II

One of the most striking features of Sappho's poetry is her use of apostrophe to play out the conflicts of her erotic drama. In his essay on poetic apostrophe, Jonathan Culler points out that literary critics have largely considered apostrophe a meaningless convention that is taken for granted as an inherited, accidental characteristic of the genre.^[10] . But indeed studying the role of apostrophe is crucial to an understanding of poetic discourse itself. As Culler argues, "Apostrophe is different in that it makes its point by troping, not on the meaning of a word, but on the circuit or situation of communication itself."^[11] In other words, what Culler calls "the vocative of apostrophe" is a device that the poetic voice uses to dramatize its own calling, its ability to summon images of its own power so as to establish, with an object, a relationship that helps to constitute an image of self.

Thus, apostrophe poses the problem of the poetic subject as a problem of the addressee's relation to it. The addressee becomes a live presence only when poetic voice constitutes itself. The "figure of voice" dramatizes both its own speaking and its power to give life to inanimate objects or to make present an absent addressee. As Barbara Johnson puts it, "Apostrophe is a form of ventrioquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness."^[12] Apostrophe raises the question of whether the sheer act of utterance can animate lifeless objects and heal the pain of separation and loss. By conferring presence on an absent addressee, the lover transforms the beloved from an object into a subject, effecting in the process a discourse between two subjects. The idea that the vocative posits a relationship between two subjects is greatly intensified in the context of erotic

[10] Culler, The Pursuit of Signs 136-54. This chapter, "Apostrophe," is one of the most influential studies of the use of poetic apostrophe and has drawn attention to its importance as a literary device.

[11] Ibid., 43.

[12] B. Johnson, "Apostrophe" 185.

poetry. The erotic subject is faced with the beloved's absence and with self-dissolution.^[13] Not only does the act of apostrophe make present the absent object of desire, but it also is the mechanism through which the erotic subject constitutes itself.

Sappho's dramatic use of address and invocation in her erotic fragments shows the paradoxical relationship between the debilitating and fragmenting effects of eros on the self and the reconstruction of the self in the poetic act. In Sappho's poems, the speaker often associates the diminishing of verbal power—attendant on separation from the beloved—with a kind of death. Apostrophe—the recuperation of voice through memory—reanimates the "I" through a reinscription of an individual poetic voice into a communal discourse. I shall argue that fragment 94 shows a progression from third-person narrative to second-person address to the emergence of first-person "we" and that this progression is inextricably bound up in the performative and communal context of Sappho's poems. That Sappho's narrator reconstitutes her fragmented self by establishing a relationship with her addressee in the time of the apostrophe refers us to the transforming and animating activity of the poetic voice. However, the inclusion of an audience (the "we") in the grammar of the poem—in the present moment of discourse—moves the speaker outside a radical interiorization and narcissism whereby the other is merely a projection of self.^[14]

Fragment 94 illustrates how Sappho's apostrophizing voice affirms the eroticism of her narrator by erasing the distinction between self and other, speaker and addressee, and creates an intimacy based, in Luce Irigaray's words, on a "nearness so pronounced that it makes all discrimination of identity, and thus all forms of property, impossible."^[15] Sappho doesn't fantasize about the beloved as separate from herself, as an object either to gaze at or describe.^[16] Irigaray's assertion that "the predominance of the visual ... is particularly foreign to female eroticism"^[17] seems consistent with the way Sappho pictures love relations in 94 as an environment of mutual enclosure and reciprocity. The speaker's erotic fulfillment comes not from making the beloved a beautiful object of contemplation, but by drawing the

[13] From Homer through the early Greek lyric poets, erotic experience is closely associated with a loss of vital self, and even death. For an insightful discussion of this, see Carson, Eros the Bittersweet .

[14] Culler, The Pusuit of Signs 146.

[15] Irigaray, This Sex 31. Irigaray's work has been extremely influential in articulating ideas about the question of woman's essence and of a female sexuality. Irigaray's view of feminine sexuality, which supplants the logic of the gaze with the logic of touch (22-33), seems especially relevant to a discussion of the mutuality of desire in Sappho's poetry.

[16] Stehle, "Sappho's Gaze."

[17] Irigaray, This Sex 25-26.

beloved to her by making the beloved a part of the lover's interior world of memory and imagination.

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Honestly, I wish I were dead.
Weeping she left with many tears,

And said; "Oh what terrible things
we endured. Sappho, truly,
against my will I leave you."

