed.

Keywords:

• El disputado voto del Señor Cayo
• Miguel Delibes
• political fiction
• Spanish Transition literature

Notes

1 Miguel Delibes, El disputado voto del Señor Cayo (Barcelona: Editorial Destino, 2010 [1^st ed. 1978]). All quotations from Delibes’ novel will be referenced parenthetically within the main body of the text, and the title will be abbreviated to El disputado voto.

2 See Juan Ignacio Plaza Gutiérrez, ‘Espacio rural y paisaje en la narrativa de Miguel Delibes: el ejemplo de la novela El disputado voto del señor Cayo’, Ería. Revista Cuatrimestral de Geografía, 39:3 (2019), 265–83; available at <https://reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/RCG/article/view/13959/12576> (accessed 3 May 2022).

3 See Pilar de la Puente Samaniego, Castilla en Miguel Delibes (Salamanca: Ediciones Univ. de Salamanca, 1986), 17.

4 See Raquel Fernández Cobo, ‘La visión desmitificadora de la Transición a través de El disputado voto del señor Cayo: un problema de lenguaje y ética’, Tonos Digital. Revista de Estudios Filológicos, 23 (2012), n.p.; available at <https://www.um.es/tonosdigital/znum23/secciones/estudios-8-fdez_cobovision_desmitificadora.htm> (accessed 3 May 2022).

5 See Manuel Redero San Román, ‘El cambio político postfranquista en el cine de su tiempo: El disputado voto del señor Cayo’, in La historia a través del cine. Transición y consolidación democrática en España, ed. Rafael Ruzafa Ortega (Bilbao: Univ. del País Vasco, 2004), 23–50.

6 See Carmen Peña Ardid, ‘El (menospreciado) voto del señor Cayo: la sombra patriarcal del franquismo en El disputado voto del señor Cayo, una novela de la Transición y un film de la democracia’, in El relato de la Transición: la Transición como relato, coord. José Luis Calvo Carilla, et al. (Zaragoza: Prensas de la Univ. de Zaragoza, 2013), 81–118.

7 See Sheryl Lynn Postman, ‘El domino del orbe de Caína en la contemporaneidad de El disputado voto del Señor Cayo de Miguel Delibes’, Castilla. Estudios de Literatura, 28–29 (2003–2004), 219–40.

8 17 October 2020, marked the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Miguel Delibes. My intention is for this article to constitute a contribution to the dissemination of Delibes’ work, beyond national borders.

9 Josep M. Armengol, ‘Aging As Emasculation? Rethinking Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction’, Critique. Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59:3 (2018), 355–67 (see especially p. 355).

10 Francisco Umbral, Miguel Delibes (Madrid: Epesa, 1970), 31.

11 See Judith Hubback, ‘The Archetypal Senex: An Exploration of Old Age’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 41:1 (1996), 3–18.

12 Carl Jung, ‘The Stages of Life’ (1931), in his Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell & Cary F. Baynes (London/New York: Routledge, 2001), 97–116 (p. 112; my emphasis).

13 C. G. Jung, ‘Psychology and Literature’, in The Collected Works, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham & Gerhard Adler, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 20 vols (London/New York: Routledge, 1953–1979), XV (1967), The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 4695–702 (p. 4702).

14 Nuria Morgado & Rolando Pérez, ‘The Complicated “Colonization” of Mr. Cayo: Or Delibes’ Poetics of Critique and Irony for a (post)Modern Age’, in Agorapoetics: Poetics after Postmodernism, ed. Rolando Pérez (Aurora: The Davis Group, 2017), 141–66 (p. 156).

15 See Antonio García Velasco, ‘El disputado voto del señor Cayo: técnica narrativa, lenguaje y contemporaneidad’, in Miguel Delibes: el escritor, la obra y el lector. Actas del V Congreso de Literatura Española Contemporánea, Universidad de Málaga, 12, 13, 14 y 15 de noviembre de 1991, coord. Enrique Baena Peña, dir. Cristóbal Cuevas García (1992), n.p.; available at <https://www.homonosapiens.es/monografico-delibes-el-disputado-voto-del-senor-cayo-tecnica-narrativa-lenguaje-y-contemporaneidad/> (accessed 22 June 2022).

16 García Velasco, ‘El disputado voto del señor Cayo: técnica narrativa, lenguaje y contemporaneidad’, n.p.

17 Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, 3^rd ed. (Saline: McNaughton & Gunn, 2007 [1^st ed. 1998]). This monograph dwells on twelve stages of the Hero’s Journey, which I have compressed here into three sequences.

18 Vogler, The Writer's Journey, 92–94.

19 Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 127–86.

20 Vogler, The Writer's Journey, 117–26.

21 Delibes’ narrative fiction has repeatedly included the figure of the ‘paleto’; El camino (1950) and Las ratas (1962) are cases in point. As Umbral reminds us, the depiction of the ‘paleto’ in Delibes’ work goes further than a simple portrayal of the prototypical rural peasant, but is presented as a full human being: ‘El paleto de Delibes es ya el protagonista humano, demasiado humano, de todo verdadero novelista’ (Umbral, Miguel Delibes, 35).

22 Delibes, to some extent, pre-empts the current problem in Spain in terms of migration from rural to urban spaces i.e., what is known today as ‘la España vaciada’. See Fernando Collantes & Vicente Pinilla, ‘La verdadera historia de la despoblación de la España rural y cómo puede ayudarnos a mejorar nuestras políticas’, Asociación Española de Historia Económica, Documentos de Trabajo núm. 2001 (enero 2020), 1–25; available at <https://www.aehe.es/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/dt-aehe-2001.pdf> (accessed 30 May 2022).

23 Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 135–43.

24 Vogler, The Writer's Journey, 139.

25 Vogler, The Writer's Journey, 143–55.

26 Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 143.

27 Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 343.

28 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self Reliance’ (1841), American Transcendentalism Web, n.p.; available at <https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/selfreliance.html> (accessed 31 March 2021).

29 Emerson, Nature (1836), American Transcendentalism Web, n.p.; available at <https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/nature.html> (accessed 12 May 2022).

30 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods, The Project Gutenberg eBook of Walden, by Henry David Thoreau (1854), n. p.; available at <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm> (accessed 31 March 2021).

31 Vogler, The Writer's Journey, 155–74.

32 Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 15.

33 R. W. Connell, Gender and Power (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), 155.

34 Connell, Gender and Power, 182.

35 Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 159.

36 Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 18.

37 Morgado & Pérez, ‘The Complicated “Colonization” of Mr. Cayo’, 152.

38 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde & Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010) [1^st French ed. 1949]), 390.

39 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Borde & Malovany-Chevallier, 245.

40 Dana A. Heller, The Feminization of Quest-Romance: Radical Departures (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990), 2.

41 Matthew Gutmann, ‘Alternative Cultures of Masculinity: An Anthropological Approach’, in Alternative Cultures of Masculinities for a Changing World, ed. Josep M. Armengol & Angels Carabí (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 51–62 (p. 51).

42 Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 215.

43 Jung, ‘The Stages of Life’, trans. Dell & Baynes, 112.

44 Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 227.

45 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1973 [1^st ed. 1957]), 151.

46 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 199.

47 Victor Minichiello, Jan Browne & Hald Kend, ‘Pereceptions and Consequences of Ageism: Views of Older People’, Ageing and Society, 20:3 (2000), 253–78 (p. 253).

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.