Highlights from this issue...

Untitled, 2000, mixed media on paper, 55 x 71-1/2". From Kara Walker.

Beyond the controversy
Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress edited by Ian Berry, Darby English, Vivian Patterson, and Mark Reinhardt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003, 205 pp., $45.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Johanna Branson

BORN IN 1969, KARA WALKER is by all accounts one of the most talented, accomplished, and controversial artists of her generation. She burst on the scene fresh out of graduate school in 1994, in an exhibition at The Drawing Center in New York City which included Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. As the title indicates, from the get-go Walker was fully engaged with an ambitious program. One long white wall held a series of life-sized black paper silhouettes, which she seemed to have cut from our nation's collective image bank. Hoop skirts, Spanish moss, twisted braids, "birthin' babies,"-- the figures dance and float their way down the wall, embodying and enacting exchanges of power between characters drawn from historical romance, sexual fantasy, and the parlor games, theatrical melodramas and dioramas of 19th century popular culture. It was a dazzling tour de force of visualization, at once elegant, hilarious, and extremely painful.

In the nine years since, Walker has followed up on the promise of her early ambition, extending in many ways the material set forth in Gone. She has been very productive; she has exhibited many series of drawings and watercolors, made a pop-up book, and filled room after room of the world's major galleries and museums with tableaux of her silhouettes. She has had remarkable success, in terms of opportunities to exhibit, attention from the press, and major awards conferred. She has also weathered serious controversy; in an act of attempted infanticide unusual in women's art, some older artists were so offended, angered, and hurt by her images that in 1997 they mounted a letter-writing campaign against her work, hoping to prevent it from reaching a public.

After taking some time out to collect herself, Walker came back from this attack feistier than ever. A recent exhibition and its important accompanying catalogue, both titled Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress, provide us with an opportunity to step back from this tumultuous young career, to reflect on what Walker, just now reaching full maturity, has accomplished in the first decade of her life as an exhibiting artist. The project as a whole shares a remarkable unity of purpose. It is clear that the design of the book was of a piece with the staging of the exhibition--the curators were also two of the four editors--and many decisions were made to keep Kara Walker's art and voice as strong as possible.

There is much indeed to say about the exhibition, most of it beyond the task of this essay. Perhaps it is enough here to acknowledge that the installation of the work was straightforward in terms of the clear access it provided to Walker's art. This is unusual; in an effort to alert viewers to controversial work, galleries often use various techniques, including wall texts and the construction of special routes viewers must follow to enter the exhibition. Either practice places a buffer between controversial work and the viewer. Either practice can also, conveniently for the gallery, place distance between the exhibiting institution and the artist, in effect serving as a disclaimer. This shapes the message of an artist, sometimes nearly to the point of censorship. Neither of these things happened in this installation. There was one sign at the entrance notifying the parents of young children of the content of the images; the two main galleries holding the show were openly arranged, with clear lines of sight permitting comparison between earlier and more recent work, work in different media, and work on different scales.

Before the Battle (Chickin' Dumplin'), 1995, cut paper on canvas, 48 x 54". From Kara Walker.

The complex, multi-authored catalogue reveals strong editorial vision partnered with enlightened design of the book as a physical object. Perhaps more than any other task facing a designer, a book about a visual artist is a tough challenge. It takes great skill, which must be invisible--the designer's presentation of another person's visual material does well not to compete with it stylistically. The task is even more difficult with the subset of artists' books that are exhibition catalogues, where the artist's choices concerning the staging of her material are the part of the subject; the designer's own decisions concerning format and presentation must be especially thoughtful, or they run the risk of obscuring the artist's message altogether. In typography, the phrase often used is "crystal goblet," that is, a perfect transparency, where the content is all you see.

Narratives of a Negress poses a still greater challenge, due to the many kinds of work being presented--there are index cards (more about them shortly); drawings; watercolors; photographs of silhouette installations; and even a book within the book (the pop-up book mentioned above). In addition to changing media, Walker's images are all changing form internally, as they are morphing embodiments, bits of evidence from visual archives from all levels of culture. Within each artwork, there is an ongoing visual turbulence, with constant exchanges of power being represented. It would be easy to imagine design that insisted on adding its own visual information, which would have had the effect of tipping the whole endeavor towards overabundance, creating visual white noise. The large, heavy book could have seemed pretentious or even arrogant.

Happily, this does not happen. The book is saved by restraint; the cover and the basic design scheme is black and white, and the weight comes honestly, as it were, from the quality of the paper stock. The color photography, even of black and white art, is excellent; the texture of the materials comes across. The layout is elegant, beautifully functional. As you look through the images and read the texts, all the reference information you need is at hand, on each page. The only flipping you do is to locate different bodies of work, and this serves the function of keeping the art constantly in front of your eyes.

SPEAKING FOR THE TEAM that steered the project, editor Ian Berry said they saw the exhibition and the catalogue as two components of the same project, one providing a vivid experience in a specific time and place, the other having a long afterlife and reaching a much broader audience. The catalogue not only documents the exhibition but also presents additional information to the reader about the artist and her work. Reference information is included, from reproductions of many works of art not in the actual exhibition, to an exhibition history, to a bibliography. Reflection on the work is provided in essays by four critics and scholars, each of whom approached the subject from a different professional background. This is a real strength of Narratives of a Negress; it is hard to imagine sufficient illumination concerning Walker's work coming from any one direction. One thing all four do share, however, is a reference to her critics; the controversy forms a subtext of the book. The reader senses a will to put it aside, if not behind, to "set aside the yoke of always having to address it," in Ian Berry's words.

Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found, by Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker, Colored, 1997 (detail),cut paper and adhesive on wall, 12 x 155 feet overall. From Kara Walker.

In "Kara Walker: 'The Black-White Relation,'" Anne Wagner provides the thorough, intelligent, articulate framing of art historical context we have come to expect from her, focusing on race in representation. She begins her essay with an account of the controversy the work has provoked, and then dips into the origins of Walker's images in popular culture, including the strategies of minstrelsy and the history of the cut-paper silhouette. She offers an illuminating comparison with Byron Kim, an artist who takes a multicultural approach to looking at skin color, as if we lived in a post-black/white culture. Wagner finds this position wanting, insisting that, to paraphrase her, the play of difference still dances hectically along a single black/white axis. She continues by comparing Walker to Frantz Fanon, the model of an engaged narrator, "hardly exempt from the very pathologies he aims to diagnose and cure." Wagner is eloquent in her posing of the central questions of Walker's work-- whose fantasy controls? what are the uses of melodrama?--and sees as one of Walker's greatest strengths the conspiracy between the artist and the viewer in the telling of a history of race.

Mark Reinhardt provides the fresh look of a political scientist, writing with great sensitivity about the images themselves as well as their contexts and uses. His essay, "The Art of Racial Profiling," uses as points of reference our everyday experience, non-expert, outside any art gallery--for instance, the pickle the police are in when they gather racial profiling information to prove they don't use racial profiling; or the prevalence of the novel and film versions of Gone With the Wind as the primary vehicles of popular impressions of the history of the Civil War. He never underestimates the power of such practices to shape our thinking and beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, regarding race and is clearly engaged by Walker's powerful use of them. He describes the consistent duality of her work, at once elegant and vulgar, clear and obscure, grim and funny, and the way it engages us in reflecting on our relation to the seductions of popular culture. Reinhardt is very acute on the humor in her work, discussing the unheimlich, or the making strange of our own home, our own history. He takes up the controversy surrounding her work, with a sharp analysis of her goals and of the often used but not often unpacked word "stereotype," insisting that a stereotype is a field of struggle, neither inherently positive or negative, but dependent for its meaning on the uses to which it is put. Reinhardt compares her work to two other major presentations of racism and stereotyping: first, the unquestioned, hidden fascination--he uses the word pornography--of early abolitionist accounts of slavery; and second, the work of philosopher-artist Adrian Piper. Both of these exist as a pretext for correcting the wrongs of racism. Reinhardt points out that Walker's vision is grimmer, finally. Her images are buried deeper in imagination and fantasy. He concludes: "She does not give us a world of redemption in suffering and virtue in victimhood… in taking up old fantasies and familiar idioms, she has found a new way of picturing the politics of race."

Darby English's extended essay, "This is not about the Past: Silhouettes in the Work of Kara Walker," reveals admirable depth and breadth of reference. He sees as central in her work her reformation of history, her freeing of the self to "do the work of mining history's unarticulated passages, art's unmade objects, and the value of counter-memory itself." Like the other essayists, he examines the controversy surrounding her work as well as her response to it in a remarkable work of 1998, Cut. In this analysis, as well as in subsequent examinations of her pop-up book, Freedom: A Fable by Kara Elizabeth Walker--A Curious Interpretation of Wit in a Negress in Troubled Times with Illustrations, and of the Klein Group-type, perceptually oscillating silhouette Untitled (1995), English shows remarkable insight into the history of silhouettes and racism. He offers a stirring defense of Walker's project of counter-memory. It is also the case that the only lapse of editorial rigor in the catalogue comes with his piece, which has the congested tone of a writer who has more ideas than he knows what to do with and would appreciate the challenge of strong editing. And the only mean-spirited note of the book occurs in his piece, where he refers to another scholar's writing about Kara Walker as "pop psychology," a needless potshot in a volume that otherwise maintains a near courtly tone about difficult subject matter.

"The Enigma of the Negress Kara Walker," by Michele Wallace, is an example of tough-minded, opinionated writing that has a sure, on-the-ground voice. It disarms the reader with the depth of sympathy it creates for the young artist. Unflinching in its defense of the individual voice, Wallace's essay remarks on the lack of support the individual can have in any collective of people who have experienced the same attacks, the same harm: There is only safety together, no one else can know our experience. Wallace points out that Walker works outside that circle of safety. She also offers a kind of reassurance to Walker's critics that they have underestimated their own strength; she argues that beauty has helped African Americans survive. Others disappeared and are disappearing off the face of the earth, but African Americans, with constructions of beauty just like Walker's, have survived. It is a ringing defense, and she is the last writer whose work appears in the catalogue.

One of the pages of Freedom: A fable by Kara Elizabeth Walker-A Curious Interpre- tation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times with Illustrations, 1997, hardbound artist book, pop-up design by David Eisen, 9-1/4 x 8-1/4". From Kara Walker.

Or, more accurately, the last writer to appear who isn't Kara Walker. Editor Ian Berry explained that he believes the production of catalogues of the work of living artists should be collaborations. Since Walker did not want to write an essay, and since she had already given many interviews, they had the notion of making a kind of book within the catalogue, through the sequencing of the information and the inclusion of a different kind of writing from Walker herself.

