Erica Jong’s Sappho’s Leap:(Re-)constructing Gender and Authorship through Sappho

For contemporary female authors, Sappho is a literary forebear who is both a model for women’s writing and a reminder of the ways in which women have been excluded from the literary canon. Poet and novelist Erica Jong takes up the challenge to gender and authorship posed by Sappho in her 2003 novel, Sappho’s Leap. Jong weaves Sappho’s poetry into her fiction to both complement the Sapphic tradition and to supplant it, proving that female poetry —and authorship— is alive and well, with Sappho continually mediated by and validating each subsequent writer in the female tradition. In addition, Jong’s emphasis on the authentic expression of sexual desire as a bridge to authorship transcends gender binaries, turning Sappho’s Leap into a study of authorship that is not confined to gender. This enables Jong to shift the debate away from the sense of burden placed on female authors post- Sappho and to transform her Sappho into a positive role model for all authors, turning the focus towards a poetics of passion and away from prescriptive assumptions of the relationship between gender and authorship.

her first foray into the ancient world after a career that began with poetry and then moved into novelistic fiction with the worldwide success of her 1973 bestseller, Fear of Flying. In an interview published in the final pages of the 2004 Norton paperback edition of Sappho's Leap, Jong gives several motivations for her decision to write a novel based on the life of Sappho: a childhood fascination with ancient myth, the "surprising modernity" of Sappho's fragments, the importance of the past as a moral compass to the present. 3 At another point, however, she asserts strikingly that "Sappho's fragments have endured because they so vividly describe women's feelings […] Sappho is at once the voice of ancient Greece and a voice we recognize as ours" (SL 319,297).
This article acts as a focused case-study of Jong's relationship to Sappho The sense of Sappho as a model of transcendent womanhood is one which appears again and again in modern and contemporary receptions of Sappho. 4 "All fictions of Sappho are fictions of the feminine," Joan DeJean observes (1989,22). Ellen Greene, in the introduction to an edited volume on receptions of Sappho, Re-reading Sappho, notes that Sappho is seen by female authors as a kind of "literary foremother": "it is in Sappho's broken fragments that the modern woman poet could reinvent Sappho's verse and thus inscribe feminine desire as part of an empowering literary history of her own" (1999,4). 5 Greene's emphasis on the much-commented-upon fragmentary nature of the Sapphic tradition plays an important part on this process of re-inscription (Prins 1999: 23-4). It is precisely the fragmentary nature of Sapphic poetry that has enabled female authors to write themselves into it, inscribing themselves into a tradition that, in its very incompleteness, allows them to become a part of it: "precisely because so many of her original Greek texts were destroyed, the modern woman poet could write 'for' or 'as' Sappho and thereby invent a classical inheritance of her own" (Gubar 1984: 46-7). 6 Sappho thus becomes an empty space, a potentiality through which female authors could (and can) express and explore the relationship between womanhood, authorship and canonicity. 7 This relationship, however, has not always been an easy one. Thomas Habinek, in his foreword to Re-reading Sappho, suggests three different modes of relationship to Sappho: as either an irrecoverable past, a source of truth, or a mediated experience. 8 But these relationships, whilst valid, are ones that are envisioned very much within the constraints of male hegemonic, value-driven standards such as 'tradition, ' 'canon,' and 'truth.' The more complex relationships between female authors and Sappho operate instead, I would suggest, on a different plane. Sappho becomes either a refuge for female anxieties, a way of dealing with the "anxiety of authorship," a long-standing feature of historical female literature; 9 the butt of their frustration with tradition and authority, as Habinek correctly notes in Sylvia Plath's poem "Lesbos"; 10 or -and I want to place a particular emphasis on this, as it has not been previously noted-the symbol of an inheritance of inadequacy. The double epigraph to this article bears witness to Virginia Woolf and Erica Jong's shared sense of Sappho, less as the instantiator of an "empowering literary history," and more as a source of admonishment to female authors. 