Make it ancient!

[imomus]

I'm delighted to say that it looks as though we've found an English-language publisher for The Book of Jokes -- no details until the deal is done, but they're American and have a great list. The book -- my first novel -- will come out (in French, German and English) in the autumn of 2009.

Utter silliness, obscenity, bravado, ridiculous plot twists, bawdy humour and magical episodes -- The Book of Jokes isn't exactly in the tradition of Tolstoy, George Eliot and Dostoyevsky. If I had to trace the ancestral line it is in, it'd probably be more like: Lucian, Apuleius, Aesop, Ovid, Chaucer, Boccacio, La Fontaine, Rabelais, Goldoni, Moliere, Voltaire, Sterne, Kierkegaard, The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Kafka, Cocteau, Dario Fo, Donald Barthelme, Nicholson Baker, Tao Lin.

This is a tradition of farcical metamorphosis, and it begins two thousand years ago. British novelist Tibor Fischer gives an excellent introduction to its beginnings in this radio programme (which I've mp3ed, because the BBC has a tendency to whisk these things away after a few days) about Chariton and Apuleius, first and second century novelists from the extended Greek and Roman diaspora:

The Ancient Novel BBC Radio 4 (23.4MB stereo mp3 file).

Far from being innovative in the Modernist "make it new" tradition, I'd say my Book of Jokes is trying to "make it ancient". It's trying to divert inventively, chaining together funny stories (by other, often nameless, authors; old riffs told in new ways) and digressing all over the place. Lector, intende: laetaberis says Apuleius in the prologue to The Golden Ass: "Lend me your ear, reader: you shall enjoy yourself". Which is what it's all about.

As Fischer says, the oldest known novel (if we don't include things like the Odyssey) is Chaereas and Callirhoe by Chariton, written in Aphrodisias (in modern-day Turkey) in the first century AD. A historical romance of sorts -- and frankly a bit glitzy and trashy -- this interests me less than the one the Carthaginian Lucius Apuleius (known as "Africanus", because Carthage was, of course, in Africa) wrote a century or so later: The Golden Ass (or The Metamorphoses). Lucian (one of the main sources for information on Momus, the ludicrous god I'm named after) wrote his own version at about the same time, Lucios or The Ass.

The plot is basically that Lucius, trying to change himself into a bird, gets stuck as an ass (yes, Shakespeare did use this in A Midsummer Night's Dream) and spends most of the novel tagging along with deities, trying to get changed back into human form. There are set pieces like the marriage of Cupid and Psyche and an extraordinary account of the cult of the goddess Isis which is now one of the main sources of information on this vanished religion. (Another writer, Fischer reminds us, was scribbling down the Book of Revelation at about the same time.)

You can read the whole of the Golden Ass (or get your computer to read it -- mine has the voice of Lawrence Olivier) here. It's the 1566 edition, so the language is pretty Shakespearean. It's a ripping yarn -- or do I mean a farcical set of metamorphoses?

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Blimey! "Africa- Anus" Apuleius used to scribe up my letters for me before I knew how to write properly. If he knew people were still talking about him 2000 years later he'd be chuffed to the buskins!

[(Anonymous)]

You mention Larry Olivier and Fontaine--that is, Joan Fontaine. What a pairing in Rebecca from 1940! What a twist when you find out he actually killed her!

[desant012.livejournal.com]

Lucius Apuleius is even better than Chariton and all those other guys ... he indulges in parody, plays around with genre and narrative voice, and all that good stuff we associate today with mid-late 20th century literature.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Fischer basically sets it up so that Chariton becomes the precursor of Hollywood and Apuleius the precursor of... Salman Rushdie et al.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

I think Apuleius is way more fun than Rushdie... he almost has a Sorrentino bite to him. He brutally mocks the Hollywoodesque conventions of writers like Chariton, and he's conscious of the conventions of storytelling itself. In studying Apuleius a lot of people miss those aspects because they don't assume ancient Rome to have had pop culture cycles or the ability for its artists to have a degree of cultural self-consciousness, since we attribute that to our modern day.

Yes, I have a degree in Literature.

lol literary intellicock

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Really? You can't tell.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Cogitam historia it de Aphroditeia Callipigoi, eheu, idiotica sum. Sed Lucius Malfoy transformatus comedissimus est.

[drywbach.livejournal.com]

That's very good news indeed. It would be annoying to have only the translations available, knowing that your book had been written in English. It sounds interesting--I like many of the writers in its "ancestral line"; there are some others I haven't read at all.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Another way to describe that particular lineage is "children's books for adults"!

[drywbach.livejournal.com]

Tangential, but did you happen to read this story earlier this month?

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4446131.ece

I was quite amused by the article for various reasons!

The book cover's nice. He needs a banjolele though:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Excavating-Kafka-James-Hawes/dp/1847245447/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220224680&sr=8-1

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Brings to mind Joe Orton's saying that "writing is 10% inspiration, 90% masturbation".

I believe Halliwell finished his thought. Then finished his thought.

[mssr-rabelais.livejournal.com]

Congratulations, Sir Nicholas!

roman graffiti

[(Anonymous)]

English-language? I thought this was going to be written in a contemporized Latin. If anyone could bring Latinback, it's Momus.

Great Post on Apuleius

[(Anonymous)]

You might enjoy a slightly updated version of the great Apuleius here:

http://chapter1thetransformations.blogspot.com/

best regards,
Dex Quire