For the Love of Ambiguity
Researching queer history involves embracing ambiguity, but ambiguity is present on many levels with many different purposes. This article, though otherwise somewhat tangential, is a useful exercise in recognizing that.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP LHMP #513 Pelliccia 1995 Ambiguity against Ambiguity About LHMP Full citation:Pelliccia, Hayden. 1995. “Ambiguity against Ambiguity: Anacreon 13 Again” in Illinois Classical Studies, Vol. 20: 23-34.
In the ages before people fought their academic battles in mailing lists and then blogs, the pages of academic journals often recorded back-and-forth rivalries over such details as the accuracy of translations and interpretations, proper credit for prior publication, and accusations of misunderstanding. This article is one of those: largely a record of detailed pedantic rivalry over whether a prior rebuttal to a previous article had correctly understood the original author’s position. As such, I don’t know how much value it has in absolute terms—especially given that neither the original article nor the rebuttal had previously come to my attention—but it touches on whether a particular turn of phrase in one ancient Greek poem does or does not make lesbianism a punchline.
Perhaps of more general interest, the essay considers questions of ambiguity: not only the ambiguity inherent in trying to decipher and choose among multiple possible meanings in a text for which we are not a contemporary audience, but also trying to discern the deliberate ambiguities built into the text by the original author and how those ambiguities would have been received at the time.
So, that said, the poem in question is Anacreon #13. Superficially it is an old man’s lament that an attractive young woman has no interest in him. Anacreon’s poems tend to be witty epigrams with a theme of “wine, women, and song.”
[Note: if you ever want to go down a peculiar rabbit hole, check out the 18th century English “Anacreontic Society” who chose him for their patron. And in particular their theme song “To Anacreon in Heaven,” whose tune has achieved some small amount of lasting notoriety. But I digress.]
The translation offered in Hubbard 2003 can serve as context. I’ve re-ordered the words in the last line to better match the Greek original, since it will be relevant. (See also Boehringer 2021 for further context on the poem.)
Once again golden-haired Eros,
Hitting me with a purple ball,
Calls me out to play
With a fancy-sandaled maid.
But she, hailing from
Well-endowed Lesbos, finds fault
With my hair, for it’s white.
At another she gapes open-mouthed.
The first key point is that the word “another” in the last line is grammatically feminine, but the word for “hair” is also grammatically feminine. So there is ambiguity in whether the punchline is simply “the girl prefers another type of hair, i.e., someone younger” or refers to an unspecified female person “the girl prefers another girl.”
The reference to the girl being from Lesbos stands out to a modern reader, but as many scholars have pointed out, the women of Lesbos were associated in antiquity with a wide variety of attributes, including beauty (and thus the ability to pick and choose partners), and same-sex desire is far from the most obvious interpretation. (Though Pelliccia seems to lean towards that being a significantly available association at the time.)
The second key point in interpretation is that the structure of the poem demands a “punchline”—a twist of interpretation, and that the phrase “gapes at” has a negative connotation.
The scholarly arguments covered in the article revolve around who has endorsed which possible interpretations of the poem, on what basis, and which interpretations should be ruled out. Three possible readings of the text are discussed by both the author and his adversary:
The poem is straightforwardly heterosexual, the missing referent is “hair,” and Anacreon is being nasty to the girl because she prefers a younger man. The poem is straightforwardly homosexual, the reference to Lesbos indicates the girl’s desires, the missing referent is another woman, and Anacreon is being nasty to the girl because she’s a lesbian. Both the reference to Lesbos and what could fill in the missing referent are ambiguous to the audience, the context of the poem first signals the audience to expect “from Lesbos = beautiful” in a heterosexual context, the missing “another [xxx]” is thus filled in with “hair,” based on the previous mention, but the final “gapes at” signals the audience to reanalyze the poem and look for a reason for the surprising hostility, which they can find by switching to the alternate readings “lesbian…another girl.”After much detailed discussion of how the structure of the poem sets up the various possible readings (with examples from similar poems and expressions), Pelliccia offers the conclusion (or at least opinion) that all three readings could be inherent in Anacreon’s intent, with different members of the audience either getting the lesbian reading immediately (#2), not getting the reading at all (#1), or experiencing that twist of meaning when the final words signal to look for it.
Although the context of this article may seem to be a pedantic snit-fit, the deep dive into the meanings and uses of ambiguity and the considerations in how to analyze it, is useful to keep in mind when popularized queer history offers simple and straightforward assertions about historic texts.
Time period: Classical EraPlace: GreeceMisc tags: sexual/romantic desireEvent / person: Anacreon View comments (0)
