The Novel in its Assy Shape

 Tristram Shandy has some intertextual moments with an Apuleian ass:

"He was eating the stem of an artichoke as this discourse went on, and in the
little peevish contentions of nature betwixt hunger and unsavouriness, had dropt it out of his mouth half a dozen times, and pick'd it up again------God help thee, Jack! said I, thou hast a bitter breakfast on't—and many a bitter day's labour ...And now thy mouth, if one knew the truth of it, is as bitter, I dare say, as soot— (for he had cast aside the stem) and thou hast not a friend perhaps in all this world, that will give thee a macaroon.------In saying this, I pull'd out a paper of 'em, which I had just purchased, and gave him one—and at this moment that I am telling it, my heart smites me, that there was more of pleasantry in the conceit, of seeing how an ass would eat a macaroon------than of benevolence in giving him one, which presided in the act."
Tristram Shandy, 7:22


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"'Twas by a poor ass who had just turned in with a couple of large panniers upon his back, to collect eleemosunary turnip tops and cabbage leaves; and stood dubious, with his two forefeet on the inside of the threshold, and with his two hinder feet towards the street, as not knowing very well whether he was to go in, or no. Now, 'tis an animal ... I cannot bear to strike------there is a patient endurance of sufferings, wrote so unaffectedly in his looks and carriage, which pleads so mightily for him, that it always disarms me; and to that degree, that I do not like to speak unkindly to him: on the contrary, meet him where I will—whether in town or country ... whether in liberty or bondage------1 have ever something civil to say to him on my part; and as one word begets another (if he has as little to do as I)— —I generally fall into conversation with him; and surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance—and where these carry me not deep enough-----in flying from my own heart into his, and seeing what is natural for an ass to think—as well as a man." 

Tristan Shandy, 7:32

Below, some observations by Margaret Doody in "Shandyism, Or, the Novel in Its Assy Shape: African Apuleius,The Golden Ass, and Prose Fiction," Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Volume 12, Number 2-3, January-April 2000, pp. 435-457 (available through Project Muse or on  this class's UBLearns site under Course Documents):

"The Ass-Novel, the story of negative metamorphosis, provides a means of dealing with some of the most painful experiences of mortal nature, and eases us into a world not only of thought but of feeling—and of feeling in which pain is dominant. In all versions of the Ass-Novel, masculinity is
in question, and the torments and dubieties of masculinity not only form a central subject but also put pressure upon and shape the form."

"Lucius in the time of his transformation has no effective human voice, but the narrator is abustle with talk, talking to us all the time, in a wonderful stream of egoistical and pathetic and funny personal discourse."

"The absence of true virility is expressed everywhere in the form of the novel, which is an extensive first-person narration not acting as formal or argumentative discourse. It is wandering, digressive, chatty, anecdotal, and irrelevant—deformatus. As Lucius says, he found consolation in his deformity, in that with his gigantic ears he could easily hear everything said, even at a distance (see 2:9, c. 15, 152). Deformity has its advantages, which the style explores. The narrative is greedy and rich in lists, catalogues of marvellous completeness and irrelevance. Lucius the ass is tempted by the baked goods prepared by the pastry cook: "cuiusce modi pulmentorum largissimas reliquias, hic panes, crustula, lucunculos, hamos, laterculos, et plura scitamenta mellita" ["the other brought all sorts of great leftovers of pastries—here were breads, cookies, little shaped cakes like lizards and anchors, biscuits and more dainty things made with honey"] (2:10, c. 13, 240). Apuleius enjoys the enumeration of richness, the rhyme of lucunculos and latercolos, the sense of great variety just enumerable, held loosely together within some overarching but not exactly enclosed unity. The multiform is his favourite mode, and words such as "multiform" among his favourite terms."