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Abstract:

In the concepts of “eventfulness”, the question of the (non)eventful status of what is happening is decided not in the sphere of external reality, but in the correlation between it and thinking: the key criterion for the “eventfulness” of a story is its (non)conformity with a certain concept of reality. But what then determines the eventfulness of a work that depicts a reality that is initially presented as “tremendous” (i. e. conceptualized as “eventful”)? The article examines this issue using the material of C.J. Cela’s novel “The Family of Pascual Duarte” (1942). The main part of the novel consists of the protagonist’s confessional notes: confessing to a crime that dooms him to a sad end, he sees its causes in his personal circumstances and character; but the commentary at the end of the novel hints that the prerequisite for the catastrophe was the war. The event presented by the hero as stunning, “tremendous”, is part of the historical ordinary: the boundary between the exceptional and the general is blurred — same as the boundary between the immanent and the transcendent: the latter is external to the here-and-now lived experience, but serves to reveal it (the character’s crime is rationalized by society, and the essence of his confession, symbolically deprived of an external addressee, is realized not “on the other side”, but in itself). The eventfulness of the tremendist novel is mental, of a phenomenological nature: the minor correspondences of the two versions encourage the reader to seek their unity, communicating to him not a ready-made meaning, but the experience of reflection.