When the Text Becomes the Teller: Apuleius and the Metamorphoses

In Apuleius' Metamorphoses, the text speaks, introducing itself to its audience in its own voice. When the text tells the audience to ask the question "Who is this?" it responds by giving a "family" history and linguistic genealogy. While the text highlights storytelling through its plot and situations, it also participates in storytelling, making itself the primary agent of transmission. During a time when ancient Rome highlighted the performances of literary works in order to offer authorized interpretations (that is, the performance of the text would indicate to the audience how to understand it), Apuleius' text makes itself the performer and subordinates the audience to itself. This new relationship of audience to text that was created by a new use of storytelling allowed for the exhibition of and creation of a counter-culture that permitted imperial critique during the Age of the Antonines. The Metamorphoses, or Asineus Aureus, continually plays with the concepts of making a written text "speak," with storytelling in literary form, and with the creation of an alternative hermeneutic of a mediating genre. The plot-line, a continuous wandering through the frontiers of the Roman Empire with a brief, glossed-over interlude in Rome, and the surprise ending of a conversion to the cult of Isis (the credibility of which is questionable), is full of detours and deceptions. The form continually slips from allusions to literary epic, to oral storytelling, to novelistic prose, all of which are attached to an introductory prologue that sets itself up as formally and narratologically distinct from the whole. The reader must be involved in the process of making meaning for this text and is explicitly called upon to speak at certain points. The historical situation of this work is the Age of the Antonines in the second century CE, a time period that Edward Gibbon called the "happiest period the world had ever known" (1963:14). Yet when read against Apuleius' disruptive techniques of questioning discourses of power, the perception of the calm and serene historical period creates a conflict that needs to be addressed.