Entrance

How can we enter the Metamorphoses? This work is a rhizome, a burrow. The Metamorphoses has multiple entrances whose rule of usage and whose location are not very well known. Let's pick a point, and enter through Milo's house, the place where Lucius is transformed into an ass. The house is located outside the pomerium, the ‘city limits’ (1.21). Its windows overlook the city, and its heavily bolted door is at the rear, giving on to an alleyway. This door isn't the only entrance: Pamphile, Milo's wife and a witch, turns herself into a bird and exits and enters through her chamber's windows; Lucius enters through the fores (‘gates’) of the house and leaves with the robbers (in his new donkey shape) through the stables; the robbers break into the house through its gates. Milo's house is a trap devised by Apuleius, by Pamphile, by Lucius: it is not a house—it is a net, a junction, a rhizome with no priority points, a multiple. And it is the very principle of multiple entrances that ‘prevents ingress of the enemy—the Signifier, and those attempts to interpret a work that is actually only open to experimentation’.Footnote ³

Deterritorialized Language

Modern theories of language argue that each proposition has three dimensions: denotation, which refers to objects; manifestation—the subjective declarative nature; and signification, which attributes meaning through general concepts. However, Gilles Deleuze is not satisfied with these three dimensions. He thinks that they cause stagnation by imposing steady forms, structures, and meanings, and in The Logic of Sense he suggests adding a fourth dimension, sense (sens).Footnote ⁴ This dimension differs radically from the preceding three: whereas they belong to ‘being’ (être), sense is a matter of ‘becoming’ (devenir). Sense, according Deleuze, is indecisive and located at the border of language, and it expresses exactly that which escapes denotation, manifestation, and signification. It does so by proliferating and making the language stutter, thereby rupturing its representative functions and turning common sense and good sense into nonsense. Such unique use of language characterizes minor writing, as it undermines stable connections between signifier and signified, deterritorializes the language, and rejects steady positions and points in favour of dynamic processes of change and becoming.

Apuleius uses language in a unique way, which—as Finkelpearl points out after Callebat—is rich in neologisms; he is a ‘confounder of the expected, who manipulates language to show the reversibility and instability of human actions, and…[he] creates through his different linguistic levels expressions to describe his world of new combinations, interconnections and disconnections’.Footnote ⁵ This describes a classic minoritarian use of language, which deterritorializes it, resists fixated expressions, and opens new ways and possibilities. An even more fascinating minoritarian use of language in the Metamorphoses is the destruction of human voice and representational language which creates common sense. In fact, it is Lucius’ loss of human language after his metamorphosis that moves the whole novel. The moment he smears his body with the magic potion (3.24) he realizes that he has acquired the form of an ass rather than a bird, as he had wished. Immediately, he addresses Photis, Pamphile's maid who gave him the concoction, in order to utter his vexation over the unwanted outcome. However, when he tries to speak he realizes that ‘human gesture’ is not the only thing he has lost: he is ‘also deprived of his human voice’ (humano gestu simul et uoce privatus, 3.25). This destruction of language leaves him with no choice but to bear the situation ‘silently’ (demussatus, 3.26). Nevertheless, he keeps trying to use human language.

His second attempt is made when, after being abducted by the robbers, he tries to address some local Greek villagers he sees, by calling out Caesar's name in his native tongue:

Here Lucius’ language becomes a pure sound, a signifier without a signified, an unintelligible cry with no denotation, manifestation, or signification. This, however, happens only in the literary plateau; the novel's readers understand Lucius perfectly. Nevertheless, Apuleius does adhere to a strategy of ambiguous vagueness through his use of language: even here for example it is hard to know whether Lucius is trying to speak Greek—his supposed native language and that of the literary source, or Latin—the actual language of the book, since it is unclear whether Graecorum modifies turbelas or sermone.Footnote ⁷ The ‘o’-sound recurs twice more in the novel when Lucius tries to use language. The first time is when he hears that he is being charged with the robbery at Milo's house. Upset by the lie and the miscarriage of justice he says:

The second time is when Lucius cannot tolerate the perverted behaviour of Philebus the priest and his companions:

After his becoming-animal Lucius’ protest against law and religion, two apparatuses of the major order, is not delivered through language. He produces ‘a pure and intense sonorous material that is…connected to its own abolition’.Footnote ⁹ Lucius’ use of sound dismantles and deterritorializes the language, turning common sense into nonsense and opening a line of flight from the social construct.

The deterritorialization of language through sounds occurs with humans as well. It happens with various degrees of intensity throughout the novel, and it ruptures the structured and representational language. The voice of the old man who exposes the murderous wife in Book 2 is ‘intense’ (uoce contenta) and ‘broken by constant sobs’ (adsiduis singultibus impedita, 2.27). He produces a loud noise (instrepebat) which inflames the citizens, who ‘add’ to the din their own ‘shoutings’ (conclamatus, 2.27), which then turns the sound into violent actions. Shouts are released by the crowd, who demand the conviction of Lucius in the fake trial in Book 3 (3.2). This sound soon turns into applause, which then turns into laughter in a chain of various sonorous forms that escape language (as well as logic in this bizarre fabricated trial). The gardener's wife in Book 4 sees her husband wounded after being attacked by the ass, and immediately starts crying, while shrieking laments (4.3); this sound excites the people of the village, who set off in pursuit of the ass with their dogs in a clamour of noisy barking. The language is constantly ruptured, silenced, driven to its exteriority. The sounds cross the continuum of situations with varied intensity; they subvert the static lingual structure and produce motions and acts, speeds and intensities, temporary assemblages of humans and animals. In other words, they generate modes of becoming.

