James Joyce referred to his novel Ulysses as "a kind of encyclopaedia" which attempts to represent all sides of life. The novel is planted with a plethora of material details entailing an unmatched diversity of narrative methods. Joyce adopted ``the technique of the inventory,`` which lists names, facts, events, information, and so on, as one of the most noteworthy encyclopaedic approaches intended to build the ethos of universality. The ethos of universality is achieved in Ulysses through two formal features pertaining to the technique of the inventory: materiality and unlimited semiosis. On the one hand, the technique of the inventory, listing a mass of things with little interpretative qualification added by the author, foregrounds the materiality of things and thereby induces the objectivity and generality in interpretation. On the other, each of the inventories, separately, forms a coherent unit dealing with an issue in a unique style and form, but the inventories as a whole constitute a large set of information systems that provide clues to a fuller understanding of the entire text. In what might be called a closed universe, where potentialities of every constituent are fully realised, almost unlimited possibilities of textuality and meaning are rearranged by means of ordering devices such as phonic analogies, associations of motifs, and symbolic correspondences. In such a semiosic system, even the apparent randomness and redundancy deriving from the superfluity of the lists can serve as the potential source of information that helps to enrich the reservoir of the text and continually iterate its self-organising process. In so doing, the possibilities of interpretation ousted at the first reading are capacitated and the novel is given durability and vitality.