Melissa Mueller’s Sappho and Homewr: A Reparative Reading lies at the crossroads of three fields: philological analyses of Sappho’s lyrics and their connection to Homeric epic, post-critique methods that attempt to go beyond the traditional literary criticism, and the study of affect, new materialism, and queer theory. Amid the extensive scholarship on Sappho and Homer, this book distinguishes itself through its intricate weaving of classical texts and modern theories, smooth and engaging style, and groundbreaking perspective.
This book considers Sappho’s poetry a poikilia, a multi-layered reweaving of Homeric language and themes. Mueller’s book is similarly a poikilia of many layers, with Part I (chap. 1-2) revealing the two significant strands of methodologies and Part II (chaps. 3-8) weaving those threads tightly between the texts of Sappho and Homer.
After a brief introduction to the origin of reparative reading and its relation to the modern theorist Eve Sedgwick, Sappho, and Mueller herself, Chapter 1 suggests we approach the Sappho-Homer relationship through an “avuncular intertextuality.” In other words, we should consider Homer a sort of “uncle” to Sappho, rather than her poetic “father,” whom she strives to challenge and surpass according to Harold Bloom’s famous “anxiety of influence” model. Mueller indicates that this avuncular model not only shares with Sedgwick’s reparative reading the notion of not privileging “conflict, competition, and hierarchy” (22), but also possibly reflects how ancient listeners of Lesbos approached Sappho’s poetry. Mueller contends that our usual practice of intertextuality originates from our preconception of poets as scholars and readers as detectives. She advocates, however, for a return to the oral-poetic performance cultures of archaic Greece in engaging with Homer and Sappho side by side.
Chapter 2 serves both as an introduction/review of Sedgwick’s literary theories (and how they relate to avuncular, reparative intertextuality) and a layout of the various theoretical foundations for the detailed analyses discussed in Part II. By introducing the bodily, sensory, affective, and emotional intimacy with the texts as in this reparative reading Sedgwick advocates, Mueller declares the persistent theme of this book: the queerness of Sappho’s reparative reading of Homer. While queer is a “famously impossible term to define” as Mueller suggests, we can roughly understand it in gender and sexuality as “non-heteronormative,” all forms of deviance from the once “compulsory heterosexuality” (2). In this book, she shifts our attention from the traditional focus on power and mastery in agonistic intertextuality to the failures, non-normative desires, materialities, and the queer future–the four different theoretical branches of Sedgwick’s theories that underpin Sappho’s reparative reading of Homer, as illustrated in Part II.
Chapter 3 lays out a sequence of connected objects in Sappho and Homer and presents an extended metaphor of plaiting as a means of viewing the Sappho-Homer relationship. Inspired by Sedgwick’s theory on the mediated agency of weaving, Mueller claims that Sappho similarly replaits Homeric materials through objects in her poems: the Homeric loom as a symbol of female domesticity becomes the lyre in the lyric space; the epic horses in Homeric wars parallel the lyric sparrows in Sapphic marriages; the headbands and dresses carry a similar emotional charge in Sappho’s poetry as the heroic armor does in Homeric epic, eliciting terror and excitement among their beholders. By comparing Sappho’s rearrangements of female “armor” in marriage to Alcaeus’ reworking of Homeric glimmers in 140V, Mueller argues that unlike Alcaeus’ effort to reenact the heroic past, Sappho’s reparative reweaving of the Homeric material exemplifies her avuncular poetics of regenerating and queering the Homeric epic.
By delving into Sedgwick’s theory of queer failure of shame, Mueller reveals in Chapter 4 how Sappho reframes the shame of Aphrodite and Helen in the Iliad, suggesting a reparative healing potential in her lyric responses to Homer. Juxtaposing Dione’s consolation in Iliad 5 with Aphrodite’s dialogue with the speaker in Sappho fr. 1, Mueller argues that Sappho recasts Aphrodite’s vulnerability, shame, and humiliation in the Iliad into a new genre that celebrates her “weakness,” amplifying and reshaping the Homeric failure into a new space of “female artisanship and poetic creativity” (106). Mueller engages with Winkler’s argument on Sappho’s double consciousness (a female viewpoint grasping a male epic tradition) and argues that instead of the “binary” and “hierarchical” nature of double consciousness, Sappho defamiliarizes the masculine heroic ethos for her audience while cultivating a sensitivity toward negative feelings, minor gestures, and silent communications, recreating a different contour of the Homeric epic.
