The Rhetoric of Storytelling in The Golden Ass

Spencer Smith In the mid–second century AD a well-educated, Latin-speaking North African named Lucius Apuleius composed an extended prose narrative that explores some of the foundational themes of the western intellectual tradition: the place of the human in the world, the nature of social order, the quest for spiritual identity—the very nature of being itself, as well as of the divine. Much to the delight as well as the instruction of posterity, Apuleius raised these profound concerns by telling a rambunctious story about an ass. In the resulting work, The Golden Ass, Apuleius explores his themes in such a way as to raise another basic question within the western literary tradition: “What are stories, and what are they good for?” The narrative tells of a curious journeyman, also named Lucius, who is unwillingly transformed into an ass and then led on a kind of odyssey throughout the Greco-Roman world. As a beast, he is given a perspective on the human order from without, while his consciousness remains paradoxically within. With his human agency denied him, his time as an ass allows—or rather forces—him to hear a series of stories, of which The Golden Ass is largely composed. The resulting tale-within-a-tale structure allows Apuleius to call attention to the problem of discovering meaning within stories and to the importance of interpreting that meaning. Lucius’s physical transformations also call attention to the role that stories play in the transformation of the soul. Lucius’s initial transformation into an ass results from an inability or refusal to find meaning in the stories he encounters; as an ass, he hears various tales that progressively help him to construct an informed image of the world; finally apprehending the cumulative meaning of the tales he has heard, he flees a debased society and seeks isolation, where divine grace intervenes (in the form of the goddess Isis) to provide a final interpretation for the meaning of his own journey and to restore to him his humanity. The narrative’s religious conclusion has attracted much critical attention, provoking at least one critic to dismiss the work as mere “religious propaganda.”1 While The Golden Ass achieves too much artistically to be compartmentalized thus, its religious element cannot be ignored when considering the whole of the work. Critics since Augustine have noted the autobiographical aspect of the narrative; and the marked sincerity of the “religious fervor” in book 11 and its compatibility with Apuleius’s Platonism