Becoming

The deterritorialization of language ruptures the reproducing of structures and generates instead processes of becomings, the first of which is the becoming-animal. Indeed ‘it is the language that fixes the limit’, as argues Deleuze in The Logic of Sense, ‘but it is the language as well which transcends the limits and restores them to the infinite equivalence of an unlimited becoming.’Footnote ¹⁰ Pamphile's transformation into a bird is accompanied by a ‘shrill querulous hissing’ (stridore querulo, 3.21); Socrates’ slashed throat produces ‘undetermined hissing’ (stridorem incertum, 1.13); Thrasyleon, disguised as a bear, growls like a beast when stabbed to death by the crowd (4.21). These becoming-animals are marked by sonority that ruptures the language and ‘breaks away from a chain that is still all too signifying’.Footnote ¹¹ These are not metaphors nor are they humans turning into a bird or a bear. Rather they mark the release of molecular particles of animals from molar humans.Footnote ¹² The stridor is not an imitation of a bird's sound. It is the release of a sound that already exists in Pamphile's throat, in her vocal cords, a sound which escapes from her once her molar unity is dropped in favour of flows and intensities that cross her. Similarly, the becoming-bear of Thrasyleon does not refer to an imitation of ‘bestial growling’ (ferino fremitu, 4.21); rather it is particles of bestiality that escape from him once extreme violence is actuated on his body. In his becoming, there is no longer subject of expression or enunciation of a subject; the language is erased in favour of lines of flight that liberate ‘a living and expressive material that speaks for itself and has no need of being put into a form’.Footnote ¹³

Thrasyleon's becoming-animal, like the other becomings, opens a zone of indecisiveness that blurs the boundaries between man and animal. It escapes the mimetic system and the major order and dismantles the molar and stable entity. In this sense every becoming is also becoming-minoritarian, and ‘all becomings are already molecular’.Footnote ¹⁴ But isn't Apuleius’ entire novel a text of becoming? The becoming-animal of Lucius is not a figurative way of talking, nor is it a human imitation of an ass. Imitations or analogies merely replicate and reinforce moulds; to see Lucius’ metamorphosis that way is to miss the novel's subversive potential and the minor politics it offers as a temporary escape from the major order. Indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari explain,

The force mineure of Lucius’ becoming repeatedly dismantles his own molarity (as well as others’). He escapes steady positions in favour of nomadic movements, accidental events, contingent connections, and random experimentations. His becoming disrupts hierarchies and genealogy, which are emphasized before his becoming (in the Preface, in his social ties in Book 1, in his family connection to Byrrhena), and reappear in the last book with the entrance of the stabilizing religious apparatus of the major order. It also breaks up reason and rationality—as he promises in Book 1 (1.3). Indeed, the whole novel is a process of becoming: becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-sound. Even the novel's hearers undergo becoming-animal as Apuleius tries to permulcere, ‘caress’, their ears (1.1), to unfasten the bridle of their structural set of beliefs, and to lead them to graze his textFootnote ¹⁶—as bizarre and fantastic as it may sound to those who are confined by (human) structural forms of thoughts.Footnote ¹⁷ Furthermore, the book itself is in a becoming-human process: in the prologue, as Harrison argues, it is the personified book that talks to the listeners (rather than Lucius or Apuleius).Footnote ¹⁸

Lucius’ becoming-animal (as well as other becomings) occurs through a stream of contingent encounters, accelerations, and decelerations that open new possibilities and generate additional encounters and becomings. In Book 4 Lucius happens to spot some rose bushes whose petals, once consumed, can turn him back into a human. He is so eager that he starts galloping towards them, and states, ‘In my extreme speed I became a racing horse and not an ass’ (non asinum me uerum etiam equum currulem nimio uelocitatis effectum, 4.2). However, the velocity and becoming are blocked by an unexpected encounter with the gardener who owns the roses. His intense violence towards Lucius shifts the horizontal gallop into a vertical assailment position (lumbis eleuatis in altum, ‘I raised my loins up high’, 4.3). The blocking dismantles the galloping body, turning it into agglomerate organs of legs and loins which are caught in ‘repeated motion’ (crebriter, 4.3). When the gardener's wife joins the encounter, followed by all the villagers, a multiplicity is created.Footnote ¹⁹ This multitude is then enlarged by a pack of dogs who are ‘great in size and many in number’ (et modo magnos et numero multos, 4.3). The assemblage of speeding dogs are becoming-predators that are apt to fight ‘like bears and lions’ (ursis ac leonibus ad conpugnandum idoneos, 4.3). In their rapid movement they generate enormous velocity and together with the villagers and their weapons form a war machine.Footnote ²⁰ Lucius tries several maneuvres to escape the enemy; stopped in his escape, he changes direction and gallops towards his stable. But he is eventually caught, and is unplugged from the war machine only when he emits particles of bestiality and sprays the others with his foul diarrhoea.

