Latgalistikys kongresu materiali, III. 2011. - Latvijas Universitāte

The figures mentioned here actually appear further in the novel in the
form of minor characters popping up in the fragmented episodes of narration:
the passenger — a ‘southern looking’ crank (dīnvydnīciskuo paskota
cylvāks) hanging around the bus station leading philosophically absurd
conversation; Latgalian activists and political leaders Trasuns and Kemps
engaged in the debate over the political status of Latgale within the newly
established independent Latvian state; students discussing their studies and
watching people through the window of the dorms; Valerjans and Donats
boozing and discussing local politics in an early twentieth-century Latgalian
rural homestead; the black symbolical mastiff that is desired by Tiļne,
a dog that gets killed in a trap while the narrator is chasing an imaginary
burglar, etc.
At the end of the novel Tiļne is revealed as a would-be writer:
TIĻNEM VĪNKUORŠI DALĒCE, KA — ITE JYS, JŪ GAIDA SĀTĀ,
JAM. I JYS RAKSTEIS, RAKSTEIS KAI JŪRDŽS PI SKOLA, PI
SVECIS, RAKSTEIS BIERŽGALĪ I FEIMAŅŪS, DRYCĀNŪS I
DOMOPOLĒ. RAKSTEIS PAR POŠIM SUOKIM, PAR TŪ, KAI JĪ TE
NŪTYKA, KAS JĪ TAIDI BEJA I KAI JĪ TE BEJA. PUOREJŪ JAU MES
ZYNOM POŠI. 55 (Seiksts, Lukaševičs 1996: 179)
Hence, in a somewhat Proustean manner (Moss 1963: 13–14), the
diffuse subject of the narration is revealed as a writing subject that may be
imagined as the focus bringing together the scattered narrator and character
identities. However, according to Kristeva, writing subject is always a
subject-in-process (Kristeva 1980: 124), transcending a focused identity;
traditionally it was manifested in the plurality of characters, while in the
twentieth-century modernist literature it appears in the fragmented narrative,
a polylogue (Guberman 1996: 190). This facilitates what Kristeva
calls ‘a reader’s intertextuality’ — putting into process our identities in the
act of reading (ibid.), traversing the multitude of poetic instances without
the need to identify with a certain “individualized” position, thus gaining
access to limitless sources of anxiety (of a loss of meaning alias loss of
self) on the one hand, and gratification (sexual pleasure, working out crisis
shoulder or a drunkard quietly and feebly burping with hangover somewhere in an
old homestead of the beginning of the century. I could be all that at once.’
55 ‘it simply struck tiļne home that this is him, he is expected to be back home. And
he will write, write like andrievs jūrdžs by the splinter light, by the candle, will
write in birzgale and freimaņi, dricāni and domopole. He will write about how it all
started, how they got here, who they were and how they were here. The rest we
know.’
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