Queers in the canon

Navel-gazing in the name of Sappho

Ruth McHugh-Dillon

After Sappho

by Selby Wynn Schwartz Text Publishing $29.99 pb, 277 pp

Whether or not you have read literary critic Harold Bloom, you will have heard the term ‘anxiety of influence’, coined in his 1970s book of the same name. There and in The Western Canon (1994), Bloom proposes a vision of creativity inspired by Freud, the Romantics, and the Ancient Greeks, in which great men throughout history wrestle one another for poetic supremacy. Creative production is a violent, Oedipal struggle in which only a ‘strong’ poet can overcome the influence of his forebear. And yes, it is almost always a ‘him’. In The Western Canon, only four women in history make the cut in a list of twenty-six, mostly English-language, writers whom Bloom deems central to Western civilisation (Shakespeare, Proust, Beckett, etc.). My nit-picking would no doubt have annoyed Bloom, who rankled at what he called the School of Resentment – feminist, Marxist, and race studies scholars who kept tampering with the canon in the name of social justice. For him, aesthetic value transcends these concerns and can be objectively assessed. Some people (almost always male) are simply geniuses.

Bloom died in 2019 so we can only guess his take on Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho, a novel which weaves together fictionalised biographies of real-life, queer, feminist writers, artists, and activists – some famous, others not – who clustered in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. Pitting her novel against centuries of systemic gatekeeping, erasure, and violence, Schwartz has eyes on the canon. By weaving historical events and legal texts into fiction, After Sappho exposes how the patriarchy has erected its narrow canon in law and in literature and then defended itself as if it were already there, the natural order.

Like her masculine predecessors, Schwartz is well versed in the classics. She diverges from their path with knowing glee, however, to revel in influence as an immersive experience. After Sappho creates a vision of creative, sexual, and romantic connection between women that is as lush and joyful as it is enraged by men’s violence.

Individual genius? Creation as a battleground between fathers and sons? These ideas are on the chopping block. After Sappho instead builds a portrait of artistic vitality through repetition and return, in vignettes depicting historical figures such as Eileen Gray, Sarah Barnhardt, Lina Poletti, Natalie Barney, and – of course –Virginia Woolf. Although the narrative generally moves forward in time, it overlaps, jumps and traces back. The novel’s uniting thread is Sappho’s poetry, interspersed throughout, and the dream of her sexy queer life on Lesbos, which yokes together the novel’s huge community of characters. As a unifying foremother, Sappho is also an appropriate paradox, given that so little is known about her life and that her poetry survives only in fragments. This Sapphic past holds the promise of a queer future, what the novel repeatedly calls ‘becoming Sappho’. Creative life as a queer ‘chosen’ family – what you assemble rather than what you inherit.

Like queer sex meant for pleasure, not reproduction, After Sappho delights in the messy, non-linear state of creative connection. However, it frequently delights too much in its own cleverness, and the cumulative effect of reading vignette after vignette, each closing with a line freighted with meaning, can be exhausting as the story continuously changes gears. The novel’s relentless sweeping and swapping, and its devotion to poetic imagery, arch observation, and untranslated morsels of French and Italian, ultimately depersonalise the very characters it aims to bring to life. Quirks, whims, and fancies masquerade as personality:

Romaine detested crowds and sandwiches, she liked solitude and cakes that were half-chocolate and half-vanilla. Romaine wore black clothes that made a room colder, more elegant.

Where After Sappho succeeds is through its communal voice: Schwartz summons a group of anonymous women to narrate the story in the collective pronoun ‘we’. As the novel’s most inventive element, they function like a Greek chorus: ever-present to observe and comment; implicated in the story yet slightly removed. The collective voice claims both tragedies and triumphs. When people hiss that the dancer Liane de Pougy is too whore-like and low-born to have written her own book, the narration bristles, protective and faintly puzzled: ‘in our eyes no one had written any of this herself. We were grasping each other by wrists in a circle.’

Sustaining an entire novel in the choral ‘we’ is an impressive feat. Yet precisely because its voice and its ideals of equality, community, and emancipation are so ambitious, the novel invites scrutiny over who its tight-gripped circle excludes. Reading, I tried to resist imposing that heavy burden on marginalised voices, to represent everyone and everything. And yet I kept wondering where the poor punky dykes were, and the illiterate queers enslaved in domestic work. What about the homophobic laws the British installed in its colonies, which still wreck lives today? Schwartz herself seems self-conscious about the omissions as the text flits over Italy’s colonial atrocities in Eritrea: ‘Perhaps we closed our eyes in order to linger in that dream of our idyll … We kept them at a distance and turned our eyes to Sappho, to Lina Poletti, to the Divine Sarah [Bernhardt]. We wanted stories set about us like gleaming surfaces, reflecting and burnishing our hopes.’

Thus the novel excuses us for where ‘we’ turn our eyes by eliding the intellectual engagement it claims to celebrate. The postcolonial scholar Edward Said knew, unlike Harold Bloom, that the Western canon could only be enriched by readings which acknowledged the imperial violence that it created and that created it. Disappointingly, for all its passionate talk of messiness, subversion, and communality, After Sappho seems intent to preserve many of the myths empire has perpetuated for centuries, tucking them – polished, gleaming, and self-reflective – out of reach. g