Saints, Beliefs and Magazines in the Legitimacy Conflicts: The Two Heresies of Manuel Zapata Olivella

Abstract

In this article, we will present two forms of “heresy” in the work of Manuel Zapata Olivella as a novelist and cultural critic during the 1960s. First, we will observe how, in his novel En Chimá nace un santo, the heretical actions of the inhabitants of Chimá pose a direct affront to the legitimacy of the ecclesiastical authority, which derives, at the same time, in the exercise of repressive violence by the state authorities and, in a certain way, in the political awareness of the Chimaleros. Secondly, we will explore how the exercise of cultural and literary criticism that Zapata Olivella carried out in the magazine Letras Nacionales and other publications during the 1960s can also be considered “heretical” in the context of the struggles for cultural legitimacy within the emerging Colombian literary field. This parallelism or “homology” will be constructed from the point of view of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture and his field theory.