And I answered: "Go, be
happy, and remember me;
For you know how we cared for you.

And if not, then I want
to remind you ... of the wonderful
things we shared.

For many wreaths of violets and
roses ...
you put on by my side,

And many woven garlands
fashioned of flowers,
you tied round your soft neck,

And with rich myrrh,
fit for a queen, you anointed ...

And on a soft bed,
tenderly,
you satisfied [your] desire.^[18]

And there was
no sacred place
from which we were absent,

no grove,
no dance,
no sound...."^[19]

The fragment opens with the expression of a wish to die. Since the beginning of the poem is missing, the poem does not tell us who speaks the first extant line—the speaker or the other woman. Scholars who attribute the line to the speaker interpret the poem as "a complex picture of longing and pain" and view the speaker as a woman overcome by frenzy and grief. Burnett argues persuasively that the other woman rather than the speaker utters the wish to die in the fragment's opening line. As Burnett shows, "The disconsolate girl thinks that parting is the end of life and love, but her wiser mistress commands her to go her way rejoicing."^[20] In accord with Burnett's view, Snyder argues that "[t]he poem, then, is hardly a 'confession,' but rather a recapturing of past pleasures through memory, by which the 'dreadful things' mentioned by the girl—that is, the impending separation—are transformed into Sappho's 'beautiful things' beginning in stanza 4."^[21] I concur that it is the other woman who speaks the first line of the fragment—a line that plunges the poem into the realities of separation and loss. Moreover, attributing the opening line to the other woman heightens the

[18] L. 23 is usually translated with your desire . But the verb in the line is active rather than middle, so it may refer to someone else's desire. The ambiguity may well be intentional since, in the context of mutual desire, it does not matter who is satisfying whom.

[19] The Greek text of fr. 94 comes from Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry . The English translation of the poem is my own.

[20] Burnett, "Desire and Memory" 23.

[21] Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre 26.

tension in the poem between the two speakers—whose different approaches toward the separation are reflected in their correspondingly different modes of discourse.

Indeed, the stark wish to die is expressed baldly, without the embellishment of poetic images. The use of the word initiates a conversational diction and tone that accentuate the contingencies of circumstance. The time-bound world of circumstance evoked here is reinforced by the speaker's use of third-person narrative to describe a past event that is irreversible—the painful departure and loss of her beloved. The vocative in line 5, although framed within a narrative in the past tense in which the beloved addresses "Sappho," introduces an apostrophic element into the narrative. This apostrophe in the narrative creates a sense of dramatic immediacy that begins to bridge the gap between the past of narration and the now of discourse.

The drama of separation unfolds as we hear the distinct voices of the speaker and her departing lover shift back and forth in nearly ritualized responsion to one another.^[22] The speaker's direct recollection of the time of departure locates both the narrator and the woman who is leaving in a temporal sequence of events in which they are each distinct characters within the narrative reported by the speaker. The predominantly descriptive mode of discourse here preserves the sense of separateness between the two lovers. This separateness is reinforced by the parallel structure of the first four stanzas, which all end in verbs that function in responsion to one another.

The speaker's request in line 8 that the woman remember ( ) draws the poem away from the dramatic portrayal of the woman leaving to the more inward situation of remembering. And although we are still in the narrative frame, the speaker's verbal imperatives to the woman (go and remember) are spoken as second-person address. The speaker has moved from reporting a past event in the third person to reporting the reciprocal apostrophes spoken by the two lovers. These two modes of discourse—third-person narrative and the reporting of second-person address—both remain within a temporal frame. It is not until the "we" emerges at line 8 that the speaker begins to turn away from narrative altogether. The "we" of initiates a shift from reported speech to a detemporalized mode of discourse in which the individual voices of the two lovers are no longer clearly differentiated. Furthermore, "we" in (we cared) connects the "I" and the "you" of the poem to a communal context. There is much debate and speculation in Sappho criticism about how and under what conditions Sappho's poems were performed. But many

[22] See McEvilley, "Sappho, Fragment 94," for an insightful discussion of the way responsion between the two lovers works in the poem.

scholars believe that her fragments were performed either by Sappho herself or by a chorus of women to an audience comprising a community of other women.^[23] Thus, the audience becomes implicated in the poetic enactment of eros as the speaker includes the group in a communal discourse that both proclaims and provokes desire.