11 Both Woolf and Jong articulate their relationship to Sappho in forms of negation that admit their sense of inferiority (perceived or real) in contrast to Sappho's achievements. To paraphrase Woolf, it is precisely Sappho's success that has made it impossible for a woman to achieve greatness in the eyes of the popular press. For Jong, on the other hand, the canon of female authors did not end with Sappho but began there (she cites Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Colette, Virginia Woolf as continuators of the female tradition) -and yet still, female authors have consistently failed to be viewed as equivalent to men over their entire history. If Sappho is a safe place to deal with the "anxiety of authorship," then, she also brings it to the table and therefore makes it an issue. As Jong writes in her essay, "The Artist as Housewife" (1980), which clearly functions as Jong's response to Virginia Woolf's seminal essay on women's writing, A Room of One's Own, 12 the dominant female cultural stereotype of authorship is based on a sense of lack: "If they were good, they were good in spite of being women. If they were bad, it was because they were women" (Jong 1980, 118). This ambivalence perfectly sums up what Sappho represents for a figure such as Jong who refuses to reject her: both a symbol of women's writing, and a challenge, a provocation to prove that women can be good writers, irrespective, or even (from Jong's feminist psychoanalyst perspective) because of their gender. 13 So Sappho provides two different models of authorship for female authors who are willing to accept her as a model, and do not, as Plath does, reject her outright. She represents either the triumphal beginnings of a hidden female tradition of authorship that reaches back in time, a locus of identity and belonging for a modern female author that overcomes the anxieties of self that female artists experience; 14 or she represents the pressure exerted by a monolithic canon upon women who have not, except in a single instance, been allowed to become a part of it. She represents either a model of authorship as belonging, or authorship as loss. For those like Woolf and Jong, who are interested in problematising the notion of an easy relationship to the female tradition, there are some difficult questions to be faced: why has subsequent female literature not lived up (or been perceived to live up) to Sappho? Is it, to reduce the argument to its furthest extent as Woolf does, because women are not as good writers as men -or have they simply been unrecognised as such? Or are female and male writers alike struggling against restrictive notions of canonicity, irrespective of gender?
It is important to note at this point that I do not want to suggest that Jong (or any of the other women authors mentioned above) needed Sappho to construct her identity. Jong herself was already a famous author and poet in her own right, before she ever approached reformulations and receptions of Sappho. 15 What I want to suggest rather is that Jong chooses to use fiction about an ancient female author as a particularly fertile means to reflect on questions of the relationship between gender and authorship; and that Sappho, as the 'icon' of western female authoriality (SL 294), and with her particular qualities as both a potentiality for female self-creation and a reproach from the past, is the perfect site for women to explore female authorship. Her double qualities allow female authorship to be explored both within bounds authorised by men ("an invention of Professor Hobkin," as Woolf's parodying of male scholarship has it), as well as to deal with and explore the reasons why women's writing has been less acknowledged than men's-why Sappho's influence didn't stick.

Authorship as female creativity
In the interview included in Sappho's Leap (2004), Jong makes an interesting observation: "I don't think you can write a novel about a poet without telling at least some of the story in poetry" (SL 319). Sappho's Leap is as unusual a novel as is its heroine, interspersed throughout with epigraphs, quotations, songs and poems of Sappho, all of them 'translated' by Jong. As she observes in her Afterword, translations of Sappho have always reflected the age in which they were created and the personalities of the translators. My reading showed me that different translators tend to produce different Sapphos. After much deliberation, I decided to attempt my own versions -not literal translations but adaptations of Sappho's verses in a style appropriate to the flow of the novel. In my versions I have tried to capture the essence of Sappho's ideas, in a way that approximates (as much as possible) the original Greek. (SL 297) These "adaptations" are anchored in the ranslation history of the fragments, given that Jong herself does not know Greek (though she worked closely with a classicist, Robert Ball). 16  Raise high the roof beams! The groom comes like Ares, Towering above mortals As the poets of Lesbos Tower over all the others! Lucky bridegroom! We drink your health! (SL 29) The reason this makes such a good starting point for an analysis of Jong's relationship to Sapphic authorship becomes clear in the fourth and fifth lines, which are clearly a translation of fr. 106 LP, πέρροχος, ὠς ὄτ' ἄοιδος ὀ Λέσβιος ἀλλοδάποισιν ("superior, as the Lesbian singer to those of other lands"). The controversy over fragment 106 revolves around the question of the identity of the ἄοιδος (bard, poet, singer) and whether the word applies to a singular person or -as I have suggested elsewhere-if it could be seen as a generic masculine ("poets") (Hauser 2016: 140). Interestingly, Jong interprets ἄοιδος here unequivocally as the latter: "the poets of Lesbos" [emphasis mine] -even though the singular noun "poet" in English is non-gender marked. In the wedding hymn for Sappho, then, sung by the girls whom Sappho herself has trained, Sappho is named explicitly as a poet and incorporated in her own right into the Lesbian poetic tradition in a specific nod to the textual ambiguities of the Sapphic text.
