In a Sapphic Time and Space: The Chronotope of Lesbos in Les Chansons de Bilitis

This paper invokes Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope to propose what I call the "chronotope of Lesbos," the origins of which are found in ancient lyric poetry and formalized in nineteenth-century decadent literature. I examine the characteristics of the chronotope through the example of Pierre Louÿs's Les Chansons de Bilitis (1894)—which traces the life of Bilitis, a fictional contemporary and pupil of Sappho—arguing that Lesbos is characterized by abstract time and othered space. After establishing that the lesbian subject is the product of this space-time relationship, I consider how the chronotope constructs a particular image of the lesbian subject within and in relation to modernity.