Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius' Metamorphoses by Evelyn Adkins

Abstract

Reviewed by: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius' Metamorphoses by Evelyn Adkins Alexander Kirichenko Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in Apuleius' Metamorphoses. By Evelyn Adkins. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2022. Pp. 277. Defining discourse as "the use of various media of communication between two or more people to negotiate identity, status, and power, often by conveying the possession of superior or restricted knowledge," Evelyn Adkins's monograph analyzes the use of discourse in Apuleius' Metamorphoses "as a tool of social power" (20). On Adkins's reading, speech and silence function in Apuleius as instruments of self-representation and self-fashioning whose success and failure betray some of the fundamental aspirations and [End Page 385] anxieties that characterize the second-century Greco-Roman culture. The Introduction, in which Adkins lays out the theoretical premises of her investigation, is followed by six chapters that focus on various aspects of how the novel stages tensions between the production and reception of discourse. Chapter One discusses misunderstandings that surround two types of non-elite discourse—the language of the priests of Dea Syria, who cast themselves as women but come across as sexual deviants, and the language of the bandits, whose hypermasculine selfrepresentation forms a marked contrast to the comic failure of their mock-heroic exploits. Singling out oratory as the predominant elite discourse within Apuleius' contemporary culture, Chapter Two analyzes three rhetorical performances (the tale of Thelyphron in Book 2, Lucius' speech at the Festival of Laughter in Book 3, and the speech of the wise physician in Book 10) and interprets them as paradigmatic of how the novel as a whole frames discursive strategies in order to destabilize social status and truth. Along similar lines, Chapters Three and Four focus on Lucius' discursive self-fashioning and discuss the panoply of discourses to which he, with varying degrees of success, resorts in his interactions with men (his hosts and masters) and women (Byrrhena, Photis, the Corinthian matron, and Isis). The theme of Chapter Five is silence—not so much the silence to which Lucius becomes condemned as a consequence of his transformation into an ass as the silence that he learns to employ in order to project authority in the aftermath of his initiation into the mysteries of Isis and Osiris. This analysis of "mystical silence" as a manifestation of the superior knowledge the narrator chooses to conceal leads in Chapter Six to a more general discussion of the manipulative strategies on which Apuleius relies throughout the novel to wield power over the reader. Taking its cue from the "self-revelation" in which, at the very end of the novel, the first-person narrator describes himself as a native of Apuleius' hometown of Madaurus (11.27: Madaurensem), the Conclusion considers the Metamorphoses as an instance of the author's own discursive self-fashioning in which rhetoric, philosophy, literature, magic, and religion coalesce into a highly idiosyncratic "attempt to control the uncontrollable, to make and remake one's image and one's place within the world through words" (225). Surprising for a monograph investigating the power of discourse in a narrative about magic is a lack of discussion of magic itself as a discourse of power par excellence—a discourse presumed to be capable of forcing nature or the gods to obey one's will. The story of an aspiring magician becoming an epitome of discursive powerlessness can indeed be read as a satire on a misguided belief in the possibility of such a discourse, and Lucius' foolish desire to become an expert practitioner of what he sees as the most powerful discourse available in his contemporary culture can be considered the clearest manifestation of the exuberant comedy of discursive misappropriation staged throughout the novel. What is more, portraying a "misfiring" of a "serious" discourse is not only one of the main sources of humor in any culture but also a comic device that Apuleius shares with multiple literary predecessors—from the Odyssey, which caustically ridicules the royal aspirations of the suitors, to Petronius' Satyricon, which derives much of its comic effect from portraying discrepancies between elite discourses and the non-elite contexts in which...