The "imperial archive" of Russia in James Joyce's Ulysses

The article examines the novel Ulysses (1922) of the Irish writer James Joyce in the light of the postcolonial theory which has become a major theme in Anglophone literary criticism for the last four decades. The interest of Russian literary critique in postcolo-nial readings is only beginning to manifest itself. Within the mentioned period of about forty years Ulysses has been subjected to analysis in terms of the most diverse literary approaches but having been the highest manifestation of modernism it appeared to be hidden from postcolonial reflection. Besides, Ireland was considered to be the country without any colonial experience. Since the mid-1990s in Anglophone literary criticism the view on Joyce as a modernist writer has changed; however, attention was initially paid to the episodes that openly considered the issues of British imperialism and Irish nationalism. The 17th episode "Ithaca" which is in the spotlight of postcolonial readings today does not directly address the colonial relations between England and Ireland due to its retreat to the family sphere. The change in the perspective is owing to the form of Ithaca which reproduces catechism or school textbook. It also fits the definition of the "imperial archive" known to be the structure that organizes knowledge into a series of discrete experiential facts about the empire. Though the "archive" is an imaginary construction, its existence is impossible without any reference to real geography. It therefore includes travel notes, maps, administrative records or other documents that are to be stored in certain institutional spaces such as museums or Public Record Offices. The compressed form of the geographic archive is the map as a visual systematization of knowledge. Each separate piece of data in the "imperial archive" can be placed on its geographical location by means of cartography. The "Ithaca" archive contains information about Russia thereby including it into the world system. The Russian allusions of Ulysses which create the imperial structure of Russia seem to be a series of absolutely unrelated empirical facts having been united by waterways. Sea dominance was recognized to be an important component of national power and the sea conceptually and metaphorically turned into a continuation of the land. The examples of geography focused on the border between the sea and the land organized the colonial space of the Russian Empire of the early 20th century. So, the "archive" had to become a safe house for knowledge; a utopia that could preserve the materializations of the world even if this world has already disintegrated. But Joyce in "Ithaca" shows that the symbols which are used to fix the world in a logical image whether narrative or map are never limited and closed. Outside the hermetically sealed world of the archive there are places in which the struggle of history and geography takes place and where the facts refuse to maintain their form.

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