[In the following excerpt from her monograph containing feminist, materialist, and historicist approaches to Sappho, Dubois uses the example of Sappho's fragmentary poem no. “31” to suggest the central importance of fragmentation and dismemberment to our modern, theoretical understanding and reconstruction of the antique past.]

One of Walter Benjamin's theses on the philosophy of history expresses scorn for a certain view of historicism. He wrote: “Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism's bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.”¹ Benjamin here argues, in scandalously sexist terms, against a kind of historicism called by Fredric Jameson “existential historicism,” that aesthetic contemplation of an immutable past called “once upon a time,” “the experience … by which historicity as such is manifested, by means of the contact between the historian's mind in the present and a given synchronic cultural complex from the past.”² I argue here for a historical materialist historicism, one that is not content merely to contemplate the past from the point of view of an autonomous subject in the present, who comes into contact with the collective past, but that rather engages with the past in order to generate some vision of a utopian future. And if Benjamin, in his vision of the aestheticizing, contemplative version of historicism, uses the image of the whore in historicism's bordello, feminism needs not only to reject such degrading imagery but also to consider a dialectical materialist theory of history, to use Marxism, to see difference, to put into question contemporary assumptions about such concepts as gender, sex, sexual difference and to struggle for change.

We may need a counter to what I see as feminism's continuing and sometimes exclusive emphasis on the present, a circumstance in which even an “existential” historicism might have much to offer. If we focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see only contemporary women writers, reflect only on what is to be done in the next few months, the next few years, we limit ourselves radically in speculation, in strategies and tactics, in the invention of new realities. It seems important to reinsert the possibility of utopian thinking into feminist work, and to argue that historicism, a certain variety of historicism, can expand the vocabulary of possibilities for all work on gender. This [essay] is not only an argument for feminists to adopt a theory of history but also perhaps a regression to a pre-postmodernist vision of history and progress. I realize that such a line is out of fashion, that postmodernity has erased history, rendering all of our experience flat and one-dimensional, that the concepts of past and future, of linear time, evoke unfortunate associations with master narratives, with the humanist trajectory of patriarchy. But to refuse any model of historical difference and change limits us inevitably to a purely aleatory experience of time, without the possibility of political and intellectual change and practice, and will restrict us to a passive observation of the machine of the world as it displays itself and us. I argue for a Marxist-feminist historicism, one that includes not only a narrative about the past but a vision of equality and emancipation in the future not only for women but for everyone.

Historicism will allow us to claim other histories for our political and intellectual work, allow us to see other peoples, other ideas of gendering, power, and sexual difference that help us see beyond the horizons of our own culture's essentializing notions of gender and difference. The ancient Greeks are, for me, a particularly suggestive example for historicist work, in part because we often name them as our origin, in part because they are in fact radically different from us. And fragmentation can stand as a figure for a difference in approach from the traditional classicist drive for wholeness and integrity, origins and continuity rather than recognition of difference.

Before reading Sappho's poem “31,” let me recall some ways in which fragments figure in ancient culture, and undo from the first any possible confidence concerning the integrity and stability of this distant place and time. Ancient Dionysiac ritual included reference to a sparagmos, the ritual dismemberment and devouring of animals in Bacchic celebration. Sophocles' heroine Antigone is haunted by the figure of her brother's broken and unburied body. The Athenians buried the broken bodies of the korai, the cult statues of Athena, after the Persian invasion at the beginning of the fifth century; they used broken pieces of statuary and masonry to refashion the wall that protected the city. The various Greek tribes saw themselves and their settlements as fragmentary, disseminated bits, broken off into individual cities from original unitary founding ancestors' families, saw their colonies as similarly dispersed fragments of an original whole.

What is the political meaning for Athenians both of tribal dispersion after the death of their founder Ion, and of the dissemination of citizens in colonization? What are the discourses in historical texts on dialects, what are the political attempts to establish leagues, to reconstitute wholeness? The Athenians, in their imaginary integrity and homogeneity, descended from a single ancestor, or sprouted from the earth, lived surrounded by refugees, slaves and foreigners, the metics, broken away from their places of origin. The Athenians in particular seem to have seen their existence as a community as haunted by a dialectic between integrity and dissemination. How did they think about democracy—the dispersed, heterogeneous votes, scattered bits of broken shells, ostraka, pebbles broken from rocks, shards once part of whole bodies of vases—transformed through the vote into a single unified voice of the majority, of the polis as a new whole?

