INTRODUCTION

Ellen Greene

 
Someone, I say, will remember us in the future.
SAPPHO (FR. 147 L.-P.)

As the earliest surviving woman writer in the West, Sappho stands at the beginning of Western literary history. Despite a reputation that "has been battered more often than it has been burnished,"^[1] Sappho has exerted an intense and lasting presence in the Western imagination. Aristotle's comment, however, that Sappho was honored "although she was a woman" speaks to the fact that Sappho's reputation owes at least as much to her gender as to her talent as a love poet.^[2] Interest in Sappho, particularly in the scholarly tradition, has often reflected a voyeuristic fascination with the "queerness" of a woman writing poetry in which men are "relegated to a peripheral, of not an intrusive, role."^[3] Curiosity about Sappho over the centuries has been fueled by the fragmentary condition of her poems, the lack of any concrete information about her life, and the implications of homoeroticism in her work.

Much of the scholarship on Sappho, until relatively recently, has focused either on textual reconstruction and analysis or on Sappho's sensationalized "biography." In the past thirty years, however, with the feminist wave of the 1960s and 1970s, Sappho's poetry has begun to be reevaluated. Like so many other women writers who have been gradually brought out of their literary closets, Sappho has resurfaced—not as the hysteric or "schoolmistress" of previous generations, but as a powerful and influential voice in the Western cultural tradition. With Giuliana Lanata's article, "Sappho's Amatory Language," originally published in 1966 and appearing here in English for the first time, Sappho scholarship turns decidedly away

from the obsession to reconstruct Sappho's biography and to rationalize away the homoerotic aspects of her poetry.

Edgar Lobel and Denys Page's 1955 commentary on Sappho marked a turning point in Sappho scholarship. Their book, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta , with a complete text and commentary on Sappho's fragments, became the definitive edition of Sappho's poems and, to a large extent, resolved the philological issues of textual reconstruction. Within a decade or so of their commentary, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, an efflorescence of literary and contextual criticism emerged in which scholars began to read Sappho's poetry for its literary content and its relation to literary and mythical tradition. Changes in Sappho criticism, moreover, coincided with general changes in classical scholarship; in the 1970s efforts to assimilate methodologies from other branches of literary and cultural studies began to appear. In addition, feminist scholarship and, more recently, gender theory and criticism have provoked discussion about how Sappho's gender has both shaped her poetic discourse and influenced the social context of her poetry.

This book is the first anthology devoted to scholarly studies of Sappho's work. Significantly, it represents the fruit of two and a half decades of a burgeoning corpus of Sappho scholarship—due largely to the serious study of women in antiquity and to inquiries into Greek and Roman sexual attitudes and practices.^[4] The aim of this collection is to draw well-deserved attention to Sappho's importance as a poet and to present the diverse and often contradictory critical approaches toward Sappho that have become the hallmark of Sappho scholarship. The book divides into four section: "Language and Literary Context," "Homer and Oral Tradition," "Ritual and Social Context," and "Women's Erotics." These categories represent a simplified organization of a range of positions that often overlap and are more diverse than such categorization might suggest. They are meant to guide the reader through the major strands in Sappho scholarship and to provide a sense of the lively debate and competing critical positions within Sappho studies that have continued to engage scholars over the last several decades.

The opening section of the collection, "Language and Literary Context," illustrates the first wave of essays (after Page and Lobel) that focus on literary content in Sappho's poetry: that is, Sappho's use of literary conventions

(topoi) and poetic devices, including elements of ritual language, the assimilation of oral modes of discourse, and the relationship of Sappho's poetry to a literary and cultural tradition. The first essay by Lanata is one of the earliest articles to focus closely on Sappho's erotic language within the context of both the epic and lyric traditions.

In a similar vein, Mary Lefkowitz's 1973 article, "Critical Stereotypes and the Poetry of Sappho," shows how traditional biographical approaches to Sappho fail to do justice to her poetry. Lefkowitz objects to early<->particularly Victorian—views of Sappho's work as the product of an "abnormal" female psychology. Lefkowitz's article takes issue with the tendency of male critics to assume that the art of women writers is merely an emotional outpouring indicative of psychological disturbance or "deviance." She argues that Sappho's poetry is not, as Denys Page avers, "without artifice," but rather that Sappho's poetry shows a sophisticated and ingenious use of traditional poetic figures and literary topoi.

