JunxiHe

= "//Venison//" by KAREN CHASE (2000) =

// Junxi He //
Paul set the bags down, told how they had split the deer apart, the ease of peeling it simpler than skinning a fruit, how the buck lay on the worktable, how they sawed and anklebone off, the smell not rank. The sun slipped into night.

//Where are you// I wondered as I grubbed through cupboards for noodles at least. Then came vension new with blood, stray hair from the animal's fur. Excited, we cooked the meat.

Later, I dreamt against your human chest, you cloaked me in your large arms, then went for me the way you squander food sometimes. By then, I was eating limbs in my sleep, somewhere in the snow alone, survivor of a downed plane, picking at the freshly dead. Whistles of a far-off flute--leg, gristle, juice. I cracked an elbow against a rock, awoke. Throughout the night, we consumed and consumed.

Way 1: First Impressions
After I read through the poem for the first time, the speaker's coldblooedness impresses me a lot. The poem is divided into three stanzas. As in the first part, starting from line 1 to 6, by describing how easy to peel a deer even easier than skinning an apple, it is obvious that this is not the first time of killing an animal like this. They have already get used to the bloody smell when sawing off the deer's body.

Later when the woman is searching noodles in the kitchen, I realize that she is facing hunger. And maybe the previous brutal act is related to this famine. I can feel how hungry she is when she sees her partner (or husband) come back with a deer with its blood bleeding. She is even excited more by the vension's blood and cook and eat it without any hesitation.

Another remarkable phrase in the poem is the italic "//Where are you"// in the second stanza. I think the writer's purpose of using italic words here might be to emphasize the woman's great intensity of wants of seeing her partner back with capture. In the third part of the poem, the speaker further shows her unsatisfied desire of meat by describing her fleshly dream.

By the last line of the poem saying they consumed again and again throughout the night, I suddenly come up with the thought that venison may be just a sign of something else, for example, sex. And the dream in the third part make me reconsider whether the second part of the poem is real or just a part of her dream as well. Because in line 19, she says she awoke when she is cracking the deer's elbow, then it's possible that the description of cooking and eating is in her dream too.

So, one of my concerns after primarily read through the poem is if venison is a metaphor of sexual desire.

Way 2: Engaging with the Text
Since I couldn't find any audio recording on the web, I just read it to myself. By reading it out loud, I find out that all lines in the first and the second stanzas end up with consonant sound. And I don't feel obvious rhymes and assonances are using in the poem. It seems like a free stanza to me. I feel, because most of the lines end with non-vowel syllables, the tone when I read is quite deep and that brings me to a somehow gloomy mood. I kinda feel sad that not a drop a pity they ever have results from their massacre, but on the contrary, the bloody flesh induces the speaker's sexual desire. By this point I do not quite understand if there is any significant sound effect and how is that connected to the poem's meaning.

Way 3: A Point about Form and Its Relationship to Content
This poem is probably a dramatic monologue. To my understanding, Paul and "you" are not refers to the same person. The anonymous "you" is possible the speaker's lover and Paul is a friend of them. And as indicated at the beginning, they are a group of wild-life hunters. Through the speaker's soliloquy in the poem, the woman and her peers impress me as a group of cold-blooded hunter. In the first stanza, Chase uses three "how" phrases to emphasize the rudeness, coldbloedness and eagerness of them. Later in the second part of the poem, the italic //"Where are you"// is her interior monologue indicates her strong will to see her lover back with the quarry.

Way 3: Another point about Form and Its Relationship to Content
In the other hand, this poem is written in free verse style. There are certain rhymes used in each stanza. However, the rhymes are very irregular and no constant meters are used. It's written in a more flexible form instead of a rigid and strictly regular structure. For example, to express the term "deer flesh", synonyms like "venison", "buck" are applied and none of them is used more than once. Furthermore, the irregularity of the rhymes probably reflects the speaker's emotional status.She even cannot distinguish dream from the reality very well. In the way the poem is set, the enjoyment of eating venison derive her dream about her lover's chest badly and in her dream she is eating deer flesh again and then awakes but still want to consume it more and more.`The dream is so real to her that she couldn't stop tasting the juicy gristle of the legs.

