THE ASS GOES EAST:
APULEIUS AND ORIENTALISM

CAROLE BOIDIN

Artistic and intellectual ‘afterlives’ often rely on powerful and long-lasting comparisons. Most of the earliest commentaries on The Golden Ass that have come down to us (that by Macrobius for example) draw parallels between Apuleius’ stories and Plato’s fictions, working on the assumption that Apuleius was a Platonist. This comparison played a crucial role in ulterior interpretations and artistic receptions of the text.^171: Readings in terms of other strong paradigms, such as conversion narratives or picaresque novels, have also had long-lasting effects. In this chapter, I will consider a few instances of another comparison that is frequently drawn when framing the reception of The Golden Ass. My purpose in doing so is to ask why commentators have so frequently compared this book with famous collections of oriental tales.

The invention of the oriental tale and the genealogy of fiction

Nearly forty years ago, Edward W. Said identified the tendency, common to classical scholarship, to consider Eastern traditions from a Greco-Roman perspective. According to his views on ‘Orientalism’, the very concept of the Orient was an early modern occidental construction, based on a kind of inverted mirror of occidental values.² While Said’s model is limited in certain ways, we cannot overlook its validity concerning the way in which this attitude permeated European representations of the collection of beliefs, practices, and artistic works dubbed as oriental. On the other hand, a reverse cultural process also created unexpected associations between many familiar classical texts and the Orient. Through such associations, new aesthetic and intellectual values were defined, and a range of cultural traditions of very different natures (be they ancient or modern, local or extraneous) were consequently labelled as ‘oriental’ by scientific and artistic discourse, allowing for critical distance and new considerations, as well as for fantastic projections.

The ‘oriental tale’ was thus invented by European literate circles, as an archetypal literary genre that was believed to have its origins in Antiquity, in an attempt to trace the history of modern fiction and to give it some cultural legitimacy. As the progressive autonomy of literary fiction elicited a collective reflection on the morality of storytelling and the limits of invention, the reconstructed entity that was the ‘oriental tale’ provided a distant model against which it was possible to delineate what modern fiction should be.

In 1669, Pierre-Daniel Huet thus defined the modern (European) novel or ‘romance’ by reference to a historical or genealogical narrative. He described modern romances as elaborate and moral versions of ‘fables’ that had originally come from the Orient, considered as the well-known source of all wisdom and fantasy. He particularly stressed the distance between the modern novel and ancient oriental tales that conveyed the mystical secrets of the Egyptians, the ‘unnatural metaphors’ of the Arabians, the Persian ‘art of falsifying agreeably’, and so on regarding Indian, Syrian, or Hebrew forms of fiction.³ These ‘fables’ were first transmitted to the Greeks, who invented the very genre of romance, then to the Romans, and then onwards to their medieval successors.

The Golden Ass holds a special position in this historical account. Huet suggests that Apuleius found inspiration in a specific vein of oriental writing known as the sermo Milesius. He argues that certain ancient oriental traditions were transformed by writers from Miletus (in Asia Minor—the oriental Greece), giving birth to a lesser form of fiction that remained peripheral to, but a historically constitutive element of, the European canon. The writers from Miletus knew of oriental traditions but they translated them in corrupted, lascivious taste:

Apuleius’ book thus, according to Huet, inherited its dubious morality from this doubly oriental ancestry:

In addition to these Milesian roots, Huet also mentions Apuleius’ own African origins, which are supposed to confer an oriental sensibility of another kind to his stories: ‘Son style est d’un sophiste, plein d’affectation et de figures violentes, dur, barbare, digne d’un Africain’ (‘His style is that of a sophist, full of affectation and violent figures, hard, barbarous, most befitting an African’).⁶ The Golden Ass was therefore perceived as being an oriental tale squared, due to its Asian origins and its African author. The old debate about Apuleius’ African style was not the only issue underlying this assessment:⁷ Apuleius’ work provided a singular piece of evidence, a surprising oriental milestone, for Huet’s historical apology of the novel. The Golden Ass belonged to an internal Orient which was imagined to be the birthplace of fiction, constructed within the classical tradition for both strategic and rhetorical reasons. Despite its obscenity and its ambiguity towards magic, The Golden Ass thus became part of the common patrimony: it was published in the collection Ad usum Delphini in 1688 and was constantly referred to by such authors as Sorel, La Fontaine, and Perrault, albeit at a sufficient distance from its origins to allow for the affirmation of the modern romance and its morality. This ‘orientalization’ thus became a way of addressing the peculiar status of The Golden Ass, a status that was relatively new in the history of its reception.