While Lanata and Lefkowitz locate Sappho within an archaic literary tradition, Gregory Nagy's essay focuses on the mythical tradition as a way of contextualizing her poetry. Nagy's essay "Phaethon, Sappho's Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas: 'Reading' the Symbols of Greek Lyric" examines the origins of the Greek myths of Phaethon and Phaon that led to the famous Sappho-Phaon story. Nagy looks for mythological parallels in the various accounts of the story primarily in archaic Greek lyric, Homer, and a fourth-century Greek play, The Leukadia , by Menander. Nagy analyzes the symbolism of the White Rock and its complex relationship to both the mythical figure of Phaon and to Sappho—as both mythical figure and poet.

Charles Segal explores yet another facet of Sappho's use of literary convention. His article, "Eros and Incantation: Sappho and Oral Poetry," investigates the ways Sappho's poetic language embodies modes of discourse used in oral poetry. Segal examines the "ritualizing, incantatory" qualities of Sappho's language and investigates the extent to which Sappho's poems reflect personal experience expressed within a social and ritual context. Segal articulates the problem that we, as modern readers, often encounter when we try to draw the line between the personal and the conventional in Sappho's poetry:^[5]

The total aesthetic experience produced by [Sappho's poems] results from a coming together of the two levels of communication, the ritual and the private. It is here, at these points of juncture between the social, outward-facing, public

dimension and techniques of her art and their private, more personal, less ritualistic aspect, that Sappho especially exemplifies her originality and artistry. It is also where she is most difficult for the modern sensibility to grasp.

Indeed, the relationship between a "private" voice and a "public" discourse in Sappho's poetry is extremely vexed, since archaic Greek culture is thought to be far more communal and certainly more reliant on oral forms of communication than is our own culture.

An important dimension in investigating the oral qualities of Sappho's verse is the interrogation of Sappho's use of Homer. The second section, "Homer and the Oral Tradition," includes Page duBois's essay "Sappho and Helen" and John Winkler's essay "Gardens of Nymphs: Public and Private in Sappho's Lyrics"—essays that focus specifically on Sappho's use of Homeric myths and formulas. DuBois argues that Sappho's reinterpretation of the Homeric Helen overturns many of the male assumptions embedded in Homeric narrative, and that Sappho's "reading" of the Helen myth reflects a feminine consciousness that emphasizes Helen as a subject of her own desires, rather than as an object of male desire.

Winkler's essay also looks at Sappho's use of Homer as a way of "allowing us, even encouraging us, to approach her consciousness as a woman and poet reading Homer." Winkler explores the tension between the "public" and "private" character of Sappho's poems by investigating how Sappho's use of Homeric material reflects the encounter between her private, woman-centered world and male public culture. Through an examination of fragments 1, 2, 16, and 31, Winkler explores Sappho's revision of Homeric myth and argues that in Sappho's appropriation of the "alien" text of Homer, she reveals the implicit inadequacy of the exclusion and denigration of women in Homer and thus, in a sense, revises traditional "male" readings of Homer.

A related area of inquiry in recent Sappho criticism focuses on the per-formative and cultural context of Sappho's poetry. The section "Ritual and Social Context" includes essays that investigate the ritual and social purposes Sappho's erotic poems might have served in her community on Lesbos. This area of scholarship invites the most speculation about Sappho since we have little or no conclusive evidence for the social conditions on Lesbos at the time Sappho composed her poems. The scholarly debate about Sappho's audience and the performative context of her poems focuses on questions concerning the relationship between Sappho's expression of personal passions and the public, social function of her art, and how participation in a communal cultural discourse may be reconciled with Sappho's distinct, highly individuated voice—a voice that seems to articulate "private" feelings so compellingly.