And what is writing itself, the inscription on the ostraka that led to ostracism? Writing is the scattered letters, lots, seeds, like the dragon's teeth of Thebes, the gift of Kadmos, like the fragmented bodies of Actaeon and Pentheus, sons of his house, like the stones of the wall of Thebes, moved by the singing of Amphion and Zethus, like the severed, singing head of Orpheus, dismembered by maenads. Can we consider the imaginary opposition between Thebes and Athens in terms of this slippage, this oscillation between fragmentation and integrity, Thebes as the site of dispersion and dismemberment, Athens the city of remembering, recollection, democracy which is the unification of the once dispersed and scattered?³

The period of the earliest democracy and of the Persian Wars, the latter part of the sixth century b.c.e. and the early part of the fifth, exhibit the Greek's own fascination with fragments. An ostrakon is an oyster shell. The term came to be applied to broken bits of pottery. The ceramic vases of the Greeks, when broken, provided myriad shards. Vases came to bear the names of potter and painter, of donor, of the recipient of the gift, epigraphs naming the figures in paintings; they bore writing on them, random letters at first, when the painter wanted to demonstrate his ability to write, then parts of words, names, whole words, whole names, even sentences. Was it these inscribed words, painted and fired into the surfaces of the rounded vases and then split off from their former sites, that led the Athenians to see these broken pieces of vases as proper surfaces for the names of those who were becoming too prominent, who threatened to unbalance the democracy and who thus had to be exiled? The word ostrakon has an interesting history, moving as it does from the split leaves of the oyster, the two sides of the bivalve, to an extended meaning, the broken-up bits of the vases, which might have vaguely recalled oyster shells. The mound of Testaccio in Rome, a hill of waste, of shell and broken pieces of pottery, still looms as a considerable elevation in the modern city. Archaeologists excavating in the modern city of Athens discovered a cache of 190 ostraka, all bearing the name of Themistokles written in just a few hands. They conjecture that Themistokles' political opponents were plotting to have him ostracized, and planned to distribute these potsherds either to the illiterate or to supporters who would be organized to vote against their enemy.

In a significant parallel to the Athenian practice of using pottery fragments for the most important type of voting, the casting out of a prominent man from among the citizens, the citizens of Syracuse in Sicily, a Corinthian foundation, engaged in a political ritual called petalismos, after the petala, or olive leaves, used in voting. Homer, in a famous passage, likens the generations of human beings to leaves on a tree:

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity
The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber
burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.
So one generation of men will grow while another dies.(4)

Olive leaves were a convenient and available source of writing material in the Mediterranean, but it is nonetheless significant that this act of scapegoating and expelling a member of the ancient community of Syracuse would use the medium of leaves, the once living and then fallen parts of the olive tree.⁵ These practices of expulsion take up fragmentary elements of ordinary life, use them to mark someone and to expel him, in order to reconstitute the integrity of the city. The fragments are the instruments of the construction of a new whole, one renewed and strengthened by the breaking off of one of its parts, one of the citizen members of the polity.

Voting in the assembly of Athens took place by a show of hands and does not exhibit the characteristics of the casting of names into a pool for ostracism. However, voting by juries in legal trials was done by secret ballot, and thus has affinities with ostracism; it is remarkable that these two kinds of activity fall into the same field because of the Greeks' physical practices of voting with objects. Questions concerning individuals (ep'andri) were decided with secret ballot (psēphisma, from psēphos, voting-stone, voting-pebble), even in the assembly, and the decisions of juries on individuals similarly used pebbles dropped into an urn, a black stone for conviction or a white one for acquittal. These deliberations, pointed at an individual member of the community, required a secret ballot, one conducted by means of these fragments, ostraka, potsherds, and pebbles, when what was at stake was the punishment or removal of one element of the polity. It is as if all these practices were understood as efforts at cleansing and repair, the reestablishing of balance after a moment of fragmentation and harm brought on the group by the efforts of a single person on his own behalf. The selfish acts of conspirators, criminals, and potential tyrants split the community; the fragments used to name such actors, or to condemn them, served to renegotiate the bonds of community and to create a new whole, one no longer split and fragmented by the actions of the culprit. So both the ostracism and the jury system of Athens might be said to exhibit similarities to the process of historiography, the recognition of fragmentation, the use of fragments to negotiate some change, and the provisional, temporary, establishing of coherence.

The metaphorics of the discourses and practices of the Athenians, in some sense our ancestors, in some sense descendants of Greeks of the archaic age, like Sappho, themselves exhibit a sense of fragmentation, dismemberment. The Greek words that derive from speirō, “sow,” interestingly combine the metaphorics of dissemination with those of fragmentation and dismemberment. It is as if the ear of grain, the source of seeds, is seen as a whole from which parts are stripped, in a move that transfers that act of separation from the sparagmos, which is in fact derived from spaō, “draw, tear, rend,” rather than from the verb for sowing. In a typically unscientific but interesting ancient etymology, there is a confusion between these two verbs and their derivatives which makes both of them partake of the connotations of the other, sowing becoming rending, rending becoming sowing, the Sown Men, the Spartoi of Thebes, the ancestors of the dismembered members of the house of Thebes, Dionysos, Aktaion, and Pentheus.⁶ All these etymological nets and metaphors, although applied to the city of Thebes, are known from Athenian tragedy, from Athenian accounts of the history of that state.

