APA Newsletters

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2

Newsletter on Philosophy and Lesbian,
Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Issues

Book Review

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Du Bois, Page, Sappho is Burning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

D. Rita Alfonso
State University of New York at Stony Brook

The essays gathered in Page du Bois' Sappho Is Burning offer a historically nuanced reading of the fragments of Sappho, the seventh-century B.C.E. lyric poet from the Mediterranean island of Lesbos. A Greek who nonetheless was closer to Asia Minor than Athens, a member of the ruling class but a woman, Sappho challenges the traditional view of a homogeneous Greek culture. Despite Sappho's fame as the Lesbian poet, the question of Sappho's sexuality is not central to any one of the essays. More striking are du Bois' claims that Sappho opens up the space for a pre-philosophical subjectivity by first inhabiting the desiring "I"; or, that Sappho re-figures the Homeric narrative of flight and pursuit in the battlefield, so that love becomes the battle in which lovers pursue each other; or again, that Sappho's poems offer an "aesthetics of the fragment." Du Bois' readings are undertaken from various theoretical perspectives: classical studies, feminism, philosophy, psychoanalysis, postmodern and poststructuralist theories, and queer studies. As such, this slim tome represents a fabulous example of interdisciplinary scholarship.

In her "Fragmentary Introduction," du Bois situates her discussion in the present historical moment, one in which the idea of a historical meta-narrative has been discredited, but one in which historical relativism is presented as the unpalatable alternative. Seeking the middle ground between these, du Bois invokes Walter Benjamin's sense of history that "insists on the necessity of a relationship to the past, one rooted in interest, in the commitment of the historian to remember the past and to change the present for the future." (23) The poems gathered under Sappho's name provide the objects through which a relationship to pre-classical Greece is constructed, with a view toward opening onto a better future. Since Sappho's volumes have survived only in fragments, a relationship to these are forged through what is missing and forever lost, as much as through what has been preserved.

Resisting the urge to restore Sappho's fragments to completeness, the task for du Bois becomes reading for the gaps and erasures in the poems. Borrowing from Lacan's theory of the construction of subjective identity through the mirror stage, du Bois describes the process through which a relationship to Sappho's fragments is constructed. In the way that a child looks into the mirror for the first time and forms a coherent self-image, Sappho's fragments acquire the fictional, but functional, coherency of the mirror image. Admitting that this is not a use that Lacan himself would have foreseen, Du Bois nonetheless wants us to recognize that any interpretation of Sappho's poems is at once provisional and fictional.

In the "Aesthetics of the Fragment," du Bois communicates to her readers the same desire for the unattainable, and regret over what has been the lost, that is evoked in Sappho's poems. Through her reading of Sappho's wedding songs, du Bois evokes the distance and unattainability that produces a certain pathos, a pleasure in reading Sappho's fragments. The unattainable is figured by "sweet apple turning red …on the top of the topmost branch" of Fragment 105a, and the fragile hyacinth flower trampled underfoot of Fragment 105c becomes the figure of the beautiful thing lost. (40) It is almost as if Sappho could have anticipated the neglect and destruction of her poems, and left us with the aesthetic sensibility for reading her in her absences.

When not being actively ignored or literally destroyed, Sappho's poems arouse great controversy because they often speak of intimacy and love between women. As du Bois notes, interpretations of Sappho's fragments range from out of hand dismissals of Sapphic desire (Sappho merely ventriloquizes male desire when she speaks longingly of young girls, for example), to the worship of Sappho as the mother of lesbianism. Throughout the essays, Du Bois supports her initial thesis that Sappho's desire "is polymorphous, constructed with a view toward domination rather than exclusively towards women."(15) Du Bois draws upon David Halperin's thesis that sexuality in the Hellenic world was constructed along the lines of passive and dominant roles, and not of sex and gender, to argue that Sappho's sexuality should be understood in the context of her belonging to a dominant class, more so than along the contemporary lines of sex and gender.(13, 155) This argument assumes that male and female (homosexual) desires were similarly constructed, and that the Sapphic tradition is akin to the tradition of pederasty in philosophy. If we are willing to accept this, the figure of Sappho presents a challenge both to the reductive representation of women as passive objects of a dominant male desire (since Sappho here plays the dominant role), and to any essentialized history of lesbians as women-identified women. If Sappho wrote as a woman desiring other women, she was also driven by a desire to assume the dominant role.

