Casting my mind back to 30 years ago, when I embarked upon a literary commentary of The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) of Apuleius, I found enough to read and absorb for the purposes of a PhD thesis. My thesis Unity in Diversity was published 2 years after its completion. This delay in publishing had a significant effect, because, in the meantime, John J. Winkler’s (1985) narratological reading of the work, Auctor & Actor, caused an intellectual revolution in Apuleian studies. Looking back, it was probably for the best that my first book on the Metamorphoses caused a relatively modest ripple in Apuleian scholarship, as I relished the opportunity to broaden my research interests and publishing profile in subsequent years. There is a danger that a linguistic or cultural commentary on one work can convert one into a single-text person, and textual monogamy has its frustrations. I diversified, revisiting Apuleius with the occasional presentation and publication, but never feeling inclined to produce another monograph on his novel. I have, however, “kept my hand in” with essays and articles ranging from comparisons between Apuleius and film director Luis Buñuel to metaphorical parrots in the Latin narrative.
I have had the privilege of reviewing a number of stimulating works on Apuleius in the last few years, for instance, the Paideia at Play: Learning and Wit in Apuleius (2008, ed. Werner Riess). This is a collection of wide-ranging essays delving deeper into Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and Apology from the perspective of the author’s cultural identity and with an eye on his strategies for self-promotion. In spite of the emphasis on playfulness as a strategy in engaging the reader in the game of literary allusions and in jokes for the educated, it was not the fashion to wear one’s learning lightly in this cultural milieu. The community of writers and orators of the Antonine age liked to parade themselves as polymaths in print and performance. Although Lawrence Kim (2011) in his review of Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel asked if there were still new and worthwhile things to be said about the ancient novel, he clearly approves of approaches to Apuleius and other prose narrative authors that see authors as simultaneously second guessing and manipulating the responses of their contemporary readership. Fantasy fiction in prose form was considered to be a “trivial pursuit,” but Apuleius called the bluff of those reading his work for pleasure with ironic asides about the genre he was producing and they were consuming.
What, however, does the lector scrupulosus (learned or attentive reader) of the twenty-first century make of his text? Winkler (1985, 11) explores the rich cultural referencing of the Metamorphoses while involving any and all readers across the centuries in the game of “outwitting.” This response to Apuleius’ narrative strategies adds another dimension to the notion that the reader rewrites the text or at least shares the burden of creativity with the author. Joseph Pucci (1998, 26) states:
My claim in what follows is that the allusion demands a special sort of reader (the full knowing reader)—who is just as busy as the author of the literary work and, so I hope to suggest, just as powerful. [See the comments in Hilton’s 2004 review.]
Winkler suggests that the consumer of the text does indeed produce meaning but well within the framework constructed by the author. To sustain the metaphor of consumption, it is worth returning to John Heath (1982), for he identified the tension in Apuleius between narration and nutrition (Lucius as man and ass is offered stories rather than sustenance at key points), and its real and figurative role in the novel.1 Heath argued (1982, 71) that: “fed on free-floating narratives the modern reader faces the main menu with frustrated appetites.” He concluded that because we are unsure about the import of what we have read, readers: “return to the feast for a second helping—but it is with a different strategy for filling our plates.”
The message has remained the same for many years, namely that the scrupulous reader of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (henceforward Met.) must expect to be stretched by displays of erudition, sometimes, but not always, signposted, and occasionally experimental in function and effect. Wytse Keulen’s 2007 highly detailed linguistic exegesis on Book one comprehensively explores controversial literary and historical issues that emerge from the text at the outset. Keulen’s commentary on the novel’s opening chapters engages with most of the motifs and conundrums that arise from the language, imagery, allusions, and narrative arcs.