A fashionable oriental tale

This rhetorical construction gave way to a more complex process in the following decades, in the context of the growing knowledge and popularity in Europe of narratives with a real Eastern origin. The first European translation of the Arabian Nights in 1704, by Antoine Galland, a regular correspondent of Huet’s, was also introduced as another piece of documentation in this genealogy of fiction.⁸ The foreword claimed that European readers could finally have direct access to what Galland presented as a genuinely oriental tradition of fairy-tales and romances.⁹ The particular treatment of verisimilitude and morality in these tales had a fascinating effect on literary production, creating a European vogue for ‘oriental tales’ in the eighteenth century. A whole series of forged ‘translations’ from Arabic, Turkish, and Persian were published alongside authentic ones, based on the common formal basis of a sensational use of imagination, relaxed morality, and exoticism. This proved to be an excellent pattern for philosophical fictions. Not only were oriental tales postulated as ancient paradigms for the novel but they were now accessible to non-specialists and, at the same time, constituted a living, modern literary genre.¹⁰ This new European genre of the oriental tale can, in retrospect, be seen to have contaminated other narrative genres and, indeed, the whole Western patrimony. For example, the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre was republished in 1740 under the title of Les Mille et une faveurs.

The ‘orientalization’ of The Golden Ass thus acquired a new and enduring dimension. Eastern connotations were eagerly looked for in the text and were sometimes heavily underlined by translators, in both texts and peritexts. For example, in 1707 the Abbot Compain de Saint-Martin deliberately translated the famous mention of ‘modo si papyrum Aegyptiam argutia Nilotici calami inscriptam non spreveris inspicere’ (Met. 1.1) as an allusion to this oriental style of the text, omitting the reference to the material writing realia: the Ego promises the reader a delightful experience ‘provided you don’t despise reading a book written in the merry and facetious style of Egyptian authors’.¹¹ Footnotes also draw parallels between a number of details in Apuleius’ text and contemporary oriental customs: the religious mortifications performed by the priests of Cybele and Attis in Met. 8.27 or the purifying ‘lavacrum’ of Lucius in Met. 11.1 are likened to Islamic rites in Turkey and India.¹²

This form of naturalization of a text allegedly imbued with some sort of oriental sensibility—and not devoid of esoteric connotations—also accounted for its later integration within a collection of ‘Imaginary travels, dreams, visions, and cabalistic novels’ in 1788.¹³ This development accorded with the peculiar status that Egyptian antiquity had progressively acquired in the imagination of eighteenth-century artists and intellectuals. In a quite fascinating way, the oriental flavour of the text could be taken as accounting for both its lack of explicit morality and its spiritual significance, obscure as that may have appeared.

Oriental Psyches

Several literary allusions to the story of Psyche in the eighteenth century also integrate these oriental connotations. In the Ricciardetto by Niccoló Forteguerri (1738), an imitation of Ariosto, we meet Psyche as a well-meaning fairy, desperately looking for her husband Cupid, who has fallen in love with a fifteen-year-old Arabic girl in Rome, and whose fatal attraction holds him prisoner. In a closer and more elaborate relationship with the Apuleian Psyche story, the French ‘historiette’ La Nouvelle Psyché (1711) introduces its main character using an oriental set of criteria, in spite of her blond hair:

Psyche passes the time in mundane pleasures and is courted by three princes: the first comes from Happy Arabia, the second from the Distant Islands, and the last from Monomotapa, with an escort of elephants and giants. All three princes die of desperation upon Cupid’s arrival.