But it not quite so simple. In spite of the Sapphic signature, the hymn is both entirely Sappho's and entirely Jong's at the same time. Entirely Sappho's, because it is made up of a jigsaw of Sapphic fragments: frr. 111, 106, 112, and 141 LP. 18 The first two lines of Jong's hymn are a reduction of the alternate call-and-response pattern of the Sapphic wedding song at fr. 111 LP: ἴψοι δὴ τὸ μέλαθρον…γάμβρος εἰσ' ἴσ' Ἄρευι...ἄνδρος μεγάλω πόλυ μέζων ("raise high the roof!…a bridegroom will be coming like Ares…much bigger than a big man!" [translation: Lobel-Page]). 19 The comparative πόλυ μέζων is then subsumed into the comparative force of πέρροχος in fr. 106, followed by a vocative (ὄλβιε γάμβρε, "happy bridegroom!") extracted from the opening line of fr. 112, another wedding hymn, and completed with a paraphrase of the final lines of a third wedding song, fr. 141. The question is -rather as in the Athenian fable of Theseus' ship, which was replaced plank by plank until none of the original wood remained-is this still Sappho? What is the difference between a "version" and a "translation" -and do either get closer to the 'meaning' (lexical or felt) of the original Sappho? 20 It is in asking questions like these that Sappho's Leap opens up into a deeper and more complex plane: it becomes what Hardwick calls Seamus Heaney's version of the Antigone, "a complex and shifting site" (Hardwick 2008: 347). The problem of translation and transmission is explored as a leitmotif throughout the text, especially given the particular instability of the Sapphic fragmentary tradition which is continually used as a site of exploration in Sappho's Leap. At page 225, for example, Jong's Sappho comments that someone "misquoted" her in his rendition of fr. 132 LP, hinting at the incompatibility of a "fixed" manuscript tradition with the fluidity of Sapphic performance. At page 221, as Sappho debates how she will resolve her love for Alcaeus and her daughter Cleis, there is a subtle but explicit play with the instability of Sapphic translation. Around halfway through the passage, Jong inserts a block quote into the text in apposition to the body of the prosenot in quotation marks, but in italics, set aside typographically from the flow of the narrative.
