Auctor and Actor. A Narratological Reading of Apuleius's the Golden Ass

355 Pages·1985·24.77 MB·English

by  John J. Winkler

Auctor & Actor
- - -
_____ A U C T O R
& A C T O R
A Narratological Reading of
Apuleius's Golden Ass
John J.
by Winkler
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angdcs · London
University of California Press
lkrkdcy and Los Angeles. California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 1985 by
The Regents of the University of California
Printed in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Ljbrary ofCongreu Cataloging in Publlcation Data
Winkler. John J.
Author and actor.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Apulcius. Metamorphoses. 2. Apuleius-T~hnique. 3. Narration
(Rhetoric) 4. First person narrative. 5. Isis (Egyptian deity) in literature.
6. Detective and mystery stories-History and criticism.
I. Title.
PA6217. W5 1985 873' .01 84-00182
ISBN 0..520-05240-4
Fnmlispitu: Lef[, figure of Egyptian priest, Hellenistic bronze, counesy
of The Walters An Gallery, Baltimore; right. bald comic tc:rracoua.
Myr 324, photographed by Chuzcvillc, courtesy of tbc Louvre, Paris.
Contents
Pre faa• VII
List ofAbbrcviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xm
1. The Question of Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
The Question of Genre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Mithras's Interpretation of
Tlte Golden A 8
H
Ht•rnu-ncutk Entcrtajo nwnt 11
Historical Context 14
Overview 19
Pan One: Til UTH
2. The Interpretation ofTa1es
Introduction ?5
Aristomcncs' TaJc ofSocratcs (1.2-20) . . . . . . 27
Lucius's Account of Lucius (1.26) . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Milo's TaJc ofDiophancs (2.11-15) . . . . . . . . . . 39
The Ass Reporter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Two Womcnts Stories 50
3. The Scrupulous Reader.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Detection 60
Sc•nsationl 93
4, The Contract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Playing Fair ............................. 100
Malice Aforethought ..................... 104
ImpJication ............................. 110
The Marketplace of Desire ................ 119
5. Interlude: Socrates in Mot1ev ................. 123
v
VI CONTENTS
Part Two: CONSEQUENCES
6. The Duplicities ofA uctor IA ctor ...•.•......... 135
The Narrator (Auctor) as Character (Actor) and
the Character of the Narrator . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Suppression of the Auctor-Narrator ......... 140
From Auctor-Narrator to Auctor-Novelist.
and Back Again ....................... 153
7. The Prologue as Conundrum ................. 180
The Origin of the Book ................... 183
Egyptian Sharpness ...................... 186
Mutual Nexus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188
The Rude Speaker's Identity ............... 194
A Model for the Speaker's Identity .......... 200
8. The Text Questions, the Reader Answers ....... 204
Three Difficulties 204
The lsiac Interpretation ofLucius·s Life ...... 209
Surprises at Rome:
Money and More Initiations ............. 215
The Final I mage ......................... 223
How Else Could This Book Be Read? , , . , . , . 227
Part Three: CONJECTURES
9. Parody Lost and Regained .........•......... 251
Three Tales ofthc Ass . . . • . . . . . . • . 252
The Restless Quest for Wisdom ............ 257
Apulcius's Adaptation of the Parody ......... 273
10. Isis and Aesop ............................. 276
Why Isis? ............................... 276
The Lift of Aesop ........•................ 279
The Grotesque Perspective ................ 286
11. The Gilding of the Ass ...................... 292
The External Case for Asinm Auwus .. , , , .. , 293
The Meaning of the Title .................. 298
Select Bibliography .............................. 323
Index LocoruJn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... 327
Index
Preface
This book is written for three quite different audiences-those
whose inrerests are, respectively) in modem literature, in Greco
Roman culture, and in religious history. To set the scene for the per
formance of this book. you must imagine yourself in an audience
composed of people with diverse interests and backgrounds, hoping
to ]cant something not only new but multidisciplinary.
My first aim is that readers whose focus of interest is modern
fiction and its theory will find that self-consciousness in narrative (a
mode that often seems distinctively modern), so far from beginning
with Cervantes, is an ancient achievement. The Esc her-like interplay
off iction and reality. the joking awareness ofw hat a subtle and foolish
game it is for any "I" to write anything-these arc the specialties of
The Golden Ass. Borges and Nabokov have nothing on Apuleius.
CJassicists. it is my second and fonder hope, will find that narratol
ogy, though the word and the theories it names are recent, is a good
language for giving voice to the interpretive problems of Apuleius's
novel. The method is untraditional, but then The Golden Ass is and
always was a d&lasse dassic. The risk of anachronism seems to me
worth taking for the reward of bridge building between ancient and
modern literature, not to mention of solving an as yet unsolved liter
ary puzz1e. As I invite modernists to inspect a novel that ought to
interest them, so I invite classicists to sample a method that has much
to offer them. For the traditionalist in us alii would recall Frank Kcr