What does one say, 30 years on, about a work that is close to suffering from interpretation overload? As the rules of engagement with the novel shift and proliferate, the main links of the Metamorphoses’ narrative and methodological chain can be difficult to grasp. The Metamorphoses continues to be discussed in academic forums on the ancient novel, for instance the Rethymnon International Conference on the Ancient Novel (RICAN), convening every 2 years in Crete and taking up the mantle of the Groningen Colloquia where Apuleius usually had a starring role. Kyknos, a center of research on Ancient Narrative Literatures, University of Wales, has regular conferences and seminar series. Publications invariably follow. The Lisbon conference of 2008, Crossroads in the Ancient Novel: Spaces, Frontiers, Intersections, was a generously inclusive fiction fest, allowing for the possibility that, in the world known to, even if not actually a colonized part of, Greco-Roman culture, all kinds of oral and written forms of communication might be reviewed as storytelling, including historical writing, epic poetry, personal epistles, inscriptions, and performance art. Paradoxically, several Lisbon papers on the Metamorphoses seemed to suggest that Apuleius’ text is almost anti-narrative, being capable of metamorphosing into epic, elegiac, satirical, and theatrical modes. Hence, while the underlying assumption and compass of the 2008 conference was that most ancient genres could be viewed as narrative, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses has for some time proved far too protean to be categorized in this way (the genre issue has been discussed at length by Laird 1993; Selden 1994; and Rosenmeyer 2006).
However, I continue to be intrigued by Stonehill (1988) on the self-conscious novel: his texts are post-Classical, ranging from Pynchon to Joyce, in which he sets out a stall of identifying characteristics for this genre. His checklist “The Repertoire of Reflexivity” has these subheadings: Narration, Style, Structure, Characterization, and Themes. He identifies such features as “direct address to the reader, as reader, reminders that the book is a book, overt and eccentric moralization, Euphuistic styles [affected or artificial but also exuberant and effective?], discontinuity between rhetorical codes.” The list goes on, and Apuleius’ narrative ticks all the boxes. Stonehill argues that the self-conscious novel is distinguished as a genre by insisting upon its own artifice and its textual self-reference. After the prologue, in which it is announced that a Greek tale will be told, Lucius the narrator never actually violates the illusion of reality where his own experiences are concerned. What he does do, with an occasional direct address to his notional reader, is to forestall objections about the accurate reporting of events which he has not witnessed with his own eyes, or apologize for passing judgment like a rational human when he is imprisoned in a bestial form.
The heading is inspired by Niall Slater’s observations (2008, 235–236) on the Metamorphoses’ relationship to its Greek source, which has survived as a problematic epitome. Slater suggests that Apuleius:
[t]reated the previous narrative very much as the great declaimers of the Second Sophistic treated the common inheritance of Greek history: as materials that could be refashioned for new cultural purposes. It might be revealing to approach the whole of The Golden Ass as an extremely extended melete, a historical declamation in character, in which Apuleius writes a new first person narration for a pre-existing fictional character, Lucius.
This approach in some measure (but with a twist) engages with Laird’s (1993) “Fiction, Bewitchment and Story Worlds.” Laird cites the opening of C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew to illustrate the way in which a fiction, in this case a fantasy fiction for children, the Narnia series, can locate itself in the historical past by referring to real events, actual people, and, less factually secure, but sociologically significant, nostalgic memories of the way things were. By introducing made-up characters and plotlines from other fictional texts as part of this relatively authentic world, Lewis creates a community of story words (“the spatio-temporal universe designated by the narrative,” Laird 1993, 151 n. 6) which readers can accept as plausible, drawing upon their own experiences of life as it is lived and as it is represented in fiction. It seems we cannot get far with Apuleius without bumping up against allusion and intertextuality again.
