James Joyce's "The Dead" and Macrobius's Saturnalia: The Menippean Encyclopedic Tradition and the Mythical Method

Abstract

This essay focuses on James Joyce's "The Dead" in the context of Menippean Satire—a philosophical literary mode that emerged in the Hellenistic period. It shows that the final story of Dubliners presents an intertextual dialogue with the Saturnalia composed by the Roman philosopher and grammarian Macrobius in the early fifth century A.D.. Living in a time when the culture of ancient Greece and Rome is about to be displaced by the rise of the Christian world picture, Macrobius applies the Menippean tradition as "a kind of encyclopaedia" to keep the pre-Christian world from oblivion.