Thus, the voice that comes across most clearly in the catalogue is Walker's. The table of contents doesn't even appear until page 87; all the pages before are reproductions of Walker's work and pieces of her writing, with the result that her voice sets the tone. Her voice begins and continues throughout the volume in the form of index cards, which appear to be Walker's personal note-keeping system. Edited by Berry from a large pile the artist gave him to work with, the cards are reproduced nearly as a trompe l'oeil; typed by Walker on white stock, they look like they have been laid out, slightly dog-eared, somewhat marked up and edited, on the white pages of the book, giving them a sense of informal immediacy. They encompass a wide range of material, from quotations from her reading, to flights of fiction, to character sketches, to rants. The first two, opening the book, bear transcribing in as close as possible to Walker's original (typos included):

(1)
"and now, dear reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could. The remembrance fills me with sorrow and shame. It pains me to tell you of it; but I have promised to tell you the truth, and I will do it honestly, let it cost me what it may. I will not try to screen myself behind the compulsion from a master; for it was not so. Neither can I plea ignorance or thoughtlessness. For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood.

(2)
"The influences of slavery had had the same effect on me that they had on other young girls; they had made me prematurely knowind, concerning the evil ways of the world. I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation"

"Linda brent"
harriet Jacobs
Incidents…

One of Kara Walker's index cards. From Kara Walker.

The very last image of the book is a cut black paper cloudscape taken from a larger installation. "The End" is written on the central cloud, and it is a lovely visual joke. On the opposite page, however, is another of the note cards, firing its own final salvo:

No more pretty shadows,
papercuts
or delicate things,
that's so 90's
No more Irony
no more mercy
it is high time
for anger,
which precedes chaos,
but which is hard to create, when there's money in the bank, and a healthy economy.

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In memoriam: Monique Wittig
A tribute to the innovative philosopher/poet/novelist who died in January 2003

By Julia Balén

A YEAR HAS PASSED since we lost a dear friend and colleague, and the world lost one of its greatest writers and thinkers, Monique Wittig. She went for a walk in her beloved Sabino Canyon on that sunny winter day, and I can hear her talking with the birds, rabbits, and lizards as they stopped to consider her French. We had taken many such walks together over the 12 years since she had first come to Tucson, shared many dinners and conversations long into the night. She had become my dearest friend. Strangely, the morning of the day she died, my partner and I went out to find "lesbos" scrawled across the camper shell of our truck. In retrospect it seemed an odd omen.

Amazingly few people in our relatively quiet valley knew that one of the 20th century's most innovative writers had lived in Tucson since 1990, or that she taught at the University of Arizona in women's studies; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender studies; French and creative writing. This suited her desire for solitude. Many who did know were too awed by her work to take her classes or to get to know her. As department adviser, I often had to urge intimidated students to take her classes--daring them to work with her. Those who did become her students took every class they could with her thereafter and have described working with her as a life-changing experience. Even faculty members have admitted being awed and unable to bring themselves to reach out to her. For those of us who invited her into our lives, there was no better friend in the world.

Wittig will be remembered throughout the world for, among other things, being a winner of the prix Médicis, France's most prestigious prize for writers, for her first novel, L'Opoponax. The New York Times Book Review wrote, "In both form and content The Opoponax is a revolutionary story." One of its most revolutionary aspects is Wittig's use of pronouns, a project she developed throughout her oeuvre. Resisting language's insistent generalization of the masculine and particularization of the feminine, Wittig brilliantly and effectively used the non-gendered pronoun "one" to articulate lesbian childhood experiences as the general. This allowed her to, in her words, "locate the characters outside of the social division by sexes and annul it for the duration of the book." Claude Simon expressed evidence of her success when he wrote in his 1964 review of the book, "I see, I breathe, I chew, I feel through her eyes, her mouth, her hands, her skin." He, in effect, became lesbian--for the moment, neither man nor woman. All of her fiction continued this project of resisting what she came to call "the mark of gender."

THE MATERIALIST REVITALIZATION of language, particularly pronouns, so central to her works makes translation difficult, if not impossible. Unfortunately she had no say in how her novels were translated and, while she was generally pleased with the quality of the English translations, the pronouns remain a serious problem in two novels in particular. In The Opoponax the translator used "you" instead of "one" even though, as she has noted, the use of "one" in English is no heavier than in French; and in Les Guérillères the feminine plural elle is most often translated as "the women" rather than "they"--both of which offer a different valence than elle. In spite of these problems, her poetic play with language still produces an effective universalization of lesbian subjectivity. In The Straight Mind and Other Essays, the one book she published first in English, she explains the theory behind her writing practice. She describes the battle that she felt Djuna Barnes' work effectively wages and, in doing so, describes her own work:

[The lesbian] poet generally has a hard battle to wage, for, step by step, word by word, she must create her own context in a world in which, as soon as she appears, bends every effort to make her disappear. The battle is hard because she must wage it on two fronts: on the formal level with the questions being debated at the moment in literary history, and on the conceptual level against the that-goes-without-saying of the straight mind.

Monique Wittig's work is taught throughout women's studies, lgbt and queer studies, and French literature. She remains a leading force in feminist and queer theory throughout the world, with contemporary work relying on her brilliant resistance to heteronormativity. It is important to note that she had serious disagreements with queer theory, particularly with the ways in which some prominent scholars have misread and misused her work to articulate concepts of power with which she did not agree.

As writers and scholars go, she certainly had reason to be elitist: Her substantial oeuvre has been translated into at least 12 languages; she produced a play, The Constant Journey; and her story, The Girl, was produced in film by her partner, Sande Zeig. Nevertheless, she lived what she believed at every level of her life, preferring reasoned argument over power plays and remaining staunchly anti-elitist, even within institutional frameworks like the University of Arizona.