This is the point at which Slater’s suggestion adds an interesting nuance. It implies that Apuleius has incorporated further adventures into the Onos of Lucius’ story world, one familiar to readers, whether this was the shortened Onos narrative or the Greek Metamorphoses, which, according to Photius, included additional transformation episodes. We shall probably never know which of the two Greek “story worlds” of the ass-hero was more widely disseminated in the second century CE, but the assumption is that Apuleius brought new material into his version of Lucius’ encounters with witchcraft in Thessaly to suit his own literary and possibly philosophical agenda. How exciting it would be if the Greek original ever came to light and, instead of a partial match with Apuleius’ text, we were able to enjoy completely different subsidiary narratives and episodes experienced by Lucius, man and beast. No doubt, that would set us all puzzling over the “story world” created by one Lucius of Patrae and the kind of cultural footprint he left for us to decipher.2
Apuleius constructs a highly suggestible hero who, from very early on in the text, is eager to enter a world full of mystery and magic. He operates in a world familiar to his readers but filters it through a mythical, mimetic, and literary lens. The early narratives, those of Aristomenes and Thelyphron, could be viewed as skillful but spontaneous slices of make-believe that actually respond to cues and prompts from Lucius himself. In the first story (1.5–19), Aristomenes, one of two fellow travelers in a chance meeting on the way to Hypata, gives Lucius just what he wants to alleviate the tedium of the journey with his fantastic and fearful tale of the supernatural. Lucius describes this truly terrifying narrative as lepida (elegant, pleasing) though modern readers might flounder to find the charm in it. Keulen (2007) is informative on the range of meanings indicated by this epithet. The lepida fabula also delivers frissons of fear, and this has implications for Lucius’ description of the Cupid and Psyche story as just such an experience for the audience. Aristomenes swears that the events are well known in Thessaly: nec vos ulterius dubitabitis, si proximam civitatem perveneritis, quod ibidem passim per ora populi sermo iactetur quae palam gesta sunt (“and your doubts will be further dispelled, when you have arrived at the next town, because my narrative is being bandied about there on everyone’s lips as things that happened in broad daylight”). Is Aristomenes bluffing? He has actually taken ingredients provided by Lucius and incorporated them skillfully into a scary story of witches avenging themselves on his friend, Socrates. Lucius has championed an open mind about strange and supernatural scenarios in response to the derision of the unnamed skeptical companion. The hero then proceeds to relate an anecdote about choking on cheese bread and how this intensified his wonder at the flexible throat of the sword swallower whose wondrous performance he witnessed. Blades going down gullets and cheese displacing sponges, along with other ingredients present in Lucius’ story, are reworked by Aristomenes to embellish his performance (I hinted at the extemporization theory 1987, 44–46; but see Kirichenko 2006).
Later, at his aunt’s banquet, one of the guests, Thelyphron, is entreated to tell of his traumatic experience, as he has first-hand knowledge of Hypatian sorcery and of the mutilation that witches are capable of (2.21–30). Thelyphron’s tale seems to be a standard party piece, although he feigns reluctance to relate it. The company clearly finds the storyteller’s loss of nose and ears while guarding a corpse from desecration a hilarious horror story, however many times it is told. To step outside the text for a moment, Thelyphron’s narrative has proved a popular choice, in suitably simplified Latin, for school students of the language. It resonates with the young, always ready to be scared in safe surroundings so the story is still effectively spooky in the twenty-first century. However, within the narrative continuum of the novel, it could be argued that Lucius himself exhibits a childlike curiosity and eagerness to hear about things weird and wicked. He has pre-empted the central premise of the story to come with his declared fascination with witches who bite off parts of corpses to use in their spells. Lucius locks into rumors readily, and Thelyphron, by happy coincidence, is ready to fulfill Lucius’ expectations with an original variation on the theme—the corpse is not violated but his watcher is. Thelyphron’s mutilated face both is and is not living proof of the truth of his tale. Does he always tell the same story, or is he another skillful opportunist who refreshes his tale to suit the company and the circumstances of his party piece?