Chapter 5 examines another aspect of mortal failure: the experience of aging and death in Sappho, Sedgwick, and Homer. Mueller connects Tithonos to Sedgwick’s theory of the “bardo” (i.e., a liminal stage through which those with terminal illness must pass until death). Applying Sedgwick’s theory of bardo, Mueller argues that the Tithonus poem expresses “the moment of the singer’s realization of what formerly she only knew death to be (115).” The metamorphosis of Tithonos into cicada shares with the bardo stage a period of being in-between life and death. Moreover, Mueller proposes that Dawn’s failed request for Tithonus’ agelessness is a peri-performative, as theorized by Sedgwick—a negated, failed version of proper performatives. Finally, Mueller connects Tithonos’ bardo voice with Achilles’ grief after Patroklos’ death, suggesting that these laments represent the depressive position of the singers. Unlike the warrior’s war cry of fury and hatred, both singers have accepted the “failures” and transformed into an “entirely different sort of being” (130).
Mueller connects Sappho fr. 44 with Iliad 22 in Chapter 6, arguing that the Homeric intertext casts a tragic hue on the happiness of the wedding. Focusing on the affect and atmosphere of fr. 44, Mueller suggests that the kleos aphthiton borrowed from Homer by Sappho implies a tragic mood, inviting the listener to recall the pessimistic future of Hector’s death, Andromache’s slavery, and the killing of Astyanax. Through the description of the impending arrival of the bride, especially the glittering wedding gifts associated with Andromache’s lament after Hector’s death in Iliad 22, Sappho creates an in-between space of presence for a doomed future in this otherwise celebratory scene. Mueller argues that by juxtaposing Sappho fr. 44 and Iliad 22, we observe an example of Edelman (2004)’s “queer future,” in which Hector chooses the childless kleos aphthiton over the heterosexual futurism predicated on marriage.
Chapter 7 explores Sappho’s most agonistic poem, fr. 16, through a reparative lens by focusing on Helen’s desire, a middle range of agency that between active and passive. Mueller argues that in fr. 16, Sappho attempts to reconcile the two mutually exclusive Homeric fields–the battle and the bedroom–by asserting that both are led by desire. Delving into the character of Helen in the Odyssey, Mueller discovers that Sappho renders Helen’s forgetting a performative queer act that breaks with her past and traditions. This differs from the strategy of Alcaeus, who considers Helen’s desire as transgressive, blameworthy, and devastating, reinforcing the heteronormative values in Homeric epic. By connecting Homeric Paris with the Sapphic Anactoria in terms of their radiance and their roles as objects of female desire, Mueller argues that Sappho’s reparative reading of Homer transcends the binary in epic, allowing sexual desire to bypass the boundary of heteronormativity.
Mueller transitions from Helen’s queer art of forgetting to Penelope’s act of remembering in Chapter 8, extending the theme of female and avuncular remembering in Sappho as a lyric kleos for the nonprocreative, sisterly attachment among women. Through a close reading of fr. 96, Mueller argues that by placing non-human objects alongside human actors, Sappho configures a non-domestic, female-gendered world that hinges on the feelings and sensations of female memory.
Rather than summarizing the previous chapters, Mueller’s epilogue reframes the Sappho-Homer relationship through a new metaphor–one of night and day. Sappho’s lyric world, symbolized by the moon, is a realm where vitality and nuance are cloaked in darkness and not visible to the eyes of men, whereas the epic heroes’ narratives in the Iliad occur mostly during the day.
This book makes three significant contributions. First, it proposes a non-linear, “avuncular” intertextuality between Sappho and Homer which differs from our traditional view of intertextuality as agonistic, hierarchical, and linear. It considers Sappho’s attitude toward Homer as reparative rather than competitive. Sappho takes up Homeric materials and “reweaves” them in her own style. This non-hierarchical view of literary kinship opens new possibilities for interpretating both Sapphic and Homeric texts.