Wittig will also be remembered as a co-founder of the feminist movement in France and of famous groups such as Les Féministes Révolutionnaires and Les Gouines Rouges (the Red Dykes). She caused a great stir in Paris when she and several comrades placed a wreath at the Arc de Triomphe with a banner that read: "There is someone more unknown than the unknown soldier--his wife." Many of us will remember always the delicacy and strength with which she challenged us to better thinking and writing, her willingness to listen with an open and intelligent heart, her love for simple but elegant food, and her ferocious attentiveness to language and its material effects.

She had many plans: a script for another film with Zeig; an article for English speakers about her latest publication, Paris-la-politique, that she and I had been developing over the year; and, no doubt, spending time in Sabino Canyon. While we mourn a life lost too early, the rich projects unfinished, we are grateful to have such a peerless body of work by which to remember her.

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Looking for Sappho
Sappho's Leap by Erica Jong. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003, 320 pp., $24.95 hardcover.
The Sappho History by Margaret Reynolds. New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2003, 311 pp., $27.95 paper.
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho by Anne Carson. New York: Vintage, 2003, 416 pp., $27.50 hardcover, $14.00 paper.

Reviewed by Meryl Altman

Baron Gros, Sapho, 1801. From The Sappho History.

WHO WRONGS YOU, SAPPHO?" Aphrodite asks, ready to come to her devotée's defense in Sappho's fragment 1. Surely 26 centuries later Sappho no longer needs defending? Yet as recently as last summer, the magisterial New York Review of Books opined, "It is safe to say that none of these fragments…would arouse a great deal of excitement were it not for the fact that Sappho was a woman, and… that she wrote about desire." Counterweights to such dismissal, all three books under review, the latest Erica Jong no less than Anne Carson's long-awaited translation and Margaret Reynold's sprightly lit crit, are labors of love on behalf of the poet all three find inspirational. But Sappho's poems have always needed defense especially against her defenders. (Would Aphrodite wish her ode to spend eternity immortalized beside the "zipless fuck"?)

We don't know much about Sappho, and most of what we know is wrong. As Yopie Prins shows in Victorian Sappho, Joan de Jean in Fictions of Sappho 1546-1937, and as Reynolds vibrantly argues, later writers fill in the white space around the fragments of papyrus and pottery that have come down to us, "make her up" to be what we need to see. This is still true of Sappholatry today: 141 Amazon.com hits revealed (among other things) a handful of rivalrous, and widely divergent, translations; a revival of serious scholarship; links to second-wave and later feminist theory and practice (Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, Sappho Goes to Hollywood (lots of pix of Garbo and Dietrich), Sappho Goes to Law School (critical legal theory); other women poets, Greek and non-Greek; the Sappho T-Shirt Calendar (sold out); lesbian formula romances from pulpy to earnest; a young adult book, blessed by an eminent gay historian; and a DVD, "The Witches of Sappho Salon." Customers who bought this last also bought "Sin Sisters" and "Vampire Vixens," whereas customers who bought Willis Barnstone's translation of Sappho's poems also bought The Golden Notebook, Colette, and The Second Sex.

All the happy and sad complications of 21st century lesbian and feminist culture and identity can be read off this list; as de Jean says, "fictions of Sappho are fictions of the feminine." To judge by Jong, the feminine seems to be in more of a mess than ever: Is the representative Woman a singer or a sexpot? Must she choose? "When a woman is standing on a cliff about to jump into the wine-dark sea, her life does tend to flash before her. But the times get all mixed up." What if Jong's Fear of Flying heroine Isadora Wing--bright, funny, angst-ridden, good with words, impelled urgently in every direction by "the divine delta, that juicy fig, the powerful phallus, that scepter of state"--had lived in Ancient Greece? Jong has produced a picaresque portrait of the artist of the sort usually called "raunchy," "campy," or a "romp," where plausiblity and verisimilitude seem utterly beside the point. As her afterword explains, she sees Sappho as a cross between Sylvia Plath and Madonna.

Like everything Jong writes, Sappho's Leap is explicitly feminist; although as blurbs from Naomi Wolf and Anne Roiphe signal, the kind of feminist who shops at the ancient equivalent of Bloomingdale's,"and what's wrong with that?" If you enjoy Jong and her other avatars you'll enjoy her Sappho, too; if you find them annoying or embarrassing, you won't. I find Jong interesting because she continues to work unsolved second-wave problems--how to reconcile erotic, ambitious, and maternal longings; how to give public voice to the most private of experiences--long after they've stopped being theoretically fashionable. But the problems are still with us, and therefore so is she.

Meanwhile, Sappho's Leap has more plot than a soap opera and more facts than a History Channel miniseries. Jong pooh-poohs Ovid's influential story that Sappho committed suicide out of unrequited love for Phaon: Her Phaon is a spoiled, annoying boytoy, not the homme fatal who turned the first lesbian in world cultural history into the first "has-be-an." Jong's Sappho is hardly "woman-identified," though: The real love of her life is her first teacher, the phallic and golden poet Alcaeus. While looking for him she has more adventures than Odysseus, accompanied throughout by her faithful slave and sort-of-girlfriend, Praxinoa. (Praxinoa puts up with a lot: painfully branded on the forehead, abandoned when anyone hotter turns up, addressed throughout as "Prax!") A visit to the country of the Amazons leads to a full-blown allegory of '70s and '80s feminism: Separatism Doesn't Work, because Amazon daughters turn out to like cock more than their grim-faced matronly leaders had figured on.

