Narrative and Repetition              Hum 110                    Gail Sherman

 

I. Introduction

A.   Who was Apuleius?

B.    What is The Golden Ass?Metamorphoses?

1.     The Golden Ass  is "an open-ended problem text"(Winkler, 241)

2.     a self-reflexive model for reading

         3. "a narrative of religious experience. . . specifically, a narrative of conversion." (Shumate, 1)

           

II. Ekphrasis and interpretation: The Golden Ass, book 2 (Lindsay, p. 52) and Ovid's Metamorphoses,  III (Humphries, p. 61).

 

III.  Narrative repetitions: the inset tale of Cupid and Psyche, books. 4-6

            A. Narrative contexts: Charite, the old woman,  and the bandits; teller, tale, and audiences (Charite, Lucius, reader of The Golden Ass)

            B. Echoes and allusions:

                        1. Ovid: Demeter, Persephone, Hades

                        2. Virgil and Apuleius: anguish and journeys    

                                    a. Psyche travels to the underworld;  cf. Aeneas, Aeneid  6.

                                    b. Charite is distraught; cf. Dido, Aeneid   1, 4

            C. Plot as allegory:  Cupid and Psyche: marriage, separation and trials,                                                       reunification of Love and the Soul

           

Texts:

1. One of these grandsons was the lad Acteon,

First cause of Cadmus' sorrow.  On his forehead

Horns sprouted, and his hound-dogs came to drink

The blood of their young master.  In the story

You will find Actaeon guiltless. . .

                                    Ovid, Metamorphoses; trans. Humphries, 61.

 

2.         The conte  of Cupid and Psyche adds a mythological dimension to the serious theme of the romance. Artistically inserted at the heart of the book by Apuleius himself, it presents the experiences of Psyche in parallel with those of Lucius. No written version incorporating Cupid and Psyche as protagonists predates Apuleius. The likelihood is that our Platonist philosopher has created the story of the marriage, separation, and reunification of the god of love and the maiden symbolizing the soul by fusing a version of the folk-tale with a developing motif of literature and art; for the poetry and art of the Alexandrian age exploit that love of Eros and Psyche rooted in the Phaedrus and Symposium, the dialogues in which Plato depicts the attraction of the soul to the divine by the power of love. . . .

            As Lucius listens to this story told to Charite, he hears without understanding his own history and his future deliverance.

                                                            P. G. Walsh, 781-2.

 

6.         The reader is made to participate not only in the events of Lucius' fictional life but in the original helplessness of not knowing where they might lead. Thus in Book 11 the reader experiences a deliberate discomfiture of his expectations and is apparently required to acknowledge errors of reading. No author can convey in words more than a simulacrum of any experience. But he or she can construct a narrative about mistakes in such a way that each reader will make mistakes in interpretation that might be called analogous to the original experience. The aim is an Aha-Erlebnis   [aha-experience] because any straightforward preaching of the insight in question would misrepresent it as an objective thing that could be passed from hand to hand rather than an unreproducibly personal experience.                           Winkler, 243-4.

 

7.  Demeter's Prayer to Hades

 

This alone is what I wish for you: knowledge.

To understand each desire has an edge,

to know we are responsible for the lives

we change. No faith comes without cost,

no one believes anything without dying.

Now for the first time

I see clearly the trail you planted,

what ground opened to waste,

though you dreamed a wealth

of flowers.

 

There are no curses -- only mirrors

held up to the souls of gods and mortals.

And so I give up this fate, too.

Believe in yourself,

go ahead -- see where it gets you.

 

Rita Dove, Motherlove, 63.

Selected Bibliography:

 

Brown, Peter. The Body and Society. Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation     in Early Christianity.  Columbia University Press, 1988.

Dove, Rita. Motherlove.  New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.

Finkelpearl, Ellen D.  Metamorphosis of Language in Apuleius: Ann Arbor:             University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Ovid; trans. Rolfe Humphries.  Metamorphoses. Bloomington: Indiana             University Press, 1955.

Shumate, Nancy.  Crisis and Conversion in Apuleius' Metamorphoses.  Ann             Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Walsh, P.G. "Apuleius" in E.J. Kenney and W.V. Clausen. The Cambridge             History of Latin Literature. Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Winkler, John J. Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius'               Golden Ass. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.