Taken together, "Sappho in the History of Sexuality," and "Michael Foucault, Sappho, and the Postmodern Subject" represent both a critique of Foucault, and an appreciation of his acute sense of historical difference. The first essay tittle ("Sappho in the History of Sexuality") is an oxymoron, since Sappho is not figured in either modern or postmodern histories. Du Bois aims this question at the historians of sexuality: "How can Sappho not figure in the history of sexuality?"(130) Sappho challenges the reduced view of Greek homosexuality (in particular, of Foucault's history) which fails to account for desiring women. Du Bois intends to reinsert herself here, and play a little havoc with Foucault: "I want to use the figure of Sappho to disrupt Foucault's narrative" which "perpetuates the worst features of the most traditional views of classical culture, that it is an austere, philosophical, Apollonian, Platonic, pederastic symposium."(128) At the same time, however, du Bois admits to owing a great debt to Foucault's historization of gender categories, which she argues is a good corrective for feminist analyses that have often operated under the assumption of a universal, timeless category of women. In "Sappho's Body-in-Pieces," du Bois provocatively argues for a return to the discredited idea of feminist utopias, but to a historicized utopia: "It seems important to reinsert the possibility of utopian thinking into feminist work, and to argue that historicism…can expand the vocabulary of possibilities for all work on gender."(56) The critique of feminist theory is well taken, but one still wishes that the idea of feminist utopias had been further elaborated.

Philosophers will find of special interest du Bois' thesis that Sappho first opens up a space for subjectivity by inhabiting the "I" of desire and thus should stand next to Plato, and between Homer and Aristotle, in the history of Western thought. "Helen" offers a reading of Sappho's Fragment 16 that is sympathetic, even celebratory, of the beautiful Helen, who is also a subject desiring beauty. In this poem, Sappho treats the philosophical question, "What is beauty?," concluding that: "whatever someone loves, is" the most beautiful thing.(105) This move toward subjective truth is still embedded in a world in which particularity has not yet given way to transcendence; this "beautiful thing" is not yet the Form of Beauty of Plato's Symposium.

"Sappho in the Text of Plato" considers whether it might be possible to read Sappho's influence in the texts of Plato. Sappho is literally mentioned once in the texts of Plato, but the reference made is false-in the Phaedrus, the very text where Socrates urges the control and domination of the same desire that Sappho's poetry celebrates. Sappho is nonetheless present, though unnamed, in another part of the Phaedrus, where he mimics her own description of desire - the trembling, shuddering and fever of Sappho's description of love in Fragment 31. It is du Bois' conclusion that "Plato echoes and appropriates the female position, and then uses the occasion to deny the body and to sublimate erotic desire into philosophy"; and "In Plato's hands the Sapphic model is appropriated and then disembodied, amputated." (87)

Du Bois reading of the infamous "Seizure" poem in "Sappho's Body-In-Pieces," tells of a body rendered inchoate, fragmented, dispersed, though "Eros the limb-loosener," the war monger.(66) After reviewing various translations and interpretations of the poem, du Bois argues that we find neither subjective transcendence nor universal objectivity in Sappho's poems, but the opening of a pre-philosophical subject, "…the beginning of the historical evolution of selfhood, of individuality, the aristocratic origins of what will become the male citizens of the ancient polis, the city-state…"(p.73) As such, Sappho remains an unacknowledged source for the Western literary tradition. In "Asianism and the Theft of Enjoyment," du Bois draws upon Slavoj Zizek theory that traces the roots of xenophobia to resentment over and fear of another's enjoyment. She argues that the neglect and destruction of Sappho's poems is evidence of fear not only of the erotic pleasures represented in Sappho's poems, but also of their Asiatic themes and styles-effeminate, luxurious and non-classical. "If Asianism is effeminacy, floridity, luxuriousness, then we must see Sappho as well, at the very beginnings of Western Poetry, as an Easterner. …[Sappho] contaminates the strain of Greek poetry at its source, with luxury, with 'Asianist' longings."(193) Behind the virile, masterful subject of Philosophy stands the figure of the Lesbian Poet, Sappho.

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APA Newsletters

Spring 2001 Volume 00, Number 2

Spring 2001
Volume 00, Number 2