“‘Poised on the threshold’: The Unfinalizability of Joycean Encyclopedism.”

In this essay, I propose to consider Joyce's encyclopedic method in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in light of the complex negotiation of narrative closure in these texts, an aspect which has—a few exceptions aside—remained largely neglected in critical discourse. Drawing on Mikhail M. Bakhtin's concept of "unfinalizability"—developed in Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics—and closely analyzing individual sections from Joyce's encyclopedic novels, I investigate the productive tension between fragmentation and totality that characterizes encyclopedic modernism. Arguing that established binary distinctions between "open" and "closed" endings do not adequately capture the complexity of the closural and anti-closural processes in Joyce's novels, I demonstrate how encyclopedic modernism can be made productive for the complicating, testing, and questioning of narrative closure in these texts.