|
A Conversation with Erica Jong
Why does a writer set a novel in ancient Greece?
The first stories I loved as a child were Greek myths. They seemed to encapsulate all the struggles of human life. Long before I dreamed of being the mother of a daughter, I was enthralled by the tale of Demeter and Persephone. The daughter kidnapped and taken to the Land of the Dead seemed a universal fear with a bittersweet ending. When I read the fragments of Sappho I rediscovered the things I had loved in those myths: pathos, compression, surprising modernity. Also, in times of trouble—subjection to tyrants, impending war, fear of future continuance of life on earth, we naturally turn to the ancients to see how their civilizations survived—or failed to.
Sappho’s fragments punctuate the narrative of your story. Why?
I don’t think you can write a novel about a poet without telling at least some of the story in poetry. Sappho’s fragments have endured because they so vividly describe women’s feelings. They have to be given pride of place in her story.
It’s also important to understand that Sappho first created the metaphors of love that have been used by poets and songwriters through the ages. She is more than a creator, she is a primal source.
Sappho’s story, like Fanny’s, like Isadora’s, is a picaresque novel. Have you thought about that?
It seems to me that every novelist has a fable embedded in her unconscious. We repeat that fable in all our books. My fable is picaresque. A female naïf sets out on the road of life to seek her fortune. In the process she gains wisdom and sees her experiences with new eyes. I never think I am writing this story. Later I discover I have written it again.
Whose translations of Sappho do you use in the novel and how did you find them?
The translations are my own. Working with various translations of Sappho’s lyrics I devised my own translations which then were vetted by a classics scholar (see the Afterword).
In rereading various translations of Sappho, I came to understand that each period claimed Sappho as a contemporary. I tried to go back to her own texts and render them anew. I hope the reader of this novel will be inspired to read and compare the many translations of Sappho that exist. Modern translations include Anne Carson’s, Mary Barnard’s, Willis Barnstone’s, Paul Roche’s, Suzy Groden’s, Denys Page’s, and those of many other scholars and poets. Sappho inspired both Greeks and Romans to quote and emulate her. Ovid and Catullus fell under her spell and transmitted her to European literature. Like Shakespeare and Dante, she is more than a poet, she is a muse.
Is Sappho’s Leap a novel or a biography?
There is not enough known about Sappho to write a true biography. The few references to her life in ancient texts tell us only that she was born on the isle of Lesbos before 600 B.C., that she had a brother named Charaxus who loved a courtesan named either Rhodopis or Doricha, that her father was an aristocrat named Scamandronymos, that her mother and daughter were both called Cleis, that she married a trader called Cercylas from the island of Andros. Then there are the dubious and conflicting legends about her. Evidence of her lesbianism arrives via two grammatical forms with feminine endings in two fragments. One is a participle, the other an adjective in fragments 1 and 31, respectively. Her supposed suicide (provoked by unrequited love for a young ferryman named Phaon to whom Aphrodite had given irresistible beauty) is based entirely on myth. Using these few factual and mythic markers, I have invented my own Sappho as writers have always done.
You give the women and men in Sappho’s life equal importance as friends as well as sexual partners. Did you do this consciously in order to dispel the myth that Sappho was a lesbian?
In Sappho’s time bisexuality was not uncommon, nor was it viewed as taboo as it came to be in Christian times. Marriage was considered a thing apart from love, a dynastic decision rather than a romantic one. Sappho’s passion for women, suggested by grammatical forms in two fragments, did not make her a lesbian in the modern sense of exclusivity to her sex. She was a devotee of Aphrodite and celebrated all the erotic pleasures. We can hardly imagine such an open-minded pagan creature. As a result, we put her into contemporary categories and distort her meaning. Surely Sappho loved women but she also loved men. The point is that she understood passion. We put too much stress on gender and too little stress on eros.
Sappho struggles to balance her existence as a sexual being with her desire to be taken seriously as a musician, a mother, and a woman. Both Isadora and Fanny face similar issues. Has it gotten easier for women or do modern women face the same difficulties?
The problem of reconciling work and passion is still complex for women, but at least more choices are open to us. We are far from having complete equality and our revolution has far to go. Our importance to society is still not honored. Still, our role as mothers and grandmothers gives us great vulnerability and also great understanding of the human condition.
Sappho’s journey can be seen as an odyssey both literally as she travels the world in search of her daughter and figuratively as a voyage of self-discovery. Typically, in ancient Greek literature, these journeys belong to men. Does Sappho fill a void in the genre of the time period by being a woman embarking on such a voyage?
I have always wanted to reclaim heroic stories for women. Perhaps I was initially drawn to Greek myths because women are so important in them. In the novels I loved as a teenager—Great Expectations, David Copperfield, The Catcher in the Rye—I always had to imagine myself through the eyes of a boy. Not that such transposition is impossible. People are people. Men and women suffer similar crises of identity in different ways. But as I grew up I was drawn to create women protagonists who suffered human limitations rather than the limitations of gender.
Why is Praxinoa such an important character in the book? In what ways does she help Sappho grow and change during her journey?
Sappho is an aristocrat. Praxinoa is a slave. Sappho comes to understand slavery through her and also comes to appreciate liberty.
The Greeks had a slave society. For this we often fault them. But slavery also exists in our world though we call it by different names. People in rich societies profit from child labor in poor societies but we prefer not to focus on such exploitation. Slavery simply has taken new and invisible forms in the twenty-first century.
Although Sappho’s Leap was written nearly thirty years after Fear of Flying, Sappho, in many ways, is the precursor to Isadora. Did you consider this while you were writing Sappho’s Leap? Was Sappho the poet an influence on you while you were creating Isadora?
I had read Sappho in college but I don’t think I understood her at all when I created Isadora. It was only when I reread her later that I began to see all she had in common with modern women.
Discussion
Questions
1. The author has clearly transformed her Sappho into a female Odysseus. For those who have read Homer’s Odyssey, how does Sappho’s journey of self-discovery compare with Odysseus’s (similarities and differences)?
2. In chapter 4 Sappho utters a quotable line: “No woman can understand her mother until she becomes a mother.” How did Sappho’s mother influence Sappho’s life and why do you think this line still speaks to women today?
3. In chapter 7 three immortals debate the importance of love, intellect, and motherhood—an unresolved issue. What does the author imply that women should desire based on what Sappho has acquired at the end of her odyssey?
4. Sappho’s Amazoniad, bowdlerized by “first-wave” Amazons, sparks a “second-wave” revolt (chapters 12–14). How can you explain this episode in terms of the women’s movement that has evolved over the past thirty years?
5. In chapter 23, in one of the most poignant episodes of the novel, Sappho’s pupil Timas commits suicide. Why does one find this section so moving and what does it say about the status of women in Sappho’s time? What other passages can you cite from the novel that evoke a similar emotional response from the reader, and what techniques does the author use to enable the reader to understand the motivations of the key characters?
|