modc's words: "what we arc leaming about narrative may be, in a
sense, new, but narrative was always potentially what we have now
learned to think it, in so far as our thinking is right."1
1. Not'P.·I and NanuliJ't', W. P. Kcr Mcntoria] Lecture 24 (GJa..,gow, 1971): 6.
vn
Vlll PREFACE
Third, religious historians, particularly those focusing on early
christianity and related cults, know that no text is more frequently
cited in discussions of Greco-Roman piety than the concluding book
of this nove!. Lucius's unexpected devotion to the goddess who saved
him from 3sininity, his prayer and fasting. his apostolic self-publicity
and self-rejection give us one of the first (it seems) first-person ac
counts of an experience that from then on would have a central place
in the conflict of Western religious and political idcoiogics-convcr
sion. The jack-in-the-box appearance of that born-again narrator is
what first irked me to look very closely at the narratology of Apu
Jcius'scxceedingly clever performance. The reinterpretations reached
here should significantly alter our understanding of what it could
mean to have a new religious commitment in the second century C. E.;
they thus ought to be of interest to Western social historians gener
ally, who arc sometimes misled by periodizations (especially of the
exciting Foucauldian variety) to dismiss the beforc-X as radically ir
relevant to X.
From each of these audiences I anticipate a different skepticism, a
different initial reluctance. From modem literati I cxpc:ct modern
ism-the belief or premise that medieval and ancient cultures are be
yond the horizon ofo ur conremporary perspective: one can get there,
but only by abandoning all the familiar social and historical realities
that have shaped Europe and America since the Renaissance. There is
some truth to that. I hope this book will build a bridge. From classi
cists I expect an initial disdain ofc urrent fads and a feeling ofd isorien
tation at the untraditional arrangement of materials. Classical philol
ogy is a venerable discipline ofg reat comprehensiveness and stability,
and its best practitioners arc rightly suspicious of the ephemeral. But
important new 3pproaches to literature have flourished in recent dec
ades: they can complement and build on the achievements of tradi
tional philology. Certainly this book has relied on the labors of sev
eral generations of classicists and would not have been possible
without them. Again I hope to build a bridge. From religious histo
rians I expect a reluctance to deal seriously with the whole of The
Golden Assratherthanjust its magnificent lsiac conclusion. The lusty
ta]es at the beginning obviously have so 1itt1c to do with the Great
Lady at the-end that their suspicions. I admit, are not without founda-
PREFACE IX
tion. But if you approach the subject with an open mind and a little
curiosity I promise that you will see a marvelous bridge being built.
l would hazard a guess that the general reader, whom l have in
mind as much as the specialists, is likely to care more about the claim
that there was a "modem" ancient novel or about the issues involved
in rdigious individualism than about Latin liter:ature as such. Sinct' (it
goes without saying) Latin literature is terra incog~Jita, how should we
conduct our trek over this strange terrain? The problem concerns
more than just the general n:ader. Since the argument of this book
draws on three kinds of expertise. even the three kinds of expert will
probably find themselves sooner or later in alien lcrritory. My chal
lenge as a writer has been to speak. as it were:. not only everyday
English but also the special vocabularies ofl3arthes, Pauly-Wissowa,
and Nock to an audience of persons who may not know those lan
guages or who may know one very well and the others not at all.
l think at this point of a display speech that Apulcius once delivered
to a sophisticated and critical crowd iu two different languages: ••1 ha\·e
not forgotten my original promise to the opposing factions oft his audi
ence-that neither the Greek-speakers nor the Latin-speakers among
you would leave at the end with less than full measure of my mcssagc."2
My aim here has been to conduct the analysis at a level that will satisfy
not only the sman general reader but also those knowledgeable in each
discipline without contusing or alienating the rest. In practice this
means that I try, wherever possiblt:', to usc narratologkal techniques for
their implicit intelligibility and to avoid Members Only discussions of
shop. particularly in pans One and Two. The footnotes cite some key
theoretical discussions behind the techniques I employ, but I have Jim
ited references to secondary literature to what 1 hope is a helpful mini
mum rather than given an t.•xhausrivt.• maximum (a point on which
Quintilian is wise).3 The cultural specificity of Part Three demands a
good deal of documentation but even here the text is meant to be re-ad-
2. 114m t1 i11 prin(ipio ,,_,his diu,·rs.1 tendemibus iM lllt'miru pvllicm, 111 tll'fllra pcHS UI"S·
tnmt, nee qui Gram• lite qui l.aliN•' prldbdti~ JiaaC<~fi~ lmius t'XIIC'Ift'~ tlbirrti~. (Dr· plriiMLIJllri.a
libr~ cd. [~ Thomas I Leipzig. 19081: 5 = Op11swlrs plrilosophiqu~s tt fra~mrnts, cd. J.
lkaujeu l?..lris, 1973]: 168.)
J. •·To search out what c,·crybod.y, duwu to the most wnrcmptiblc of men. hJs
said on a subject i!O l'itht"n·xcruri:uingly painful or d1e \\.'ork ofe mpty vanity: ir sruit~ns