The Metamorphosis of Apuleius: Cupid and Psyche, Beauty and the Beast, King Kong Pasquale Accardo
BOOK REVIEW
The Marriage Made in Heaven When Apuleius wrote his Metamorphoses in the second century A.D., the ancient Western world was experiencing great upheaval, having been shaken to its foundation by the rapid influx of barbarian influences, religious practices that appealed strongly to the public, but contrasted starkly with the purely political notion of a “state” god residing in the person of the Roman Emperor. These were the Oriental “mystery cults,” centered largely upon the frenzied worship of a single goddess and possessing a syncretistic nature hitherto foreign to the reserved Roman sensibility. Now, in addition to that pesky Christian sect, the civil authorities were faced with hotbeds of “magical” monotheism popping up everywhere like ants at a picnic – they could never hope to stamp them all out. The profound desire for mysticism unsatisfied by secular culture, and overwhelming anxiety over the end of the world as they knew it, drove citizens of Rome in great numbers to embrace these rites and, ultimately, into the arms of Christianity. Metamorphoses (Transformations), the only Latin novel in its entirety to survive antiquity, is composed in the “African style” – a bewildering swirl of highly ornate sensual imagery and religious fervor that reflects the chaos of the age, complicating the matter of translation. By turns near-pornographic and profoundly musical, it is the story of one Lucius of Patras on a perilous journey both physical and metaphysical. From the very beginning there are signs of bad portent, and an unfortunate episode involving a beautiful slave girl and a jar of ointment bring about his transformation into an ass, hence the novel’s more popular title The Golden Ass. Now a hapless beast of burden, Lucius is the unwilling party to a brutal series of misadventures characterized by torture, mutilation, and suicide, and that highlight, as Accardo puts it, the theme of “married love and its perversions.” Echoes of this motif appear without warning throughout the text and attain their zenith in the inserted tale of Cupid and Psyche. Psyche, a maiden of unearthly beauty, is doomed to marry a monster, that is to die on the altar of sacrifice, for the crime of deposing Venus in the hearts of men. The purity of her innocence is no excuse and the goddess of love sends her own son Cupid to dispatch this imposter. Her divine plan, deemed just in the tradition of Oresteia, backfires badly and Cupid takes Psyche to wife. Their bliss does not last; in an act of original sin Psyche betrays her husband’s trust and his last words to her before departing forever are a terrible condemnation. Heavy with child, she wanders the world over, searching for her lost love. Meanwhile Venus is enraged by the deception; she has Psyche dragged before her and though the poor girl pleads her case with the modest eloquence of an Antigone she is beaten and tortured without mercy. Elsewhere Cupid has been confined to his bed, recuperating from the very real wounds inflicted by Psyche’s treachery, and unaware of these events. Psyche performs a sequence of tasks designed by the goddess to bring out her demise; when the last of her strength is spent, Cupid spots her lifeless body from the air – he has been searching everywhere for her – and Jupiter himself decrees that their nuptials take place. This is the plot composed by Apuleius; French novelists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries adapted the story for their own purposes and came up with the fairy-tale of Beauty and the Beast. These watered-down versions were further mined for material used in such disparate entertainments as the cinematic King Kong, a modification that is in many ways a return to the Latin original. Pasquale Accardo assiduously disclaims any original scholarship on his own part, but his synthesis of the evidence makes abundantly clear the fact that with each re-telling the post-modern imagination is fleeing ever more hastily from its encounter with the divine. That the author’s exposition of the tale of Cupid and Psyche should manage to be both thoroughly researched and enjoyably readable without becoming tiresomely academic is a major accomplishment – and yet this feat is nearly overshadowed by his own masterful retelling of this classic story, “the first fairytale.” Designated Appendix 2, his narrative provides the perfect complement to seventeenth century playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Ni Amor se libra de amor (Appendix 1). “Love enslaved to love” develops the ancient mythological theme of the god of love defeated by his own weaponry. Accardo’s compelling vision, which would stand on its own merits in any comparison, flawlessly draws elements from the French fairy-tale tradition, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and even King Kong while remaining entirely faithful to Apuleius’ original. The novelette comprises a third of the book and features a fully-fleshed out Aphrodite resplendent in divine fury. It will come as no surprise that The Golden Ass is largely autobiographical; in his youth Apuleius squandered his inheritance, Accardo writes, “in an apparently futile search for meaning,” wandering throughout the civilized world, being initiated into various “occult religions” along the way, and finally entering the priestly service of Isis. Accused of witchcraft after the death of an old schoolmate and brought to trial before the proconsul Claudius Maximus around the year 158 A.D., his defense was successful but probably did little clear his name and all references to Apuleius disappear from the historical record at the time of the great plague that swept the whole of the Roman Empire at the terrifying close of the second century. Readers of Pasquale Accardo’s Metamorphosis cannot escape the violence of that divine love that pursues the human soul, desires with burning passion its consummation, and pledged its troth on the lonely desolation of Calvary’s hill. The god of love is the God of Love. What seems to us ancient obscurity can be elucidated only just so far, especially since what passes for the modern mind has sadly grown through many ages to much narrower and more skeptical. Any reader who expected this narrative to explain all these mysteries will necessarily be disappointed. Mysteries do not exist to be swept away but to be entered into. The deep truth of the tale will need to be left to those whose faith is stronger that Beauty’s when they encounter the god in the dark. –Therese Warmus, Gilbert!, August 2003 To see a full description of this book, search our online database
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Photograph courtesy of Louise Dell-Bene Stahl © 2001