An aspect of the debate about Sappho's audience centers on the traditional dichotomy between choral and monodic poetry. Gordon Kirkwood's 1974 study, Early Greek Monody , assumes that Sappho's voice is primarily monodic, that is, spoken as a solo voice expressing emotions of an exclusively personal and intimate nature. Similarly the eminent scholars Bruno Snell and C. M. Bowra assume that "the distinction between choral lyric and monody is fundamental." Thus, Bowra writes of Sappho's "remarkable intimacy and candour," and Snell refers to Sappho's "deeply emotional confessions."^[6] Many recent scholars have contested the strict division between choral lyric and monody, arguing that although Sappho speaks in the first person, the "I" cannot possibly denote merely private consciousness, but rather suggests an embodiment of the shared or communal.

Claude Calame's article, "Sappho's Group: An Initiation into Womanhood," the first essay in the section, "Ritual and Social Context," addresses the debate in Sappho criticism about the modern construction of a thiasos , a group of woman with ritual and cultic functions to which Sappho has often been linked as a sort of leader. Calame looks at Sappho's own fragments as well as other archaic Greek fragments for evidence of the existence of a Lesbian "circle" or group whose female members may have been affiliated with one another through the bonds of friendship and erotic love. Further, Calame examines the ways in which such a "circle" may have functioned. He argues that there is evidence to suggest that Sappho gathered groups of young woman around her as both students and companions. Musical and erotic instruction in the Lesbian "circle," Calame maintains, were crucial elements in preparing young girls for their roles as adult, married women. However, Calame argues against the view of Sappho as a "schoolmistress"; his article emphasizes that the education imparted to the young women of Sappho's group, through the performance of song and cult acts, was entirely ritualized in both form and content.

Judith Hallett's article, "Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality," continues the debate raised by Segal about the relationship between Sappho's expression of personal passions and the public, social function of her art. Hallett's discussion of Sappho's social context, however, raises the question about what the social purpose and public function Sappho's poetry may have been in the context of a community of women operating in a socially segregated society. Hallett's essay is one of the earliest to consider Sappho's gender as a crucial factor in the "public" dimension of her poetry. Hallett argues that Sappho's erotic verses may be viewed as an institutional force, a social vehicle for women designed to impart sensual

awareness and confidence in young females "on the threshold of marriage and maturity."

In responding to Hallett's article, Eva Stehle's essay, "Romantic Sensuality, Poetic Sense: A Response to Hallett on Sappho," fuels the debate over the public and private in Sappho by taking issue with Hallett's (and other's) views about the dominance of a social function for Sappho's poetry. Stehle argues that the private emotional reality in Sappho's poems is paramount, superseding any function Sappho's poetry might have as an "institutional force." Moreover, she maintains that Sappho's "strong personal focus and introspective quality" would be subversive to a public celebratory setting. Taking fragment 94, as her example, Stehle argues that Sappho's poetic expressions of desire in an atmosphere "of segregation in sensuous surroundings" suggest an alternate femme world quite apart from the assumptions of male public culture—assumptions associated with competition and domination.

In contrast to Eva Stehle's view, in a new essay entitled "Who Sang Sappho's Songs?" André Lardinois suggests the possibility that all Sappho's poems were chorally performed. Lardinois questions the traditional distinctions between choral and monodic poetry and argues that Sappho's poems ought to be regarded chiefly as choral in nature rather than as personal or autobiographical forms of expression. Lardinois specifically addresses the question of how Sappho's songs were sung. Although he acknowledges that we have very little information about the actual performance of Sappho's poems, Lardinois examines a number of the major fragments and shows how they can be interpreted as being performed "with the help of choruses." His analysis focuses primarily on the pluralistic voice in Sappho (the use of "we"), references and allusions in the poems that suggest a communal atmosphere, and the use of poetic topoi common in choral songs. Although Lardinois points out the many ways in which Sappho's poetry is similar to that of her male counterparts, at the end of his essay he acknowledges the possibility of differences in tone and subject matter between Sappho and male poets. He sees the difference, as he says, not "as a difference between a public (male) and a private (female) world (Stehle, Winkler, Snyder)," but as a "difference between two distinct public voices."

