Sappho Is Burning

Rating:
Summary: A Powerful, Disruptive Challenge to Classicism
Review: Sappho of Lesbos, appropriated in modern times as a classical literary progenitor of sexual transgression, lived and wrote in the 7th century B.C.E. Apart from that fact, however, little is known of her life or the circumstances in which she wrote and performed her poetry. Indeed, the poetry itself exists only in fragments. In the words of Page duBois, the author of this thought-provoking collection of essays, "[s]he is not a person, not even a character in a drama or a fiction, but a set of texts gathered in her name."

"Sappho is Burning" presents a series of close, subtle readings of Sappho's poetry, readings which present a powerful, disruptive challenge to the traditional Classicist's view of Greek antiquity. Writing in the period between Homer and the so-called "Golden Age of Greece", Sappho's "lyrical, sensual, emotionally laden textuality" undermines the austerity of Plato and other writers of the ancient Greek canon, disrupting prevailing views of cultural wholeness and opening a space for difference at the origins of Western civilization.

While "Sappho is Burning" is undermined by the author's own propensity for self-characterization ("I am a psychoanalytic female subject, an academic, a Marxist historicist feminist classicist, split, gender-troubled") and occasionally lapses into the thickets of Lacanian jargon, these shortcomings are overcome by the brilliant insights of four of the essays: "Sappho's Body-in-Pieces", "Sappho in the Text of Plato", "Helen", and "Sappho in the History of Sexuality". In each of these essays, duBois, through close readings of the texts of Sappho and others, persuasively establishes a number of counter-readings to Classicist orthodoxy and, perhaps more significantly, inscribes Sappho in the history of ancient Greece, the history of Western sexuality, and the psychoanalytic history of the development of subjective identity. The ultimate effect is to cause the careful reader to re-examine received notions of the origins of Western thought and to recognize that "[t]o begin the history of the West with classical Greece and with the philosophers is a polemical choice."