In stanza 4, the pattern of shifting voices changes as the speaker's own point of view and poetic voice take over. The speaker's assertion at line 9 that she will remind her beloved if she doesn't remember focuses attention on the poetic voice and its ability to activate the past and make it come alive in the present. The word (I wish) at the end of line 9, expressing the speaker's wish to remind her departing lover about their past happiness, echoes the earlier wish to die in the opening line of the fragment. The repetition of in the parallel contexts of death and memory suggests the active transformative power of the poetic voice as it replaces the will to die with the will to create.

In fact, it doesn't seem to matter whether the woman remembers or not. (and if not), at the beginning of the fourth stanza, conjoined to the emphatic (I wish), suggests a negation of narrative temporality, by making the evocativeness of the speaker's own apostrophizing voice the central issue. The speaker turns away from narrative and addresses the beloved as a presence in a "time of discourse rather than story."^[24] The speaker's clearly delineated voice offering her beloved an abstract consolation about how great the past was gives way to the dissolution of both their voices—voices that become subsumed within a detemporalized, intersubjective space inclusive of speaker, addressee, and an audience of women. As Culler points out, apostrophes displace the temporal sequences of narration by "removing the opposition between presence and absence from empirical time and locating it in a discursive time."^[25] The move from empirical to discursive time is heightened in stanza 4, which brings about a transition to a more remote time and introduces a use of language that abounds in poetic images.

The picture in stanzas 5 through 10 is one of idyllic beauty and blissful satisfaction. As against the clearly delineated voices and personalities at the beginning, here the "I," "you," and "we" of the poem are all linked in the aura of sensations and erotic stimulation. Boundaries of person, object, and place seem to break down as everything in the environment dissolves into a totality of sensation. The speaker's erotic vocabulary—images of

[23] See Calame, Les chœurs ; Nagy Pindar's Homer ; and Lardinois, "Subject and Circumstance," for arguments that support a view of Sappho's poetry as choral.

[24] Culler, The Pursuit of Signs 149.

[25] Ibid., 150.

violets, roses, woven garlands, perfume, and soft beds—creates a song of seduction that enacts both the mesmerizing spell of desire and the power of the poet's voice to suspend time and draw the poem's audiences into what Dolores O'Higgins calls "the dangerous felicity of listening.^[26] This atmosphere of sensual stimulation, however, does not seem to be placed in any actual environment; rather, the images of flowers, soft couches, perfumes, the shrine, and the grove all have a generalizing force that suggests remoteness from the world. Even the long series of flower images seems to function in isolation from nature and does not seem to refer to any specific ritual function or purpose except for the sensual enjoyment of the lovers and its poetic enactment.^[27] What is emphasized about the flowers is the way they are artfully fashioned into beautiful garlands for the lovers to wear.

In spite of the speaker's rapt absorption in the woman whose presence she invokes, there is no emphasis on describing the woman independent of the effect she has on the narrator herself, or separate from the atmosphere their shared erotic experience generates. In the last two stanzas of the fragment, the sense of fullness, expressed in the repetition of negatives that negate the lovers' absence at the shrine, the grove, and the dance, contrasts with the emptiness implicit in the earlier verbs of abandonment and departure. The negation of place to denote presence suggests that it is the mutual experience of the two lovers that gives form to the world. The implication is that place comes alive only in the presence of the other.

Jessica Benjamin sees woman's sexual grounding in intersubjective space as her solution to the problem that woman's desire is not localized in space— not linked to phallic activity and its representations: "When the sexual self is represented by the sensual capacities of the whole body, when the totality of space between, outside, and within our bodies becomes the site of pleasure, then desire escapes the borders of the imperial phallus and resides on the shores of endless worlds."^[28] Indeed, in Sappho's fragment the space inhabited by the two lovers expands outward to the seemingly endless spaces of streams, temples, and groves. The movement from the interior space connoted by the "soft bed" to the exterior space of the temple, the grove, and the dance reinforces the earlier link between the speaker, her addressee, and the circle of listening, perhaps singing, women. The effortless motion from interior to exterior space that suggests the dissolving of spatial boundaries correlates with the breakdown in clearly distinct positions of self and other, subject and object. Moreover, the connections in the poem between the

[26] O'Higgins, "Sappho's Splintered Tongue" 162.

[27] See Stehle, "Retreat from the Male," for a discussion of Sappho's use of flower imagery in an erotic context.

[28] Benjamin, The Bonds of Love 130.

personal and collective discourses of women suggests an intersubjectivity that embraces a cultural system significantly different from male models of competitive and hierarchical self-other relationships.