“A Family Chronicle”: Renegotiating Literary Maximalism and Encyclopedism

The goal of this paper is to explore the distinctions between two terms that are usually used interchangeably to describe big, ambitious fiction: encyclopedism and maximalism. It engages with theorizations relating to the encyclopedic mode of writing, most notably EdwardMendelson’s, and recent definitions of maximalism as an epistemological approach– one that values the pursuit of detail as a means of training attention (Letzler 2017; Levey 2017) or fostering empathy (Severs 2017). Encyclopedic narratives are usually characterized by the aspiration to an all-encompassing representation of the world. Indeed, an encyclopedia seeks to capture the privileged knowledge of the universe as opposed to trivial information. Instead, maximalist texts embrace, if not rely on, seemingly useless information of the worlds they describe, but not necessarily for mimetic purposes. Attending to the possible overlaps between these two literary forms, this article analyzes two texts that have never been studied alongside, namely “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940) and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). While reading the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov in tandem is no novelty, the unorthodoxy of choice in this juxtaposition will prove useful to make my point. Ultimately, the results of my analyses demonstrate that these texts contribute to an understanding of encyclopedism, though in different ways, while not both might be described as maximalist writing. Furthermore, they show that whereas a neat distinction between these two modes of writing cannot always be easily drawn, it helps recognize their finer, oft overlooked differences and affordances.