The Metamorphoses of Apuleius

On Making an Ass of Oneself

Carl C. Schlam

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807865880, 9780807820131
• eBook ISBN: 9781469620718
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

This book examines the comic and philosophical aspects of Apuleius' Metamorphoses, the ancient Roman novel also known as The Golden Ass. The tales that comprise the novel, long known for their bawdiness and wit, describe the adventures of Lucius, a man who is transformed into an ass. Carl Schlam argues that the work cannot be seen as purely comic or wholly serious; he says that the entertainment offered by the novel includes a vision of the possibilities of grace and salvation.

Many critics have seen a discontinuity between the comedic aspects of the first ten tales and the more elevated account in the eleventh of the initiation of Lucius into the cult of Isis. But Schlam uncovers patterns of narrative and a thematic structure that give coherence to the adventures of Lucius and to the diversity of tales embedded in the principal narrative. Schlam sees a single seriocomic purpose pervading the narrative, which is marked by elements of burlesque as well as intimations of an ethical religious purpose.

As Schlam points out, however, the world of second–century Rome cannot easily be divided into the sacred and the secular. Such neat distinctions were largely unknown in the ancient world, and Apuleius' tales are a part of a tradition, flowing from Homer, that addressed both religious and philosophical issues.

Originally published in 1992.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

CHAPTER ONE


MEANING IN


THE NARRATIVE

A puleius in the Metamorphoses is above all a storyteller, expressing himself in narrative and images. Storytelling need not, however, exclude ideas. Lucius, metamorphosed into the Ass, takes pains to demonstrate to the reader that his mind has remained human, that he can both think and respond morally. The reader too, however enchanted by the narrative, need not suspend these functions. The Metamorphoses is a work of narrative entertainment, and among the pleasures it offers is the reinforcement of moral, philosophic, and religious values shared by the author and his audience.

At the outset of the Metamorphoses Lucius, the narrator, tells the reader that he will string together various stories,¹ offering no suggestion of a single or overall plot. He proceeds to recount his experiences over some two years,² his pursuit of magic, his transformation into an ass, who undergoes a series of adventures, and his restoration to human condition and becoming a devotee of Isis and Osiris. This principal narrative provides a frame into which are set numerous subordinate tales, told by or about various people the protagonist encounters—or simply a good story the narrator says he wants us to know too. The Metamorphoses has been harshly criticized for lacking unity.³ Certainly it does not have the kind of organic unity which was the ideal for a nineteenth-century novel. But such unity, an inappropriate standard even for earlier or more recent modern fiction (one thinks of Richardson or Nabokov), is scarcely suitable for interpreting an ancient work. The narrative of the Metamorphoses consists of a loosely connected sequence of incidents and stories, but the assemblage is not chaotic or meaningless. Both the plot and pacing of the narrative are clearly organized, as we shall see in chapter 3. The abundance of materials is given coherence through thematic patterning.

The embedded tales comprise well over half of the text and give the Metamorphoses something of the character of a tale collection. The self-contained quality of numerous incidents in the main plot reinforces this character. Though the principal narrative here is not a minimal frame, the unifying patterns of the Metamorphoses can be appropriately compared to those of the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales.⁴ No single, central theme provides unity to the work; rather, an abundant network of themes integrates the account of Lucius’ experiences and the diversity of interpolated stories, all of which range from the funny to the horrific. The incidents and stories are a kind of continuous commentary on themselves and each other.

Recurrent concepts and motifs, played and replayed in juxtaposed incidents, are a regular technique for establishing themes. Identification of themes does associate events in the narrative with ideas. These are not, however, arbitrary abstractions, but part of the language and texture of the Metamorphoses. The narrative is not a bare recital of events. Statements are made by the characters about themselves and their experiences. These often formulaic reflections are introduced in ways which both show the characters trying to make some sense of things and invite the reader to think further along similar lines. In addition to such explicit statements we can trace the elaboration of themes through repetition in a variety of narrative situations. Recognition of such patterning throughout the work does not depend on reading back from issues only enunciated in book 11. The pursuit of wonder, power, and pleasure, the contrasts between male and female, human and animal, sacred and profane, are themes extending through all the eleven books of the Metamorphoses.