The semantic complex associated with sowing and rending connects the practices of agriculture, which functioned to unite the community, with myths and rituals of dismemberment. In the Bacchae, for example, a messenger describes the ripping apart, the sparagmos of the ruler of Thebes, Pentheus:

Ignoring his cries of pity,
she seized his left arm at the wrist; then, planting
her foot upon his chest, she pulled, wrenching away [apesparaxen]
the arm at the shoulder. …
Ino, meanwhile, on the other wide, was scratching off
his flesh. Then Autonoe and the whole horde
of Bacchae swarmed upon him. Shouts everywhere,
he screaming with what little breath was left,
they shrieking in triumph. One tore off an arm,
another a foot still warm in its shoe. His ribs
were clawed clean of flesh [sparagmois] and every hand
was smeared with blood as they played ball [diesphairizde] with scraps of Pentheus' body.
                                                                                The pitiful remains lie scattered,
one piece among the sharp rocks, others
lying lost among the leaves in the depths
of the forest. His mother, picking up his head,
impaled it on her wand. She seems to think it is
some mountain lion's head which she carries in triumph.(7)

The passage has some of the baroque strangeness of the scene of Creousa's melting flesh in the Medea; Euripides links by a half-pun the dismemberment and playing ball. The sundered shoulder recalls the body of Pelops, partially consumed at the feast of Atreus and Thyestes, although his shoulder was replaced by one of ivory, and he lived on. While this Bacchic scene is hardly agricultural, it does associate the choruses, the dancing groups of bacchants, with the chorus of the theater, performing before that assembly of the city of Athens that unifies them in the act of watching and seeing. Although this tragedy was supposedly written in Macedonia during Euripides' exile there, it was performed in Athens.

Other relevant scenes of tearing apart, ripping apart, include the image of the city at the time of the Peloponnesian War, when parties struggled against one another and when people turned against each other in fear of Sparta. The ancient historian Thucydides writes about the rebuilding of the walls of the city of Athens after the Persians sacked and burned the city's akropolis. They built broken pieces of the old wall into the new, constructing a fabric consisting partly of stones, the “bones of the mother,” and partly of fragments of earlier man-made structures. Although these elements of the visual culture of Athens may seem distant, these classical Athenian texts to have little to do with the archaic Lesbian Sappho, they demonstrate a cultural preoccupation with the fragmentary that goes beyond the fact that the Greeks of the archaic and classical ages were widely dispersed across a great geographical territory. They saw themselves as scattered parts of a former whole, and the tribes, then dispersions of peoples, then colonization as dialectically related phenomena.

This essay considers the figure of fragmentation of the body in relation to the world of the ancient Greeks and to our own naturalized notions about the body. I am concerned with postmodernity's focus on contemporary culture and with the concomitant loss of a perspective on past and future that might enable other visions of bodies, sexualities, genders. Our lack of relationship to the past, our refusal of its fragmentedness, may depend on a psychological resistance to the fragmented body, a resistance that Jacques Lacan's work can perhaps help us to understand. Our fear of coming to terms with the fragmented historical past leads us to re-member its dismemberment, often to falsify that past. Such misrecognitions have implications not only for how we read the past and its fragments but also for how we read the world and women's place in it. Sappho's poems, their form and the ways in which we receive them, can exemplify an alternative aesthetic. Seeing the possibilities of this alternative—recognizing and accepting our own fragmentation and the inevitably fragmented past—has implications for how we treat bodies of poetry, bodies in poetry, and bodies in the world.

In a recent book called Rethinking Art History, Donald Preziosi characterizes his discipline in terms that cast light on classics as a field. He argues that “the discipline … serves to project or to validate a certain kind of viewing Subject: ideally, passive consumers, and, in more contemporary contexts, educated and discerning cryptographers—but receivers of messages all the same.” He points out further that the discipline actually “shares with other humanistic disciplines … a highly complex and self-perpetuating analytic theater of power and knowledge, a discourse always written in the third person singular.”⁸ I am especially concerned here with the ways in which the field of classics projects and validates a similar Subject, “the classicist,” who is at once consumer, cryptographer, and receiver of messages, but who has rarely acknowledged rhetorically his own power and presence in the act of interpretation of the fragments of antiquity, assuming rather a transparency, an unmediated access to the remnants of the past.

My question here is: How do classicists come to terms with ancient culture? What sort of subject does ancient culture produce, in the person of the classicist? And how can contemporary theory, especially psychoanalysis, help us think the relationship we have to antiquity?

