I. Overview: How can we make sense out of a literary work that seems to be made up more of a series of stories than as a unified story? How do these multiple inset stories work? In answering these questions, I will develop the thesis that The Golden Ass is a literary work that attempts to make us better interpreters of objects, texts, and stories. To develop my argument, I'll focus on the text's models of reading and interpretion by analyzing two textual instances of such models in some depth: the Diana and Acteon ekphrasis in book 1, and the inset tale of Cupid and Psyche, books 4-5. In discussing these two sections of the book, I'll call attention to the ways that The Golden Ass picks up on and re-reads myths that we have encountered in Virgil and Ovid. Finally, I'll discuss how the The Golden Ass's focus on mortality, storytelling, sex, and magic might fit into the second-century Roman/North African landscape that is the context for the works we'll be reading in the upcoming weeks.

II. Diana and Acteon

1. On his [Acteon's] forehead
   Horns sprouted, and his hound-dogs came to drink
   The blood of their young master. In the story
   You will find Acteon guiltless. . .

   1. Ovid, Metamorphoses, III
      (trans. Humphrey, 61; cf. Melville, 55)

2. Apuleius' description of the sculpture (trans. Lindsay, 52)

III. Cupid and Psyche

1. How does Psyche's condition mirror Charite's and Lucius'?
   
2. Are we to focus on the notion that stories often tell truths through expressing their contraries? Or to assume that Psyche's story, though it does not foreshadow a happy ending for Charite, DOES foreshadow a happy ending for Lucius, our curious protagonist?
   
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.

IV. Modes of reading

1. Death and stories
   
   1. "Death radically puts in question the taken-for-granted, 'business as usual" attitude in which one exists in everyday life. Here, everything in the daytime world of existence in society is massively threatened with "irreality" --that is, everything in that world becomes dubious, eventually unreal, "other" than one used to think. Insofar as the knowledge of death cannot be avoided in any society, legitimations of the reality of the social world in the face of death are decisive requirements in any society." (P. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociology of Religion, 44; quoted in Shumate, 172)
      
2. Conversion narratives: Parallels between the inset story of Cupid and Psyche and the frame story of Lucius the man/ass.
   
   1. Desire, Sex, Love
   2. Curiosity
   3. Allegorical account of descent and ascent
   4. Protagonist's essential moral innocence?
      
3. Sexuality as a cultural template: freedom and slavery
   
   1. "The question which had preoccupied many Christian groups in the second century was embarassingly 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.
      
   2. "There was one potentially reversible process shared by all human beings. Sexuality was based on a drive that was widely spoken of as irresistible . . . This drive, furthermore, was the known cause of the one irrefutably unidirectional process to which human beings freely contributed -- procreation. . . . If sexual activity could cease among human beings, the tumultuous cascade of the human race from copulation, through birth to the grave, would come to a halt. . . .To give up sexual joining (even, some thought, to transcend the sexual urge) was known to be humanly possible. Given the manner in which freedom from the "present age" was posed - in terms of the halting of one-way processes - to halt sexual activity could be regarded as a symbolically stunning gesture. . . .In a world seemingly governed by iron constraints, the human body could stand out as a clearly marked locus of free choice." Brown, 84.
      
   3. "Because it was closely associated with the urge to overcome death through the begetting of children, 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.

V. Conclusion: some cultural functions of fictions

1. "High literature, low trash; a single tale, a heterogeneous collection; a responsible narrator, a man who can't help himself: The Golden Ass is characterized by its obsessive shifts along the axes of class, unity, and authority. . . .The Golden Ass entertains by shifting its frames of reference. That makes the novel inconsistent, but inconsistent in a funny way and within a system. . . . the system itself is a problem. Because of the leap to Book 11, the existence of the three dimensions of volatility seems now to be somehow or other significant. Significant of what? I should say: of the impossibility of authorizing an answer to the question of the meaning of the whole, any whole. The text can raise the question, play with a variety of answers, but cannot successfully endorse and hand over a solution to such a question. . . . The Golden Ass is an evocation of a religious experience bracketed in such a way that the reader must, but cannot, decide the question of its truth." Winkler, 178-9.

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.