We can thus see that The Golden Ass was read as an analogue of collections of oriental tales, i.e. as a free form of fiction, apt to convey different kinds of messages,¹⁵ and as an open and inexhaustible source of narrative motifs from which could be created new fictions. Interestingly, this kind of retroactive contamination of The Golden Ass by an Eastern infection reached an unexpected literary climax (albeit confidential and unique) in an anonymous 1802 book entitled L’Âne au bouquet de roses, renouvelé de l’Âne d’Apulée (‘The Ass with a bunch of roses, renewed from Apuleius’ Ass’).¹⁶ In this adaptation of The Golden Ass, the story of Psyche undergoes an explicit process of orientalization through specific uses of narrative devices. First of all, the narrative frame of the story is a conversation between Apuleius and his friends about metamorphosis and metempsychosis, which brings him to tell the story of his own adventures. This invention provides a discursive actualization of the dialogical beginning of The Golden Ass (‘At ego tibi […]’) and renews the opinion, common since Augustine’s time, that Apuleius describes his personal metamorphosis in this book. Later on, we follow his adventures until the expected point at which he encounters a young maiden and an old woman who tries to comfort her by telling her a fabulous story, with the latter having to try surprisingly hard to find the right tale to tell. First, she starts narrating the mythological challenge of Paris and his attempt to find the most beautiful woman in the world, but the young maiden soon interrupts her, protesting that she has already heard that story. The servant then announces a more astonishing tale, in which she emphasizes the presence of three human sisters instead of three goddesses, thus affording greater pleasure. This proves to be an interesting, although seemingly arbitrary, commentary on the original story of Psyche. Yet again, the maiden starts yawning and interrupts the old woman:

The complex transformation of the passage announcing the expected story of Cupid and Psyche arouses multiple effects in the readers. The ‘famous author’ may refer to Apuleius, who explicitly figures as the main character and narrator in the novel but has not yet written the tale of Psyche at this point in the story. This first reading, paradoxically enough, is certainly influenced by the knowledge of the original framing that is to be found in the Latin text, together with the comic regrets of the ass who is unable to transcribe the fabella for lack of a tablet (Met. 6.25). For the readers of the time, it may also have alluded to La Fontaine, or to a more recent translator or adaptor. However, the most important point is the way in which these words underline the radical change at stake here: the central story of Psyche is overtaken by a first-person narrative of the old woman’s story, and this story happens to be an oriental tale. Furthermore, the need for a more amazing story, and the use of the first-person narrative, might also consciously echo the celebrated narrative patterns of the Arabian Nights. The whole design thus belongs to the typical, oriental-like, construction of the modern novel: the oriental tale turns out to be a romanesque and playful one, full of twists and turns, situated in an antique Indian setting and narrated by an antique Roman philosopher, who later confesses that the whole adventure actually occurred in a dream he had one amorous night, lying next to his beloved Photis. Literature here expresses a unified vision of the Orient as the birthplace of all fictions, and such representations framed the reception of Apuleian stories through both texts and illustrations.¹⁸

The orientalization of The Golden Ass was also progressively supported by science. Several folklore specialists devoted the same attention to The Golden Ass as they did to oriental narrative traditions, hunting for evidence of circulation and influence, mostly in order to prove the existence of an Indo-European connection. Psyche was thus attributed an Indian origin by such scholars,¹⁹ although this method was satirized from an early stage.²⁰

In all these examples, the discussion about the oriental identity of Apuleius and his masterpiece offered a way by which to establish paradigms for modern fictions, as already noted. However, such a conception is also quite reversible: the oriental tale proved to be a generic category functioning, more or less, as a modern way of designating a genre of literary discourse missing in Aristotle’s categorization. It had a pragmatically analogous function to that of the ‘Milesian tales’ in early modern times.²¹

Orientalism and the ideological exploitation of an ‘alien’

This process had gained a new momentum by the middle of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the Romantic quest for exotic literary sensibilities and the Symbolists’ fascination with Apuleius. A series of new European translations were published, which both explained and were shaped by this renewed interest of a slightly different kind. The old debate about Apuleius’ African style continued, but now with a new phrasing, as we find in the prefaces of two English translations. In 1893, Charles Whibley introduced a new edition of William Adlington’s 1566 translation as follows:

This designation of Apuleius as an ‘alien’ was not new per se. In the same vein as many other commentators, Whibley took the initial portrayal of the ego-narrator in Met. 1.1 as a definite truth about Apuleius: ‘A barbarian born, a Greek by education, Apuleius only acquired the Latin tongue by painful effort’.²³ But this traditional way of accounting for Apuleius’ style is here renewed by the dedication of ‘this metamorphosis of an Ancient Decadent’ to the French poet Mallarmé. It is the French-speaking ‘alien poets’ who are in the observer’s mind:

This declaration received a most virulent reply a few years later, in Francis D. Byrne’s introduction to his new translation (1905):

The allusion here to Kipling is rather interesting, as Apuleius seems to have become at the time a precocious master of the new literary genre of Orientalism, illustrated by Kipling’s novels about the Empire. In reply to Whibley’s depiction of Apuleius’ education, Byrne writes:

The orientalization of Apuleius had thus reached, by the end of the nineteenth century, a literary and scientific climax, with the ancient author becoming an involuntary witness to ideological considerations about civilization hierarchies. On the one hand, a colonial propagandist such as Louis Bertrand could later rise against this notion of an oriental Apuleius and claim a reappropriation of The Golden Ass as proof of the Latin identity of Northern Africa, discarding its Arabic and Islamic past. Apuleius was, thus, used as a tool to ‘de-orientalize’ the Orient and to promote the reintegration of North Africa into Western (and Christian) civilization. Louis Bertrand tried to invent a new tradition (to paraphrase Hobsbawm’s formula): the ‘Afrique latine’ novel.²⁷

On the other hand, The Golden Ass was also to be used as a postcolonial ‘counter-text’ in answer to colonialist ideology in North Africa, through a process of indigenization, both in French, Arabic, and Amazight texts, creating a new sort of ‘re-orientalization’.²⁸ But this is quite another story.

Concluding remarks

This oriental dimension in the European reception of The Golden Ass proves interesting with regard to what it tells us about cultural identity and literary characterization within the European canon. Rather unexpectedly, we might even suggest that the enigma of the Madaurensis character speaking in Met. XI (thus originating from Africa) could be the textual reason why so many readers and artists have felt free to fantasize about the oriental dimensions of the text. Many of the texts I have mentioned here could, thus, be considered as imaginary extensions that take their starting point from this vexed passage. They all testify to an acute consciousness of the seminal value of this text in modern literary tradition, in spite of its moral ambiguities.

I would like to insist on the fact that such ‘afterlife’ phenomena should ultimately bring us back to the source texts and help us read them in a new, retrospective light. I only wish to suggest that, in considering the ways in which European modernity elected the Orient as a fantastic and constructed origin for the pleasures of pure fiction, we may find a pragmatic equivalent of this imaginary origin in the way Apuleius uses a purely literary and fantastic Greek setting for his delectable story. The statement that the whole story is a fabula graecanica should not only be tackled from a Quellenforschung perspective that would study how Apuleius re-wrote an originally Greek model.²⁹ A more anthropological investigation allows us to focus on the cultural and literary connotations of this Greek affiliation, to consider why Apuleius needed to promote his work as a story ‘à la grecque’.

Université Paris Nanterre

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² E. W. Said, Orientalism (New York 1978). Although the terms ‘orientalism’ and ‘orientalist’ only appear towards the end of the eighteenth century, Said invokes pre-modern precedents for European interests directed towards Eastern cultures.

³ P.-D. Huet, Lettre-traité sur l’origine des romans (first published as a preface to Zayde, histoire espagnole, attributed to Segrais, Paris 1670). I quote F. Gégou’s edition (Paris 1971). All translations from French or Latin are my own.

⁴ Huet, Lettre-traité (n. 3, above) 70.

⁵ Huet, Lettre-traité (n. 3, above) 109.

⁶ Huet, Lettre-traité (n. 3, above) 109.

⁷ On this debate, see, for example, the article by C. Marsico in this volume.

⁸ In 1702 he explicitly compared these tales to the works of Apuleius and Lucian in a letter to G. Cuper: ‘Ces contes sont de la nature de l’Âne d’Apulée, et de l’Histoire véritable de Lucien’, in Correspondance d’Antoine Galland, ed. M. Abdel-Halim (Paris 1964) 436.

⁹ ‘Si les Contes de cette espèce sont agréables et divertissants par le merveilleux qui y règne d’ordinaire, ceuxci doivent l’emporter en cela sur tous ceux qui ont paru, puisqu’ils sont remplis d’événements qui surprennent et attachent l’esprit, et qui font voir de combien les Arabes surpassent les autres nations en cette sorte de composition’. Les Mille et une nuits, Contes arabes, trans. A. Galland, eds A. Chraïbi and J.-P. Sermain, 3 vols (Paris 2004, based on the princeps edn Paris 1704–1717) I 21.

¹⁰ For further detail concerning this literary vogue, see J.-F. Perrin, L’Orientale allégorie. Le conte oriental au XVIIIe siècle en France (1704–1774) (Paris 2015).

¹¹ ‘[P]ourvu que vous ne dédaigniez pas de lire un ouvrage écrit dans le style enjoué des auteurs égyptiens’, Les Métamorphoses, ou l’Âne d’or d’Apulée philosophe platonicien, avec le Démon de Socrate, 2 vols (Paris 1707) I 1.