Whether this strategy for explaining the echoes of themes and images across the early narrations would work for subsequent stories and especially those Lucius hears as an ass when he can no longer speak and give ideas to narrative “performers”3 is a moot point. However, it is worth speculating about Isis rising on cue from the sea in Book eleven. She picks up on what Lucius needs and arrives ready to tick all the boxes about the kind of goddess the hero has prayed for. The hero finally finds his voice perhaps to utter his prayer or silently summons one who has the divine ears to hear his inward utterance. The ass articulates a range of attributes and identities for his savior goddess and, behold, Isis! For those skeptical about Lucius’ salvation and the change of tone and pace in Book eleven, the goddess, like the rest of the narrators/actors, could be viewed as repeating to the hero the sort of story he has asked to hear. She looks and plays the part the praying ass has created.4
In an earlier chapter (Chapter 7: “Apuleius’ The Golden Ass: The Nature of the Beast”), I gave a skeletal analysis of this story, its place in the text, and its lasting appeal as an interlude with attitude. Lucius the ass is entranced by the tale and, as we finish reading it, he paradoxically laments his lack of writing materials to record such a lepida fabula for posterity (see Winkler 1979, 84). This fable is possibly the most lasting legacy of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. It boasts a tantalizing mix of features from folktale, fairytale, and myth packaged up in an absorbing story and punctuated with poetical passages of description, dramatic monologues, and emotional highs. The story of Love cleaving to the Soul adapts itself in chameleon fashion to philosophical and religious interpretations. Its main parallels with Lucius’ story were summarized in my previous chapter in this book (Chapter 7).
In the past, I have argued (1998, 35) that we should rejoice in the proliferation of theories that linked the fable of Cupid and Psyche thematically with Lucius’ story, even if they sometimes confused as much as clarified the function of the interlude in the novel.6 The internal function of the story is (allegedly) to charm and distract. Apuleian scholars have been so busy integrating it, thematically and metaphorically, into the mainframe (and I plead guilty to this strategy) that it was refreshing to hear presentations at Lisbon with an emphasis on the story’s transmutations outside the text and across cultures.7 The fable of Cupid and Psyche continues to be detached from the main narrative in a variety of contexts. It is another favorite in school teaching and, like Trimalchio’s feast in the Satyricon, it is more familiar in popular culture as a free-floating story.
However, there are more scholarly circumstances in which it might become the route into a study of the whole Metamorphoses. I am grateful to Daisy Thurkettle Roper (University of Leeds) who in 2008 shared with me her recent experience of writing an undergraduate dissertation on Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius’ novel. She felt delight and surprise that “such a charming story was surrounded on all sides by inordinate amounts of debauchery and revels in all shapes and sizes.” She compared the description of the lingering death of the girl Charite sewn up in the rotting corpse of the ass Lucius, which the robbers plan with detailed relish, as truly shocking: “I have only felt such shock and morbid astonishment at the author’s ability to surprise his audience when reading the Marquis de Sade. All in all, I adored reading and studying Apuleius at such an early stage in my academic life.” This view of a first-time reader in an academic environment is illuminating not least because she started out by reading the myth of Cupid and Psyche, situated in a far-away, fairytale world, and then was jolted into the reality, relatively speaking, of the bleak landscape where Lucius continues his adventures. The ass’ suffering and the near-psychotic characters he encounters might put the modern reader in mind of the slasher movie or pulp fiction. Several storylines reveal a “Tarantino” in the text (violence and vengeance with more than a touch of the farcical—Quentin Tarantino’s films are famous for incorporating stylized scenes of slaughter and torment inspired by graphic novel representations and the Japanese Animé screen genre) as well as having a real affinity with Gothic narratives of the nineteenth century, something I noted in the earlier chapter.8
The presentation at Lisbon by Sonia Sabis (Reed College, OR, United States) on the “Donkey Gone to Hell: A Katabasis Motif in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses” visualized as well as interpreted the horror of hell on earth in the mill episode, Book nine, with striking images of donkeys at the wheel. Such scenes as the mill in Apuleius are eminently filmable, especially as the entertainment industry seems to be encouraging consumers to embrace feelings of social alienation and have packaged this up for audiences as part of the normality of capitalism. Slaves and worker wage slaves have some affinity.