Angelica Kauffmann, Sappho Inspired by Love, 1775. From The Sappho History.

Jong has done her homework, and I enjoyed watching her shimmy around controversies that have bedeviled scholars for centuries. Was Sappho homosexual or heterosexual? Yes. Was she a public poet or a poet of private emotion? Yes. Was she in tune with her culture, or opposed to it? Yes. Was the ritual aspect genuine or just a form into which physical passion could flow? Yes. Did she run a girl's singing school, or an erotic academy--well, why not both? Everything works out for the best: If Aphrodite can't be present herself, she sends magic dolphins or Pegasus or crafty advice. Shrinkless in Syracuse, our heroine meets the wise Aesop, whose fables do just as well as Freud. And as usual there is lots of steamy and detailed sex: with men, with women, with her olisbos (guess).

The actual Sapphism here is a great improvement upon that in Jong's How to Save Your Own Life, where Isadora's experiment with an East Side ice queen yields the revelation: "Gentle reader, it did not taste good." But it never regains the symbolic capital of that in Fear of Flying, where she fantasizes avenging herself on Columbia's English department (and on patriarchy in general) by making public love to Colette during her PhD exam. I'm tempted to read the progression of Jong's novels as an allegory of early straight feminist oscillation between the idealized lesbian as feminist heroine and the real thing as anxiety-producing and faintly yucky, with Sappho's Leap happily resolving everything under the big tent of queer: "If you are lucky enough to love, who cares what decorative flesh your lover sports?… We are all hermaphrodites at heart, aren't we?"

Jong's biggest problem--unevenness of tone and uncertainty of diction, especially in dialogue--may result from re-voicing unfamiliar material. (We don't know much about Sappho, but we're pretty sure she wasn't Jewish.) Yet it's an oddly didactic, almost dissertation-like, book, so much so that it's hard to feel anything for the characters. Do I need to know that "Syracuse was founded by the Corinthians, who worshipped Artemis?" Would Alcaeus really write, "When I think of beautiful green Lesbos, it merges in my mind with a vision of violet-haired Sappho--or Psappho, as you call yourself in our beautiful Aeolic dialect"? The story is framed by Olympian kibbitzing and interference: Aphrodite claims a woman (Sappho) can be a great singer; Zeus wagers she will be derailed by sex and love; and both try to stack the deck.

Aphrodite: "Sappho's life matters! Someday she will be called the "tenth muse" by a great philosopher, not yet born, named Plato."
Zeus: "Plato, schmato! These mortals are no more than dust…." (p. 272)

SO, IT SEEMS, WAS THE SAPPHO HISTORY. Informed by countless hours in international archives, its breezy style nonetheless clearly invites a general (lesbian?) readership. "Sappho's speaker may, or may not, have once felt the desire she describes, but through the contrivance of her words, she makes a new feeling, which is authentic. I know it is. Because it is mine. Yours. Ours." Those seeking a survey of recent scholarly work on Sappho and her reception might be better off with Prins, or de Jean, or Ellen Greene's two anthologies, Reading Sappho and Re-reading Sappho. For others new to Sappho, I'd suggest starting with Reynolds' own capacious The Sappho Companion, which does enormous service by reprinting many later "versions" of Sappho, helpfully contextualized by informative and thorough historical headnotes. Work on the earlier book seems to have left Reynolds with a reserve of delightful anecdote and a praiseworthy awareness that a linear progress narrative of responses to Sappho across the centuries simply won't wash.

But as a result, The Sappho History is a bit of a grab bag. Reynolds jumps from century to century and country to country providing what she calls "snapshots," linked by dramatic claims that lack of synthesis is the point. "Sappho is nobody. She has no body." "S - - - - o is a space. For joining up the dots. Filling in the blanks. Making something out of nothing." Page du Bois and others argue similarly that "Sappho" is a fiction, a cathexis, a conflicted and contradictory locus of self-authorization down through the centuries; and the sheer variety and contrariety of Reynolds' examples proves it anew. So it's clear why she would renounce the search for the "real Sappho." It is less clear how this harmonizes with her mystical claims to authentic connection.

Charles Auguste Mengin, Sappho, 1877. From The Sappho History.

Reynolds capably shows how Sappho's image and narrative have been mobilized simultaneously on all sides of every question. Male painters of the Napoleonic period used Phaon as an excuse to show heroic male nude beauty (and Sappho disconsolate); in the same period, women painters and writers invoked Sappho as an enabling foremother, in the face of Rousseau's directive to tend to their needlework. Some snapshots are in clearer focus than others: I loved hearing about Lady Hamilton, who in the late 18th century transformed herself from bought concubine to respectable lady and artist by performing Greek "attitudes" in Naples for her husband's guests; but the connection to poet Mary Robinson, and thereby to Sappho, is sketched metaphorically rather than demonstrated. The account of Tennyson and Hallam is interesting in itself, but the link to Sappho hangs on a very slender textual thread. Reynolds' broad historical sweep means she can't engage fully with scholarship in each period, which may leave experts peevish. (For example: The finer points of understanding H. D. may not be of general interest, but those who care may find Eileen Gregory's elegant and sensible H. D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines, and other recent works, more careful and better informed.)

