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Review: Ursula K. LeGuin, Lavinia (Harcourt, 2008)
The short version of this review is that this is a wonderful book, and you should all go read it too. And to explain why, I might as easily quote the entire afterword as write a review.
This novel tells the story of Lavinia, the girl Aeneas marries in Italy, the motive of the war which takes up the last six books of the Aeneid. In the poem itself she famously speaks not a single word; she's more notable for her association with omens foretelling the history of the Roman people, and for a scene in which she blushes. In this book, she tells her own story.
There are a number of things which one might think this book is, which it is not. It is not an attempt to correct Vergil, or to outdo him, or to undo his work; it is, unexpectedly and wonderfully, as the author calls it, "an act of gratitude to the poet, a love-offering." And it is particularly wonderful because LeGuin understands Vergil's work as deeply as she loves it.
LeGuin rejects the possibility of finishing Vergil's poem: rather, she presents an interpretation of its final act, where Aeneas kills Turnus. This is an act which is both horrible and virtuous, pious and impious; it is the point at which all Vergil's questions -- about history, about heroism, about virtue and its cost -- remain unresolved. In the book, it is an act which weighs on Aeneas for the rest of his short life, the moment when two necessities, virtus and pietas, come into conflict. LeGuin makes the problem explicit in a brief series of conversations between Aeneas and his son Ascanius about the nature of virtue. Ascanius argues that true virtue is military, and only that; Aeneas, older and with more experience of victory and defeat, answers, "I thought what a man knew he ought to do was what he must do. But what if they're not the same? Then, to win a victory is to be defeated. To uphold order is to cause disorder, ruin, and death. Virtue and piety destroy each other. I cannot make it out." Lavinia's narration makes the connection to Turnus explicit, although she does not rule out other meanings, other moments when virtue and piety collide, where "what we must do," and "what's right" fail to meet.
The novel itself breaks the bonds of Vergil's story, pushes it fifty years forward by the end of the book, but the characters are versions of their epic selves. Even LeGuin's Ascanius is, in his weaknesses, a reasonable extrapolation of the boy in the poem; I think this is the characterization that people will question the most, and my sense is that this is a character I've seen before in LeGuin, the weak man who is so attached to his own privilege as a man that he cannot see anyone else. But if it gives us conversations like the ones between him and Aeneas, I can't complain.
There are other echoes of the Aeneid, as well -- Lavinia's exile, toward the end of the book, mimics Aeneas' own experience of exile. It's even prompted in the same way Aeneas' is, as her father warns her that when the time comes, "take your child and your gods and go!"
But more, the very fabric of the book and the fabric of the poem are one: the landscape in which the action takes place is, physically, a few square miles of Latium, but more truly, the text of the Aeneid itself. LeGuin pays attention to early Latin culture and early Roman culture, but there is no systematic attempt to recreate the world of 12th (or 8th) century Italy. Instead, we are told again and again, the world is the world of the poem and the characters are precisely that, the characters of the poem, who live only inasmuch as Vergil brought them to life. There's something typically post-Vergilian about this inability to escape from Vergil's creation, and it's both strange and pleasing to see an author like LeGuin facing the same problems and responding in the same way as Ovid did, two thousand years earlier. (And the book ends on a distinctly Ovidian note). LeGuin's characters, like Seneca's, know exactly who they are even before the action begins: they become their own authors, and act out their fates, their own versions of "what we must do" and "what we ought to do."
But if the characters live because of their poet, they also live independently of him. Indeed, Vergil, who appears as a character within LeGuin's text, recognizes that his own knowledge of his creation is incomplete: he is amazed by Lavinia when he meets her, and appalled by his failure to tell his story. LeGuin certainly plays with the unfinished nature of the Aeneid here -- Lavinia's story is told so incompletely there that it can never end, even in LeGuin's book. It is too unfinished, too susceptible to reinterpretation and retelling. Certainly, the Aeneid has its unfinished edges, where new threads can be woven in, but I don't think LeGuin limits the eternity of stories to ones the author never quite finished: within the novel, Lavinia asks to hear the story of Aeneas' death over and over, because as long as Achates is telling it, it's never truly over, and Aeneas is never truly dead. Lavinia's story here doesn't quite end, so long as we keep reading, but the same must be true of other characters in their own stories, beyond the confines of this one.
There's a certain deceptive simplicity to Lavinia and to Lavinia, but what shines through most clearly, to me at least, is LeGuin's attachment to this story, to the characters, the poet, their world. Her Latins are also Romans, coarse and brutal and inescapably alien, far from perfect, but also the source of so much that we value in our own world, those "homely but delicate values, such as the loyalty, modesty, and responsibility implicit in Vergil's idea of a hero." That Roman world -- Aeneas' world and Vergil's -- does not go unchallenged here: when Lavinia looks at Aeneas' great shield, all she sees is war and death and destruction, and that is a true vision. But LeGuin does not entirely reject it: their world, after all, is also Lavinia's.