The ass’ misery at the mill seems a far cry from the fantasy world inhabited by Cupid and Psyche, and yet slavery is both real and figurative throughout the story. Psyche, like Lucius, enters into a relationship that demands bondage and bargaining. The vital need of secrecy to preserve happiness involves a sacred promise, a taboo that cannot be broken. The dangers and delights the two mortal protagonists experience with extraordinary partners culminate in near deaths of the orgasmic and spiritual kind and suggest that an enthrallment with that is potentially fatal for both of them. In its literary and post-Classical incarnations, the story of Cupid and Psyche rather readily metamorphosed into the cultural form of the fairytale. The genre can foreground the fearful and transform the narrative into a cautionary tale. Warner notes that Mme de Beaumont, a governess working in England, published her 1758 story La Belle et La Bête in the Misses’ Magazine, and one of her sources was the fairytale of Cupid and Psyche:
[h]er version is kindly and domestic, shaped to help young women facing arranged marriages to hope for a happy future and accept the marriage their father proposed, however unappealing they find the prospective husband. They will come to love him, the story reassures him. As Angela Carter acerbically commented, Mme de Beaumont was in the business of “house training the id.”9
In Apuleius’ story, the oracle of Apollo predicts a fatal destiny and commands the king, her father, to sacrifice her to a serpent. She is to be a monster’s bride—literally, not just in the sense that “men are rough hairy beasts, eight hands and all just want one thing from a girl!”10 There is a partial fulfillment of this prophecy. Psyche’s virginity is described eccentrically by the narrator as murdered (interfecta) when Cupid “makes her his wife” (Met.5.4). Although it contradicts her experience of her unknown husband, Psyche believes her sisters when they tell her a huge snake is her nightly visitor and that she must take a lamp and razor to the bedside and kill the creature. Was it just that she remembered the oracle, or had she been reading too many fairy stories? Gullible Psyche becomes totally besotted with Cupid at her first sight of him. There is a lingering and sensuous description of his wings: per umeros volatilis dei pinnae roscidae micanti flore candicant, et quamvis alis quiescentibus extimae plumulae tenellae ac delicatae tremule resultantes inquieta lasciviunt (“the shoulders of the winged god glistened with the whitest feathers, like dew-bright blossoms. Even at rest, the fragile plumes on the surface of his wings were tremulously quivering, restless and playful” Met 5.22). Wings are attributes of gods and monsters, and angels and demons in Christian imagery. They are the means by which Cupid abandons and then subsequently rescues Psyche. Psyche is given ambiguous feelings about this hybrid husband, even before the moment of revelation: in eodem corpore odit bestiam, diligit maritum (“in the same body loathing the beast but loving her husband” 5.21). This surely sums up the test and the tension of Beauty’s feelings for the Beast.11
Pasquale Accardo (2002) has a fascinating chapter, “The Beast Goes to the Movies” (88–101), in which Accardo suggests an illuminating interplay between Apuleius and the David O. Selznick’s classic 1933 film King Kong. At the end of the film, it is sententiously pronounced that: “It was Beauty who killed the Beast.” Noting (2002, 93–94) that the mighty Kong inspired subsequent horror films “exploiting the theme of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ as well as monsters emerging out of the archetypal past to level a modern city,” Accardo (2002, 98) identifies motifs in the film from Apuleius and the European “Beauty” traditions:
A girl child is sacrificed in a marriage that is equivalent to death and in which the bride is fully expected to be “eaten” by her monster groom, the implied contrast of urban and civilised with rural and jungle societies, the wardrobe of beautiful clothes and the service and attention by numerous “hands” and, of course, the (almost) mortal pain that Beauty ultimately inflicts on the Beast.
Accardo already observes (2002, 89):
If Victorian virgins had vaguely feared the beastly sexual appetites of their future husbands, there now arose a quite specific hairy beast with which to associate these primal images, the ape from which man had apparently not yet completed his descent.