Classicists receive antiquity in pieces, as fragments. There are various attempts to come to terms with the material of the past, both to break it up further, into more manageable entities, and to recover an imagined lost unity. Paradoxically, both those attempts to reunite lost parts and to break down the past can deter readers from the act of interpretation, from considering what the past means for us, what it makes of us. One way of responding to this recognition is to pursue a dream of wholeness, transparency, perfect access to what we desire to know through such scholarly practices as “conjectures,” imagining the word that might have once been where there is now a gap. Another is to try to manage the instability of our relationship to the past by reducing it to atoms accessible to philological science, through the production of a scholarly apparatus and commentary, through the perusal of lexicons, catalogs of all the words, fixing them into alphabetic lists. Another is to accept the partiality of our experience, to seek, even as we yearn for more—more fact, more words and artifacts, more lines of Sappho, more poems of Sappho—to read what we have in light of who we are now.

Speaking of those ancient writers whose work “counted for something,” in praise of Horace, Nietzsche said:

This mosaic of words, in which every unit spreads its power to the left and to the right over the whole, by its sound, by its place in the sentence, and by its meaning, this minimum in the compass and number of the signs, and the maximum of energy in the signs which is thereby achieved—all this is Roman, and, if you will believe me, noble par excellence.⁹

Nietzsche's appreciation of Horace does not concern the fragment, nor is it directed to archaic Greek poetry, nor does his praise of Horace as noble suit my purpose. But his remarks on the minimum of signs, maximum of energy might direct a reading of the fragmentary, one that attempts, not romantically, not lamenting the loss that surrounds the fragment, not to restore its lacks, but to read the minimal signs of the fragment with a maximum of energy.

What follows is a reading of a necessarily fragmented poem of Sappho, one that attempts to recognize the fragmentary state of my own encounter with the poem.

This is Sappho's poem “31:”

To me he seems like a god
as he sits facing you and
hears you near as you speak
softly and laugh
in a sweet echo that jolts
the heart in my ribs. For now
as I look at you my voice
is empty and
can say nothing as my tongue
cracks and slender fire is quick
under my skin. My eyes are dead
to light, my ears
pound, and sweat pours over me.
I convulse, greener than grass,
and feel my mind slip as I
          go close to death.(10)
φαίνεταί μοι κη̑νοs ἴσοs θέοισιν
ἔμμεν' Ὤνηρ, ὄττιs ἐνάντιόs τοι
ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάσιον αδυ φωνεί-
σαs ὐπακούει
καὶ γελαίσαs ἰμέροεν, τό μ' ήμὰν
καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόαισεν
ὠs γὰρ ἔs σ' ἰδω βρόχε', Ὤs με φώναι-
σσ' οὐδ' έν ἔτ' εἴκει,
ἀλλὰ κὰμ μὲν γλω̑σσά ‹μ'› ἔαγε, λέπτον
δ' αὔτικα χρἳ̑ πυ̑ρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν,
ὀππάτεσσι δ' οὐδ' ἐν ὄρημμ', ἐπιρρόμ-
βεισι δ' ἄκουαι,
κὰδ δέ μ' ἴδρωs κακχέεται, τρόμοs δὲ
παι̑σαν ἄγρει, χλωροτσρα δὲ ποίαs
ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ' ὀλίγω σιδεύηs
φαίνομ' ἔμ' αὔτ[ą.
ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον, ἐπεὶ †καὶ πένητα†(11)

The lines break off here, into fragments. This poem was much admired in antiquity; Plato seems to echo it in the Phaedrus when Socrates describes the symptoms of love as beauty enters through the eyes:

… first there come upon him a shuddering and a measuring of … awe. … Next, with the passing of the shudder, a strange sweating and fever seizes him.¹²

Catullus translated this poem, retaining the gender markers of the object of desire and transforming it into a heterosexual text. Longinus, in citing the poem in his work, speaks of the skill with which Sappho picks out and binds together the most striking and intense of the symptoms of love.¹³

Sappho's selection of akra, of high moments, is a fragmentation of experience, in that it must perforce break up the flow of lived time. Poetry performs such a splitting up of experience through selection. But piled on top of this sense of fragmentation is another, one peculiar to the thematics of this particular poem, in which the body is represented as falling into fragments, seen as a series of discrete, unconnected, disjunctive responses. As Longinus points out in remarks that have been found inadequate in the twentieth century but that suit my purpose admirably:

Is it not wonderful [literally, ou thaumazdeis? are you not amazed?] how she summons at the same time soul body hearing tongue sight colour, all as though they had wandered off apart from herself?¹⁴

Longinus says that the poet constructs of all these things a sunodos, a meeting, a junction. The poem is a crossroads of emotions, a reassembly of the fragmented, disparate parts of the poetic “I” that have “wandered off apart from herself.” These parts are her heart, which is given a separate existence in her breast, her voice, which escapes her, her broken tongue, her skin, over which fire runs, her blinded eyes, her humming ears. This is Eros the limb-loosener, lusimelēs, the one that unstrings the assembly of the body and brings the “I” here close to death.