The second breakthrough of this book is Mueller’s exemplary application of “post critique” to classical materials. When Sedgwick (1997) and Felski (2015) criticized the mainstream “paranoid” mode of literary criticism and advocated for a reparative, non-critical reading of literary works, their work posed a challenge to the entire practice of literary criticism–how can we generate meaningful scholarship without relying on analytical suspicion? Mueller’s book demonstrates how much new meaning and discovery can be found by placing Sappho and Homer side by side. By treating Sappho as a reparative reader of Homer, we can appreciate both poets’ nuanced connections and uncover new (queer) meanings through their interconnectedness.
Besides proposing a new model of intertextuality and setting up an example of post-critique criticism, this book also provides an illustrated reading of Sappho’s poetry through the lens of affect studies, new materialism, and queer theory (i.e., the branches of the theory of Eve Sedgwick and their extensions into other theorists’ work). Like Greek drama and epic, Sappho’s poetry has already been interpreted using the theoretical frameworks of new materialism and queer theory.[1] Building on these interpretations, this book provides a systematic review of Sappho’s poetry and its Homeric relation through various lenses of queer theory. The complexity of angles allows this book to appeal to scholars in many disciplines, especially those focusing on intertextuality, critical theory, and interpreting Archaic lyric poetry. Due to its clarity and the craft of weaving multiple threads together, it also makes an excellent introduction to Eve Sedgwick’s theory or queer theory as a whole.
This book also provokes some questions. First, is there a real difference between the “avuncular” and “reparative” modes of reading? Mueller combines Goodkin (1991)’s term “avuncular” with Sedgwick’s term “reparative,” both emphasizing the non-hierarchical nature of the relationship. In the opinion of this reviewer, the term “avuncular” highlights the direction of the relationship, the non-linear, the branching out, the queering gesture of Sappho toward Homer. In contrast, the term “reparative” foregrounds the quality of the Sappho-Homer relationship as affective, enjoyable, a form of reweaving and recreation. Similar to Sappho, Mueller’s redirection from the “mainstream” agonistic view of intertextuality to her arguments on Sappho’s various queering gestures of Homer is “avuncular,” while her methodologies on the materiality and affect are “reparative.” The “avuncular” content and the “reparative” mode of Mueller’s research are innovative and refreshing, exemplifying new possible directions for further research, and this book will perhaps spark the further refinement of different intertextual relationships.
The book also invites us to consider whether Sappho is unique in being a “reparative reader” of Homer or if there are any other poets who also read Homer in this way. In Chapter 3 and Chapter 7, Mueller compares Sappho’s reframing of Homer to that of Alcaeus, revealing different modes of Homeric reading. Mueller argues that Alcaeus reenacts and reinforces the epic world, whereas Sappho reframes and recreates a fertile and erotic world using Homeric materials. But what about other authors, such as the Hellenistic and Roman poets? Do their modes of intertextuality follow the Oedipal (Bloomian) model, or are they more reparative (avuncular)? Consider the famous Ovidian remaking of the Virgilian material illustrated in chapter 4 of Stephen Hinds’ work. According to Hinds, Ovid avoids the direct rivalry with Virgil by reversing Virgil’s foreground and background, making Virgil a fragmented precursor of Metamorphoses (106). Is Ovid a reparative reader of Virgil, given the Ovidian play and interplay? If so, how does the Ovidian manner of reparative reading differ from that of Sappho? The answers to these questions, though beyond the scope of this book, can be inspired by this important piece of work for further exploration.
Work cited
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. The University of Chicago Press.
Goodkin, Richard E. 1991. Around Proust. Princeton University Press.
Haselswerdt, Ella. 2023. “Sappho’s Body, Queer Abstraction, and Lesbian Futurity.” In The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory, edited by Ella Haselswerdt, Sara H. Lindheim, and Kirk Ormand, 437–457. London: Routledge.
Hinds, Stephen. 1998. Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge University Press.
Kurke, Leslie. 2021. “Musical Animals, Choral Assemblages, and Choral Temporality in Sappho’s ‘Tithonus Poem.’” American Journal of Philology 142.1: 1–39.
Lesser, Rachel H. 2021. “Sappho’s Mythic Models for Female Homoeroticism.” Arethusa 54.2: 121–161.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 1997. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1–37. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Notes
[1] For scholarship applying critical theory to Sappho’s poems, see Kurke (2021), Lesser (2021), Haselswerdt (2023).