Studia Litterarum (Sep 2022)
What is “Tremendo”? Several Features of the Poetics of Tremendism
Abstract
Tremendism is a tendency of the postwar Spanish literature in the times of censorship and dictatorship formation in Francoist Spain. A Tremendist novel generally uses two kinds of time. The first one is historical present: a story usually takes place in 1940s Spain. The second one is individual past: the plot is grounded in a very personal story about an event which is shocking for the protagonist. A description of such an event alludes to the Civil War. The narration turns out to be an aposiopesis: speaking about the event retrospectively, the protagonist fails to mention the present, and at every moment reports less than he knows throughout the novel. His story about a tremendous event is akin to the process of silencing. This antagonism of word and silence, of the personal past and the historical present, creates a world in which dispute and mutual affirmation of contradictory orders is a constant. Protagonist involuntarily obeys the fatal order of things, the affect, and becomes a criminal or insane. Unlike the protagonist, his doppelganger can not only talk about the frightening phenomena but is also able to coexist with it. Interestingly, the description of the doppelganger’s death hints on practices of institutionalized violence. The death of the doppelganger, who is claiming power over the protagonist, simultaneously marks the end of the story for the main character. A change that it heralds for the protagonist at first glance seems extraordinary for him but, in fact, it only returns him to his initial circumstances. At the end of the novel, he is depicted in the state of agony, losing power over the world that he had been creating. He is balancing at the border between his personal non-existence, where his story is interrupted, and the artistic world of a more global creative consciousness, where his “self” turns out to be just a fantasy of some unknown creative will. Here ends his life story and his retrospective narrative begins.
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