"Feminine jouissance is perhaps a clue to Sappho's persistence." Perhaps. But the mobilizations of narrative and image Reynolds catalogues--"imposter phantoms that throng into the spaces between the fragments of the text and her story"--leave Sappho's poetry curiously untouched. Reynolds' leaping enthusiasms take her farther and farther from Sappho's restrained poetic mastery, the overcoming of desire's tyranny through form. I find slightly overwrought gush an unsatisfactory substitute for closely reasoned argument. "Sappho has given me much pleasure. As she has pleasured others before. In my imagination she comes to me, she comes for me. I have looked at her with desire. I have imagined that she looks back at me." Still, readers who would be put off by "drier" literary criticism may be pleased and instructed by both of Reynolds' books, and will turn back to Sappho herself, which is all to the good.

BUT TO WHICH SAPPHO should they turn? Noted classicist and acclaimed poet Anne Carson has provided a spare and elegant rendering of every word of Sappho's that has come down to us, including single-word scraps quoted by ancient grammarians. The ancient Greek is here on facing pages, but textual apparatus is minimal, and gaps in the papyrus or the translation are indicated by a backwards bracket. Large stretches of white space are so integral to these poems that to offer compressed quotations would betray their spirit. The impression is of finely honed thought and deep feeling through self-restraint--and of loss, of meaning torn briefly and hopefully from a surrounding field of silence. Some of the results are conventionally beautiful, meaningful speech; others are haunting, mute, or surreal. Carson explains, "I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through. This is an amiable fantasy (transparency of self) with which most translators labor."

Paradoxically, "standing out of Sappho's way" means leaving traces of the translator's labor on the page. "Brackets are an aesthetic gesture toward the papyrological event…. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp." Notes provide clues toward interpretation ("Sappho's poem threatens the woman with an obliteration which it then enacts by not naming her") and explain "correption" and the force of the particle "de." But Carson never pretends that implacable puzzles can be complacently solved; she provides matter for interpretations that may counter her own.

This makes Carson's an ideal edition for someone like me, who has just enough Greek to follow happily: The white space tempts me to treat it like a workbook. But readers for whom the Greek is, well, Greek may find Carson's abstinent but encyclopedic approach frustrating. They might prefer to begin with Mary Barnard's more reader-friendly modernist version, first published in 1958 and still deservedly in print. When Victorians saw space, in a text or in a drawing room, their instinct was to fill it up with bric-a-brac; then high modernism cleaned the house of poetry with a blowtorch. What Mary Barnard showed for Sappho (and Richard Lattimore for Homer) was that Ancient Greek material could be enjoyed without scholarly attainments, but also without too much lying or embroidery. Whenever Jong or Reynolds lifted me out of my chair in irritation--"Sappho would never say that!"--the internal voice I heard, even though I knew better, as "Sappho" was actually Barnard's. Because it was the first I encountered? Because my lover gave the book to me? Because liking modernism had prepared me to value Barnard's simple directness, to hear the underlying rhythm of her free verse as a dance? I suspect all readers, even the savviest, carry within ourselves a version against which we measure the others, defensibly or not.

Perhaps with patience If Not, Winter could work that way too. Even the briefest fragments are more polished than they first appear, and, without grandstanding, the results are poetry. Here's desire, from the middle of Sappho's fragment 31 phainetai moi [He seems to me]: "No: tongue breaks and thin/ fire is racing under skin/ and in eyes no sight and drumming/ fills ears// and cold sweat holds me and shaking/ grips me all"--I prefer this to Barnard's more sedate "If I meet/ you suddenly, I can't// speak--my tongue is broken; a thin flame runs under/ my skin; seeing nothing,// hearing only my own ears/ drumming, I drip with sweat;/ trembling grips my body…" Carson's syntax comes closer to the physical dissolving; also, Barnard's "If I meet you suddenly," while helpful, is not exactly in the Greek. But both seem magnificent in light of this moment's history: Reynolds reports that Boileau omits any reference to "sweat" as "indelicate"; that the "matchless Orinda" transforms it to "dewy damps"; and that Germaine Greer (overcompensating?) suggests the overexcited poet has simply wet herself. Yes, all translations are fictions. Yet to say with Reynolds that all imaginary Sapphos are created equal disables the intellect. No version is perfect but some are worse than others.

Carson's discreet notes are helpful, but her main interpretive work on Sappho is elsewhere, in well-regarded scholarly articles and, most memorably, Eros the Bittersweet, an incandescent thesaurus, or anatomy, of the paradoxes of human desire, which takes off from phainetai moi and ranges throughout Western culture ancient and modern. In that work, she often responds to and reworks other writers in her own poems and sequences, in a direct, personally involved, gripping way. If Not, Winter is different.

The effort here is to rescue lyric from the irrelevant pressures of narrative. "Controversies about her personal ethics and way of life have taken up a lot of people's time throughout the history of Sappho scholarship. It seems that she knew and loved women as deeply as she did music. Can we leave the matter there?" After so much noise and drivel the wish seems utterly coherent. Given the art Carson's made before by taking liberties with the lives and lines of others, what she wants now, it seems, is to respect distance and difference, not to force intimacy on her poet--to take Sappho as an end in herself rather than a means to an end. Isn't there a form of love that consists in knowing when to be quiet? She does not flatter or pressure the reader--no attempt here to package Sappho or to sell her--having reached the point perhaps where even, or especially, the beloved's imperfections seem beautiful.

