BOOK REPORT: LAVINIA BY URSULA K. LE GUIN

"I WENT TO THE SALT BEDS BY THE MOUTH of the river in the May of my nineteenth year, to get salt for the sacred meal.” So opens Ursula K. Le Guin’s wonderful tale of poetry, history and myth set in the time of Roman pre-history when greatest city of the ancient world was nothing more than a rude settlement on the swampy banks of the Tiber River. It is the story of Lavinia, the daughter of Latinus, king of Latium who, in Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, marries Aeneas, the mythic hero that lead his people from the ruins of Troy to found the dynasty that was to bring the Roman republic into existence. The Aeneid itself was written during the reign of Octavian (later Augustus) between 29 BC and 19 BC, and combines traditional myths and legends to give a “history” of the founding of Rome by survivors from another great city of the ancient world, Troy. In a sense, Virgil’s epic describes the ‘passing-on’ of the torch of high civilization from the Greek world to the Roman. Thus, Rome was founded by a great hero of the ancient world, foretelling of Roman greatness to come in an epic foundational myth.

LeGuin’s story takes a different tack. She focuses on the life of Lavinia, a native Latin whom Aeneas will marry to found his dynasty. It is written in the first person, through her memories and reflections, and tells the story of her life, something she points out “her poet” neglects to do.

“As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all. Before he wrote, I was the mistiest of figures, scarcely more than a name in a genealogy. It was he who brought me to life…who…made me able to remember my life and myself… But he did not write them. He slighted my life, in his poem. (3)

Virgil writes hundreds of years in the future from the time of Aeneas’ supposed “arrival” in Italy, and Le Guin sets her story in the kingdom of Latium which borders the “holy Tiber” river on the west coast of Italy. She takes her story from the last six books of Virgil’s epic, where Aeneas and his fellow Trojans attempt to establish themselves on the Italian mainland. It is a time before recorded history, when the gods of the woods and hills are honoured, still, through ritual and ceremony, by people who have yet to know the power and terrible majesty of the Greek-borne gods. “The messenger spoke on: oracles had bidden them bring the gods of Troy over the seas to the far shore of Italy, where they would find a home.” (100) It is a time of peace and security, but a war would be soon fought, and in both Virgil’s tale and Le Guin’s, it is fought over a woman—Lavinia, King Latinus’s daughter—who will marry the victor of the conflict. Virgil draws parallels between events in Homer’s Iliad (which tells the story of the rivalry between the Greek hero, Achilles, and Troy's champion, Hector, during the Trojan War), and the struggle between Aeneas and his Italian rival, Turnus.  Le Guin follows Virgil’s tale, but focuses on Lavinia, and it is through her eyes we see the war that will bring about the end of Italy’s antique world and the start of the Roman. We are made aware of the gains and losses such a change will bring.

In addition, Le Guin has Lavinia question whether she and her world are “fictional” or not. In a trance, she talks to her ‘creator’, Virgil, who comes to her as a wraith from the distant future, where, dying, he struggles to complete his masterwork for the emperor Augustus. While making offerings at the sacred cave in the forest of Albunea, she cannot decide if her world is merely a dream, an imagining, in the poet’s mind or something real. She decides that it doesn't matter, for all she can do is "go on." And as Le Guin’s tale gives life to Lavina, whether she is a character in a novel or one barely mentioned in Virgil’s poem, is irrelevant. It is her story that lives. 

 “We are all contingent.* Resentment is foolish and ungenerous, and even anger is inadequate. I am a fleck of light on the surface of the sea, a glint of light from the evening star. I live in awe. If I never lived at all, yet I am a silent wing on the wind, a bodiless voice in the forest of Albunea. I speak, but all I can say is: Go, go on.” (68)

Le Guin’s novel weaves the art of story-telling, myth and legend to create a compelling portrait of a character whose life is every bit as rich and evocative, and real as Virgil’s great hero.^** It is a story written by a master story-teller at the height of her powers.    

Cheers.

*Lavinia is contingent on the vagaries of Virgil’s imagination and his inclination as a writer to tell her story or on the other hand, to leave her all but invisible in his poem. Virgil’s writing, in turn, is contingent on his need, in part, to please his emperor and to provide him with an epic story that affirms Rome’s heroic beginnings and noble lineage.

**At one point, Lavinia speculates that without war there could be no heroes. She asks if that would be such a bad thing. It’s a question that we still need to ask, I think.

—Note: Le Guin adds a helpful postscript where she discusses how she came to write the story of Lavinia.

  

Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia. Harcourt, Inc., NY, 2008.