Sapphic eros in the writing of Cristina Peri Rossi: Strategies of desire and positions of the poetic subject in fantasy

Abstract

The reference to Sappho and her enunciation of eros as a stubborn and untameable force appears vividly in the work of Cristina Peri Rossi. Her participation or identification with the sapphic genealogy is read through images, conceptual approaches and explicit references. This article proposes a cartography from which to read the poetic work of Peri Rossi through the motif of sapphic eros, as it has been studied by specialists such as Jane McIntosh Snyder (1997), Anne Carson (2020) and Aurora Luque (2001). Three fundamental features of sapphic eros are analysed here: The compression of erotic desire as a bittersweet event; triangulation as a strategy of eros and its paradoxical unspeakability. It will be argued that this unspeakability also appears as the motor of the author's poetics, who chooses the sapphic image of the fleeing bison to represent not only the intangible nature of eros, but also the inability of language to capture the material cause that motivates it. The analysis of the desiring position of Peri Rossi's poetic voice is offered considering that the lesbian difference emerges imbricated in a written tradition that repeats and preserves the normative heterosexual fantasy.