"I do not know what to do. / My mind's in two" (SL 221). The lines are an interpretation of fr. 51 LP, οὐκ οἶδ' ὄττι θέω· δίχα μοι τὰ νοήμματα ("I do not know which way to turn; my mind is divided" [translation mine]). At first glance the adaptation of the Sapphic fragment is neatly assimilated into Jong's narrative, the English end-rhyme between "do" and "two" simulating a near-perfect translation in both the ancient Greek sense and Anglophone conventions of rhyming poetry. But the difficulties of rendering the Greek accurately are soon explored, and the seeming perfection of the Sapphic translation exploded. Later in the passage, on the same page, Jong has Sappho exclaim to Aesop, "'Don't tempt me, Aesop. My condition is weak. My mind's divided.'" The Greek adverb δίχα, "two-ly," is here rendered with an adjective, "divided", in place of the adverbial phrase "in two." The same word is given two different meanings, the very "two-ness" intimated by Sappho's divided (δίχα) mind in fr. 51 setting the stage for the doubling of meaning and the division of language in translation, as Jong, in effect, provides two words for a word that means two. 21 At the same time, it points to the instability of the transmission of the text, which preserves two readings for this word: δύο ("two") according to one tradition, and δίχα ("in two") according to another. 22 The two translations for the same word thus hint at the dual transmission history of a word which, itself, literally means "two." Jong's awareness of Sappho's potential for manipulation and re-formation into Jong's (or any other author's) mould through the instability and suppleness of her translation thus becomes patently clear: as Jong puts it, "different translators tend to produce different Sapphos" (SL 297). Building on her thematic highlighting of the problems of translation and transmission, Jong also includes at the end of the text, but also, and more importantly, within the text itself, her own Sappho-esque poetic creations. For the nonspecialist reader who is unfamiliar with Sappho, these Jongian creations are impossible to tell apart from her translations of original Sapphic fragments: they are told in similar language, using similar vocabulary (and sometimes even adopting vocabulary from Sappho's own poems), and are displayed the same typographically upon the page. Jong's use of Sappho to reformulate her into her own words and, ultimately, into her identity as an author, becomes clear as we progress throughout the novel, where we are able to watch the increasing fluidity of the boundary between Jong's versions/translations of Sappho and Jong's own Sappho-esque creations, in which Jong's voice supplants Sappho's, until ultimately they become fused. As Jong herself writes: "I began to write a sequence of poems in Sappho's voice, in Aphrodite's, and in my own" (SL 293 Jong's version of fr. 1 LP is remarkably close to the Sapphic original. True, it is not a literal translation -the fifth stanza of Sappho fr. 1, for example, is transformed into two lines ("To make her pursue / When she longs to flee"), and details such as παῖ Δίος ("daughter of Zeus," 1.2) are omitted. But in general, the correspondence is striking: Jong's "rainbow-throned" for Sappho's ποικιλόθρον' (1.1), "in a whirling of sparrow's wings" for ὤκεες στροῦθοι…/ πύκνα δίννεντες πτέρ' (1.10-11), "as you smile / your sly, immortal smile" for μειδιαίσαισ' ἀθανάτωι προσώπωι (1.14) -all are close and accurate renditions of the Sapphic Greek.
What is particularly interesting here, however, is not the accuracy of the  She sent greetings back -together with a beautiful sea-green cloak, emblazoned with gold, for baby Cleis. Of course, it was big enough for a five-year-old child, but I draped it over the baby in her crib and said, 'Your grandmother wove this for you with her own beautiful fingers just like yours. (SL 52) Weaving in the classical world was not only a typical female task, but was also connected imagistically to the act of literary creation. Within the narrative, Jong's Sappho is portrayed as acutely aware of weaving as deeply implicated in both femininity and poetry. 32 The handing down of the cloak from mother to daughter to granddaughter can, within this framework, be seen as symbolic of the continuation of the female tradition of poetry from mother to daughter, woman to woman. What is even more interesting, however, and strengthens the suggestion of the woven cloak as symbolic of a female tradition of poetry, is that the image is itself an act of reception of an ancient female poet-Nossis' third epigram

Authorship as (sexual) authenticity
