The Religious Dreamworld of Apuleius' ‘Metamorphoses’: Recovering a Forgotten Hermeneutic by James Gollnick (review)

334 letters in canada 1999 Plato's Phaedrus cannot be understood apart from its emphatically rural setting. Nicholson's study of the dialogue also acknowledges its own obligation to a particular place. The University of Toronto, the author says,`has been a home to me as well as a school for many years, and not a year has passed in which I have not been able to discuss a Platonic text with a group of students here.' It is fitting that he should pay tribute to the great tradition of reading and writing the history of philosophy which for many years distinguished the University of Toronto. One hopes that that tradition has not come to an end with the scholars of Nicholson's generation. (GRAEME HUNTER) James Gollnick. The Religious Dreamworld of Apuleius'`Metamorphoses': Recovering a Forgotten Hermeneutic Wilfrid Laurier Univeristy Press for the Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion. xiv, 178. $28.95 Virtually all studies of the Metamorphoses (a.k.a. The Golden Ass) of the North African Latin orator, philosopher, and B improbably, since it wasn't a normal option for the elite writers of antiquity B novelist, Apuleius of Madauros, find themselves confronting the question of the work's seriousness. Do we read it as a comic fantasy (after all, it's the memoirs of a quondam donkey), where rhetoric is at play with sensationalism? Or do we `look to the end' in the unusually numbered eleventh book, to Isis's retransformation of Lucius back into human form, and to the series of mystery initiations which follow with much explicit drawing of lessons by the divine and human characters involved? In other words, do we read it as a profound account of religious conversion? Classicists still worry at these questions of authorial intent, although for this work we now mostly settle for J.J. Winkler's brilliant ambiguities (Auctor and Actor: A Narratological Reading of Apuleius's `The Golden Ass,' 1985). Religious experience is the ultimate marvel, though whether you plunge into it with Lucius or enjoy the show from the benches, the choice, dear lector, is yours. James Gollnick takes the serious option, and his study of thèdreamworld' of Apuleius drives firmly to the conclusion that the dreams with which the novel is liberally interspersed (but any more so than comparable works of ancient fiction? B Gollnick doesn't say) are indices of the religious development of Lucius the narrator/protagonist. Co-opted into this dreamscape and privileged as an `archetypal' dream is the great inset story of Cupid and Psyche (`Love' and `Soul'), which Gollnick treats not merely as dreamlike but functionally as the principal dream of Lucius. As an unreconstructed classicist, I have problems with the concept of Apuleius encoding a (Jungian) archetypal dream for his hero narrator and then camouflaging it as a subordinate narrative. Gollnick presents his case humanities 335 well, however, and the narratologically picky may profitably read his book as a contribution to the novel's reception history, especially to the rich tradition of psychological reinterpretation both of the novel and of its inset myth. Gollnick does full justice to that tradition in his lucid surveys of the approaches of his predecessors, both Freudian and Jungian (his sympathies lie more with the latter B as, excessively in my view, did those of Robertson Davies in the libretto of the recently premièred opera version: getting in touch with one's inner archetypes may be the stuff of psycholiterary criticism; when rendered explicit at the climax of a performance, it makes for somewhat indigestible art). To good effect, Gollnick brings his expertise as a practising psychotherapist to bear on the dreams themselves and on the ancient theories and practices of dream interpretation. These latter are clearly relevant however one reads the novel, and Gollnick displays them lucidly. He has one gem which he holds until near the end: Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 2.123, that dreams of `Serapis, Isis, Anubis, Harpocrates in person as well as their statues and rites and every story that is told about them' signify salvation for those in trouble and for those not in trouble `crises from which salvation will come when one's hopes and...