Over the last dozen years, Vergil’s Aeneid has become a touchstone for me. I was studying it properly for the first time when I met my wife, and since then I re-read it every two years, as I go to teach it. Most people who remember the poem from school or college, recall the famous parts: the sack of Troy, the disastrous affair with Dido, or Aeneas’ visit to the Underworld. The last six books of the poem, the entire second half, are not often recalled or referenced, even in the already small segment of culture that can knowingly make references to Vergil at all. And that is a pity, because in my opinion, it is in the second half of the poem that Vergil really hits his stride, and drives his epic home.
So it was with some pleasure that I came across Ursula LeGuin’s Lavinia. Lavinia, who never speaks in the Aeneid, is the hero’s destined bride. Her silence as a character compared to the more famous Dido, or even to her terrifying mother, Amata, is deafening. Vergil’s Lavinia is all object, no subject. LeGuin, in making her the narrator of her own story, is setting a risky and well-trodden modern and post-modern path, giving voice to the voiceless characters of better known works of fiction. The easy path here is one of inversion and diatribe: the “hero” of the standard narrative is shown to have feet-of-clay, at best, and worst to be a dastardly cad. LeGuin manages to avoid that trap almost entirely. As she says in her highly intelligent afterword, Vergil is “one of the great poets of the world,” and her intent she compares to a translator’s, in an effort to be “faithful.” If Vergil presented Lavinia as publicly silent, and Aeneas as almost completely heroic, then LeGuin has taken it on herself to honor those characterizations, and—through the conventions of a novel—put them on a human scale.
LeGuin’s portraits of Lavinia and Aeneas are lovingly rendered, and convincingly give details of a primitive Italy, but more importantly, let the meaning and joy, in the lives of women especially, shine through without sliding into preachiness or politics. Lavinia is submissive, but not to men, not to her mother. She is, like Aeneas, pius, and, in the novel, she offers the best definition of that peculiar Roman virtue that I have yet run across: “by that word, I meant responsible, faithful to duty, open to awe.” LeGuin’s Lavinia displays a very Roman kind of spirituality, somewhere between Greek paganism, and a kind of universal animism whose true virtue lies in listening and looking, in patience.
The writing of the novel is limpid and clear, in the understated way that readers of LeGuin’s other work will recognize and appreciate. The way in which she introduces the character of Vergil into the story is an interesting device, and the way in which she deploys details from the Aeneid itself is unfailingly interesting and sometimes breathtaking. There is even a kind of cameo from Dante. Indeed, my deepest concern for the novel, which may be unfounded—I cannot say—is that it may not be readable by those who have not read the Aeneid itself. While I think the novel is capable of changing the way the epic is read, I am not sure it can be enjoyed without having read the Aeneid first. However, having said that, it can be read as a kind of essay-in-novel form, a far more interesting form of literary criticism and appreciation than the usual fare. Anyone who has read LeGuin’s essays knows that she is a gifted and disciplined critic, and that discipline, those gifts, are much in evidence here.
