For all the work that is done on Apuleius, Apuleius is always a work in progress. This compact, 250-page volume presents eleven papers given at a symposium on Book 11 in 2009. Since then, M. Zimmerman's Oxford edition of the text has appeared (2012); the Groningen Commentary on Book 11 is scheduled to appear later in 2013. If nothing else, these essays whet the appetite for that new commentary, which will take its place alongside that of Griffiths's The Isis Book (1975; I doubt that it could actually supplant Griffiths). The present essays suggest that the battle over the interpretation of Book 11 should be fought word by word, but not just over pastophorus, Madaurensem and raso capillo. We see here in general a movement away from looking for clues to looking at structures, and in this, though not all the authors would agree, we are witnessing yet another stage in the decline of the influence of Winkler's Auctor & Actor (1985). That devaluation was effectively initiated by Kahane and Laird's A Companion to the Prologue to Apuleius' Metamorphoses (2002). There, over two dozen Apuleian scholars, trained to nuance in language and culture, basically threw up their hands over understanding what Apuleius was doing in the Prologue. The reason, I believe, is simple: for all his brilliance, Apuleius is not an author in command of every detail of his text. He is opportunistic, flamboyant, ever straining for effect, not so much a master of ambiguity as indifferent to inconsistency. The essays here agree, from varying angles and to varying degrees, that Apuleius' religious language of transcendence is part of his rhetoric of delight, and that what we know of his philosophy (both from his own writings and from comparison to Plutarch's Isis and Osiris) shows that his fiction is not doctrine. So how much of what was unclear at the beginning is made clear at the end? A gullible fool was turned into an ass and then turned back again. The story could not have been about how the narrator should not have believed what happened to him, but can it be about how he tried (or tried and failed) to be worthy of the miracle that he received? If it is a tale told by a fool, can a Platonist's fiction indulge in Socratic irony?
These essays are by seasoned scholars, most of them well known in Apuleian circles, many of them authors of their own unitary books on the Metamorphoses: L. Graverini, writing here on prouidentia and prudentia, has just seen Le Metamorphosi di Apuleio (2007) translated into English (2012); S. Harrison, covering familiar ground on the clues in Book 11 that encourage an ironic reading of the narrator, in opposition to the transcendent depiction of Isiac religion, has recently published Framing the Ass (2013). Zimmerman herself contributes an essay on the exegetical implications of various readings either defended or emended in Book 11; E. Finkelpearl, whose excellent student edition of selections from the Metamorphoses appeared in 2012, is one of the editors, along with Graverini and B.T. Lee (Graverini's translator), of Apuleius and Africa (forthcoming in 2014); she writes here on Egyptian religion as depicted in the Metamorphoses and in Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride. This volume offer authors whose views diverge a chance to argue in each other's company, though there is no attempt to reproduce dialogue or debate. The editors helpfully summarise the essays in a ten-page introduction, and then summarise their summary in terms of continuity vs change from the first ten books to the last, and multiplicity of motives vs unitary/reductionist readings. Most essays find their way to a happy ending.
Some arguments for continuity come from genre. It is certainly right to align the book with the romances: so S. Tilg, who sees a ‘promotional value’ in the use of Isis at the climax as a way of distinguishing his romance from others (though the proportions of exoticness and Romanness of Isis may be argued); and as a journey to enlightenment, Isis in Apuleius' Metamorphoses can map nicely onto the Sun in Heliodorus' Aethiopica (so K. Dowden, using Bakhtinian chronotopes to distinguish between the horizontal journey to Rome and the vertical journey to Isis). W. Smith sees a parallel to an author of a romance being its narrator exactly where it should be found (that is, in the Onos – and the Onos, as a point of contrast in topic and technique, deserved a greater presence in these essays); and even if you are not persuaded of the value of Smith's parallel between the acceptance of Lucius at Rome to the acceptance of Peter and Paul by non-Jewish Europeans in Acts, the reinterpretation of the homecoming motif in romance as the discovery of a new home in Metamorphoses deserves serious attention.
Questions of discontinuity are matters of tone: is Book 11 different? Is it elevated? L. Nicolini argues for a new seriousness, even if Isis is subordinate to language; she notes that, in terms of wordplay, Book 11 is on a par with the earlier books, but it differs in being more monotonous, with fewer variations in tone and, of course, no inserted stories. E.-G. claims for the narrator a polysemous body, a body serving many personae, and not reducible by virtue of baldness to a single function or to a single interpretation. For Graverini, the world view of the opening books is countered by the divine providentia of Isis in the last; F. Drews sees a similar difference between the workings of fate in the opening books and the operation of Isis' providence in the last, and notes the metamorphosis of the asinus philosophans into the Isiac devotee.
What of Isis? L. Van der Stockt shows that Apuleius' Isis ‘has become really too big a goddess’ (p. 180). Plutarch's mediating goddess is not in evidence in Apuleius; she gives way to Osiris for no very good reasons. Plutarch's Egyptian religion requires hard intellectual work and fine discrimination; Apuleius Isis' is reached through joy. Finkelpearl stresses the difference between Plutarch's rational approach and Apuleius' mystical approach to Egyptian religion, and the difference between philosophy and inexpressibility. But there is perhaps more interest in source than in narrative here. To my eye, the essays never give the Isis procession (11.8–12) the attention that it deserves. Does the story not tell of a man taken up into Isis' procession and made one of her own, in a scene that shows, through its own parodies of the Roman triumph, that she and her followers belong to another world? Dowden mentions the Isis procession, but only because it presents a caricature of a philosopher for the reader to interpret (11.8.3) and an image of the ass as Pegasus that offers a provocative parallel to the movement of the book as a whole (11.8.4). Yet if Romanness is to be stressed in more modern readings of Book 11 (K.'s reference to Lucius' ‘Romecoming’ is endorsed by Tilg), then the Isis procession as a reflection of, possibly a parody of, a Roman triumph is certainly relevant.
The volume ends on a very pleasant note, when Smith finds a final, instructive analogue to Apuleius' intrusion into his narrative via the notorious Madaurensem (11.27.9, which Harrison refers to as ‘the bombshell’) in Chaucer's address to his readers at the end of the Canterbury Tales: the bumbling narrator of the Tale of Sir Thopas becomes the author of the whole. The idea that an author would appear at the end of what is certainly a great book to claim authorship of it is persuasive. No ironic reading of Book 11 can undermine the greatness of the Metamorphoses itself. Why would Apuleius intrude in his narrative only to laugh at the reader who took the fiction seriously? After all, if we had read that Bottom came from Stratford-on-Avon, would our reaction be to kick ourselves for finding truth and beauty in a tale of a fool's transformation that is, after all, only fiction?
