Vilikovského pátranie po skutočnosti: Fotografia a trpkastá príchuť skutočného
Vilikovský´s Search for the Reality: Photography and a Bitter Taste of the Real

Summary/Abstract: The paper interprets the radical way of rewriting the detective fiction in the short story by Pavel Vilikovský Celkový pohľad na Máriu B. (The Overall View of Maria B., 1968) and in his novel Prvá veta spánku (The First Sentence of Sleep, 1983). The two texts are in a mutual relation of variants, while their intertextual illumination generates more meanings. In the short story the narrator tells the whole story in the modality of possibility. Several events of the narrative structure are of an ontic nature. The text of the short story only provides the reader with one side of the communication process of investigation – the sender, the detective asking questions, i.e. the text offers the base of the evidence, not the core. The veil of the detective´s hypotheses conceals or at least obscures the reality – and the detective has to use simple existential statements in order to ensure what is real. Here the detective becomes a machine to generate hypotheses about the reality after the reality (the past murder) has disappeared. The novel Prvá veta spánku is disappointing in terms of genre expectations raised by itself – a seemingly detective novel becomes a novel featuring an external perpetrator. This genre method is motivated by the composition structure itself – the trifold consecutive focalization of the narration and two fake solutions. The criminal solution of the case is enabled by the unexpected abduction of the detective: the scene of crime and the weather – the remote stone-pit during the rain – help the detective draw the conclusion as to the fundamental characteristic of the perpetrator.

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