Francesca Martelli, University of California, Los Angeles
Scholars have long noted the prevalence of elements of quotidian realism in Apuleius' novel (Bradley. 2000; Millar. 1981; Callebat. 1968): the perspective of the donkey, the lowliest beast of burden, opens up a window onto a world of slaves, gardeners, barbers and cooks whose lives are seldom seen in such detail. Yet the space that the novel gives to these figures of quotidian Roman experience is not limited to human subjects -- but extends to the everyday objects against which these lowlifes might be seen to measure their object-status. Everyday objects move from the background into the foreground of this text, and repeatedly take on a life of their own. Cots, door hinges, and storage jars, items that usually remain invisible in a literary text, break the bounds of expectation, when they are turned upside down, burst their bolts, or are given voice by containing unexpected human visitors. In this way, Apuleius subverts hard and fast distinctions between subject and object as part of his extended meditation on the experience of subservient and/or colonized subjects living under the rule of Roman masters.
In this paper, I consider some of the scenes in which these quotidian objects achieve various forms of agency in light of Sara Ahmed's queer take on phenomenal objects in Queer Phenomenology. In this work Ahmed points to the role that objects play in the spatial formulation of sexual orientation, cultural identity and race. Taking on the givenness of the objects of consciousness that the tradition of western phenomenology seeks to apprehend, Ahmed 'turns the tables' on this tradition's favoured exemplary phenomenon (the table) in order to highlight how differently queer and racialized subjects encounter objects like this. Her queer phenomenology shows how queer subjects inhabit the field of such given objects contingently or slantwise; while for racialized subjects the traditional objects of western consciousness are unreachable -- constituent markers of a white space from which they are alienated, in a perpetual process of refusal or turning back.
Apuleius' Metamorphoses presents readers with a world of phenomena that reveals many of the dynamics that Ahmed's queer analyses elucidate, and which help to signal the queer aesthetics of this text. Lucius' hybrid status as a human consciousness in a donkey's body offers a parable for the kinds of queer and racialized experiences that Ahmed describes, and which speak easily to Apuleius' own status as a colonized north African subject living under Roman rule. I argue that the experience of such hybrid identities is marked by the way in which objects are made to appear in the novel. The first 'metamorphosis' arises metaphorically when Aristomenes is flipped under the cot (grabatulus) on which he is sleeping in a tavern room shared with his friend Socrates, turning him into a metaphorical tortoise. Later in the novel, storage jars (dolia) become sites of sexual concealment when they feature as the central locus of a scene of marital infidelity. Throughout the novel, doors are breached by bandits and witches, and hinges (cardines) are shown flying out of their sockets. I track the way in which these everyday objects reorient subject-object relations in the novel, to describe a space in which queer and subaltern cultural identities intersect.