Some critics reject the notion that repetition of concepts and motifs may build meaningful themes in the narrative. “There are,” it has been said, “within books 1–10, a great many correspondences (either merely between words, or between ideas, motives, actions, and situations) that no one would surmise to have been planned by the author deliberately”; their existence proves only that “our author’s wealth of words and ideas and his structural resources are not totally unlimited.”⁵1 would reply to such a rejection of interpret-ability that although not every correspondence need be deliberate or significant, this does not imply that none can be. Conscious deliberation need not extend to every aspect of artistic technique. It would be wrong indeed to claim that Apuleius had clear and consistent views on each of the serious themes in the work.

Events and experiences are narrated meaningfully in that they are related to a spectrum of ideas, of ethical, religious, and philosophic conceptions deeply rooted in the thought and feelings of the second century. These may be suggested in a set of polar opposites: human-divine, life-death, slavery-freedom, misfortune-blessedness. There is, however, no single axis along which all of the themes and issues of the narrative are plotted. The storytelling is not a mere code or cover for some abstract truths. The stories do, nevertheless, repeatedly reflect and play upon serious issues, which can stimulate thoughts and feelings in the reader. The Metamorphoses is a novel of rhetorical and comic brilliance, but these qualities do not nullify a level of seriousness in the pleasure and entertainment it offers.

Laughter is itself a theme in the Metamorphoses, which we shall examine in detail in chapter 4. Most of it is nasty, and joyless. The narrative, on the other hand, continually highlights the comic. Unexpected turns of both phrase and events underscore the absurd and the ridiculous. The comic and the serious, however, need not be mutually exclusive. Modern religion, especially among the more established faiths in Protestant countries, demands a consistent tone of sober solemnity. This is not true of every cultural milieu. The narrator in the Metamorphoses presents all aspects of his world with robust mirth, without diminishing the essential polarity of the sacred and the profane.

As suggested above, the Metamorphoses may be compared to the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales for the ways in which thematic patterns can be unifying factors in a diversity of stories. Furthermore, this second-century novel embodies a mode of seriocomic storytelling which went on to flourish in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In the Middle Ages this would reflect, not literary influence, but a continuing interplay of serious thought and comic narrative. In the fourteenth century, however, the Metamorphoses came to serve as a literary model. Like Apuleius, Boccaccio and Chaucer were not composing sermons or theological tracts. Yet their narrative artistry, satire, and joyful bawdiness do not deprive their stories of Christian meaning.

The Metamorphoses can provide insight into the character and ideas of the religious transformation in the Empire from the Augustan revival to the conversion of Constantine.⁶ Magic and religion were central to the culture portrayed. Concern for the fate of the soul was not merely an afterthought but was deeply rooted in the consciousness of the age. Profundity is not the great strength of the Metamorphoses, but the work does give powerful expression to the human search for meaning. Christianity apparently is referred to only once, and with hostile mockery.⁷ Parallels, however, between growing Christianity and pagan religious movements of the period may be seen in the portrayal in the Metamorphoses of yearning for salvation, of disregard for the political order, of the world of the flesh as corrupt and precarious, and of pursuit of oneness with the divine in contemplation. These belong to a pattern of themes which had serious significance for the author and his readers.

To read books 1–10 as about events in a purely secular world is to ignore the views of a second-century storyteller and his audience. The concept of a secular world, of areas of human experience in which consciousness of the divine does not pertain, did not then exist. The world dominated by Blind Fortune, in which human passion and willfulness have free rein, is not secular but profane.

Book 11 recounts the joyous solemnities of a festival of Isis and the experiences of a devotee. It is not marked, however, by any great shift in the style of the narrative. Just after Lucius’ restoration to human form, a priest gives an explicit religious and moral interpretation of the course of Lucius’ fortunes (11.15). Important as this homily is in the economy of the work, it cannot be taken as an authoritative statement of its quintessential meaning. It is delivered by a character, in a narrative context. It has meaning, in the sense I am using, as part of a thematic structure which extends over the entire work.

