Ephesian Tale
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Ephesian Tale
I started reading The Golden Ass by Apuleius. Written in the 2nd century, it is an superb piece of cult fiction. Beavers supposedly chewing off their own testicles (a myth), a witch locking up whole villages, displacing houses, women peeing on men as an act of violence. All this in its first 20 pages.
The piss fragment:
- "This being said, one of them moved and turned up my bed, and then they strid over mee, and clapped their buttocks upon my face, and all bepissed mee until I was wringing wet." --The Golden Ass (full text)
After the witches tear Socrates's heart out and replace it with a sponge, Socrates dies. He wakes up the next morning and is very hungry and afterwards goes to the river. There, the sponge leaps out of the wound of his neck into the water and Socrates finally dies.
- "shee turned the head of Socrates on the other side and thrust her sword up to the hilts into the left part of his necke, and received the bloud that gushed out, into a pot, that no drop thereof fell beside ... she thrust her hand down into the intrals of his body, and searching about, at length brought forth the heart of my miserable companion Socrates, who having his throat cut in such sort, yeelded out a dolefull cry, and gave up the ghost."
The final death of Socrates, when the sponge leaps out of his neck.
- "And then he rose and came to the River, and kneeled downe on the side of the banke to drinke, but he had scarce touched the water with lips, when as behold the wound in his throat opened wide, and the Sponge suddenly fell out into the water, and after issued out a little remnant of bloud, and his body being then without life, had fallen into the river."
I'm surprised I did not read the Golden Ass earlier. It is the perfect and obvious precursor to both Poe's Loss of Breath, which first impressed me immensely two years ago, and Henri Michaux's Plume, which is written in the same tradition of Loss. The Golden Ass is the granddady of these two.
From Loss of Breath:
- "The purchaser took me to his apartments and commenced operations immediately. Having cut off my ears, however, he discovered signs of animation. He now rang the bell, and sent for a neighboring apothecary with whom to consult in the emergency. In case of his suspicions with regard to my existence proving ultimately correct, he, in the meantime, made an incision in my stomach, and removed several of my viscera for private dissection. "
I previously wrote of Plume:
- "Keywords of Michaux's writing are viscerality; the tropes of the macabre, fantastique, rocambolesque and grotesque; petrifaction, death, the void, lightness and emptiness, "everything-you-know-is-wrong" feelings, disintegration, decapitation and dismemberment, walls (and especially ceilings). All things considered, this is a very eerie collection told in a matter of fact voice. "
This matter of fact voice is also very evident in the writing of Apuleius.
For those of you seeking out adaptations:
The Italian film Costantino il grande (1962) has Apuleius as a character and there is also a Italian sex film L'asino d'oro: processo per fatti strani contro Lucius Apuleius cittadino romano (1970) with Barbara Bouchet. Erotomaniacs may further want to seek out Milo Manara's 1999 graphic novel adaptation.
