The Joyce’s Tradition of V. Pelevin’s Novel «Empire ‘V’»: from Anti-scientism to the Invention of a New Character

Abstract

The article examines how Joyce’s detached attitude to progress in the novel Ulysses transforms into the parody-comic anti-scientism of Victor Pelevin’s novel Empire ‘V’. The Russian author not only refuses to recognize positive ontology as of scientific mood but also reduces its mission only to the destruction of reality and return to the basic intuition. The paper proves that Joyce’s methods of splitting the consciousness of the one acquiring scientific knowledge (cognizer) are rethought by Pelevin as the cognizer’s consciousness multiplied to infinity, which produces a subjective multiple reality, turning into a hypertext. Therefore, Pelevin turns Joyce’s hypostatized elements into independent agents, being characters of a new type. These characters are faced with the question of their real / possible existence in a subjective multiple reality. Thus, these new characters are interpreted within the framework of the subject-object antinomy, as fiction proceeds from subject-object relations. The paper aims to determine the influence of the Joycean principle of splitting subjective consciousness in Ulysses on the creation by V. Pelevin of characters and ways of expressing the new type in Empire ‘V’. The subject of study is the features of the invention of the new-type characters as a tool for organizing fictional decisions in Pelevin’s novel Empire ‘V’. The paper is the first study to prove that the artistic method showing the split consciousness in the heroes of the Pelevin’s novel directly develops Joyce’s epistemological tradition of the cognizer’s crisis, but in the era of weird-philosophy. The main research techniques employed: comparative method, historical and cultural contextualization, discourse analysis.