The plot of the Metamorphoses is resolved in book 11 in a revelation of divine providence. The resolution of the plot does not, however, dissolve all the tensions and issues raised in the course of the novel. Serious religious themes can feature in a work without their imposing an absolutely monovalent truth on the whole. Narrative is not a means of logical argumentation and does not aim at achieving certainty. The expressive modes employed in the Metamorphoses are highly rhetorical, and rhetoric was fiercely attacked by Plato as the antithesis of the serious.⁸ Apuleius, however, as well as others, tried to have the best of both worlds, to revel in rhetorical artistry while preserving some sense of truth, conceived in loosely Platonic terms.

Here as elsewhere, rhetoric plays with many voices. The polyphony of the Metamorphoses has been made grounds for discounting its serious themes, both by those who demand a more monovalent piety and by those who envision literary play as disempowering aspects of the work which they find unacceptable. The narrator turns out to be a convert and a priest, but he recounts his adventures from the point of view of a participant who lacks the the benefit of hindsight or repentance. The absence of condemnation, of a consistently religious view, has led some critics to deny any real connection between the ten books of adventures and the vision and conversion described in book 11. Connections are there, but they lie in the thematic structure of the narrative. The Metamorphoses is not an account of a growing religious consciousness, not a work of religious confession.⁹ This may be unsatisfying to some readers, but it is not a proof of meaninglessness.

Dialogic qualities throughout the narrative, beginning with the prologue (i.i), have been much examined in terms of contemporary critical theory.¹⁰ An ironic distance intervenes between the two voices of the “I” in the work. The point of view of the narrative is primarily that of the “experiencing I,” who reports his thoughts and feelings with naive immediacy. This contrasts with the rhetorical and literary sophistication projected by the tone and language of the narration. The mistakes and blunders of the “experiencing I” are part of the rhetorical characterization of Lucius—both man and ass—as a fall guy, the frequent butt of laughter and misfortune.

Jack Winkler has argued that the play between these voices is the essence of the artistic genius of the Metamorphoses.¹¹ He regards the hermeneutical question as dominating the work, since interplay makes the identity of the “I” indeterminate. This allows nothing to be affirmed other than the artistic value of keeping the self at play. Identity is, to be sure, of real issue in the Metamorphoses. It is a question inherent in a story of transformation and raised by repeated disguises—as, for example, when Tlepolemus takes on the role of the thief, Haemus. It accords ill, however, with ancient thinking to privilege the hermeneutical above all other themes in the work.

The voice of rhetorical and literary sophistication in the Metamorphoses seems to be more identifiable with Apuleius, the author, than with Lucius. Indeed the work is often read as a kind of autobiography.¹² This has been reinforced by the identification of Lucius as “a man from Madaura” (ii .27), Apuleius’ native city.¹³ This Madaurensis is best taken as an indication that the author is at this point identifying himself with his narrator and hero.¹⁴ It is nevertheless unsound to take any details of the novel as autobiographical. We do not in fact even know that Apuleius was initiated into the cult of Isis, and it is highly unlikely that he ever served in a priestly rank, as a pastophorus, with a shaven head.¹⁵

We encounter in the Metamorphoses something of a cross-section of ordinary society in provincial Greece of the high Empire, ascending in range from slaves, both in town and on the farm, the poor market gardener, and tradespeople of various prosperity, to landowners, rich matronae, and provincial magistrates. Most of the events told take place in an ordinary and recognizable world, but the events themselves partake as much of fantasy as of realism. The realistic modern novel not only portrays a recognizable society but explores the richness and conflicts with...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments,
• Introduction,
• Chapter One Meaning in the Narrative,
• Chapter Two Genre and Sources,
• Chapter Three The Arrangement of Material,
• Chapter Four Comedy, Laughter, and Entertainment,
• Chapter Five Curiosity, Spectacle, and Wonder,
• Chapter Six Cleverness and Fortune,
• Chapter Seven Sex and Witchcraft,
• Chapter Eight The Tale of Cupid and Psyche,
• Chapter Nine Animal and Human,
• Chapter Ten Man and Goddess,
• Conclusion,
• Notes,
• Bibliography,
• Index,