The Metamorphoses of Apuleius: On Making an Ass of Oneself

By Clare Mar-Molinero

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469620718

Clare Mar-Molinero

Clare Mar-Molinero is Professor of Spanish Sociolinguistics at the University of Southampton, UK. Her research interests include urban multilingualism, language policy, language ideologies, transnational migration, and language and globalisation – particularly in the Spanish-speaking world.

Book preview

THE

METAMORPHOSES

OF APULEIUS

THE METAMORPHOSES OF APULEIUS

ON MAKING AN ASS OF ONESELF

CARL C. SCHLAM

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill & London

© 1992 The University of North

Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schlam, Carl C.

The Metamorphoses of Apuleius: on making an ass of oneself / Carl C. Schlam.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-6588-5 (alk. paper)

1. Apuleius. Metamorphoses.

2. Isis (Egyptian deity) in literature.

3. Metamorphosis in literature.

4. Initiations in literature.

5. Narration (Rhetoric) 6. Rhetoric,

Ancient. 7. Comic, The. I. Title.

PA6217.S27 1992

873’.OI—dc20 91-31412

CIP

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Manufactured in the United States of America

96 95 94 93 92

5 4 3 2 1

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,

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For support essential to the writing of this book I thank the College of Humanities of the Ohio State University, which also provided a subvention to aid publication, and my colleagues and students in the Department of Classics. Charles Babcock has been an abundant source of encouragement, not to say prodding. In friendship, I thank him for nurturing the ideals of the academy. I am grateful to the Center for the Humanities of Wesleyan University for a visiting fellowship. It gave me a stimulating intellectual environment in which to produce a draft of this book. David Konstan and Donald Lateiner read that draft with generous care. Their responses, positive and negative, were of great help.

I recall with gratitude the memory of my father, Joseph Schlam, for the gift of life and the model of a life of learning. I first read Apuleius with Moses Hadas. He guided us to share and to emulate his dedication to literature, scholarship, and the worthiness of an examined life. To close with those closest, my acknowledgments to Helena, and to our daughters, Tanya and Julia, for our loves and for the efforts, shared and independent, to lead a good life. Without their demands and interruptions this book could possibly have been written a lot sooner, but more probably it would not have been written at all.

THE

METAMORPHOSES

OF APULEIUS

INTRODUCTION

There has been a wide divergence of judgments on the merit and the interpretation of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, or The Golden Ass, the Latin novel of the late second century of our era.¹ Virtually lost during the Middle Ages, it came to be known and imitated in the fourteenth century as a work which undertakes to be both comic and serious, serio ludere.² Beroaldus, the great Renaissance commentator on Apuleius, and Adlington, the first translator of the Metamorphoses into English, while delighting in the rhetoric and the comedy, saw the work as edifying and having religious depth.

The repute of the work fell to its lowest point in the scholarship of the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, with the inappropriate application of an ideal of the modern novel. Major research was carried out on the text of the Metamorphoses and on its sources, but the work was largely condemned as chaotic and its author as an emptyheaded patcher.³ A few scholars, however, maintained that the Metamorphoses had artistic integrity, and this view has now come to be fairly widely accepted.⁴

The chief divide among more recent studies of the Apuleian novel has been over whether the comic or the serious is its more essential quality. Proponents of the comic see Apuleius as an entertainer whose stories can have no goal other than to amuse. They emphasize the rhetoric and playfulness of the work, its lack of unity, and the tone of the narrator, which is not that of a sober convert recounting the sinful journey of his former life. Interpretations which allow some seriousness to the work range from a maximally religious one, which posits an allegorical kernel as the essence and origin of the narrative, to a more moderate view, which sees Apuleius shaping a diversity of stories and connecting them thematically to a religious conclusion.⁵ Opposing assertions, however, of the author’s real intent do little to advance our understanding. We can, perhaps, agree that the Metamorphoses, like most of ancient literature, includes both the comic and the serious, the utile and the dulce. The chief problem, I submit, has been to claim exclusive validity for either a comic or serious reading of the work.