The classic (and post-Classical) Beauty and the Beast templates imagine their heroines as a gentle and civilizing force able to expel the bestial from the male of the species. It is interesting that, in such stories, the equivalent to Psyche wakens the equivalent to Cupid from a deathly sleep. In this respect, the restorative kiss in The Sleeping Beauty is closer to Apuleius’ myth.
Reading Ed Cueva’s 2008 Lisbon paper on “Horror and the Ancient Novel,” I was, for the purposes of this chapter, inspired to revisit some tentative ideas about dangerous liaisons or even fatal attractions in Lucius’ and Psyche’s story that I trialed at a Kyknos seminar in Swansea in 2009.12 I justified my title, “Lover Come Back,” a conscious tribute to the definitive rendering by Al Bowlly of this romantic torch song, with an exploration of two popular culture texts that might prompt us to trace the cultural trajectory of Apuleius’ fable and witness its metamorphosis into a horror story. Viewing Psyche’s story from this perspective adds further correspondences between the fantasy princess and Lucius, as both reap rewards and punishments from unusual partnerships. William Sansom’s extremely short tale of the unexpected, A Woman Seldom Found (spoiler warning!) at first sight owes more to the Mélusine traditions than to Apuleius, but it does present the reader with a young man on a walkabout in Rome who is ready for a romantic adventure and gets more than he bargained for. If the hero had read his myths in Ovid’s or Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, he would, no doubt, have recognized the angers of any locus amoenus (alluring place) setting and perhaps been suspicious of a sudden encounter with an equally alluring woman.
There are resonances in Sansom of the Socrates’ story in Book one of the Metamorphoses insofar as something pretty fatal can be the only outcome of this one night with an older woman of some considerable attraction: et utpote ultime affectus ad quondam cauponem Meroen, anum sed admodum scitulam, deverto (“and in my traumatized state, I sought lodging with a certain innkeeper, Meroe, a woman of advanced years but rather sexy,” 1.7). Of course, Byrrhena, Lucius’ wealthy relative, is an unknown and clearly powerful woman in whose presence Lucius feels anxious after their chance meeting in Hypata: “Vereor” inquam “ignotae mihi feminae” (“I am shy,” I say “in the presence of a woman I do not know,” 2.2). Lucius’ encounters with the fetching slave girl Photis are the beginning of his decline into ass-hood, and even the matrona who desires Lucius as an ass is a bizarre, semi-mythological wish fulfillment character.13 Last, but not least, is Isis at whose shrine the retransformed Lucius spends the night as part of his initiation. Sansom’s character meets a fantasy female and, once in the darkness of the bedroom, the beautiful but serpentine stranger stretches her hand across the length of the room and, with a terminal click, turns off the light!
My second choice for a modern text resonating with elements from Apuleius, and the reappearance of the beast, culturally layered and filtered over the centuries, was the last story in a portmanteau film, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990, directed by John Harrison). The mainframe narrative has a captive boy, imprisoned in a cage, reading horror stories to the witch (played by pop star icon Deborah Harry, stage name “Blondie”) who plans to cook and eat him. As the book has a fairy story cover, the film sets up an interesting reversal of normality and role-playing as far as expected identities of narrator and audience are concerned, and the nod to Scheherazade and The Arabian Nights is also obvious, as the boy tells stories to postpone his fate.14 Saving the best till last, the boy entrances his jailer with The Lover’s Vow, by Michael MacDowell but based upon Yuki-Onna, from Lafcadio Hearn’s stories and studies of strange things from Japan. Hearn’s collection, Kwaidan, inspired the 1964 film directed by Masaki Kobayashi (four supernatural stories are told in this acclaimed and atmospheric piece of cinema). Tales from the Darkside: The Movie sets this final story in 1990s New York and, once again, the victim is male and the monster female. Without going into too much detail, this strong finish (narratively and cinematically speaking) is a horror story with both poignancy and darkly humorous moments. It is peppered with jokes about humans as demons and monsters: metaphors come to life or which prove to be true,15 and there are all kinds of visual, as well as dialogic, clues to the identity of the hero’s mysterious wife for the second-time (and observant first-time!) viewer. Wings are a central motif in this story, being bright and bestial, the means of saving and abandoning. The beautiful stranger, Carola, who changes the hero’s life and brings him success and happiness (shades of Isis here), takes everything away from her husband, Preston, when he tells the secret and breaks the taboo. There is no pleasurable outcome here, only a retransformation and elevation that kills Preston and immortalizes his family but by turning them into lifeless gargoyles. This is a story of an extraordinary coupling that is doomed from the beginning.
