Postmodern Fiction and the Destabilization of the Metanarrative: Jiri Kratochvil's Urmedved

This article investigates how the hypothesis of a plural reality is manifest in the fictional world of Urmedved (Ur-bear-novel, 1999), a work by Jiri Kratochvil (b. 1940). He employs for this purpose the theoretical concept of Postmodern fiction as an expression of a style that foregrounds the ontological structure, which was developed by Brian McHale, and the model of the narrative universe, as constructed by Marie-Laure Ryan. The analysis of these premisses of Postmodern fiction is aimed chiefly at the recursive narrative structure of the novel, which enables the disruption of the ontological boundaries or the bridging of narrative levels of different ontological status. McHale's theoretical concept of the ontological dominant is explained by employing Lyotard's hypothesis about mistrust of metanarratives. Because metanarratives are based on the premiss of a single accessible reality, a single real world, this loss does not merely mean the loss of trust in ideology, but also disrupts the need for a single real world. Moreover, this need is important for us as human beings - it reveals itself to be the organization of discontinuous entities into coherent wholes (as in the case of myth). Kratochvil's Urmedved reveals the ideological abuse of the need for a single reality, while undermining this human need. Postmodern fiction may destabilize the metanarrative by laying bare the contrivedness that distances from reality an individual member of the society veiled in the metanarrative. By the very nature of the need for one real world, however, the metanarrative remains dear to us.