Narrative and Repetition
Hum 110, 4.12. 99
Gail Sherman

I. Introduction: varieties of interpretation

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

B. Two important questions: "What are the cases of reading and interpreting that are displayed in The Golden Ass itself? and what significance can these have as models for our reading and interpretation of the whole book?" (Winkler, 19)

C. The Golden Ass is "a narrative of religious experience. . . specifically, a narrative of conversion" (Shumate, 1)

D. Another important question: What textual repetitions and extra-textual contexts can organize our reading of The Golden Ass as a religious, philosophical, novelistic, and/or comic work?

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

III. Narrative repetition: the inset tale of Cupid and Psyche, bks. 4-6

A. Narrative context: Charite, the old woman, and the bandits, or, teller, tale, and audience (Charite, Lucius, reader of The Golden Ass)

B. Echoes and allusions

1. Demeter, Persephone, Hades

a. Ovid, Metamorphoses., V (Humphries 119-125)

b. Rita Dove, Ovid, and Apuleius

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:

1. Cupid and Psyche: marriage, separation and trials, reunification of Love and the Soul

2. Lucius: wandering, suffering, arrival "home"

D. Death, Sex, and Celibacy in Apuleius and antiquity

1. Literary traditions

2. Religious and philosophical traditions

IV. The Golden Ass as comic novel and philosophical conversion tale, or the importance of being earnest in antiquity

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. He too had been seduced by curiosity, and he too endures the weary pilgrimage, but Isis is to rescue him as Cupid rescues Psyche. He too will undertake a visit to Hades within the symbolism of the Egyptian mysteries, and the fruit of his mystical union with Isis will be inexplicabilis voluptas, a pleasure which cannot be unfolded. Book 11 contains repeated echoes of the story of Psyche to underline that Lucius' relationship with Isis after his wanderings symbolically re-enacts the apotheosis of Psyche.

P. G. Walsh, 781-2.

3. The audience envisaged by Apuleius was one of highly educated Romans. The texture of the story can be highly literary, evoking a wide range of Greek and Latin authors for the pleasure of sophisticated readers. Psyche, for example, . . . in her progress through Hades invokes the similar journey of Aeneas. The literary model for Charite's psychological anguish is Virgil's Dido.

Walsh, 785.

4. Apuleius very clearly enjoys and takes advantage of allusion. . . . In Book 10, however, there is a weariness about writing and rewriting, a sense that everyhting is growing worse rather than progressing, that there is no escape from fate or literary tradition, that, while family implies certain expected relationships, these are not often fulfilled. There is confusion, not pietas. In the earlier books of the Metamorphoses, literary ancestors do not cause this sort of tension. . . . In the later books, however, as Lucius' deliverance from the endless repetition of life's events seems less and less imminent, so Apuleius' forced dependence on the same stories seems more of a burden. The oppressive nature of the tradition in Book 10 makes thje book ripe for the sort of literary release and discovery that occurs in the final scenes. In Book 11, Apuleius breaks away from [his model] completely and from Latin tradition to a great extent and creates something rather new. Immediately before Book 11, however, literary tradition is just another trap.

Finkelpearl, 183.

5. The explicit account of the Isiac theology, ritual, and observance, recounted with none of the puckish exuberance marking the earlier adventures, is a teaching exercise, a recommendation of the Egyptian religion to a Roman audience. It is legitimate to speculate that it is occasioned by the meteoric growth of contemporary Christianity in North Africa as attested in the writings of Tertullian.

P.G. Walsh, 783.

6. The question which had preoccupied many Christian groups in the second century was embarrassingly simple: 'What new thing did the Lord bring by coming down to earth?' [Irenaeus, Against the Heresies 4.34.1] The answer was clear: "One mighty deed alone was sufficient for our God -- to bring freedom to the human person." [Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, 1.17].

Brown, 83.

7. Because it was closely associated with the urge to overcome death through the begetting of children, [heterosexual] sexual intercourse had always carried with it a tinge of sadness. For many ancient [male] Greek and Romans, their very need to sleep with women so as to obtain offspring was, in itself, a somber reminder of transience and the grave. But the new way of thinking that emerged in Christian circles in the course of the second century shifted the center of gravity of thought on the nature of human frailty from death to sexuality. For sexual desire was no longer presented as a benign remedy for death. Some Christian thinkers presented it as the first cause of death. Others, less drastic, saw it as the first, most blatant manifestation of Adam and Eve's loss of the immortality conferred on them by possession of God's Spirit. For all, sexuality edged itself into the center of attention, as a privileged symptom of humanity's fall into bondage. Consequently, the renunciation of sexual intercourse came to be linked on a deep symbolic level with the reestablishment of a lost human freedom, with a regaining of the Spirit of God, and, so, with man's [sic] ability to undo the power of death.

Brown, 86.

8. 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.

Sources Cited:

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.

Demeter, Waiting

No. Who can bear it. Only someone
who hates herself, who believes
to pull a hand back from a daughter's cheek
is to put love into her pocket --
like one of those ashen Christian
philosophers, or a war-bound soldier.

She is gone again and I will not bear
it, I will drag my grief through a winter
of my own making and refuse
any meadow that recycles itself into
hope. Shit on the cicadas, dry meteor
flash, finicky butterflies! I will wail and thrash
until the whole goddamned golden panorama freezes
over. Then I will sit down to wait for her. Yes. 

Rita Dove, Motherlove, 56.

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.