__ease of peeling it__ Karen Chase applies a lot of imagery in her writing here, such as "the ease of peeling it simpler than skinning a fruit" (line 2,3) that we can feel and visualize in what extent the narrator is talking about. The purpose of comparing peeling off the skin of a deer to paring fruit is to show the reader a touchable sense of the "ease". Since common people rarely hunt in the wild and therefore are inexprienced of peeling skin off, then if by only saying" they easily peel it off", the line itself will be much less convictive. In the contrary, because most of us clearly know how paring an apple feels like and the ease of doing it is uncontested, by linking such sense of ease to peeling off animal's skin, his statement becomes more acceptable and agreeable. Such use of imagery help build the coldblooedness and the unawareness of killing of the main character in the story.

__ legs, gristle, juice __ The three words are used in the last stanza in the poem (line 18). The order of lining up these three words physically sink to the bone from the suface. It is a metaphor to demonstrate how intense the speaker's quest for sex is. After finishing her deer meal previously in the second stanza, the deliciousness of the fleshy venison not only make her want to consume more but also induces her want of lust badly. As described "Later, I dreamt against your human chest" (line 12) and "...I was eating limbs in my sleep" (line 15), she enjoys every little inch of the leg more than just the flesh but also every tiny piece of gristle and to suck out the juicy bone marrow as much as possible from the bottom layer. In the last a few lines, the contradiction of the speaker's dream and reality is illustrated by awakening from her dream again and again.

__//Where are you//__ The italic starting line "Where are you" of the second stanza is used as a symbol to emphasize the speaker is eager for her lover's returning. In one hand, as grubbing around the cupboards when she is waiting at the same time, she expects finding something that she can have a bite, even just some noodles, to satisfy her hunger for a while. In the other hand, "you" can be referred to the deer flesh itself. We can say that venison is exactly what she's looking for in the cupboard although this is rather a mirage while she cannot even find a pack of noodles. The author uses the italic symbol here to reinforce the speaker's thirst for venison or further, sex, to the readers.

**Way 5: Analyzing the Setting**
The dark and coldblooded mood of the characters in the story is clearly indicated by the description of the setting in the openning stanza. the reader can explicitly get a sense of this by lines which show the ease of peeling off a deer's skin and sawing its ankle off and the bloody smell of the animal body. And to my understanding, venison later is the symbolic use of setting -- the dissatisfaction of deer flesh is a metaphor for the narrator's voracity of sex. I recognize such corelation via the narrator's description illustrates that "Later, I dreamt against your human chest" (line 12). That indicates that the sucessful hunt of the narrator's peers (refer to "you" and "Paul" in the poem) and therefore the delicous heavy meal they ate, seduces her into thinking and asking for more sexual enjoyment. By reading lines "you cloaked me in your large arms", "went forme the way you squander food.." and "...legs, gristle, juice. I cracked an elbow..." I even feel that the narrator is a potential sexual masochism. The way she expresses her feeling in is so flesh-explicit that make me feel that she will not be satisfied until having sex at a really deep and intensive level.

**Way 6: Identifying and Analyzing Point of View**
"Venision" is written in the 1st-person point of view. First of all, the story is obviously told by a narrator who is involved in the story (Brown and Yarbrough). In addition, the narrator refers herself as "I" throughout the poem. By using first-person point of view, the author provides her readers plenty of information on the narrator's character, thought and act. However, such point of view at the same time leads to a lack of information on the relationship of the writer and the narrator inside the story. Since the poem is wriiten in the first person point of view, the name of "I" has never been mentioned, and therefore we have no way to confirm whether the spokesman in the poem exactly refers to the author herself or not.

Way 7: Analyzing Complexity, Ambiguity, & Difficulty
One of the ambiguities to me is that who are "you" referring to in line 7 ("//Where are you//") with italic characters. On the one hand, "you" can refer to "Paul" as mentioned at the very beginning of the story. On the other hand, it can be referred to another male character. If it's the second case, that means the narrator is having relationship with two different person at the same time as we can interpret from the first stanza that she probably lives with Paul but at night she begin dreaming another guy's body image. In addition, a main complexity or difficulty to me to interpret the poem thoroughly is the chaos of dream and reality in the poem. If the scene setting in the first stanza (line 1-6) is real, the second part should be in a dream. The logic is if she has got such abundant fleshy inventory, she cannot be so hungry that "grubbed through cupboards for noodles at least". Also, the bottom line is confusing because the object that "we consumed and consumed" is indetermined. It can be interpreted in one way as "we" dream again and again to consume the deer flesh together or in another way as "we" have sex again and again throughout the night.