In other encounters Lucius becomes a racehorse (6.28), a gluttonous camel (7.14), an elephant carrying a burden (7.17, 8.28), a wether among a group of catamites (8.25), and a warhorse (10.1). His becomings create indeterminate areas of in-between and plot lines of flight, yet they never allow freedom.Footnote ²¹ Lucius’ constant attempts to escape his condition never enable exit, only misleading motions in space (even if they are represented as escapes). Sometimes his becoming is becoming-motion itself: in Book 7, during a contingent encounter with a she-bear, Lucius throws back his body weight onto his knees, stretches, raises his neck, and starts rolling down the hill by inclining and throwing his body forwards (7.24). Here Lucius becomes the gallop itself.

The continuum of movements and becomings stresses the imaginary unity of Lucius (and other characters) and opens up a game of possibilities, effects, and desires. The events ceaselessly proliferate and accelerate, constantly creating packs and multiplicities of various intensity. The robbers just sit down around their table, and immediately another gang appears, ‘larger in its number’ (plures numero, 4.8). This group increases the quantity of objects (possessions and fortune), and multiplies the pack: ‘beside the big amount of fortune that we obtained by our braveness, we not only returned to our camp with our band unharmed, but we also returned augmented by eight feet’ (praeter tantam fortunae copiam, quam nostra uirtute nacti sumus, et incolumi numero castra nostra petiuimus et, si quid ad rem facit, octo pedibus auctiores remeauimus, 4.8.)

This is a movement from the individual to the pack or the collective multiplicity. There is no subject but a collective, a ‘circuit of states that forms a mutual becoming in the heart of a necessary multiple or collective assemblage’.Footnote ²²

Packs and Multiplicity

In the tale of Psyche, the desire for Cupid throws Psyche into a ‘restless motion in diverse directions’ (uariis iactabatur, 6.1), and propels her through series of movements, speeds, and events. She circulates through the country (5.28); wanders around day and night (6.1); accelerates when climbing a mountain (citatum gradum, ibid.); retraces her steps (6.3); descends into a valley (ibid.); ascends to Venus’ palace (6.8); approaches the woods near a river (6.11f.); returns to Venus’ palace (6.13); ‘increases her pace’ again (studiose gradum celerans, 6.14) when climbing a mountain; returns yet again to Venus’ palace (6.16); advances relentlessly towards a tower in order to kill herself (6.17); descends to the underworld ‘without delay’ (nec morata, 6.20); hastens back (6.20); and finally, although ‘hurrying’ (festinanse, 6.20) to complete her toil, she opens the forbidden jar, falls asleep, and is carried up to heaven (ibid.). The movements of acceleration (citatum, celerans, festinans) are repeatedly blocked by the hostile divinity, who is herself in a constant motion (6.2). However, these stumbling blocks do not eradicate Psyche's desire but generate more movements, more becomings, further encounters. The motions of alacrity and sloth that occur simultaneously (interim: 5.28; 6.11; 6.21; interea: 6.1; 6.22) characterize also the tale's linguistic modules, which alternate between swiftly moving narrative and static depiction.Footnote ²³

Hence the encounter between Psyche and Venus produces a series of new encounters, which generate movement from the individual Psyche to the pack or the collective multiplicity.Footnote ²⁴ Facing the toil of sorting and classifying an enormous pile of grain, Psyche is aided by the arrival of a pack of ants. Psyche becomes ant as her dimension shrinks before the towering mountain of grain and the ‘unresolvable mass’ (inextricabili moli, 6.10); she suddenly loses her human ability to speak and to use her hands. Soon enough though she is joined by ‘a whole division of ants’ (cunctam formicarum…classem, 6.10), becoming one of their number.Footnote ²⁵ The ants themselves undergo a becoming-human: one ant calls the neighbourhood's ants, and they all run from place to place (just as Psyche did), pray in human voices to the goddesses. The ants and Psyche form a multiplicity and collective assemblage. When the toil is completed this temporary unity disintegrates, and the ants accelerate their movement and disappear ‘speedily’ (perniciter, 6.10). Throughout the tale Psyche constantly forms assemblages with various packs: from the first pack formed with her village population who accompany her when she is driven out of the family framework to an unknown fate (4.34) to the various packs that appear in her toils (ants, a herd of sheep, a band of ferocious snakes).

In fact the entire novel is populated by packs, bands, groups, and multitudes. In his becoming-animal Lucius loses his singular subjectivity and molar subject position. He becomes a member of the bands and packs, and enters the polity of the multitude. Indeed, ‘every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack’, argue Deleuze and Guattari; ‘it has pack modes, rather than characteristics, even if further distinctions within these modes are called for. It is at this point that the human being encounters the animal. We do not become animal without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity.’Footnote ²⁶ Tossed between poles of stasis (molar position) and change (molecular becomings), Lucius constantly creates compositions with objects and subjects, becomes a pack, joins the multiplicity. From the moment of his becoming he is hardly ever alone or on his own; he is always with packs and blocs (of robbers, of slaves, of religious cults, of other animals). Also his constant intersections and encounters proliferate through contagion, battles, and catastrophes, which are combinations that are not genetic or structural but are inter-kingdoms and unnatural clustering.Footnote ²⁷