I had the privilege of chairing a thought-provoking paper on “The Implied Mule in the Metamorphoses” at the Classical Association annual Conference, Glasgow, United Kingdom, 2008, in which Lisa Hughes of Colorado College, CO, United States, looked at unequal yoking in Apuleius’ novel as an indication that the mule (born of a mare compelled to lower herself to coupling with a donkey) was not only present in the subtext of the Met. but also the aim of physical existence, an animal representative of mystical achievement. Hughes’s central premise about the metaphors of miscegenation in the novel and its philosophical and religious ramifications that drive the reader forward to the Isiac conclusion is enormously rewarding as an interpretative strategy for a great deal of the novel. For instance, if Psyche is read as an allegory for Lucius, then she, as Hughes mischievously suggested, is the implied Donkey to Cupid’s Mare. Venus condemns Psyche to a marriage beneath her, with the lowest and most unfortunate mortal partner, and yet this backfires. Cupid shoots himself with his own arrow in order to fall in love with the mortal who has supplanted his divine mother. The union between the god and the girl shifts around in the levels of mismatch. As Hughes observed, impares nuptiae, Venus’ contemptuous term for Cupid and Psyche’s liaison, might be an unequal sexual yoking, but it can yield a valuable commodity. The mixed marriage of Cupid and Psyche gives the child Voluptas to the world, and this Hughes read as an eternal good, the mule on a philosophical plane, quoting Dowden (1998, 9): “Platonic or mystic thesis, confronted by Gnostic antithesis, yields Apuleian synthesis.”
As one who has read Voluptas (Joyfulness) as only too short-lived for mortals outside the confines of this clearly demarcated fantasy world (see Zimmerman 2004, 553, for the disingenuous nominamus “we name”), this forced me to rethink the product of Cupid and Psyche’s union. I always imagined that Voluptas and Consuetudo (Habit), which seems to imply the sexual addiction Psyche develops for Cupid, doubled as psychological sites for destructive sex drives. I also argued (2001) that they were part of the proliferation of abstracts as characters that the plot of Cupid and Psyche sets into motion. It is possible to overcomplicate the shifts between the symbolic and corporeal presences of these abstract states as all kinds of processes and conditions could be worshipped as minor deities in the Roman belief system.
Greek and Roman authors exploited the essential indeterminacy and sometimes over-determinacy of largely supernatural or numinous creatures that signified a skill or a characteristic and yet became agents in mythical narratives and poetic scenarios. Ovid must be regarded as the most imaginative writer in this respect, realizing the potential of the duality for destabilizing identities among gods and nymphs (for a rich nexus of correspondences between the Apuleian and Ovidian treatment of metamorphosis and myth, see Krabbe 2003). However, the mule as metaphor sheds a new and intriguing light upon the immortality (or not) of the Apuleian Voluptas, the child born to the star-crossed lovers!
It seems fitting to finish this journey through Apuleius’ novel somewhere near its starting point. The genre issue that I sketched out earlier in this chapter is perhaps an issue no longer. We may not need to pin the ass and his story down any further, at least not for the purposes of its popular reception in our contemporary world. However, it would be interesting to take the mule metaphor further and apply it to the structure and nature of Apuleius’ novel as well as to an ending that still seems to trouble scholars as out of kilter with what has gone before. Has Apuleius mated fictional forms in order intentionally to produce a valuable product? If so, his choice of the ass story as a vehicle for experimental hybridized literature seems more than appropriate. Ultimately, Lucius, asinus multiscius (the very knowledgeable ass17), being for a time united as beast and man in one body, may be having the last laugh.