To reduce Jong's Sappho to a precursor of the female literary tradition, however, is to underplay the complexity of her portrayal, and the complexity of Sappho as a figure for reception beyond her gender. Poets in the ancient world did not exist in a void, and poetic production was a particularly male activity, typically produced by male poets in male social settings for male audiences; moreover, literary coteries were common across ancient Greece, particularly on Lesbos which had an especially active poetic tradition. 34  To understand what is going on, we need to look at a second Jongian definition of authorship: authorship as (sexual) authenticity/authority (Jong tends to blur these terms), irrespective of gender. In "The Artist as Housewife," Jong explicitly links authenticity to authorship in an important passage: "authenticity is a difficult thing to define, but roughly it has to do with our sense of the poet as a mensch, a human being, an author (with the accent on authority)" (Jong 1980: 117). For Jong, authenticity/authority is strongly linked to sexuality and sexual empowerment, irrespective of gender; but even more importantly, it is connected to one's ability to express sexuality -thus providing the link to authorship as a medium for expression. Again and again in her interviews Jong discusses the importance of expressing sexuality as an access point to honesty, self-knowledge, and authenticity: 38 I had to learn to trust myself. I had to learn to trust that part of my mind which had the potential of being original … what analysis teaches you is how to surrender yourself to your fantasies. How to dive down into those fantasies…[Mark Strand] recognized that I was dealing with sexuality in a way that was more daring for me and that I had begun to allow my imagination free rein. (Templin and Jong 2002: 5) At another point, she says, I believe we accept a level of intimacy in writing now that we never accepted before. It's still very hard to write honestly and gutsily about your life…The most important thing about a book is whether or not is has the gift of life. what it means to receive a letter from a lover: What is more personal than a letter written by a hand you love? Words, breath, kisses. Papyrus can transmit all these. Alcaeus' scrawled letters kept me alive. Kissing the papyrus was almost like kissing him! This is the mystery of words. Simple things made of reed and plant fibers, and yet they reproduce our heartbeats and our breath. Mouthfuls of air trapped in timelessness. The miracle of writing! (SL 33) The connection between writing and sexuality here is only too clear, with the sensual suggestiveness of words as "mouthfuls of air," the conflation of "words, breath, kisses," and, most strikingly, the comparison drawn between kissing papyrus and kissing Alcaeus. The And yet I think always of Sappho -violet-haired, holy, honey-smiling Sappho. I wish to say something to you, but shame prevents me. (SL 32) Once again, we see Jong making use of a jigsaw-like piecing together of the poetic tradition -only this time, it is not only Sappho or her female counterparts which she includes, but a mixture of Sapphic and Alcaic fragments, put into Alcaeus' mouth in a book told in Sappho's voice. The first phrase, "violet-haired, holy, honey-smiling Sappho," is a near-exact translation of Alcaeus fr. 384, which has been attributed to Alcaeus as a description of Sappho. The second phrase, "I wish to say something to you, but shame prevents me," Jong's Sappho at once identifies the author: "Should I tell the child it was his own grandfather, Alcaeus?" (SL 260). The poem is, in fact, a close translation of Alcaeus fr. 6. Just as Cleis, Sappho's daughter, inherited the mantle of her song, it is Alcaeus' male grandchild here who recites his poetry, suggesting a mirroring and parallel male poetic tradition, whereby the daughter inherits her mother's poetry, and the son his grandfather's. Yet this coherence and the suggestion of the exclusive separateness of the male/female literary lineages is almost instantly shattered. At the final line of the poem Hector hesitates. "'I can't remember!'", he exclaims. This can be taken as a reference to the fact that Alcaeus, too, has a troubled textual transmission which -like Sappho-allows for his interpretation as a "potentiality," as we saw above. In this particular fragment, the preserved section of the papyrus ends abruptly at line 14, ἔσλοις τόκηας γᾶς ὔπα κ[ειμένοις ("our noble fathers lying beneath the earth" [trans. David Campbell]), to be followed by barely distinguishable words, amongst which the most legible are τὰν πο[ (conjectured by Campbell as "city"), ἄπ πατέρω[ν ("from fathers"), θῦμ[ ("spirit"), μοναρχίαν δ [ ("tyranny"), and μ]ηδὲ δεκωμ[ ("let us not accept"). What Jong has done here, then, is to explicitly highlight the instability of the Alcaean transmission tradition alongside that of Sappho. Furthermore, she uses her own fictional Sappho to fill in the gaps, 'correcting' the male tradition and inscribing herself into it by connecting the disparate words of the fragment into a coherent whole, as she supplies: "They built our city and our spirits! / Let us not bow down to tyranny!" (SL 260). The supposed isolation of the male and female poetic traditions is thus broken down as Sappho's voice intrudes into the tradition of male transmission, refusing to be silenced, and is replaced by a model in which Alcaeus' and Sappho's poetry comes together, both figuratively in Jong's Sappho's supplementing of the Alcaean fragment, 43 and literally in the voice of Hector, the product of the sexual union of two poetic traditions. 