Deterritorialized Language II

Apuleius creates movements from stasis to change and from structures to becomings also by stuttering the spoken language; this allows him to rupture its stable position, which sets the world on steady structures, to the benefit of excesses and inundations that create heterogeneity and variety. When Psyche approaches the waters of the Styx they speak to her, uttering a series of short commands and questions:

This series of questions (a structure that is determined by aleatory points)Footnote ²⁸ and imperatives, divided and proliferated by repeated et (five times, and once more at the beginning of the passage),Footnote ²⁹ makes the word et stutter the language. The dialogical structure of questions and answers is subordinated to the sole voice of the addresser, eliminating the position of the addressee by interspersing commands instead of answers. It thwarts the speech act and suspends the questions, creating a portmanteau construction that leads to two sides: that of words and that of things. It pushes the language into a zone of indecisiveness that creates a situation of impossibilitas, in the face of which Psyche is ‘transformed into stone’: although she is ‘present in her body’, she is ‘deprived of her senses’ (sic impossibilitate ipsa mutata in lapidem Psyche, quamuis praesenti corpore, sensibus tamen aberat, 6.14).

A different way of stuttering the language appears in the nocturnal episode at the inn, which appears in the first inserted tale in the first book. At the end of a scene in which two witches penetrate the room of Aristomenes and his companion Socrates and murder the latter, they approach Aristomenes, who is lying terrified under his cot. They bend over, urinate on him, and leave the room. At that point the language, which so far served Aristomenes to describe the occurrence, is ruptured. In an effort to substantiate the singularity of the process, or the ‘sense’ (which escapes denotation, manifestation, and signification), Apuleius stutters the language. Aristomenes’ speech turns into a broken monologue followed by a series of questions. He describes himself lying on the ground ‘as if he just came out from his mother's womb’ (quasi recens utero matris editus), ‘no, indeed as half-dead and yet his own survivor’ (immo uero semimortuus, uerum etiam ipse mihi superuiuens), ‘and a posthumous child’ (et postumus), ‘or a candidate for the cross’ (uel certe destinatae iam cruci candidatus, 1.14). The extensive use of words and particles denoting doubt (quasi…immo uero…uerum etiam…et…uel certe…iam) vibrates the language and stretches it to its limits in an attempt to encounter that which escapes from it.Footnote ³⁰ The paragraph is divided into short phrases of various length with asyndeta and different conjunctions that lead to a climax.Footnote ³¹ Then follows a series of questions that ceaselessly swell the language:

This vivid style of questions, as argued by Keulen, is reminiscent of a declamation from a man trapped between truth and verisimilitude.Footnote ³² Furthermore, Aristomenes knows that his words will also not be judged credible in the court (an institution of major order), and paradoxically stresses this incredibility striving to reinforce it as a narrator by moving from common language to legal arguments.Footnote ³³

Another example of language stuttering that offers a minoritarian use of ‘becoming’ appears in the book of Isis when Lucius is saved by the goddess and returns to human shape. Paradoxically, the first thing that happens to Lucius who becomes a man again is language loss rather than its retrieval. He ‘freezes and becomes speechless’ (tacitus haerebam, 11.14), while his animus is unable to comprehend—or express—his sudden joy. Apuleius structures the situation through a series of four increasing segments, which, as noted by Keulen et al., is marked by ‘intense use of euphonic effects such as assonance and alliteration’ whose focus is on ‘the recovery of the last human feature’—the ability to speak.Footnote ³⁴ This is done again through a series of unanswered questions (that paradoxically mention four different terms related to speech: uocis; sermone; linguam; uerbis):

After the deterritorialization of language that characterized Lucius so far, its reterritorialization—which happens together with the installation of the religious apparatus of the major order—heralds the end of the process of becoming. Along with the structured major language, Lucius reacquires a secure position within the major order and the social apparatus.

The impotence and inability of a (major) language to convey real actuality is seen in various ways throughout the Metamorphoses. In Book 3, during Lucius’ false trial, he is amazed at seeing the wineskins that he thought were human robbers whom he had murdered. Immediately he releases a flow of short declarations: ‘What a sight…! What a portent! What a sudden change of my fortunes!’ (quae facies…! quod monstrum! quae…mutatio…! quamquam…numeratus, 3.9), followed by a statement that there are no ‘suitable words’ (idonea uerba) to denote a rational account of the occurrence. When in Book 11 he sees Venus rising from the sea he laments the ‘poverty of the human expression’ (paupertas oris humani, 11.3) to convey the sight. A similar phrase appears in Book 4 in regard to Psyche's beauty (4.28). Apuleius posits the sensible and the intelligible, the words and the things, in a continuum of blurred boundaries; there are no steady points or fixed positions—only lines of flight and becomings. Repeatedly Apuleius plays with the sense and the nonsense, whose diversity, as Deleuze puts it, ‘is enough to give an account of the entire universe, its terrors as well as its glories’.Footnote ³⁵ Repeatedly he leads the language to its edge by stuttering it, by inundating everything with it, by deterritorializing it. This minor use of language ruptures its sens commun and allows the actual to escape the fixed structures that the language forces on the real through its structure. The molar language is dismantled into molecular sounds, syllables, fragmentary enunciations, and proliferating phrases that lead to the singularity of events.

