Who wants to be Raskólnikov? - The theatrum mundi before the post-defrosting time

Abstract

This essay addresses Agustina Bessa-Luís’s novel Antes do degelo departing from a trait of Baroque culture that seems to persist in contemporary Portuguese prose. The perception of the world as a theater allows one to problematize man’s relation to reality, and, in that context, language. Thus, an explicit intertextual dialog between this Portuguese novel and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment functions as the starting point of our reading, which seeks to emphasize, beyond the tension that is proper to the process of resuming the literary referent, two other correlated aspects: first, the tense relationship between crime and the language that supposedly represents it; second, the process of “disfiguration” that Raskolnikov undergoes in the hands of Agustina, one which guarantees the update and pertinence of her reflexions about the values that organize this postdefrosting time.