"There is no Sappho" may be the most modest of standpoints or the most arrogant. How about, "Nobody owns Sappho?" Then, to quote the fragmentary end of phainetai moi, "all must be endured, since even a beggar…"

Although--there are a few disputed words in there--it may mean all must be dared.

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Love among anthropologists
Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle by Lois W. Banner. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, 524 pp., $30.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Rebecca Maksel

RUTH BENEDICT AND MARGARET MEAD met in the introductory course in anthropology at Barnard College in the fall of 1922. Mead was a student in the class; Benedict the teaching assistant. Two years later they became lovers. Their chance meeting would change the direction of anthropological theory.

Using archived materials from the Library of Congress and Vassar College only recently made available to scholars, historian Lois Banner has crafted a dual biography that examines the personal and professional relationship between the two women, their contributions to the male-dominated discipline of anthropology, and their lasting influence in the social sciences.

Margaret Mead in Samoan dress, with her friend Fa'amotu. From Intertwined Lives.

And Banner's biography is exceptional. Where Mead's autobiography Blackberry Winter can be seen as a narrative designed not to risk public embarrassment, and Jane Howard's well-regarded Margaret Mead: A Life is, as Howard writes, "a generalist's portrait," Intertwined Lives examines the history of the times and the discipline of anthropology in depth.

Banner explores the two women's lives in relation to the "geography of gender," defining the concept as "the complex terrain of gender and sexuality that they negotiated during their lives--political, social, professional, familial, or individual." This "geography of gender" profoundly affected how the two women determined their sexual identities--identities, Banner argues convincingly, that were more fluid than fixed until each woman experienced a personal crisis in the 1930s.

Benedict attended Vassar College where a culture of "smashing" (female romantic friendships) existed. Banner unearths a wealth of information detailing the culture of romantic friendships between girls, which she sees as central to the Victorian system of gender socialization. Margaret Mead later wrote in her autobiography about the complex structure that, as Banner writes, "encouraged intimate relations between girls while guiding them into marriage." At Vassar, sophomores invited freshmen on "dates," sending them flowers and filling their dance cards. Some students held "wedding ceremonies" to emphasize their closeness. When Benedict graduated in 1909, about one-third of the students were characterized in the yearbook as masculine. Typical is this description of a female student as "a fiery man, very proud and positive." Benedict, who, as editor of the yearbook may have written the descriptions herself, is summed up as "A salad: for in him we see/ Oil, vinegar, pepper and saltness agree."

Gender and sexuality were much discussed by philosophers and sexologists of the day. Both Benedict and Mead read Havelock Ellis, who viewed homosexuality as a genetic anomaly, much like being color-blind, and his summaries of other theorists such as the German neuropsychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who viewed homosexuality as a perversion. It is small wonder, then, that these two brilliant women chose to focus their scholarship--whether overtly, as did Mead, or covertly, in the case of Benedict--on the topic that consumed them both professionally and personally.

After graduating from Vassar, Benedict fell into a depression. She was jealous of her sister's happiness in her roles as wife and mother, and she couldn't accept her own sexual interest in women. She was resentful that her gender consigned her to such work as schoolteacher and social worker, yet she seemed to lack the initiative to obtain training that would allow her more career options. In her confusion, she turned to Stanley Benedict, the brother of a Vassar classmate. They married and settled on suburban Long Island. Benedict was so unhappy there that she rented a room in the city during the week. She still longed to be an intellectual and took classes, one of which was taught by the anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons. In many ways they were similar: both were feminists who had done social work; both had reserved personalities. But they didn't get along. Banner speculates that sexual identity may have been an issue between them: Parsons was sympathetic to homosexuality, while Benedict was struggling to understand her own orientation. Whatever their conflict, Parsons was generous with Benedict, later funding her research. Benedict entered the anthropology department at Columbia in 1921: The stage was set for her to meet Margaret Mead the following year.

MEAD WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where she had erotic friendships with other girls; the culture of "smashing" was still strong. But, following convention, Margaret became engaged to Luther Cressman during her senior year in high school. She expected to attend Wellesley College, where her mother had gone, but her father refused to finance her education, judging her too fragile for college work. In desperation, Emily Mead suggested DePauw University in Indiana, correctly guessing that Edward Mead wouldn't veto his alma mater. Margaret didn't fit in at the Midwestern school, and transferred, after her first year, to Barnard.

She was happy in New York, which she considered "the center of intellectual life." At Barnard, Mead made friendships that would last the remainder of her life. She had a romantic relationship with a classmate named Leone Newton, which she concealed, that continued until graduation. In the fall of her senior year Mead took the introductory course in anthropology with Franz Boas, with Benedict as the teaching assistant.

Ruth Benedict with two members of the Blackfoot tribe, 1939. From Intertwined Lives.

At first Mead was unhappy with Benedict and the discussion section. Banner notes that Mead was put off by Benedict's appearance. "Benedict wore the same dress every day and what seemed to Mead an unstylish hat; her hair was mousy and unkempt. Mead didn't know that she wore the same dress as an act of feminist rebellion against the male professors at Columbia, who always wore the same suit." However, Mead gradually came to admire Benedict's teaching style and intellect. Although she had already been accepted into the MA program in psychology at Columbia, Mead accepted Benedict's invitation to become a graduate student in anthropology and completed both degrees. Mead became Benedict's protégée. As Banner notes, Benedict was brilliant: "She abandoned the profession of social work to enter an academic field dominated by men. And unlike most women in anthropology, who did fieldwork and wrote ethnographies, she took up theory….Moreover, Benedict centered her early scholarship on men."