¹² Les Métamorphoses, trans. Compain de Saint Martin (n. 8, above) II 135, 179. Such comparisons with Eastern customs can still be found in the footnotes to twentieth-century translations.

¹³ Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions et romans cabalistiques, ed. C. G. T. Garnier, 39 vols (Amsterdam 1787– 89). The Met. is the 33rd vol.

¹⁴ La Nouvelle Psyché, par Mme *** (Paris 1711) 2.

¹⁵ The freemasonic use of this narrative provides an interesting case that I cannot discuss in the present chapter.

¹⁶ In a footnote to the preface of an 1802 printed and illustrated version of Fable de Psyché, we read that ‘une sorte de mutilation en deux volumes in-18 sous le titre de L’Âne au bouquet de roses’ was published, probably drawing from Compain de Saint-Martin’s translation in La Fable de Psyché, figures de Raphaël (Paris 1802) 16. However, the adaptation I quote below is quite different from Compain’s translation.

¹⁷ Anon., L’Âne au bouquet de roses, renouvelé de l’Âne d’or d’Apulée, 2 vols (Paris 1802) I 117–18, 120–21.

¹⁸ One might easily compare, for instance, the figure of Psyche in illustrations by Edmond Dulac, e.g. in The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche (New York 1951), with his representation of certain female protagonists from the Arabian Nights, inspired by Persian miniatures, e.g. in La Princesse Badourah : Conte des Mille et une nuits (Paris 1914).

¹⁹ Emmanuel Cosquin traces the oriental origins of the story in ‘Contes populaires lorrains recueillis dans un village du Barrois – suite’, Romania 10.37 (1881) 117–193. He claims that the monstrous husband is a snake in what he calls the ‘forme primitive’ of the tale: ‘cette forme primitive est tout indienne’ (‘this primitive form is entirely Indian’, 130).

²⁰ See, for example, French writer Charles Nodier’s claims that ‘Les Indiens n’ont pas tout imaginé, quoi qu’en puisse dire l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres à qui ces théories crues fourniront longtemps encore de savantes élucubrations, mais qui ne parviendra pas aisément à prouver que l’esprit d’invention ait été réservé, par une faveur exceptionnelle, à une seule branche de la famille humaine’ (‘the Indians did not imagine everything, despite the opinion of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, whose learned ramblings those raw theories will continue to stoke for a long time, but shall not easily prove that inventiveness would have been granted to one branch of the human family only, because of some exceptional favour’), Description raisonnée d’une jolie collection de livres (Paris 1844) 308.

²¹ A catalogue of the oriental manuscripts in the Bodleian Library seems to indicate that a fragment of a story from the Arabian Nights is registered under the title Fragmentum Fabulae Milesiae (Bibliothecae Bodleianae codicum manuscriptorum orientalium (…) catalogus, eds J. Uri and C. Nicoll, 2 parts in 3 vols (Oxford 1787–1835) part 2 II 153. I owe this reference to Ibrahim Akkel; I have not yet been able to consult this manuscript.

²² The Golden Ass of Apuleius, translated out of Latin by W. Adlington, anno 1566, With an Introduction by Ch. Whibley (London 1893) xviii.

²³ The Golden Ass of Apuleius (n. 22, above) xvi.

²⁴ The Golden Ass of Apuleius (n. 22, above) xvii.

²⁵ The Golden Ass of Apuleius, Newly translated with Introduction and Notes by F. D. Byrne (London 1905) xiv.

²⁶ The Golden Ass of Apuleius (n. 25, above) xvi.

²⁷ See, for example, his Nuits d’Alger (Paris 1929). I suggest an intertextual reading of this novel as a peculiar rewriting of The Golden Ass in ‘La “voie du retour” ? Le modèle de l’Âne d’or dans le parcours du mythe de l’Algérie latine chez Louis Bertrand’, Recherches & Travaux 81 (2012) 17–40. I freely refer here to Hobsbawm’s concept of the invention of traditional cultural practices, defined in The Invention of Tradition, eds E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (Cambridge 1983).

²⁸ I can only allude here to a scientific work in progress. Some useful references can be found in V. Gély’s ‘Latinité, hybridité culturelle et migritude : L’Afrique du Nord et Apulée (Ahmed Hamdi, Assia Djebar et Kebir M. Ammi)’, Silène (2011) [http://www.revue-silene.com/f/index.php?sp=comm&comm_id=86 (accessed 7 April 2017)].