Cupid Pissing on Venus: Some Tips for Reading Literature
To begin, you may wonder why I would pick such an unusually graphic title and accompanying image for this article. I imagine a reader thinking, “What is she trying to say? Is she complaining about something? Is she trolling someone? Is this commentary on masculinity? Is she upset?” This type of reaction, the tendency to assume some type of personal meaning on behalf of the author, is the exact thing that this article attempts to correct. For those of you still lost: No, I am complaining. No I’m not trolling anyone. I have no gripes with masculinity. I am not upset. The image and title hold no personal meaning whatsoever other than I think it is unusual and interesting. If all of this is surprising to you, I invite you to read on.
1.The author is not the narrator.
It is natural to conflate the two since the word is the voice we follow when reading. However, projecting the author into the voice of the narrator robs the author of creative power. Not all writing is confessional. Events and details from real life may inform or influence an author’s work, but an author who is writing fiction will change and morph those details to create something entirely different. The real-life event may have a different onset or conclusion. The character that seems familiar may have a completely unique set of flaws. The narrator may see things through a lens that makes sense and relates to the author’s background, but the author can manipulate that perspective creatively. The author may take a real viewpoint or assumption and deliver the opposite trajectory of thought or ascribe a different motivation for the assumption. To limit the narrative voice to purely an expressive instrument of the author’s lived experience negates creative potentiality. Plus, an author can take on the perspective of someone quite different from them in terms of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, or status. It is a mark of skill to portray characters in a convincing manner which is especially so if the character is quite different. If you are reading fiction and read the narrator as the author, then you are reading the work wrong. After all, not all writing is confessional.
2. The historical/sociological context of the writer’s time may or may not matter.
Historic criticism is so popular that at lower levels of education it is sometimes taught defacto. While it is true that one’s time influences one’s world view and thus influences the text, authors have the creative power to divorce themselves from their own Zeitgeist and make up a plot within its own unique universe even if it seems like the world presented is just like the regular known world. When reading Bram Stocker’s Dracula, we can make the logical observation that the theory of evolution heavily influenced the angst of the work even decades after Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published. The issue of humanity’s origins and future were of such gravity for a highly religious culture that the angst of evolutionary theory would necessarily be worked out in Western text for years to come by a variety of authors. The working out of the tension between science and grace could be seen as intentional on the one hand or subconscious exercise on the other. Fine and well, but some authors, especially more experimental ones, may adopt a voice that is counter-cultural or may purposefully examine themes forgotten in the dust of time, relics of past ages. Still, the opposition may argue that the tendency to reject current norms is so too a tendency of the times and thus historic criticism still stands. Perhaps that is true. Since authors may subconsciously express ideas influenced by their era, it is fair to say that the historic critical lens is valid. Nevertheless, it would be imprudent to overly rely on this lens since the critic’s own subconscious biases, influenced by his own era, may skew the reading of how much the author’s time period influenced the work.
3. Feminist and Marxist theories are over used and over emphasized.
If the modern era has taught us one thing, it is that people can take offense at anything and will use their offended sentiments as a basis for unbalanced cultural attacks. As someone who studied literature in California where most of the faculty is far left, Feminist and Marxist theories were heavily emphasized and depicted as vital and essential methods of literary analysis. Thus, almost every class discussion had an element of a disgruntled young lady complaining about the poor exploited female beset by toxic masculinity in a corrupt society fueled by white privilege or the privilege of the affluent. It came up so much I started to wonder if we were learning more about the young lady than the text itself. When a society that emphasizes feelings of victim hood rather than empowerment strategy meets a young women grappling with her femininity, the arts become an outlet for feelings better discussed with an expert whether that’s a therapist or a nutritionist. I do concede that some authors purposefully work with ideas of oppression from whatever angle, such as Sylvia Plath or Upton Sinclair, but there are scores of other writers who are being misread because people have emotional issues or want to make literary analysis a soap box for whatever haute political trend. I think that people should use the lens they want to analyze literature, but an over dependence on theories tied to propaganda propagators detracts from the potential depth of meaning held within the texts
4. To read literature well, it is worth learning more about mythology, semiotics, and psychoanalytic theory as well as performance.