Much has been written about this poem, some of it illustrating my view that classicists perpetuate a certain kind of subject, one rooted in reason, deciphering the cryptic fragments of the past, speculating endlessly about contexts about which evidence can never be regained. This is true of the argument about whether Sappho's bodily disintegration is caused by jealousy or fear, whether the occasion of the poem is a wedding feast, Sappho an observer overcome by envy of the bridegroom, or full of awestruck praise for the magnificence of the newly married. One particularly obfuscating debate concerns the issue of Sappho's homosexuality,¹⁵ as in George Devereux's essay, “The Nature of Sappho's Seizure in Fr. 31 as Evidence of Her Inversion” (1970).¹⁶ A belief in the tragedy of homosexual existence colors Thomas McEvilley's otherwise helpful reading of the poem in a way that seems postromantic to me; his essay is subtitled “The Face behind the Mask”! He argues that the beginning of the poem suggests a hymeneal occasion, but that then the poem veers into a private voice. As he describes what he terms the “dramatic situation,” “Sappho has been asked to write or sing the wedding song, and she has begun nicely; then the sight of the beauty of the bride sends her out of control, calling up her very ambivalent feelings about homosexuality and married happiness.” I actually find this rather unpersuasive and irreconcilable with the reading that argues that the fear and disintegration produced by the sight of the beloved are elements of praise, of suggesting the divine beauty of the beloved woman. It is not clear to me that Sappho's desire for girls produced ambivalence about homosexuality at all; we could read her songs of regret and longing as her ontological situation, her aesthetic response to the separation from the beloved that almost all overs experience.¹⁷

As Charles Segal points out, this poem is saturated with reference to the world of oral poetry. In a fascinating essay, he writes in detail about the poem's patterns of alliteration and assonance, features that contribute to its incantatory quality, and that link it with the oral tradition.¹⁸ Jesper Svenbro reads it as Sappho's allegory about reading:

Coming as she did from the oral tradition, she set up the disappearance of the writer in a new way—not by using the third person for herself, but by giving an allegorical description of her own death by writing.¹⁹

Leah Rissman, in Love as War, discusses fragment “31” in terms of the “application of Homeric battle simile and terminology to lovers.”²⁰ Her argument supports the view that Sappho's symptoms suggest not jealousy of the man who is her beloved's companion, but rather that the whole poem is in some sense a poem of praise, that the poet is stunned by the woman's beauty, which has the kind of effect on her that the aegis of Athena had on Penelope's suitors in the Odyssey. The woman in this scene is divine, the man heroic. Rissman says: “Both Sappho and the poet of the Iliad are concerned with contrasting the behavior of winners and losers. Sappho's catalogue of her own reactions to a woman is similar to the Homeric catalogue of the coward's response to the stress of ambush: both lists include pallor and unsteadiness of heart.”²¹ Fragment “31” is, therefore, a marriage poem in her view, a poem of praise in which the man is presented as godlike, the woman as divine; the poem elevates marriage by investing it with the heroic grandeur of the Homeric situation.²²

More persuasive than McEvilley's remarks on Sappho's homosexual alienation are his observations on the diction of fragment “31,” which support Rissman's commentary about the profoundly Homeric quality of Sapphic reference. He points out that kardia, “heart,” does not occur elsewhere in our fragments; that glōssa is unusual, since Sappho usually refers not to tongue but to voice, that “fire” does not occur elsewhere. “Only in fr. “31” are the unpleasant physical sensations of heat and cold a part of Sappho's poetic world. They are … intrusions from the uncontrollable realm of physical circumstance from which Sappho's poetry usually provides escape.” Ears do not appear elsewhere, and sweat too is Homeric, and inelegant. McEvilley points out that “in Sappho's general practice, parts of the body are mentioned only as containers of erotic beauty.” He argues that all this diction is meant to “make explicit the difference between the real and the poetic worlds.” “Now for once the grim facts of bodily death become overwhelmingly clear and close: she is mortal; her tongue of songs is broken, sweat pours down her body.”²³ The poem alludes to the Homeric descriptions of the body, using cruder, more corporeal language than that of other poems in its depiction of the poet's collapse.

In a particularly startling image, for example, Sappho says: glōssa eage, variously translated “my tongue broke,” “my tongue shivered,” “my tongue cracked.” Denys Page complains that the hiatus would be irregular, and the meaning “my tongue is broken” unsatisfactory; David Campbell nonetheless points out that Lucretius 3.155 seems to echo this passage in infringi linguam, and in the invocation to the catalog of ships in Iliad 2, the poet asks for the Muses' help with the words, “I could not tell over the multitude of them nor name them, not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths, not if I had a voice never to be broken [phonē d'arrēktos] (Iliad 2.488-90).²⁴ Sappho here alludes to this curious feature of the Homeric body, the frangible tongue, and in her poem the hiatus, the two vowels coming together, could be seen to “break” the tongue, to force an awkward, dysphonious phrase, a stumbling into the gap between the two vowels that produces a simulacrum of the poetic “I”'s distress in the reader.

