2025 Readings 105

    I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. I'm not sure of the nature of my existence, and wonder to find myself writing. I speak Latin, of course, but did I ever learn to write it? That seems unlikely. No doubt someone with my name, Lavinia, did exist, but she may have been so different from my own idea of myself, or my poet's idea of me, that it only confuses me to think about her. 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, to myself, and so made me able to remember my life and myself, which I do, vividly, with all kinds of emotions, emotions I feel strongly as I write, perhaps because the events I remember only come to exist as I write them, or as he wrote them.

    But he did not write them. He slighted my life, in his poem. He scanted me, because he only came to know who I was when he was dying. He's not to blame. It was too late for him to make amends, rethink, complete the half lines, perfect the poem he thought imperfect. He grieved for that, I  know; he grieved for me. Perhaps where he is now, down there across the dark rivers, somebody will tell him that Lavinia grieves for him.

Ursula Le Guin, Lavinia

This morning I finished Ursula Le Guin's novel Lavinia. Oddly, that's the third Le Guin novel I've read this year, odd because I had never read any of her work before. The first two were products of the demands of the Unofficial Book Club that continues to trundle on against all logic. Lavinia, however, was a byproduct of the Epics book. The character Lavinia plays an important, although limited and silent role in Virgil's Aeneid. She is destined to be Aeneas's second (or third, depending how you count Dido - I would be gracious and recognize Dido's belief that they were actually married) wife, and the mother of the Roman people. In the Aeneid she doesn't say a word, and she is most known for her hair catching on fire during a ceremony (which has tremendous prophetic implications) and her famous blush. I used her blush as a focal point in a chapter to talk about the fact we always want the female characters in the epics to say more, and that many modern readers have chosen these female characters and gave them that voice. It made me wonder if anyone had actually done that with Lavinia, and was surprised that Le Guin (I guess that's more pleasantly surprised that shocked). I don't know if I loved the book, but I liked it quite a bit, and it made me want to finish my own book even more. I always warn my students that when they choose a topic that they really love for a paper (for instance, instead of writing their paper on a section of Crime and Punishment for my Nature of Evil class they instead pick a video game or anime or film) one of the dangers is that they love it so much that they end up retelling way too much of the story. How could they not? If you asked me a question about Bleak House or The Chess Garden or The Book of Disquiet or Remembrance of Things Past I would waste way too much time gushing about the story. I would argue that Le Guin falls into that trip in Lavinia. She is trying to give Lavinia a voice, but too much of that voice was consumed with retelling the story of the Aeneid through Lavinia's eyes. Eventually, after the events of the Aeneid play themselves out, Le Guin can begin to tell the story of Aeneas's last three years, and Lavinia's sorrow know that he only has that short amount of time left, and the time after his death. The best part is that three year stretch of time before Aeneas's passing. It's clear that Le Guin loves the Aeneid, and that's one of the things that inspired her to take on the challenge of giving Lavinia her voice. And, if anyone know the temptation to convince folks to revisit these classic works it's me.