Becoming II

Thrasyleon (the name means ‘bold lion’), one of the robbers mentioned in Book 4, volunteers to enter a bear's hide as part of a robbery he plans with his gang. Locked in a cage he is sent to the house that they intend to rob. At night he sneaks out of his cage, and opens the doors for his fellows. Nevertheless, unlike the scheme of the Trojan horse, something goes wrong. After he opens the house's gates he is spotted by a slave, who informs everyone that the ‘bear’ has got free. A hunt begins. A multiplicity of people with weapons and barking dogs that rush to hunt him marks his becoming-bear in a scene of swift motion.Footnote ³⁶ Thrasyleon is aggressive; he moves like an animal that ‘at times flees, at times resists’ (nunc fugiens, nunc resistens, 4.20), until eventually after varying his body postures and movements he flees the place. However, the pack keeps chasing him until the dogs surround him, and with innumerable bites they tear him to pieces.Footnote ³⁷ The pack of dogs is followed by numerous hunters who injure the bear fatally. The wounds and suffering of Thrasyleon do not result in ‘a cry or a scream’ (clamore…ululatu, 4.21) but draw from him the growls of a wild beast.Footnote ³⁸

In Book 2, when Lucius returns to Milo's house at night after dinner at Byrrhena, his lamp suddenly goes out. Making his way through the dark in the pitch-black windy night, Lucius becomes a blind bat, tossed and turned by strong winds, hurled against stone walls, and blind to the coming event. Forming a ‘joint structure’ (iunctim) with his companion he encounters three robbers who are trying to break into Milo's house (2.32). This meeting with the robbers, who are actually wineskins made of enchanted goat hairs that have acquired human breath, extracts ‘particles of batness’ out of Lucius: he ‘flies into’ (inuolo) the gang, attacks, and punches them. The clash between the tiny bat and the ‘huge’ (uastuli, 2.32) goatskins creates an assemblage of a war machine consisting of sounds, movements, objects and subjects, swords, gaping wounds, breathing, fighting, and tumult.Footnote ³⁹

The dynamic motion of becoming resists static positions, fixed characteristics, and a steady sense of identity. Just as the molecular animal is released from the human, so particles of humaneness are driven out of Apuleius’ animals. When Lucius enters Milo's stable as an ass just after his metamorphosis, a horse and a donkey ‘reach a joint decision’ (consentiunt, 1.26) to drive him away; in Book 4 a fellow ass in the robbers’ band guesses and anticipates Lucius’ thoughts and intentions to rebel (4.5). He therefore lies on the ground, ‘pretending’ (mentita) to be too exhausted to keep on walking just before Lucius himself does so. The predatory bears of Demochares in Book 4 are wearied by the conditions of their captivity, and they start lying down in the streets of the city. The ants in Psyche's tale feel pity for her and pray to the god. Lucius as an ass also releases human particles: he emits weeping sounds when he learns of his expected castration (7.24); he eats human-cooked food, sleeps in a bed, and understands the human language (10.14–17).

Even when no animals are involved, the tales themselves are animalistic. The sword swallower in the first book (1.4) allows a young boy to turn and twist on his sword with his effeminate flexible body. In his becoming-snake the boy invites viewers of the scene (and listeners to the novel) to slough their layers of disbelief and to rejuvenate a childish naive and curious view. This becoming-animal generates a becoming-child,Footnote ⁴⁰ a position of curiosity and naivety towards the world. The unity of the sword swallower and the boy bound to his sword brings to mind the image of Aesculapius with his serpent-entwined staff, who is able to heal contagious diseases—and in this case disbelief.Footnote ⁴¹

Becoming III

The areas of indecisiveness which escape molar framings are manifested also in the dynamics of becoming-woman. In fact, since ‘all becomings are becoming-minoritarian’, and since men are ‘majoritarian par excellence’ (the woman—just like the animal or the child—is always in a position derived from male-standards), every becoming ‘passes through a becoming-woman’.Footnote ⁴² In the first inserted tale (1.5–19), both Aristomenes and Socrates become woman.Footnote ⁴³ During the night two witches steal into their room at the inn. This incursion starts a chain of events that ends in subverting the masculine major order and molar identity. The witches stab Socrates in the throat, collect his blood in an external vessel, and rip his heart out (both the heart and the blood have a masculine connotation).Footnote ⁴⁴ Their next victim is Aristomenes, who watches the scene from under his bed, sweating and trembling uncontrollably in extreme fear. The women approach him, urinate on his face, and leave him lying on the floor naked and cold. The two men in this episode become woman: their behaviour is uncontrollable, cowardly, and passive; their bodies are perforated and leaking (rather than staying masculine, closed, dry, and sealed); their spatial position is horizontal rather than vertical. Their corporeal boundaries blurs: Socrates's body becomes open and extended when parts of him are in the witches’ possession; Aristomenes lies on the floor under his ‘lame bed’ that becomes part of his body (de Aristomene testudo factus, ‘I turned from Aristomenes to a tortoise’, 1.12). He is covered with urine that has just come out of the witches’ bodies and is stuck to them in a mother-infant dyad (1.14). However, the becoming-woman of Aristomenes and Socrates are not the result of female conduct or attributes; rather, it is their loss of a stable position, their becoming a process and continuum, their movement between life and death (semimortuus, 1.14), liquidity and solidity, Aionic time and the time of Chronos.Footnote ⁴⁵ Linear time is disrupted as Socrates is both dead (after the murder) and alive (awakes when Aristomenes tries to kill himself), and dead (again) the following morning. This becoming turns Aristomenes and Socrates from molar males to molecular aggregates of members and motions, flows and intensities, objects and materials.

