Andrea's Baggage: Reading (in) Laforet's Nada

Abstract

One overlooked feature of Andrea's arrival in Barcelona at the beginning of Nada is the old and battered suitcase that she drags with her to her relatives’ apartment. It is filled almost entirely with books, books that—we may assume—she has read and plans to read again. Reading, it is clear, has played a large part in her intellectual and psychological formation as a teenager, but one of the strands of her overall maturation process during the forthcoming year will involve achieving a greater understanding of the distortions involved in how people (including her) see life through the optic of literature and literature through the optic of life. Gradually disabused of her overly literary adolescent imaginings, then, she eventually becomes a writer—of the text that is Nada—who is well aware of the traps that reading and writing hold.

Keywords:

• autobiographical novel
• character development
• Carmen Laforet
• Nada
• reading

Notes

1. For ease of reference, for all quotations I give the chapter number first, followed by the page number from the edition that I am using.

2. There are, of course, a large number of “gaps” in Nada, of all sorts, and this lack of information is just one of them. One other instance is, despite the fact that the action covers a full twelve months, there is no mention of Andrea ever celebrating a birthday while she is living in Barcelona.

3. According to López de la Cruz 295, 12.6% of students attending Spanish universities in 1940 were women, and a majority of that number was, as might be expected, enrolled in Filosofía and Letras.

4. It seems hardly coincidental that another token of devotion, a black plait—Andrea's mother's—is stored among her parents’ things at Isabel's house: “su larga trenza de pelo negro estaba guardada en un viejo armario de pueblo muy lejos de allí” (8: 95).

5. Thompson points out that his name recalls the French word for a novel, roman (296).

6. The final key to the puzzle regarding Angustias is provided by Juan, just after Andrea makes this telling comment. Running along the platform beside the train as it pulls out of the station, Juan yells at Angustias, “No te casaste con él porque a tu padre se le ocurrió decirte que era poco el hijo de un tendero para ti … !Por esooo! Y cuando volvió casado y rico de América lo has estado entreteniendo, se lo has robado a su mujer durante veinte años” (9: 103).

7. The recriminations over Andrea's missing handkerchief are described by her as a “borrascosa escena” (7: 75), with a clear echo of the Spanish translation of Wuthering Heights, Cumbres borrascosas. Foster cites both Juan Luis Alborg and Rafael Vásquez Zamora as making a stylistic comparison with Brontë, but no one seems to have noticed the linguistic link (47). For his part, Jordan likens Andrea's lack of proactive agency to that of “many nineteenth-century literary heroines (predominantly silent, brooding, coy, blushing)” (63) without developing the observation further.

8. Not once does the narrative venture inside a lecture hall, and the content of the classes she takes is never mentioned. All we can glean is that homework consists of doing translations from Latin and Greek (12: 127, 13: 139), hardly the stuff that dreams are made on.

9. One deduction, however, can be made from probably the most striking narratorial comment (it is really more of an outburst) in the whole book, which is made in regard to Andrea's response to Gerardo kissing her. Utterly confused by this action, the eighteen-year-old Andrea can only think that he must somehow, suddenly, have fallen in love with her, and then her older self bitterly adds: “Porque entonces era lo suficientemente atontada para no darme cuenta de que aquél [Gerardo] era uno de los infinitos hombres que nacen sólo para sementales y junto a una mujer no entienden otra actitud que ésta. Su cerebro y su corazón no llegan a más” (12: 136). Whatever else happened to Andrea in the interim, she must have had several experiences with men that led her to arrive at this damning conclusion. Strangely, Amago does not cite or comment on this telling passage in his article on Andrea's possibly lesbian inclinations.

10. Johnson 53–54; Schumm 41–42; Spires 52, 71–72; cf. Jordan 77–78, 81, 88 and Rodríguez 36. This idea of a delayed response would seem to fit well with the much-quoted phrases at the end of the novel: “De la casa de la calle de Aribau no me llevaba nada. Al menos, así creía yo entonces” (25: 275). If the year in Barcelona corresponds to 1939–40 or 1940–41, and the novel manuscript was submitted to the competition for the very first Premio Eugenio Nadal in 1944 (winner announced 6 January 1945), then in theory, the time lapse can only be of a few years.

11. Gloria remains “stuck” at this stage; Margarita gets past it in a very different manner from Andrea—through the experiences of romantic disillusionment, marriage, and childbirth.

12. The midnight arrival and dawn departure can obviously be read symbolically. Andrea herself is quite aware of both the similarities and differences: “No tenía ahora las mismas ilusiones, pero aquella partida me emocionaba como una liberación” (25: 275). El Saffar lists a number of other internal patterns that can be discerned in the novel (121).

13. Johnson 50. Curiously, Jordan seems to identify narrative closure as a desirable thing—though many acclaimed novels offer no such effect—and connects this lack in Nada with supposed deficiencies in the narrator's psychological development (67).