‘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

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.