Latgalistikys kongresu materiali, III. 2011. - Latvijas Universitāte

The motifs of being on the road, journey without destination, of intoxication
as liberation and ecstasy of mind relate this novel to the tradition
initiated by the American writer Henry Miller (1891–1980) in his
novel “Tropic of Cancer” (1934) that flourished in the 1950s in the US and
Europe, e.g. Julio Cortasaar’s “Hopscotch”, Jack Kerouac’s (1922–1969)
“On The Road” (1957), Hunter S. Thompson’s (1937–2005) “The Rum
Diary” (1959), etc. Hence, “Valerian’s Life and Views” may be considered
also as a Latgalian beatnik novel. The major emblem of intoxication and
liberation in the novel, Lelais Kryštops (the Great Christopher) — the
cheap brandy drunk by the four guys at the bus-station — is associated
with both Christopher Columbus and a Latvian mythological character,
Lielais Kristaps (the Great Kristaps) the patron of Riga who carried people
across the river Daugava and stood in for the weak. Christopher (Latvian
Kristaps, Latgalian Kryštops) is a characteristic sample of an intertextual
marker in the novel that links all three denotations (the historical person,
the mythological hero, and the name of brandy) constructing a new field of
connotation associating motifs of exploration, heroic mission and patronage,
and Dionysian liberation, all of which function as major motifs in the
novel.
“Valerian’s Life and Views” is also marked by intertextuality as defined
by the French psychoanalytical and poststructuralist theorist Julia
Kristeva (b. 1941), i.e. intertextuality as a manifestation of the multiplicity
of the writing subject as a subject-in-process (Fr. le sujet-en-procès)
(Kristeva 1980). This is first of all reflected in the narrative of the novel
that possesses a fragmented structure characteristic of the 20 th century literature:
there is no single narrator but a fluid continuum of narration in
which the collective narrator (‘we’) prevails, occasionally splitting up into
several voices that are hardly identifiable or not at all. The same concerns
the characters that are also volatile, overlapping and perform rather textual
functions than referential (social, psychological, etc.) ones.
Diffuse narration
The collective narrator appears in the novel as a group of onlookers,
four guys, sitting motionless at the intersection of bus routes connecting
the urban and the rural (one may judge that the bus-station is situated in
Rēzekne, the central town in Latgale, with lots of buses going to rural regions
around), home and abroad (Lithuania, Belarus, Poland that are hissomeone
lacks something, this is their own fault. In fact they don’t need that at all. If
you give a thought to it.’
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