44 There is one final move which Jong makes in reference to the connection of authorship to sexuality, and that is her portrayal of Sappho as bisexual. 45 Given Jong's identification of authorship and eros throughout the novel, this is a particularly loaded move and one which begs interpretation, not simply as a statement of sexual choice, but as a metaliterary investigation of the relationship between sexuality and creativity. And it is now -with the observations made above with regards to the creation of a poetic tradition, embodied in Hector and his poetry, the offspring of Sappho and Alcaeus' intercourse-that we can see precisely why Sappho's bisexuality becomes important for Jong's understanding of authorship. In her relationships with women -Praxinoa, Isis, Atthis-throughout the novel, Jong's Sappho's creativity is nourished and her poetry developed in strikingly different ways from her dealings with Aesop, Alcaeus and the pharaoh. It is in her passion for the priestess Isis that Sappho first realises that the truest gift she can give, "an offering from [her] deepest well," is a poem describing her desire, a version of fr. 47 LP (SL 62-4). As Isis tells her when she regrets not having brought a better gift, "'You brought me something more precious…your honesty'" (SL 65). It is in her despair over the loss of Praxinoa that she understands the importance of following her destiny, and in her affection for Timas and Atthis that she understands the importance of developing "[one's] own voice" (SL 236).
Ultimately, and most importantly, it is these relationships that liberate Sappho entirely from the shackles of any gendered tradition, and that teach her that authenticity to her sexual desire is the truest form of authorship. 46 It frees her in a metaliterary sense from any reliance upon the male tradition, embodied in Alcaeus, and allows her to experience eros, and thus to gain her "education as a singer" (SL 17), in each and every moment of passion.

Conclusion
For contemporary female authors, the issue at stake -particularly in relation to Sappho-is what it means to participate in a tradition of women's writing that is both acknowledged and exceptional, outside the norm of expectations of men's writing in the classical world and the subsequent, traditionally male, canon. Sappho's unusual status as both the originary icon of the female writing tradition, as well as the perceived start and end of 'good' women's writing, sets her up as both a model and as a reproach for female writers looking to define female authorship through Sappho. Jong takes up this challenge and uses Sappho's poetry, woven into Sappho's Leap, to both complement the Sapphic tradition and to supplant it, proving that female poetry -and authorship-is alive and well, with Sappho continually mediated by and validating her successors in the female tradition.
But, as we have seen, there is more to it than this. Jong's emphasis on the authentic expression of sexual desire as a bridge to authorship transcends gender binaries, and turns Sappho's Leap into a broader study of authorship that is not confined to gender. This enables Jong to shift the debate away from the sense of burden placed on modern female authors attempting to create or refute a female tradition, and to transform Sappho into a positive role model for female as well as male authors. Jong thus turns the focus towards a poetics of passion, and away from prescriptive assumptions of the relationship between gender and authorship. Male authors and male-author traditions, symbolised by Alcaeus, complicate the notion of a female tradition to suggest a broader definition of literature that is not prescribed by gender, genre or era. This is not about defining a particular type of female authorship, or even defining authorship as particularly female: it is about redefining authorship in a way that is not confined by gender, but constructed in passion.
As such, Jong's Sappho provides an answer to Woolf's caricature of women's writing as beginning and ending with Sappho, or Plath's rejection of Sappho as a literary forebear. The problem, Jong suggests, is the very idea that there might be a women's literary tradition in the first place. When we free ourselves from prescriptive and binary notions of gender, we begin to see that creativity -and authorship-are products of the connection to an authentic, sexual, generative energy. In other words, paradoxically -given Sappho's own canonical status as the originary female poet in the classical tradition-the lesson which Jong takes from Sappho is that women writers do not have to define themselves and their writing as 'female' at all. It is ultimately by rejecting Sappho as a woman, and recovering her as an authentic author in every sense of the word, that we can begin to trace a new tradition for modern women writers.