To see several levels of meaning in a text or a symbolic element of a text opens up the opportunity for a richer engagement with ideas. To study the situations within a text in this way will also have more real-life applicability as readers come to understand that our regular day to day lives are filled with symbolic interactions. Understanding the collective unconscious, archetypes, and the meaning that potentially infuses all things can help readers better understand themselves and the greater world. That is why studying mythology, semiotics, and psychoanalytic theory is so incredibly helpful for reading literature at a deeper level. When it comes to performance, learning how each action transforms into the next and how line delivery (tone, volume, pitch), positioning, direction of address, costuming, gesture, and prop can help readers see that any given story is multiple stories. Of course, the reading, study, and viewing of plays, especially the classics, are necessary actions for this course of study. Only with proper education in performance may the reader apply performance logic to literature that is not of the theatrical variety. However, once the learner has learned the incredible analytic potential of reading plays as performance and has carried out several such readings, then the technique can be applied to regular pieces of fiction whether a short story, novel, or epic.
5. Deconstructionism is a contradictory and socially harmful theory when overly emphasized.
The problem with Deconstructionism is that it is poorly understood on the one hand, and, on the other, it is a somewhat nihilistic approach. In graduate school, we studied the complex and contradictory work of Jacques Derrida. In all honesty, my classmates were frustrated and couldn’t really understand what he was saying. I understood what he meant when he talked about the intoxication of the word gilding over gaps and that reading texts and deconstructing the inevitable flaws of logic or cohesion could be seen as play. The thing is that that approach inherently builds up meaning even as it picks it apart. To focus on the gaps, unexplained elements in the text, contradictions, or details never again followed up, may indeed show that any given theme of a text collapses upon itself. However, I argue it is a nit picking, petty approach that sabotages the overwhelming amount of cohesive meaning on account of a few human errors that for the most part are easy to skim over without notice. Yes, language is fallible, but that doesn’t mean human fallibility should be the focus when reading literature. The great contradiction within deconstructionism is that while it picks apart meaning, it builds up its own flawed narrative, one that negates meaning despite the plentiful amount of both intended and unintended meaning. To emphasize this theory in the reading of texts has social implications too. It is socially irresponsible as it oddly emphasizes différance, the inability of words to express meaning or the illogic of the binaries inherent in language, that it seeks to dismantle. It degrades trust in functional social structures and dynamics, leading people to the void of decadence. They see infinite error and volatility of meaning when seeing through a Deconstructionist lens, and many would fill the void with Hedonism. Deconstructionism, unlike other theories, does not help people better understand themselves and the world; instead, in its negation of meaning, it generates despair and/or the rejection of more civilized ways of being. If the ship is going down and nothing means anything, one might as well indulge lower pleasures at the end of the world after all. While I don’t think it hurts to know about the theory and play with it when doing a critical reading; overall, it is an illogical and destabilizing approach to literature which steamrolls over the high volume of expressed meaning contained within any given text.
6. The dictionary is your friend.
The 26 volume Oxford English Dictionary, found in print in libraries or on digital databases, tracks each word meaning from its first appearance in the English language to its current meaning with all permutations noted. This is a fantastic resource when reading all types of literature. It can help readers understand older works in a more precise way but it also can help readers understand the subtlety of word meaning in literature, created by the more educated, who may be playing on a historic definition of a word in order to convey a very subtle and clever double entendre, for example.
Another excellent resource is an etymological dictionary. There is a free one online etymonline.org that reveals each word’s origin and historic meaning. This is helpful for more precisely understanding older works and better engaging with newer texts created by polyglots or those delivering subtle meta meanings.
Conclusion
All that being said, we might return to the idea of Cupid pissing on Venus. No, the painting is not a piece of literature, but we can still read the symbolism and analyze this work of art. From a historic viewpoint, the painting may be expressing the patriarchal mores of the Renaissance. While the common impulse is to read the image as commentary on male domination over and degradation of the feminine, according to the Met Museum, Cupid’s urine arcing through the laurel wreath symbolizes fertility. It stands in stead of an ejaculating phallus shooting sperm through the feminine portal. Laurel is associated with Athena and thus wisdom, so one might even read the image as suggesting that sex for fertilization is a wise choice. A Deconstructionist may see the image as constructing a false semiotic scenario where the message of fertilization falls apart since we are presented with the younger Cupid rather than the more mature Cupid. Certainly, no myth ever mentions Cupid impregnating Venus. At the same time, a Deconstructionist might argue that if the painting does suggest some sort of message about masculine domination over the feminine, that meaning falls apart because Cupid obediently followed Venus’ orders traditionally, even if it was not to his liking. The Deconstructionist would find some way to pick apart the image’s meaning, whether through gaps or talk of false dichotomy, leaving us with a sense of meaninglessness or the most Hedonistic views of the art. While these approaches may offer us scenarios that seem satisfactory enough, they detract from reading the image without socio-political bias. Certainly, art is created with bias at times, and yes, I concede that we can read art in such a way. However, the ultimate point is that people over rely on these lenses at the expense of more meaningful interpretations.
