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

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.

By rewriting the Saturnalia as a memorial storehouse of the ancient world, Joyce's "The Dead" reconstructs the pre-Christian roots of western civilization in terms of cultural archaeology. Since the essay shows that the Saturnalia serve as a structural backbone of "The Dead," one may say that the final story of Dubliners may be considered an early sample of what T. S. Eliot calls "the mythical method" of Ulysses: the intertextual use of a structural scaffold from the past as "[a] way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."