This novel tells the story of Lavinia, the girl Aeneas marries in Italy, the motive of the war which takes up the last six books of the Aeneid. In the poem itself she famously speaks not a single word; she's more notable for her association with omens foretelling the history of the Roman people, and for a scene in which she blushes. In this book, she tells her own story.
There are a number of things which one might think this book is, which it is not. It is not an attempt to correct Vergil, or to outdo him, or to undo his work; it is, unexpectedly and wonderfully, as the author calls it, "an act of gratitude to the poet, a love-offering." And it is particularly wonderful because LeGuin understands Vergil's work as deeply as she loves it.
LeGuin rejects the possibility of finishing Vergil's poem: rather, she presents an interpretation of its final act, where Aeneas kills Turnus. This is an act which is both horrible and virtuous, pious and impious; it is the point at which all Vergil's questions -- about history, about heroism, about virtue and its cost -- remain unresolved. In the book, it is an act which weighs on Aeneas for the rest of his short life, the moment when two necessities, virtus and pietas, come into conflict. LeGuin makes the problem explicit in a brief series of conversations between Aeneas and his son Ascanius about the nature of virtue. Ascanius argues that true virtue is military, and only that; Aeneas, older and with more experience of victory and defeat, answers, "I thought what a man knew he ought to do was what he must do. But what if they're not the same? Then, to win a victory is to be defeated. To uphold order is to cause disorder, ruin, and death. Virtue and piety destroy each other. I cannot make it out." Lavinia's narration makes the connection to Turnus explicit, although she does not rule out other meanings, other moments when virtue and piety collide, where "what we must do," and "what's right" fail to meet.
The novel itself breaks the bonds of Vergil's story, pushes it fifty years forward by the end of the book, but the characters are versions of their epic selves. Even LeGuin's Ascanius is, in his weaknesses, a reasonable extrapolation of the boy in the poem; I think this is the characterization that people will question the most, and my sense is that this is a character I've seen before in LeGuin, the weak man who is so attached to his own privilege as a man that he cannot see anyone else. But if it gives us conversations like the ones between him and Aeneas, I can't complain.
There are other echoes of the Aeneid, as well -- Lavinia's exile, toward the end of the book, mimics Aeneas' own experience of exile. It's even prompted in the same way Aeneas' is, as her father warns her that when the time comes, "take your child and your gods and go!"
But more, the very fabric of the book and the fabric of the poem are one: the landscape in which the action takes place is, physically, a few square miles of Latium, but more truly, the text of the Aeneid itself. LeGuin pays attention to early Latin culture and early Roman culture, but there is no systematic attempt to recreate the world of 12th (or 8th) century Italy. Instead, we are told again and again, the world is the world of the poem and the characters are precisely that, the characters of the poem, who live only inasmuch as Vergil brought them to life. There's something typically post-Vergilian about this inability to escape from Vergil's creation, and it's both strange and pleasing to see an author like LeGuin facing the same problems and responding in the same way as Ovid did, two thousand years earlier. (And the book ends on a distinctly Ovidian note). LeGuin's characters, like Seneca's, know exactly who they are even before the action begins: they become their own authors, and act out their fates, their own versions of "what we must do" and "what we ought to do."
But if the characters live because of their poet, they also live independently of him. Indeed, Vergil, who appears as a character within LeGuin's text, recognizes that his own knowledge of his creation is incomplete: he is amazed by Lavinia when he meets her, and appalled by his failure to tell his story. LeGuin certainly plays with the unfinished nature of the Aeneid here -- Lavinia's story is told so incompletely there that it can never end, even in LeGuin's book. It is too unfinished, too susceptible to reinterpretation and retelling. Certainly, the Aeneid has its unfinished edges, where new threads can be woven in, but I don't think LeGuin limits the eternity of stories to ones the author never quite finished: within the novel, Lavinia asks to hear the story of Aeneas' death over and over, because as long as Achates is telling it, it's never truly over, and Aeneas is never truly dead. Lavinia's story here doesn't quite end, so long as we keep reading, but the same must be true of other characters in their own stories, beyond the confines of this one.
There's a certain deceptive simplicity to Lavinia and to Lavinia, but what shines through most clearly, to me at least, is LeGuin's attachment to this story, to the characters, the poet, their world. Her Latins are also Romans, coarse and brutal and inescapably alien, far from perfect, but also the source of so much that we value in our own world, those "homely but delicate values, such as the loyalty, modesty, and responsibility implicit in Vergil's idea of a hero." That Roman world -- Aeneas' world and Vergil's -- does not go unchallenged here: when Lavinia looks at Aeneas' great shield, all she sees is war and death and destruction, and that is a true vision. But LeGuin does not entirely reject it: their world, after all, is also Lavinia's.
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Turnus is not exactly a hero here -- at least, not in Lavinia's eyes.
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