**Way 8: Considering Canonicity**
This week, we’ve learned from our textbook and the Professor’s Notes that the criteria for judging canonicity of a literary work are its aesthetic value, its historical and social value that related to the time and where the work is written, its longevity and universal influence to other literature and the public. The aesthetic value is embodied by the vivid elaboration about how they tear the deer off and enjoy the meal. For example, Chase uses various forms of words to describe the deer in the poem: “deer” (line 2), “buck” (line 3) and “venison” (line 9). By means of changing use of similar synonyms of the word, she on one hand achieves the goal of emphasizing that “venison” is a key point for interpretating the poem and avoid tiring the readers with vocabulary repetition, on the other hand. For the cultural value part, since the poem is written in early 21th century, so I think the society is more open for poets to have topics related to sex in their works. Although the way she metaphorizes is still not fully explicit. However, by jumping from the description of how the hunters split off the deer, to how the sufficient meal recall her want of “human chest” (line 12), the metaphor in the poem here is clear enough for the readers to further interpret the soul of the poem.

Way 9: Biographical Context
The extraordinary way that Chase expresses that how bloody the cruel slughter to the deer is can be seen from her biography. A biograhpical review about her indicates that she love the pure nature of beauty in real and in "the tightrope of human relationships" (Bookloft). So, to the narrator in Chase's story, killing wild life is even a beautiful joy because that is the human nature--the truth that "survival of the fittest". Like food is essential for survival, seuality is borned in nature. Therefore the connection from freshy satiation to the evocation about sex in the story frankly makes sense. And after knowing that Chase spends quite a big portion in her lifetime with hopitalized patients who have psychiatric problems to teach them write (Bookloft). Thus one of the reasons why her illustration seems a bit crazy or more than that come this part of experience in her life. I am not saying that Chase has been impacted by those patients and write something in abnormal style. I just think that as she get along with some different guys, she has more understanding about human in nature and cultivate some new habits in her writting.

Way 10: Historical and Cultural Contexts
Chase's works are mostly focus on women power. Obviously, the speaker in "Venison" is a women and her character shows us how women explore and enjoy the beauty of rawness. In her another book "the Vetorians & Old Ages", she spends time on a few women's stories from Queen Vitoria to Sairey Gamp, Charles Dichens's nurse. In her stories, she usually concerns on women issues during appropriate time periods. So, probably Chase is more likely to use female protagonist in her work.

Way 11: Theoretical Application
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM After learning this specific theory, I get a sense that it's possible that the illustration of the narrator's dissatisfaction with libido acutually reflects the thoughts in author's unconscious mind too. According to Freud, the father of psyanalysis, human's behaviors are drove by their unawareness in mind. If unconsciousness really is involved in lines, the confusion of distinuishing dreams from truth will make more sense then. The scene of the story where it is continuing on switch very quickly from kitchen to bed to an aircrash site; from reality to dreams and back to real. Such frequent switches confused me that is the story really talking about the narrator only or the author has already somehow jumped into the story involuntarily. There are so many ambiguities left for the readers to make their choice to interpret the meaning of the words, like what did "we consume(d) and cosume(d)"(Chase, 20)?--The dream of eating or real food consuming? " Where are you" (7) could be the quetion of either the speaker in the story or the call for sex in author's mind.

FEMINIST CRITICISM The whole story is narrated by a female protagonist. It's no more men-oriented, which means male and female become less different. Women become more open to express their thoughts to the public. By firstly implicitly using "venison" as an indicator for metaphor of something she wants, later when readers are told about her wish of lying in human chest (12), the sexual overture become apparent. That shows, turning into 21th century, the social norm become less conservative and some taboos which used to be inffeable now become free discussible in public.

Way 13: Unifying Interpretation
At the beginning of the project, the most impressive influence I see from the story is the human's coldblooedness in their hunting tour and the engaged association of sex followed. As further and further I am digging down by means of all the unpacking figurature languages, critical thinking and theoretical application we learned during the semester, I touch more deeper and connotative portions of the poem. By learning the application of unpacking messages I can now better and more quickly look for and define the potential key points lying inside the work; by critically thinking and considering the biographical context, I now have a more thorough understanding of the author's tone and ways she used to interpret her ideas; by understanding the different ways of theoretical criticism, I now understand the poem in a more dialectic way that it's more about human nature instead of focusing on the negative influence of the hunter's coldblooedness at which that is the truth though, but the point is it is more likely to be natural behavior of human beings. Hunting and sex both actually embodies human's reliance on rawness.

Works Cited and Consulted
Brown, James S., and Scott D. Yarbrough. //A Practical Introduction to Literary Study//. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2005. "Karen Chase." //The Bookloft//. 22 Jul. 2009 <[]> Gale. "Karen Chase." //Contemporary Authors via GaleNet.// 23 Jul. 2009 