‘I Have a Vivid Memory of Pulling out Crime and Punishment’: Dostoevsky’ Phenomenology of the ‘Grotesque Mind’ in Barnes’s Before She Met Me

ABSTRACT

Well, I’ve always been a word’s man myself. I would be, wouldn’t I? It’s always been words that have most affected me,’ conveys Graham Hendrick in Before She Met Me (1982). Considering Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, this paper examines, comparatively, the relation between a constitutive, discursive framing of reality and a self-reflexive perception of being in time which reflects the life of the obscure, observable in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Barnes’s Before She Met Me. Following the notion of a conflict between the outer narrative level, producing ‘discourse’ and the inner narrative level, vocalizing hesitation and discursive struggle, both novels provide a critical approach to taken-for-granted knowledge, destabilizing the characters’ conviction that mental states do possess a set of fixed and authentic patterns of meaning. As the narratives unfold, the predominantly external dimension of their characters thoughts and considerations gives path to new combinations of discourse which reveal the presence of the ‘grotesque’, unable to separate fact from fiction, or past from present.

KEYWORDS:

• Dialogism
• grotesque mind
• dostoevsky
• barnes
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Woolf, The Diary, Vol. 2, 239.

2 Lee, 436. Virginia Woolf, 436.

3 Williams, Dostoevsky, 25.

4 Lessing, Alfred and Emily, 185.

5 Russia Beyond, 2016.

6 Ibid.

7 Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened Of, 238.

8 Orwin, Dostoevsky beyond Dostoevsky, 3.

9 Childs, Peter. “Silly to Worry about: Before She met Me”. Contemporary British Novelists. Julian Barnes. Manchester University Press, 2011.

10 Lachmann, The Festival Acts of the Grotesque Mind, 173

11 Kokoboko, Russian Grotesque Realism. https://news.ku.edu/2018/02/02/grotesque-realism-russian-literature-reflected-social-turmoil.

12 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 321.

13 Rigney, The Dynamics of Remembrance: Texts between Monumentality and Morphing, 345–53.

14 Barnes, Before She Met Me, 7.

15 Ibid., 132–133.

16 Giddens, 6.

17 Erll, “Literature as a Symbolic Form of Cultural Memory”, in Memory in Culture, 144–152.

18 Barnes, Before She Met Me, 20.

19 Erll, Memory in Culture, 151.

20 Stevenson, The Last of England? The Oxford English Literary History, 2004.

21 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 319.

22 Barnes, Before She Met Me, 20.

23 Childs, Julian Barnes, 2011.

24 Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 1.

25 Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 3–4.

26 Barnes, Before She Met Me, 21.

27 Ibid., 145.

28 Ibid., 159.

29 Ibid., 200.

30 Williams, Dostoevsky, 6.

31 Ibid.

32 Erll, Memory in Culture, 39.

33 Russia Beyond.

34 Orwin, Dostoevsky beyond Dostoevsky, 32.

35 Lachmann, Memory and Literature, 145.

36 Russia Beyond.

37 Lachmann, Memory and Literature, 159.

38 Pike, The Times.