Russell Zych
November 26th 2016
Rhetoric 103A, Section 101
Dale Carrico, Kuan Hwa
2nd Short Writing: Fig. Analysis
The subject matter of Sappho’s fragment, Eros Again, is Eros, the Greek
conception of desire a topic popularly associated with her work and her poetic
persona. In this particular fragment, the elusive omnipotent nature of the
poet’s favorite subject is explored through the use of personification,
catachresis, paradox, and simile. In the dense and rich four-line fragment these
devices characterize desire, or Eros, as powerful yet intangible. For Sappho,
the material sources and effects of desire are always in exchange with a more
elusive and mythical manner of operation, taking root in the body while escaping
as an immaterial force outside of imaginable human vocabulary. This fragment of
her poem ultimately asserts that the process by which desire acts between and
upon people escapes human conception, that desire is both beyond the human and
of it, and because of that the process of desiring is a destruction of the
barrier between material and unimaginable.
Sappho’s paradoxical characterization of desire
comes primarily through her consideration of ‘his’ form, as she personifies him
in the popular Greek construction of Eros, the god of desire who inflicts
desire upon humans and gods alike. This is made apparent when she exclaims
“Eros again!” in the first line of the fragment, and again as continues in the
next line, telling the listener or modern reader that, “he shook [her] mind.” This presumably humanized (and male gendered)
identification made through the use of the male pronoun, the citation of a
popular Greek deity, and the description of a human-like (or at the very least
animated) form of agency in Eros’ action upon her mind stand in tension with
the transhuman and immaterial implication she packs into the very same line. If
we take the poet literally, than in order for Eros a human like being to shake
her mind, “like the mountain winds shake/the oaks!” he would need to have some
superhuman ability to touch the immaterial, complex, and ultimately abstract form
of consciousness, which many compress under the name mind, therein crossing categorical boundaries of what is physical
and what is imagined. Further after doing so he would then have to touch it
forcefully enough to shake it,
exerting his power of the abstract conception of the metal life and her
personal agency. The overwhelming paradoxical image constructed by the poet’s catachresis,
her straining of language to contain and explain an exaggerated emotion, contributes
to her transhuman characterization of desire, or Eros, and their effects on the
human faculties. Sappho’s desire is at once human and beyond, posing a tension
between the human agency and the superhuman ability of Eros, the signifier of
desire, by way of his roots in a human vocabulary that jests towards a
superhuman, or abstracted force.
The simile in which Sappho grounds her construction
the paradoxical tension between the material and immaterial nature of
desire/Eros further complicates this tension by use of natural imagery which
limits it to a natural world and distancing language suggest it exists outside
of that. The simile, ”like the mountain winds shake/the oaks!” draws a
connection to Eros’ action and the natural phenomenon of the winds blowing.
This naturalizing imagery suggests that desire occurs as naturally or regularly
as does wind on earth, and thereby limits the audience’s impression an earthly
realm of expected sensations. Sappho’s (of the translator’s) choice to use
simile rather than metaphor however maintains that use of common, regular
phenomenon in a limbo between natural and imagined, by using “like” to qualify
and describe rather that state they are the very same thing as metaphor would
claim. This distancing quality reinforces the paradoxically human and
superhuman characterization of Eros by underpinning it with another paradox,
being like natural and still imagined.
Ultimately Sappho’s use of figuration to describe
Eros mirrors the paradoxically immaterial, disorienting power that people inflict
upon themselves and each other through their susceptibility to desire. Further,
because she portrays desire as rooted in the body or the human form but jesting
outwards, beyond perception or conception, tapping into abstraction the
fragment’s interaction with desire can be read as a consideration of human act
of desiring (or the enacting of Eros) as the taking up of an immaterial force
from a very material, human position, a process through which humans break past
the perceptive and cognitive limits of their simple form. The conflicting use
of personification and catachresis, of paradox and simile, elevate and
mythologize Eros/desire as an incredibly powerful person/force, able to bring
what may be natural for the human past its human limits, taking what is human
beyond human, claiming that what is beyond human is of coarse still human.
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