Nancy Vickers has written brilliantly about the ways in which Renaissance lyric, the poems of Petrarch and his imitators perform a sort of dismemberment of the female body, how in their blazons and ekphrases, their descriptions of the physical appearance of the beloved, their lines anatomize, “cut up” the limbs, the parts of women.²⁵ Such an observation recalls the feminist critiques of contemporary advertising and pornography, which similarly dismember and commodify the parts of women's bodies. Such dismemberment produces not disorder but the control of anatomization. What is particularly fascinating about Sappho's poem is that here the woman herself sees the disorder in the body in love, sees herself objectified as a body in pieces, disjointed, a broken set of organs, limbs, bodily functions.

Whether or not the poem depicts envy or praise expressed as fear—both seem simultaneously possible—readers interested in psychoanalysis might see this poem as an ideal text to demonstrate the universal value of psychoanalytic theory. Such work would point to the universality of the human condition and to the capacity of psychoanalysis to describe and illuminate all human desire.²⁶ Sappho's poem is an important example of a poetics based on recollection, the conscious mind recalling a moment of bodily alienation of a sort that might be thought to exemplify the Lacanian dialectic of imaginary and symbolic. Can we use the work of Lacan to describe the effects on Sappho of the sight of her lover? Lacan speaks, for example, in terms that might seem familiar to the reader of Sappho, of a body in pieces:

This fragmented body … usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual. It then appears in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs presented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions—the very same that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch has fixed, for all time, in painting, in their ascent from the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith of modern man.²⁷

Although Sappho's fragment “31” seems beautifully to exemplify Lacan's description of the Boschian vision, what follows is an argument against the view that Sappho's catalog of broken body parts proves the universal descriptive value of Lacanian psychoanalysis. This poem, I argue, reveals not transcendent human nature, not universal human psychic structures, but rather historical difference, a moment in the constitution of the aristocratic self, perhaps even before the theorization of gender per se. The “I” that speaks and writes, the “I” that is produced in that moment, regards the past, a disordered, fragmented past, from a present in which the poem itself and the fiction of subjectivity represented in it are constituted against the backdrop of fragmentation. The “I” of the poem comes out of that fragmentation, is constructed from it. The sunodos, the junction, must be read historically, neither generalized to describe some absolute and general proposition of feminine composition, nor used to prove the universality of our postmodern ideas of split subjectivity.

I would argue instead for a historicist understanding of this poem, recalling Bruno Snell's pages on the Homeric body. He argues that the Homeric authors and audience understood the body as such not to exist, but rather to be an assembly of parts, of functions, of disparate organs loosely allied, commanded independently by gods and men. Snell says:

Of course the Homeric man had a body exactly like the later Greeks, but he did not know it qua body, but merely as the sum total of his limbs. This is another way of saying that the Homeric Greeks did not yet have a body in the modern sense of the word; body, sōma, is a later interpretation of what was originally comprehended as melē, or guia, limbs.”²⁸

Snell makes a connection between this conception of the human form and its representation in early Greek art:

Not until the classical art of the fifth century do we find attempts to depict the body as an organic unity whose parts are mutually correlated. In the preceding period the body is a mere construct of independent parts variously put together.²⁹

The tribal, collective, prepolitical world of the Homeric heroes represents the body, or rather what will become the body, as similar to its own social organization, a loose confederation, a tenuous grouping of parts.

Although Snell's work has been called into question by some, the arguments of such scholars as Robert Renehan, in his essay on sōma, do not seem to me to discredit Snell's point.³⁰ I appreciate the objections made to the orthodoxy following Snell, who contended that the word sōma never refers to a living body. Furthermore, there are problems with seeing lyric poetry in relation to Homeric epic in such a way that we see only a Hegelian, nineteenth-century evolution, an inevitable progression, a Lévy-Bruhlian passage from myth to reason. I share many scholars' objections to these versions of historical inevitability. But I do not have the same difficulty with the notion that there is a difference, a historical difference, between Sappho and Homer and that their views of the body may differ. Snell's argument seems to me to be a particularly valuable intervention in the question of the historicity of the body.

Set against the background of this understanding of human beings' physical existence, Sappho's disordered, fragmented body takes on a different resonance than if it were to be understood only as figuring in the Lacanian imaginary. The subject, the “I” of archaic lyric, is generated in the earliest urban, that is, literally “political” setting, internal to the voice of a dominant aristocracy. According to Snell, these poems record 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, and Michel Foucault's subject of philosophy in the Platonic tradition. Although I do not suggest that Sappho read Bruno Snell, or that she had a historical sense of distance from the Homeric past, Sappho's poem nonetheless recalls the relatively archaic view of the body represented for her in Homeric poetry. There is no historical consciousness for Sappho equal to Snell's in its formal grasp of a shift in consciousness between Homer's day and her own; rather, Sappho adopts here a traditional, conventional, epic description of the body, familiar to her and her audience from the traditional poetry, to express what appears to be a disintegration of her own body. If the relation of Sappho's description of her own physical distress to the earlier Homeric sense of the body may not be conscious for Sappho, it has definite consequences nonetheless. Sappho's view of eros lusimelēs, that love that disunites the only recently constituted body, suggests that eros returns that body to a past state, to an alliance of functions, a loose set of organic capacities; what she represents is a turning back from a tenuously held subjectivity, that new sense of the poet as an “I,” back to an archaic sense of identity.

