Tremendism as a semiotic window. The authority of censorship and the power of (un)correspondences

The article analyzes the peculiarity of plot construction in three novels of tremendism, its connection with the significance attributed to tremendism in the history of Spanish literature. The main part of the novel is the hero’s retrospective story about a crime he has seen or committed. At the end of the novel by a third person point of view it is reported that the background and / or prerequisite for the crime was a social cataclysm, a civil war (the protagonist did not mention it). Two versions indicate the same outcome, but different reasons. This determines the specific combination of ontological and historical dimensions in the novel, the double motivation for the hero’s actions, the presence of “fantastic” elements in the narrative (transgressive logic of action; dual optics of the place and time qualities descriptions). The co-inherence of different versions of event produce also some effect of “defeated expectancy”, which is based on a syntactic metaphor. Three studied novels of tremendism have different plots and characters, but a similar “syntactic” construction (one of the elements of syntactic structure stay intact, while the second is modified, mixed with other referential and expressive resources). This brings the structure closer to Aesopian allegories and other semantic combinations, characterized by creative potential of signification. The peculiarity of plot construction made tremendist novels an object of secondary folklorization and constant adaptations: a “semiotic window”, a tool for verbalizing new meanings, discovering cultural and literary connections in the era of censorship.