The next section in the collection, "Women's Erotics," explicitly takes up the issue of gender difference. Feminist approaches in recent Sappho criticism question the extent to which Sappho's poems present a woman specific discourse that secures a female perspective within male-dominated discursive systems. A number of essays in this volume argue that Sappho assimilates conventional social and literary formulas to a woman's consciousness. Stehle, Williamson, Skinner, and I argue that although Sappho utilizes many conventional formulas of archaic Greek poetry, her poems, nonetheless, speak a different language than that of her male counterparts

and produce a significantly different version of desire—one that is markedly nonhierarchical or, as Marilyn Skinner puts it, is "conspicuously nonphallic."

Skinner's essay "Woman and Language in Archaic Greece, or, Why Is Sappho a Woman?" investigates the degree to which Sappho's poetry represents a distinct creative tradition that transcends the "androcentric cultural categories" that dominate the patriarchal discourses of ancient Greece. Sappho's poems, Skinner argues, offer a woman-centered perspective that not only perpetuates women's culture but also reflects a "nonnormative" subject position for women that "defiantly locates itself against patriarchy." Moreover, Skinner theorizes that the nonhierarchical, nonphallic model of desire represented in Sappho's fragments provided an alternative cultural norm to both men and women, an alternative that allowed women to claim an authentic subject position and men to "escape from the strict constraints of masculinity."

Eva Stehle suggests, in "Sappho's Gaze: Fantasies of a Goddess and Young Man," that Sappho's poems can be read as implied criticism of a patriarchal value system. Stehle makes use of recent work in feminist theory on how the erotic gaze promotes gender hierarchies and preserves women's object status. She argues that in describing "the effect of the gaze on the gazer," Sappho departs from the erotic poetry of her male counterparts by breaking down "the opposition between viewer and viewed that is created by the gaze." In other words, Sappho uses the gaze not to objectify the one desired, but to "dissolve hierarchy." In my essay, "Apostrophe and Women's Erotics in the Poetry of Sappho," through readings of Fragments 1 and 94, I extend Stehle's argument in order to focus on how Sappho's use of apostrophe creates a model of eroticism that is both intersubjective and nonhierarchical.

Anne Carson, in her essay "The Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho Fr. 1," interprets fragment 1 (the "Hymn to Aphrodite") in a way that demonstrates how the poem reiterates the traditions of Greek erotic poetry. In particular, Carson argues that Sappho presents a version of desire in accord with the hierarchical mode of eroticism prevalent in male homoerotic relations. Further, Carson's effort to integrate Sappho's poem not only with the conventions of archaic lyric but also with "archaic currents of thought" militates against the view (taken by Stehle, Williamson, and myself) that Sappho's mode of discourse represents female homoerotic desire with its own symbolic systems and conventions.

In her essay, "Sappho and the Other Woman," Margaret Williamson contends in contrast that Sappho's fragments produce a version of erotic experience that defies cultural norms. Through an examination of the subject positions mapped out in Sappho's poetry, she, like Stehle, argues that Sappho's erotic discourse differs considerably from that of male writers

for whom "the only form self-other relationships seem to take is that of struggle that will end in the mastery of one over the other."

As these essays show, the last several decades of Sappho studies have been enormously productive. It is my hope that this volume will further stimulate the growing field of scholarship on Sappho, and help to situate Sappho as an important voice in the Western literary tradition. Moreover, this collection will, I hope, contribute to the ever-expanding project of recovering women writers and attending to their roles in literary and cultural history. It is my belief that as this project goes forward, Sappho will remain an authorizing and enduring presence. As the first female literary voice in the Western tradition, Sappho's poetry can lay claim to a special, originary status within that tradition. Despite the vastly diverse responses to and interpretations of Sappho's poems, readers of Sappho throughout the ages have, nonetheless, recognized in her eloquent expressions of desire the paradoxical conjuncture of pain and pleasure, bitterness and sweetness that lies at the heart of erotic experience. AS Anne Carson puts it, "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her.'^[7]