Tale – Background

The idea behind the book

The Golden Ass, a story about a young man transformed into an ass, written by Lucius Apuleius in the second century AD (possibly an adaptation of an earlier Greek work), is one of the oldest works of fiction that can be considered a novel. But it’s not just a venerable piece of literature – it’s a hoot to read. I thought so the first time I read it and had that opinion confirmed with each re-reading over the years.

An Ass’s Tale is not intended as a takeoff or contemporary retelling of Apuleius’s novel, although it is obviously a descendant. I borrowed the framework of The Golden Ass because it provided a terrific platform for the kind of novel I wanted to write. Among other things, the device of a transformation of a human into an animal allows for a kind of anthropological scrutiny of human behavior within a humorous context. There’s just something funny about the notion of a guy getting turned into an ass. Also, the episodic structure lends itself to nesting stories within stories and to tell many different little tales that support or illuminate the main themes as the hero, notable for his naïveté and lack of self-awareness, blunders from one adventure to the next.

Other than using the metamorphosis of a man into an ass as the central feature in a first-person comic narrative, I made no attempt to mirror the contents of Apuleius’s work, except for two instances. One is the affecting story of Cupid and Psyche, an antecedent of the Beauty and the Beast folktale which figures prominently in the ancient novel. The adaptation in my novel is decidedly contemporary. The other is a hilariously bawdy anecdote in which a wily wife cuckolds her dim-witted husband right in front of him.

Lest it be assumed that Apuleius’s work is nothing but a low piece of comic writing, it should be noted that the story tracks the hero’s moral growth and gradual enlightenment and religious conversion. Many of the tales within the novel carry their own moral messages. Consider the moral perspective implicit in the following passage from Robert Graves’ translation (which I wholeheartedly recommend):

It occurred to me that the old sages had been right to speak of Fortune as blind and even eyeless, because of the way she rewards the unworthy or the positively wicked. She never shows the least sense in selecting her favourites: indeed, she even prefers men from whom, if she had any eyes in her head, she would feel bound to recoil in disgust. Her worst fault is encouraging people to form opinions about us that are inconsistent with, and even plainly contradict, our true characters; so that the villain enjoys the reputation of the saint, and the completely innocent man gets the punishment earned by the wicked one.

Sure that complaint may be read as a rant against the fortunate by the less fortunate, but it may also be viewed as an appeal to a morality higher than what the gods see fit to dispense. It is also, incidentally, a lament particularly fitting for our own times and evidence that this is a piece of literature that hasn’t lost its relevance.

While The Golden Ass presented fertile ground for plotting my own novel, I had at first little idea of what my story would be about. That came into focus only after I started writing. For me it was the voice of the protagonist, a first-class rationalizer, that gave shape to the piece. Once my plot line was fairly well developed, I had to deal with the issue of magic, a central theme in Apuleius’s tale but one which I couldn’t easily use in a modern novel to resolve the puzzle of how a human character can be turned into an animal that is able to tell the tale of his transformation. I hope that the way I managed that difficulty and more generally how I transformed Apuleius’s tale of transformation is pleasing to readers.