Lacan's work on the relationship between the body in pieces and the ego, though not directly applicable to Sappho's poetic universe, might … shed light on the question of what we make of the fragments, literal fragments, of ancient poetry. Who are we, these supposed agents of integrity and coherence, who desire to mend that past? I find especially useful, when considering these texts, Lacan's way of thinking about the alternation between the fictional whole, the “I,” and the fragmentary past, as an ongoing dialectic; we are always conscious of the possibility of dismemberment, of the fragility of wholeness, of corporeal and psychic integrity, even as our identity is fashioned against the background of such dismemberment.

In approaching the Greeks in this way, fragmentation stands as a figure that both illuminates a contemporary relationship to the past and that recognizes in the Greeks themselves a certain contestation of figures of integrity and coherence. Such an approach might be seen to differ from a more traditional classicist drive for wholeness and integrity, recognition of origin and continuity, or from the need to fragment, to atomize, to render manageable and not-yet-interpretable the data we receive from antiquity.

It is crucial to understand that the pleasure Sappho's poem “31” affords us, in our positions as psychoanalytic subjects of the twentieth century, is not the same as that of the audience of Sappho's day. If Sappho's listeners heard an account of historical archaism, of dissolution back into undifferentiated collectivity, we may project a psychological state described by Lacan. And we recognize Sappho's distance from Homer, our distance from both. The richer reading of this poem would acknowledge all these dimensions, historical and contemporary, and would measure the distance between one pleasure and another. And this poem, in its evocation of distress, even of anguish, of the exaggerated pains of love, is a pleasure for us to read. The “I” as contemporary reader can appreciate Sappho's recollection of suffering because the poem has constructed coherence from disorder, reconstituted subjectivity out of a body in pieces. The pleasure of this reconstitution is what allows for readerly transference, to refer to a psychoanalytic model. If the male lover, who sits across from, enantios, vis-à-vis Sappho's object of desire, is caught in a specular, dyadic relationship to her, gazing at her, the voice of the poet has entered the domain of language, acknowledges the passage of time and the possibility of a linguistic recovery of her fragmented body. The reader's pleasure comes from an appreciation of the disintegration the poet describes, the undeniable pain of eros, of a disordering desire that shatters the tongue, that brings the “I” to a place near death, but also from the security of that “I” that speaks the poem, the voice that gazes retrospectively at the experience of fragmentation, and from it creates a crossroads, a poem, and a self. And there is further the historical dimension of our reading, a sense of distance from the fragments of Sappho's work, a sense of another distance, internal to the poem, in which the Homeric body serves as a figure for the lover. If, as Shoshana Felman argues, we are both analyst and analysand as we read, if therefore we experience both transference and countertransference, if we see ourselves as authority and as subject to the authority of the text, then such readings might take account of the contradictory drives for integrity and for atomization, for mastery of a disturbing past.³¹ The self constituted against a background of disorder can be a self of pleasure and authority that recognizes its construction of itself out of fragmentation, that acknowledges its own fictionality, its own historicity. And we as its readers can recognize our implication in its drama and our own situation in the late twentieth century, gazing at the fragments of the past, trying to work them into a story about ourselves, a story that enables action in the present, for the future. We can use the pleasures of that story, rethinking our relationship to the Greeks, to their privileged position in our history, countering the inherited vision of ancient society inhabited by disembodied, philosophical, male citizens.

I would argue for a historical materialist historicism, one that is not content merely to contemplate the past from the point of view of an autonomous subject in the present, who comes into contact with the collective past, but that rather engages with the past in order to generate some vision of historical difference. The ancient Greeks, and Sappho in particular, provide particularly suggestive material for historicist work, in part because we so often name the Greeks as our origin, in part because Sappho is in fact so radically different from us, even in such a “natural” domain as life in the body. And if Benjamin, in his vision of the aestheticizing, contemplative version of historicism, uses the image of the whore in historicism's bordello, feminism needs not only to resist such imagery but also to incorporate a materialist theory of history to see historical difference, to have a richer sense of possibility, to put into question our assumptions about the natural body.

Notes

1. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1969), 262.

2. Fredric Jameson, “Marxism and Historicism,” in Syntax of History, vol. 2 of The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986 (Minneapolis, 1988), 157.