As women entered academia and the work force, there was a predictable backlash: Cultural commentators charged that "feminization" was destroying "the intellectual establishment, the fabric of society, and the identity of men." At universities, the terms "hard" and "soft" were used to differentiate between "masculine" sciences like physics and "feminine" sciences like sociology.

In this intellectual climate Mead left to conduct fieldwork in Samoa. The sexual rebellion of the 1920s, free-love ideas (to which Mead subscribed), the still-existing culture of "smashing"--all influenced Mead's fieldwork. Indeed, Franz Boas instructed Mead to find out if Samoan girls had crushes on each other. Benedict and Mead planned to meet in Rome in 1926, after the Samoa fieldwork was complete. On the boat to Europe, however, Mead famously fell in love with Reo Fortune, another anthropologist.

Mead spent the summer traveling around France and England with husband Luther Cressman and then, later, with Fortune. Benedict was jealous and felt betrayed; but the two somehow saved their relationship, making up on the ship from Marseilles to the United States. On board, they "began an intense discussion about anthropology that, according to Mead, lasted "for years." Mead was interested in combining anthropology and psychology in her work; she felt humans shared universal characteristics that were channeled in specific ways by their cultures. Benedict disagreed; she believed that cultures had little influence over individuals. Benedict's views changed once she began the study of Pueblo Indians that would become Patterns of Culture.

The years during 1926 to 1931 deepened Mead's and Benedict's professional engagement. They read and critiqued each other's work. Mead divorced Cressman and published Coming of Age in Samoa, which focused on the process by which children become adults. Mead concluded that in contrast to what American youth experienced, adolescence in Samoa was an untroubled state. Mead married Reo Fortune and conducted fieldwork with him along the Sepik River. Meanwhile, Benedict returned to the Southwest Pueblo tribes and formulated the concept that would become Patterns of Culture; she proposed that cultures organize and arrange universal human traits, and borrowed terms from philosophy and psychiatry to illustrate her points. In her view, Pueblo Indians were "Apollonian," while the Pima were "Dionysian." The Kwakiutl of British Columbia were megalomaniac and the Dobuan of New Guinea, paranoid. In the midst of this outpouring of scholarship, probably during 1928, Mead and Benedict "pledged undying devotion to each other," but most likely ended their romantic involvement. Mead wanted to continue their sexual relationship, but Benedict had no desire to compete with Reo Fortune.

By 1935, Benedict's Patterns and Mead's second book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, were published--and both were considered controversial. Banner notes, "Both authors identify the dominant 'pattern' in their societies, while they also identify social deviants, to prove that the sort of individuals regarded as abnormal in one society may be regarded as normal in another." At the time of publication, Benedict weathered a personal crisis: professionally, she was fine. She taught at Columbia; Science named her as one of five leading anthropologists in the United States; her articles and book reviews appeared regularly in popular and intellectual journals. Personally, she had come to a realization: Just as she visualized culture as an integrated whole, she recognized, and accepted, those various parts of her personality that she labeled "masculine" and "feminine." She had resolved the issue of her sexuality, and accepted her homosexuality.

IN THE EARLY 1930S Mead and Fortune returned to New Guinea. Mead wanted to study the sex roles of men and of women, and hoped to determine how sex differences functioned culturally. In New Guinea, Mead would also meet Gregory Bateson, the English anthropologist who would become her third husband. She wrote to Benedict that upon meeting Bateson, her marriage collapsed "like a house of cards." The romantic triangle with Bateson and Fortune helped Mead focus on her work, Banner writes, and Mead had an epiphany:

It was simple: not all societies function according to the standard masculine/feminine division of the West; her basic assumption had been wrong. If that was the case, then categories different from "masculine" and "feminine" had to apply: males and females must be constructed by qualities like aggression or gentleness that cross over gender and then are shaped by societies into specific roles. (p. 327)

The outbreak of World War II encouraged Mead and Benedict to move from scholarship to activism. By 1940 both were involved with the new field of national character studies--a field they created. Mead, Bateson, and Benedict used the techniques they had developed in the field to analyze the national character of the so-called complex societies of the United States and its allies. Both women began working for the war effort in Washington, DC. Mead became the administrator for the Committee on Food Habits (establishing, in essence, the discipline of foodways), and the Office of War Information (OWI) sent her on a lecture tour of England, where she discussed the American national character.

Benedict did studies for the OWI of Denmark, where she explored the potential for an underground movement, and of Thailand, where she planned a campaign of psychological warfare, since Thailand was Japan's ally. That project grew into The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, considered the premier work of national character studies.

After the war's end, Mead returned to the American Museum of Natural History where she would spend the remainder of her career. In spite of her fame, she never held a professorship; she and Benedict speculated that the envy of fellow anthropologists (chiefly Bronislaw Malinowski and Edward Sapir) had spread throughout the profession. Benedict returned to Columbia, but many of the male war veterans entering the program there disliked her theoretical approach. And although she was Boas' intellectual heir, as a woman she was never seriously considered to take over his position as his retirement approached. In 1948, Benedict went to Europe to attend a UNESCO conference. Ten days after her return, she died of a heart attack. Mead, her friend, lover, and protégée, was in the hospital at her side.

Although devastated by her friend's death, Mead found a way to keep her memory close, completing Benedict's projects and supervising her graduate students. As Banner writes, Mead "would, indeed, construct the brilliant career that Benedict had expected of her and, by achieving it, come full circle to fulfill the dreams of her friend."

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