The language of the tale is also affected by the process of becoming. When the witches leave, the descriptive lingual turns into a flow of unanswered questions that inundates the language: ‘What will happen to me?’, ‘Who will believe me?’, ‘Why didn't you do anything? Why were you kept alive?’ (1.15). This flow is intensified (identidem… replicabam, ‘again and again…I repeated’, 1.14) and proliferates further through yet another series of questions and sentences, in a form of a dialogue between Aristomenes and the inn's gatekeeper: ‘Where are you?’ asks Aristomenes; ‘What? Don't you know there are robbers out there?’ replies the gatekeeper, not responding at all to the question, ‘Do you plan to leave at night?’ To this answers Aristomenes, ‘What can be robbed from such a poor man?’, adding, ‘Don't you know a naked person cannot be despoiled?’ And the gatekeeper replies, ‘How do I know you did not kill your roommate and you are not running away?’ (1.15).Footnote ⁴⁶ After this surrealistic dialogue of incoherent logic, in which the ‘laws of logic and rational order are turned topsy-turvy’,Footnote ⁴⁷ Aristomenes returns to his room. Nevertheless the desire is not disrupted but rather increased. Desire (désir) in Deleuze and Guattari's thinking is not desire for something, nor is it a movement driven by lack. Rather it is a process of production and experimentation created on the external surface through contingent encounters. The flow of unanswered questions inundates the language, opens zones of indecision and indecisiveness, of moving through experimentation and error. It is a productive process that keeps the options open and creates lines of flight.Footnote ⁴⁸

The religious catamites called by the priest ‘girls’ (puellae, 8.26) manifest additional instances of becoming-woman. This becoming, however, is not related to their appellation nor does it refer to their imitation of feminine conduct. Rather, it is the catamites’ marginal position in relation to the major order and law that governs this becoming, along with their deterritorialization of language, constant movement, and incontrollable desire. They deliver future prophecies rather than establish conjugal memories; they produce systems of deterritorialization in contrast to arborescent, mnemonic, and structural systems of territorialization or reterritorialization.Footnote ⁴⁹ Their ‘broken, shrill voices produce discordant shouts’ (fracta et rauca et effeminata uoce clamores absonos, 8.26);Footnote ⁵⁰ their ‘loud discordant frantic shrieking’ (absonis ululatibus constrepentes fanatice), and their groans, exiting from the ‘depth of their breasts’ (imis praecordiis, 8.27), deterritorialize the language. Their fanatic moves and dances intensify their bodies; their self-beatings perforate their bodies, allowing their ‘filthy effeminate blood’ to pour from the open wounds and ‘flood’ the ground (spurcitia sanguinis effeminati madescere, 8.28). This blurs the boundary of the body and creates physics that assembles the variations and the pulsations of the entire universe. The assemblage of voices, bodies, objects, and movements connects to the world, distributes the bodies, turns depth to surface, and produces a sonorous continuum.Footnote ⁵¹

Another form of assemblage appears when Lucius tries to escape with Charite. The robbers suggest punishing him by cutting open his belly, inserting Charite into it, and sewing her naked inside, keeping only her head outside (6.31). This proposition connects bodies and actions, depth and surface, animal and human, and it heralds Lucius’ becoming-woman: ‘I was looking at my belly again and again, seeing myself already giving birth to the poor girl’ (uentremque crebro suspiciens meum iam misellam puellam parturibam, 7.4). In fact, it seems that the whole novel of Apuleius is a becoming-woman that offers a grand tour in a rhizomatic milieu. Activated by productive desires it forms anomalous assemblages and ontologies of in-between that dismantle regular forms. It ruptures singularities and opens lines of flight from the major structure, generating a discourse which aims to thrive, increase, and proliferate rather than represent, reproduce, and reduce. Its attack on the linear and structural system makes use of a multi-linear system, creating a rhizomatic structure of endless compositions, continuous movement, connections, and heterogeneities.

On the Verge of Law and Desire

There is constant motion in the rhizomatic Metamorphoses: between natural and urban territories, between human and animalist arenas, between real and potential realms. It is a fragmented motion that moves among different continuums and structures, powers and laws. The characters always act within a certain kind of law, or at least in relation to it; and every time it enters in a despotic fashion as a transcendental authority, the law divides and breaks the text into a discontinuous repartition of blocks, with spaces between each one and the next.Footnote ⁵² The theft of Lucius the ass by a gang of lawbreakers in Milo's house; the attempt to consume roses on private property; the kidnapping of Charite; the various cases of murder (of Tlepolemus by his friend; of the farmer's boys as a result of a quarrel over territory; of betraying lovers); the systematic breaking of kinship ethics and of moral conventions: the characters are always on the edge of the formal or moral law, which is repeatedly emptied and averted, ridiculed and drained.

