"I am not a child though I seem to be so, but am older than Kronos
and all this universe." -- Eros to Philetas, Longus' Daphnis and Chloé

Sic ignara Psychesponte in Amoris incidit amorem. Tunc magis mag-
isque cupidine flagrans Cupidinis. -- Apuleius, The Golden Ass

A couple of human hearts skewered together with an arrow, cooking
before a cheerful fire, while a male and female cannibal in modern
attire . . . were approaching the meal with hungry eyes. . . . A decid-
edly indelicate young gentleman, in a pair of wings and nothing else,
was . . . superintending the cooking. -- Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

"Provoking!" exclaimed Miss Ingram: "you tiresome monkey!" (apos-
trophizing Adèle) "who perched you up in the window to give false
intelligence?" -- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

The Princess resembled Hanuman when she wielded a tree branch like
a sword . . . -- Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn

Eros, as Chariton tells us, is a lover of combat and delights in paradoxes
( Philoneikos de estin ho Erōs kai chairei tois paradoxois, 50). The word paradox here
means primarily "unexpected outcome," as in a twist of events, but it also con-
tains a sense of something aside from, if parallel to, received opinion and nor-
mative expectation. The Labyrinth has its own paradoxes, its surprises and
doubleness. The wanderer in a labyrinth is faced with perpetual contraries. One
gallery opens here, and another one opposite or beside it--this is a realm of chal-
lenging and disturbing alternatives. In the Labyrinth, choice is felt as hard neces-
sity; the wanderer registers confusion and inadequacy. So too does the reader. So
compelling is the trope that we are customarily not obliged to remain too long in
the stony entrails of the figured maze.

The Labyrinth can feel very gloomy. Eros--or Cupid / Amor / personified
Love--can seem very cheering. Eros is warmth and light, activity and movement.
He is usually winged--that is, he has freedom. Our contact with Eros is a kind of
reward for undergoing the terrors of the labyrinth, and the burial in the tomb.
Yet he is a reward which cannot be possessed.

Eros (or Cupid) as a trope of fiction is a multiple and subtle signifier, even
when introduced in apparently incidental embellishment. He stands, usually,
outside the story proper, yet to come upon him is to encounter him, an experi-
ence always important for the reader, whether the character is conscious of Eros
or not. The encounter itself fulfills the trope. If we have been winding along in

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