Laforet's ‘Nada’ as a female bildungsroman? The genre peculiarities of the tremendist novel

Carmen Laforet’s Nada is one of the most important literary works in post-war Spain, one of the first novels of tremendism. Nada is considered to be a Bildungsroman; however, since the main character (Andrea) seems excessively passive, this definition is called into question by some researchers. The article shows that Nada combines the features of the novel of emergence (according to the nomenclature offered by Mikhail Bakhtin), or Bildungsroman (according to the nomenclature used by English-speaking philologists), and the features of the novel of ordeal, but the specificity of the chronotope and the plot brings Nada closer to the novel of ordeal, which is constructed on the idea of testing the protagonist’s self-identity. Thus, Andrea stays as naive as she was, and her fate is decided by chance. The concept of identity-testing is embodied in Nada through using the elements of the archaic plot of the ‘maiden warrior’: Andrea defends her subjectivity in a duel with a man (Roman); but in their confrontation, not only the predominance of the strength of one of them is tested, but also their equality in relation to each other. A situation of the identitytesting is also captured in Andrea’s retrospective narrative: the narrator’s attempt to find a new meaning and understanding of what has happened against her will is accompanied by a new imposition of an ‘external’ will on the course of events already known to her, and thus returns her to a passive position, which she was trying to avoid. The article shows that the problem of (self)identity-testing, raised in the novel, was highly relevant to the cultural situation in Spain of the 1940-50s: that was the period of popularity of the concepts of agonismo (the character’s rebellion against the finiteness of his/her own ‘self’) and cainismo (a mysterious inner link between the winner and the loser in a fratricidal duel, any outcome of which is equally tragic).