Between Fiction and Evidence: The Artistic Space of the Non-Fiction Narrative “The Man in the Red Coat” by J. Barnes

Abstract

The article studies the specifics of nonfictional prose relevant to literary studies. In the modern “transliminal era” the non-fiction literary genre is developing rapidly and is in great demand among the readership. Modern non-fiction demonstrates a wide range of non-fiction forms and literary experiments with representations of human experience, confirming the opinion of scholars about the openness and flexibility of this literary genre. The work of the British writer J. Barnes is indicative for understanding the main trends and potentials of non-fiction literature. J. Barnes’ latest non-fiction “The Man in the Red Coat” demonstrates the non-standard nature of narrative strategies and the related image of the narrator, the creative freedom of artistic search, and its manifestation in language and speech. The text’s narrative and genre complexity determined the article’s purpose, which is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the hybridity and uniqueness of J. Barnes’s work as an example of contemporary “creative” nonfiction. J. Barnes traditionally demonstrates transgenre, hybrid writing, making no exceptions when creating non-fiction texts. The study found that non-fiction actively uses the artistic techniques of epic literary genres, adapting them to the requirements of non-fiction prose. The analysis of “The Man in the Red Coat” allows us to conclude that this book is a stylistically refined and complexly constructed hybrid in which elements of fiction and non-fiction prose coexist in a single narrative space, but the boundaries between them are as blurred and shaky as possible. The book’s text manifests the strategies of the individual author’s writing style and the traditional elements of a non-fictional narrative based on documentary evidence belonging to the bright representatives of the Belle Époque depicted in the book. At the same time, a clear tendency to “fictionalization” of the narrative was noted. It is observed that the artistic space of the non-fiction “The Man in the Red Coat” is formed with the help of artistic techniques familiar to the writer, among which irony, the mode of doubt and questioning, the amplification of details, through and constant Barnesian leitmotifs and themes that make up the transtextual nature of the book, which is manifested in a complex of intertextual, metatextual, paratextual, architextual features and an intermedial factor. “The Man in the Red Coat” reveals distinctive features of such artistic genres as novel-essay, novel-biography, novel-ekphrasis, and the novel of culture, which shakes the genre boundaries of non-fiction. The artistic space of the book is supported by the features of Barnes’s fabulations, which play a special role in presenting the image of the narrator-author. It was determined that in “The Man in a Red Coat” there is an atypical image of the narrator, whose voice is almost inextricably linked with the author’s voice, often completely merges with it and directly correlates with a specific referent. Barnes’s “The Man in the Red Coat” is an original and complex hybrid narrative that fits into the writer’s traditional transgressive writing model and has a high potential for further literary research.