Among the recent comic interpreters the artistry of the author has been beautifully displayed, but is seen as only in the service of sophisticated literary entertainment.⁶ G. Anderson, for example, has justly criticized the advocates of an essentially religious or allegorical interpretation (chiefly Merkelbach and his successors) for failure to come to terms with the novels as works of fiction.⁷ Religion is not the key to explaining the existence of a novel. A subtle and scrupulous scholar, Anderson asserts that the balance of the comic and the serious in each work must be evaluated in its own terms. Yet he interprets comic treatment of religious motifs, parody of initiation, and discrediting of clergy in the Metamorphoses as excluding serious meaning. Anderson conceives of the serious writer in narrow terms, as a dark preacher or theologian. He will allow religious or philosophic motifs to have serious meaning only when the text fails to make literary sense. This, I believe, is to lose touch with the context of cultural meanings in which the narrative was assembled and enjoyed.

Jack Winkler, whose brilliant Auctor et Actor has recently shed new light on numerous aspects of the Metamorphoses, allows and explores a wide range of both comic and serious elements.⁸ Nevertheless he regards the work as primarily one of hermeneutic entertainment, like a modern mystery novel. In this view the play of the signifier invalidates any moral prescriptions. Winkler fully reveals the self-consciousness of both the narrator and the author of the Metamorphoses. Literary self-consciousness is surely there, and important; I would maintain, however, that it is not the self-consciousness of a sophisticated poststructuralist, but that of a Middle Platonist in the second century. The storyteller in this flourishing tradition can charm his audience with healing pleasures. There are in the work, as Winkler and others observe, no certain proofs of theological or philosophic theses, but their absence is not evidence that the stories are without meaning.

I must, finally, take exception to the premise which Winkler makes central to his analysis. He posits as the major problem raised by the Metamorphoses a radical disjuncture of book 11 from books 1–10. One of the principal aims of my study is to demonstrate the opposite: that book 11 is integral to the narrative and to the thematic structure of the Metamorphoses. The cult picture of the final book is not, however, in some simple sense, the truth of the novel. It too is narrative entertainment, blending the comic with the serious, each in more than one sense. Book 11 is meaningful as the conclusion to an elaborate sequence of stories and incidents.

The Metamorphoses has always appealed to a variety of readers, who have enjoyed and understood the work variously. This is not evidence for or against any interpretation of it, though it suggests that there is perhaps no single, objectively true interpretation. My purpose is to make clear the ways in which the narrative, even when it is funny, expresses meaning. I undertake to demonstrate a structure of themes and motifs, grounded in ideas and conceptions of the second century, which gives coherence to the diversity of literary entertainment.

The readers I address will all have some acquaintance with this novel, in the original or in translation. Philological questions of primarily scholarly interest I have relegated to footnotes. Some issues, however, in the body of my text, such as questions of genre in chapter 2 or of folklore in chapter 8, involve technical matters which may be of broader interest to students and teachers of a work of Roman literature. I have tried to give enough signposts to allow readers to follow their interests.

Chapter 1 considers how meaning is expressed in narrative and examines the roots of Apuleian storytelling in literary, philosophic, and religious conceptions of the second century. Chapter 2 concerns the genre to which the Metamorphoses belongs and the nature of its sources, questions which have played a large part in scholarship on the work. Chapter 3 examines the organization of the Metamorphoses and the thematic patterns within it. Entertainment is itself one of the significant themes, or rather a cluster of themes, addressed in chapter 4, which discusses the nature of laughter, of comedy, and of storytelling in the Metamorphoses. Chapter 5 turns to the themes of curiosity, spectacle, and wonder; chapter 6, to cleverness and fortune; chapter 7, to sex and witchcraft. Chapter 8 is devoted entirely to the tale of Cupid and Psyche. Chapter 9 analyzes the distinction between animal and human and how that functions in this tale of metamorphosis. We conclude, in chapter 10, by placing the presentation of Isis and her cult within the thematic structure of the Metamorphoses.

It is misguided to exaggerate the unity of the Metamorphoses, for the work is loosely organized and has room for many voices. Formulations of the serious within it should not be too doctrinaire. Neither cult propaganda nor personal religious confession constitutes the literary essence of the work. The stories do, however, present a world of moral dilemmas. A network of ethical and religious issues underlies and connects the experiences told. Some vision of an ordered cosmos under divine providence forms part of the comic entertainment offered.

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