Almost two millennia after it was written, The Golden Ass is still a rollicking good read. I recognize that this may in part be thanks to the translator (I was reading the Kenney version in the Penguin Classics edition); but I think it is also attributable to the book's mastery of the fundamentals of narrative construction. To study it, therefore, is to gain some insight into the basic elements of effective storytelling. I propose to offer such a structuralist reading here.
I would challenge anyone to pick up the novel (the only full-length work of its kind in Latin to survive from classical antiquity) and not be drawn in. What first wins one over to the book is the author's confiding tone. He introduces us to a hapless but fundamentally plucky narrator (who shares more than one trait in common with his creator, including a career as an advocate). And from the first paragraph of the book on, the author/narrator promises us a good time, including lots of juicy gossip.
The novel is arranged in the format of a tale-cycle of a kind that would later become well known to us through the examples of Chaucer, Boccaccio, et al. And in the later stories in the collection (which are threaded together through the frame narrative of the protagonist's transformation into a donkey), the interest of each incident truly does arise primarily from its status as "gossip." These stories are entertaining in the same way reality TV is. We're hearing about the bad behavior of our neighbors.
But the earlier stories in the collection often deploy more sophisticated (or—perhaps it is more accurate to say—more primitive but more deeply moving) narrative devices. Much of the central portion of the book is taken up with one of the finest fairy tales ever penned. There is also an episode from late in the book that borrows heavily from Greek mythology—a tale of a step-mother who develops an illicit obsession with her step-son, then falsely accuses him: shades here of the story of Phaedra.
To consider the fairy tale portion, this is the Cupid and Psyche story that runs throughout Books 4, 5, and 6. I say it is the definitive fairy tale because it offers a kind of index in its own right of the genre's primary motifs. There is the injunction disobeyed (Psyche violates not one but two sets of instructions through her impetuous curiosity); there is the enchanted castle; there are the animal helpers; and there is the bloody revenge on her treacherous sisters worthy of the gruesomest passages from the Brothers Grimm.
The framing narrative of the book is itself an entertaining work of fantasy, meanwhile; but the first episode in the tale cycle—an encounter with Thessalian witches that is reported to Lucius (the future ass of the book's title) and passed on to us—partakes of something even more potent than fantasy—a distinct genre that has been labeled "the fantastic." And this, I submit, is the most fundamental reason of all why the novel is so effective at hooking the reader's attention, from its opening passages on.
I take the concept of "the fantastic" from the literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov, who distinguishes it from a crowd of related genres (to which other tales in the Golden Ass cycle properly belong), such as the fairy tale, the fantasy or romance, the Gothic tale, etc. Todorov defines "the fantastic" as a genre that includes descriptions of supernatural or otherworldly occurrences—but which maintains a critical distance between the protagonist and these events, such that we cannot be sure they actually occurred.
Many genres that deploy elements of the supernatural do so without this critical distance or any self-reflective doubt as to whether what they are describing is real. No one in a fairy tale pauses the action to ask if there really can be such a thing as a gingerbread house. So too, no one recounting a myth questions whether the gods and their powers are real. "If it was said that God made the world in six days, why He did make it in six days, neither in more nor less," as Samuel Butler once sardonically put it.
Much of the Golden Ass, as I say, falls more into these latter categories. When Lucius is transformed into an ass instead of an owl by ingesting the wrong potion, the incident is reported at face value. This is perhaps why Todorov does not include Apuleius's classic novel in his account of the "fantastic" genre. The framing device of the novel is fantasy, perhaps, but it is not the "fantastic." So too, the novel's segments of myth and fairy tale report events without any doubt as to whether they happened as described.
But the first tale in the cycle is especially interesting, precisely because it introduces this element of doubt. Here, Lucius is not describing something that he claims to have experienced himself. Rather, he has heard the tale at second-hand, and now we are getting it at third-hand. Furthermore, the most outrageous incidents from the tale occur during what later turns out to be a dream—yet a dream that has left behind evidence in the real world (a now-hackneyed device that remains nonetheless effective).
Todorov's criteria for the "fantastic" would seem to match these devices perfectly. He argued that the "fantastic" genre derives much of its power of suspense—a power lacking in narratives of fantasy, where such doubt is not present—precisely because it holds the reader in a state of "tension" as to whether what they have heard is real or not. Lucius, just like the reader, listens to the tale of Thessalian witchcraft in a state of perplexity. He wasn't there—he can't affirm it's true; but he can't exactly dismiss it either.
This, I would say, is still the most emotionally effective way to tell a story of the supernatural. But it is often overlooked by people who write in this genre, particularly if they themselves are excessively credulous as to reports of wonderful occurrences. There is an insightful passage in H.P. Lovecraft's classic essay on the supernatural in literature, in which he observes that the best writers in this genre are always skeptics and nonbelievers. Perhaps it is because they are the ones best able to leave us in doubt.
I was thinking about this too, because it strikes me that this is exactly what today's "ghost hunter" and "paranormal investigator" TV shows so often get wrong. I confess that, in a critical state of boredom one evening last week, I watched a few on Max. Many of them start off strong. The most compelling part of each episode is the opening—when we hear some "real person" recount at second-hand a supernatural encounter. We are left in a cozy state of uncertainty—Todorov's "tension" that Lucius recreates so well.
But every episode invariably goes off the rails after this point. Usually, the hosts fake an unfalsifiable subjective encounter of their own ("I just felt something—do you feel that? I felt a presence in the room"). Or else the shows go so far as to introduce obviously-doctored footage (et tu, Discovery Channel? Is this how low you have fallen?). These moments, which are supposed to be the big ratings-getters, are actually the most dull. The tension is gone; we have stepped into the realm of mere fantasy.
I suppose TV producers think they have to remove their audience's doubt. No one likes being left in suspense—or so they think. But what Apuleius realized, at least in this first tale in the cycle, is that the opposite is true—at least when it comes to carrying off the specific effect of "the fantastic." The real trick is to leave the reader hanging. It is to exacerbate the "tension" of uncertainty. And then finally to move on, without ever letting them know whether the tale they were told was truth, or mere imagination.
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