1 Zimmerman 2008 explored the festive nature of the Apuleian text and its symposiastic features, which would have made it suitable intellectual fare for the elite dinner party. See also James 2001.
2 As indicated in my previous chapter (Chapter 7 in this book), the Onos text is being re-evaluated by scholars especially for its portrayal of empowered women and through them the issue of narrative control. This has implications for Apuleius’ novel. See the research of Dollins into “the edible man as consumable text” (paper delivered at ICS, London, May 2011).
3 I am conscious that I have concentrated on the first half of Apuleius’ novel in both my chapters. This is partly out of considerations of space but also because the first-time reader needs to have some surprises. The student of Apuleius who pursues the secondary scholarship will find that the same challenges of interpretation and narratological questions only proliferate in the later episodes and secondary stories.
4 Zimmerman 2006, 317–339 draws out the Lucretian poetic resonances in the Isis epiphany. She observes that the Olympian goddesses are unresponsive to Psyche’s plight, whereas Isis responds to prayers (332–333).
5 This is another irresistible pun from the Oswald adaptation of the novel for the Globe (see Apuleius’ The Golden Ass: The Nature of the Beast).
6 This chapter is not necessarily a palinode (retraction), but the pleasure (voluptas) of having so many interpretations to read is not always unalloyed!
7 For instance, Giovanni Solinas (University of Bergamo, Italy) traced the legend of Cupid and Psyche to the novel of Mélusine, and Leonor Santa Barbara (Universidade Nova, Portugal) explored the tale’s reflections across European literary genres.
8 Any course designed for a study of the nineteenth-century novel will distinguish between realist and non-realist fiction of this period by looking at categories such as characterization, narrative voice, and setting. However, authors are fully capable of mixing modes and genres, introducing the Gothic into a realistic scenario for purposes of parody or to take readers in and out of comfort zones.
9 Marina Warner in Afterword, p. 34 of Beastly Tales, part 7 of Great Fairytales—the Guardian, the Observer October Supplement (2007).
10 The stereotype of the male of the species, voiced by a man disguised as a woman in Billy Wilder’s 1959 comedy classic Some Like It Hot.
11 Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle et La Bête is renowned for its artful and ravishing treatment of the fairy story. See Elsom 1989 and James 1998 for Cocteau’s unconscious realization of Apuleian motifs.
12 I am grateful for the animated discussion from students and lecturers in the Kyknos seminar, which added nuances to the idea of Cupid and Psyche as horror. The audience also shared their perceptions (and those of their adult education evening classes) of the novel as first- and second-time readers.
13 In her encouragement of the nervous ass who is acting like a virgin in their sexual encounter (10.21), she repeats the blandishments that Psyche used on Cupid at 5.6. There is clearly boundary blurring on the human and animal front going on in this scene.
14 The boy is empowered by his storytelling to take control of his own situation and defeat the witch. He does this by relating his successful tussle with his captor as if it is one of his fictional narratives transforming itself into reality. He tells the story of his escape—and escapes!
15 Keulen 2007 notes throughout his commentary on Book 1 that Apuleius actualizes or enacts metaphors, proverbs, and philosophical maxims. In fact, Lucius the ass at one point suggests that he is the reason that the proverb of the peeping ass and the ass’s shadow came into being (9.42).
16 Finkelpearl 2003, 37–51, discusses the creative tensions when the Apollonian and Isiac discourses meet.
17 Nam et ipse gratas gratias asino meo memini, quod me suo celatum tegmine variisque fortunes exercitatum, etsi minus prudentem, multiscium reddidit (“For I am mindful of the thanks due to my time as an ass because hidden under cover of his exterior and exercised by a variety of fortunes, he rendered me very knowledgeable but with less foresight”).
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