Latgalistikys kongresu materiali, III. 2011. - Latvijas Universitāte

of subjectivity, resolving the risk of psychosis in narrative experience) on
the other (ibid.: 193).
The poetic mode of narration in “Valerian’s Life and Views” brings
out a number of instances of anxiety and gratification. One of them is the
motif of death that recurs in the narration both as an object of philosophical
reflection and an ultimate limit of language and subjectivity, fearful
and desirable, poeticized through melancholic and feminine metaphors.
For instance, the narrator states that the novel is actually dedicated to the
priest who hanged himself having written a couplet shortly before committing
suicide:
ŠUDIŅ GRYBU PASACEIT VYSU I VĪNKUORŠIM VUORDIM —
NUOVE IR SĪVĪTE SKUMEIGU SMAIDU I SAULAINĀ PARUDIŅ
VIEJĀ. 56 (Seiksts, Lukaševičs 1996: 9)
The tramp met by the narrators shares his experience of having suddenly
realized that he should stop running away from death along the
moonlit road as she already surrounds him amid her banks and supermarkets,
and meeting her among familiar things is what he actually desires
(Seiksts, Lukaševičs 1996: 43–44). Narrators’ reflections of fragmentation
and diverse states of transformation also point to death as the ultimate limit
of subjectivity, the point of fusion and re-emergence. It generally seems
that the whole narration actually maps out the search for the ways of transcendence,
going beyond the limits of reality, and the two major routes
followed are those of transcending identities and the established modes of
reasoning.
The major instance of gratification in the novel is channeled via celebrating
the profusion (of forms of experience, transformation, transcendence)
of the poetic vision available for the narrators and, for that matter,
for the reader. In this sense “Valerian’s Life and Views” may be considered
as a life-asserting novel with a healing effect.
Self-referentiality
Within the diffuse collective narration, a self-referential authorial
voice may be discerned that provides comments on the novel, starting from
the very first page: the motto is followed by an authorial commentary on
the beginning of the novel:
56 ‘today I wish to say all and in simple words — / death is a woman with a wistful
smile and in sunny autumn wind.’
171