3. On Thebes and Athens, see Froma Zeitlin, “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama,” in Nothing To Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, ed. John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, N.J., 1990), 130-67.

4. The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1951), 6.146-50.

5. On ostracism, see also Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex,” trans. Page duBois, New Literary History 9:3 (1978): 475-501. “It [ostracism] was all organised so as to make it possible for the popular feeling that the Greeks called phthonos (a mixture of envy and religious distrust of anyone who rose too high or was too successful) to manifest itself in the most spontaneous and unanimous fashion (there had to be at least 6,000 voters) regardless of any rule of law or rational justification. The only things held against the ostracised man were the very superior qualities which had raised him above the common herd, and his exaggerated good luck which might call down the wrath of the gods upon the town” (488).

6. Cf. sparganon, in plural “swaddling clothes,” “and so, in Trag., remembrances of one's childhood, tokens by which a person's extraction is discovered” (LSJ.). Presumably Oedipus' scarred ankles would be such tokens, Oedipus also of the house of Thebes.

7. Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. William Arrowsmith, The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1959), ll. 1124-42.

8. Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1989), 52.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols: or, How to Philosophise with the Hammer, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (New York, 1964), 113.

10. Willis Barnstone, trans., Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets (New York, 1988), fr. 31.

11. David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry: A Selection of Early Greek Lyric, Elegiac and Iambic Poetry (Basingstoke and London, 1967), 44.

12. Plato, Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J., 1961), 497.

13. See David A. Campbell, The Golden Lyre: The Themes of the Greek Lyric Poets (London, 1983), 13-14.

14. “Longinus,” On the Sublime, in Aristotle, The Poetics, “Longinus,” On the Sublime, Demetrius, On Style (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1932), 10.3.

15. For a valuable corrective, see André Lardinois, “Lesbian Sappho and Sappho of Lesbos,” in From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality, ed. Jan Bremmer (London and New York, 1989), 15-35.

16. George Devereux, “The Nature of Sappho's Seizure in Fr. 31 as Evidence of Her Inversion,” Classical Quarterly 20 (1970): 17ff. For a response, see Miroslav Marcovich, “Sappho Fr. 31: Anxiety Attack or Love Declaration,” in Studies in Greek Poetry, Illinois Classical Studies Suppl. 1 (Atlanta, 1991), 29-46. Other more illuminating studies are Eva Stehle Stigers, “Sappho's Private World,” in Reflections of Women in Antiquity, ed. Helene P. Foley (New York, 1981), 45-61, and John J. Winkler, “Gardens of Nymphs: Public and Private in Sappho's Lyrics,” in ibid., 63-89.

17. Thomas McEvilley, “Sappho, Fragment Thirty-One: The Face behind the Mask,” Phoenix 32 (1978): 14. “She is showing us the extreme disharmony which she must have felt inwardly on such occasions. She seems to be the first poet who has left us a record of what has since become a familiar situation: the poet as a sensitive soul suffering feelings of frustration and alienation from the problems of relating his or her work to conventional social realities. Needless to say, in this case the situation was aggravated by Sappho's homosexuality” (15). McEvilley's tragic homosexual, like the “tragic mulatto” or the tormented Romantic poet, seems a highly ideological figure.

18. Charles Segal, “Eros and Incantation: Sappho and Oral Poetry,” Arethusa 7 (1974): 139-57.

19. Jesper Svenbro, “Death by Writing: Sappho, the Poem, and the Reader,” in Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (1988; Ithaca, N.Y., 1993), 152.

20. Leah Rissman, Love as War: Homeric Allusion in the Poetry of Sappho (Konigstein, 1983), 72.

21. Ibid., 89.

22. Anne Pippin Burnett shares this view, seeing the singer of fr. 31 as fearful, approaching someone who has aroused her desire. Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 219; see 230ff. for a useful bibliography of work on fr. 31.

23. McEvilley, “Sappho, Fragment Thirty-One,” 16, 17, 18.

24. Page, Sappho and Alcaeus; Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry, 272.

25. Nancy J. Vickers, “The Body Re-Membered: Petrarchan Lyrics and the Strategies of Description,” in Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. J. D. Lyons and S. G. Nichols (Hanover, N.H., 1982), 100-109.

26. For a psychoanalytic reading of a classical corpus, see Micaela Janan, When the Lamp Is Shattered: Desire and Narrative in Catullus (Carbondale, Ill., 1994).

27. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London, 1977), 4-5.

28. Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 8.

29. Ibid., 6.

30. Robert Renehan, “The Meaning of Sōma in Homer,” California Studies in Classical Antiquity 12 (1981), 269-82.

31. “With respect to the text, the literary critic occupies thus at once the place of the psychoanalyst (in the relation of interpretation) and the place of the patient (in the relation of transference).” Shoshana Felman, “To Open the Question,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise (Baltimore and London, 1982), 7.