In the market scene in Book 1 (1.24f.) a representative of the law comes to the aid of Lucius, who has been cheated by a fish merchant. However, he enforces the law in a paradoxical way that empties it and overturns its function, leaving Lucius with neither his fish nor his money. In the laughing festival in Book 3 (3.1–11) the process of law enters in the false form of a simulated trial for an imaginary murder that never occurred. The charge of Lucius murdering the windy wine skins turns the law itself to an empty wineskin full of nothing but air. In Book 10 (10.2–12) a false accusation of murder is levelled by a woman against her stepson, after the latter refuses to engage with her romantically. The case is brought to the forum by the boy's own father, and the council is so upset by the accusations that it wishes to waive the ‘nuisance’ (taedium, 10.6) of a proper trial—with its prosecutor's proofs and defence's learned excuses—and to stone the (innocent) boy (10.6). The magistrati who decide despite everything to conduct a trial do not do so in pursuit of justice or in order to execute the law, but rather for their own gain.Footnote ⁵³

There are many other examples in the novel, but the point is clear: no one obeys the law, which is never known. A law needs to be promulgated in order to function as an organizing principle, and to that end it must be both fixed (constantly changing law is not a law) and understood. Neither of these qualities is found in the law of Lucius’ world.Footnote ⁵⁴ The punishments and torments he experiences throughout the novel do not originate from his breaking laws or from his uncontrollable curiositas; they happen because this is the way the literary machine of the Metamorphoses operates. The wheels of justice or, in Deleuze and Guattari's terminology, the justice machine works out of pure desire, and has no objects or subjects. It does not seek law or justice, but operates to move things, to spread, to connect to other machines; it does not look for fixed truths but creates them; and it is not a restrictive and organizing principle but a productive and inventive force that generates metamorphoses. Throughout the novel Lucius (as well as other protagonists) keeps circling around this unknown transcendental law, which is no longer dependent on notions of good and bad or on any kind of ethics. Against this unknown law, which forms a pure form, Apuleius operates as minoritarian, and in response to it he generates lines of flights.

Within the apparatus of the unknown law Lucius’ desire generates movements. As mentioned before, desire in Deleuze and Guattari's thought is not a structure but a process, an event. As such it always operates in a certain apparatus—such as the law. Lucius’ desire is a movement of production and experimentation that originates in the contingent and external encounters on the surface between bodies and words, objects and deeds. He has no control over his motion; he is a nomadic desiring-machine, which testifies to the existence of other law.Footnote ⁵⁵ In his encounters he forms a machine-désirante, a productive system that constantly dismantles and recreates characters, things, assemblages, and multiplicities, through a continuous flow of experiments and becomings. Lucius is a biological, political, and collective body that affects his surroundings, is affected by them, and generates additional transformations. From this point of view Lucius is the very generator of the metamorphosis—not at all its object.

Machinic Assemblages

When the robbers invade Milo's house, they arouse fear, terror, and ‘violent noise’ (sonitu uehementi, 3.27). A crowd runs all over shouting with fear, people swarm in various direction, torches, swords and axes, darkness and light, bodies and effects—a flow of intensities and speeds that creates an assemblage. The whole place becomes a war zone. The band of robbers, appearing suddenly from elsewhere and outside the law, creates a rage against sovereignty, a celerity against gravity, a machine against the domestic apparatus.Footnote ⁵⁶ They create a war machine which Lucius—who has just left his stable position and become a process of in-between—plugs into. Lucius turns into a part of this other-species, other-nature, other-origin than the state apparatus of the war machine.Footnote ⁵⁷

After the robbery at Milo's house the gang starts moving through the country, activating intensities of violence, fear, and flight. Whenever the pack arrives, it destroys the steadiness of social order; it moves, fights, wounds, makes sounds; it forms new compositions with its environment. After the dissolution of this collective assemblage, Lucius joins other assemblages, a continuous motion throughout the novel as he keeps plugging into and out of various machines. When he joins a convoy that escapes the city after Charite's death he becomes a part of a multiplicity that contains herdsmen, children, women, valuable objects, chicks, sparrows, and puppies. In its movement this assemblage becomes a war machine (nec quicquam praeter unicam tubam deerat quin acies esset proeliaris, ‘only one trumpet differed from a line of warriors’, 8.16). The local villagers who happen to see this fast-moving organism (speed is repeatedly emphasized: festinatio, ‘speed’; temeritas, ‘hastiness’; pernicitas, ‘swiftness’, 8.16)—with its armed people, war objects (lances, hunting spears, arrows, clubs, stones, sharp stakes, flaming torches, ibid.)Footnote ⁵⁸ and hybrid creatures of beasts and animals (‘everything whose weak legs might delay the flight’ is loaded onto the burden-beasts, creating hybrids that ‘walked in our feet’, quidquid infirmo gradu fugam morabatur, nostris quoque pedibus ambulabat, 8.15)—are alarmed by the sight. Immediately they incite their dogs—‘mad, huge, crueller than bears and wolves’—who start chasing the convoy (8.17). The dogs swarm from all sides, sinking their teeth into men and beasts, tearing their bodies apart and turning everything into one violent vibrating mass. Soon another multiple plugs into this war machine: people standing on the rooftops and in the surrounding hills start throwing rocks, joining the assemblage of beasts, men, sounds, wounds, blood.

Beside the war machine and the desiring-machine there are additional machines that operate in the text. In Book 9 the slaves and animals at the mill rotate the mill non-stop, day and night. They push the wheel and move in endless cycles of various circumferences, creating an orbicular movement that produces a cycle of suffering and tortured bodies. The slaves, molecular patches of blue skin from constant beatings, are mere assemblages of organs—feet, backs, loins—dusty parts of the machine. The animals are weak and wounded; their necks shrivel from rotten abscesses; their heads bent down; their wounded sides are worn-out machinic pieces. All are described by a survey of their members and parts, as they themselves are merely parts of the machine. The slaves are tied to each other and to the device, and together with the beasts they constitute a chain which is a part of the very machine it operates. The baker and his treacherous wife are also part of the machine, and so are the treachery stories. Those of Philesitherus (9.16) and the fuller's wife (9.24) are in the inner circle, and that of the baker's treacherous wife is in the external circumference. There is a constant bi-directional movement between these circles: from the external circle we move inside to the inner story of Philesitherus, exit to the external narrative circle, enter the baker's story of the fuller's wife, and return to the external circle of the baker.

All this time the technical machine keeps entering as a mechanism that drives the story. The sex act inflicted by the baker on his wife's lover (Book 9) ends in a corporeal punishment of flogging, which operates along with the floggings endured by the animals and slaves that turn the machine. None of the positions is steady in this machine: the flogged lover and the baker become woman, the slaves become animal. The productive machine keeps multiplying and producing flows and movements constantly; it ruptures not only the major order but also the language (‘what can I say…’, 9.13), and creates an irregular word order.Footnote ⁵⁹ The episode at the mill places Lucius on the boundary between the technical machine, which is always a piece in the social assemblage,Footnote ⁶⁰ and the social construction. Plugged into the machine Lucius criticizes the attitude of these two to other parts of the machine: his fellow-slaves, his contubernii beasts (‘comrades’, 9.13), the baker's wife, her woman friend.

Escape

How can we exit the Metamorphoses? This work is a rhizome, a burrow. It is a schizophrenic text; a novel that challenges the binary relationships between text and the represented world, signifier and signified. The Metamorphoses does not imitate the world—it creates it through various formed matters, lines of articulation, strata, territories, accelerations, and ruptures. It is a book which is a productive machine rather than merely a representative one.Footnote ⁶¹ The structure of the Metamorphoses challenges the rational order, linear time, and geometrical space. It offers escape-lines that produce three degrees of freedom: freedom of movement, freedom of statement, and freedom of desire. The Metamorphoses is minor literature; it is a political action, a liberating machine. It opens paths of flight from the rigid, stratified, and hierarchical social construction. A text of this kind cannot develop unless it ‘succeeds in plugging into a concrete socio-political assemblage’.Footnote ⁶² The Metamorphoses is about multiplicity but it also is multiplicity. It keeps dismantling everything it can, producing alternatives through various encounters, flows, and motions. Instead of steady positions and fixed concepts it promotes movements of in-between and endless becomings. It prefers events over essences, and encourages occurrence as it happens in time and space.

The Metamorphoses keeps moving on unexpected routes, in which the closest is also the most distant. Psyche and Cupid locked up in Venus’ palace are both ‘separated and [present] under the same roof’ (distentis et sub uno tecto, 6.11). Their heavenly palace is depicted in a robbers’ cave. The roses, which Lucius desires in order to regain his human shape, are close by yet unattainable and faraway. Faraway too are all the characters that surround Lucius the ass throughout the story. Even the remotest reader of the novel is closer to Lucius than the figures that surround him but have no access to him. Furthermore, the fragments of the tales along the endless lines of the novel become tangential even when they are separated and far from each other, losing their fixed boundaries in favour of a continuum. It is not a matter of simple interiority and exteriority of the text; rather, the inside is a fold of the outside, a doubling of content, a contact that blurs borders.Footnote ⁶³ Thus the text forms a rhizome within the Metamorphoses (as well as with other Latin and Greek texts).Footnote ⁶⁴ The territory becomes ‘territorialization’ and ‘deterritorialization’ (processes of organization and dismantling), which create concepts that lead to the truth rather than representing or replicating it. It thus enables avoidance of casting static structures such as ‘law’ or ‘religion’ onto ever-changing occurrences, by using dynamic concepts such as becoming, assemblage, intensity, and speed, which make it possible to describe complex dynamic relations among various members and strata.

‘Everyone who knows anything about Apuleius is aware that the problem of the “unity” of the Metamorphoses is central’, argues Finkelpearl.Footnote ⁶⁵ But is unity necessary for this text? If we grant Apuleius’ plea to suspend beliefs and assumptions (1.1) we might be able to concentrate precisely on that which is untold. We might then shift our gaze to the text's movements of indecisiveness and uncertainty rather than to its steady points; to the dismantling of molar structures in favour of molecular entities; and to the subversion of the major order by becomings and minoritarian politics. We could experience the text rather than understand it; we could move from the actual to the potential and the virtual.

How can we finish a paper? Maybe we cannot. Maybe we should not. A paper is a productive machine. ‘To enter or leave the machine, to be in the machine, to walk around it, to approach it—these are all still components of the machine itself: these are states of desire, free of all interpretation. The line of escape is part of the machine.’Footnote ⁶⁶ This paper is a rhizome. Feel free to wander inside it.