Lavinia

I want to believe that the angst of originality and creativity are on the wane. At least for a season. With sampling, and open talk of influence, and David Shields' book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (an entire "novel" (although Shields won't call it a novel, and insists that the novel is in need of a rebirth, or of a kind of death) of quotes and footnotes), I expect that the decline of the original is on, in full. Of course any reader who takes his work seriously knows that "original" is one of the those wondrously impossible expressions of the English language (probably of any language). Whatever I read, I'm always thinking, "Hmmm this is a lot like ..." And if I can't think of what it's like, I'm still thinking about what it is like. I'm always trying to place it. Everything we read, we place. We sort it into one category or another. We may read by flavour, but we know what the source of it is - what it holds in common with others like it. The ones we call "originals" are those that take something we've always known and redress it in such a way that we recognize it (and if we recognize it, didn't it exist somewhere in our memory as a kind of possibility, at least) as something other. Perhaps this was what happened when people first read The Catcher in The Rye. Or when they watched The Tempest. Or The Inferno. And so on. But each of these things remains a member of something, a child of some style or movement - an end and a beginning of some imagined world.

Ursula K. LeGuin's Lavinia is a rewriting of Virgil's Aeneid no less. But she rewrites the story in novel form, with Virgil (known as the "poet") as Lavinia's muse and prophet. Lavinia, who is a silent outline of a character in the Aeneid - she becomes Aeneus's wife - tells us the story from her point of view. She tells us that Virgil tells her the story, so that she knows it, and how it will end, before it happens. She becomes the first reader of Virgil's epic, and his telling of the story becomes the template for her life. To put it in Star Trekkian terms, Virgil indirectly violates the "prime directive" for he can see what will (or should) happen and, via Lavinia, he makes it so.

The plot of the novel follows Virgil's telling, which is a modified version of the founding moments of the Roman Empire. Psychologically however, Lavinia is a force who uses her influence judiciously and effectively. Though the men make the decisions, her approval means everything. In this she is a political force for she defies the commands of her deceased husband's son, Ascanius, to save her own (by Aeneus) son, and becomes a symbol of heroism for her people because of it.

Rather than replicate the large-scale myth of her model, LeGuin scales things down, empowers the silent and everyday voice of a woman who loves the land and her people, and in doing so the story becomes inhabitable. Whereas the men too often hear the call of "Mars" who always lurks around them, Lavinia brings to the fore the necessities of living, of sowing and reaping, of making daily sacrifice to the gods, of caring for a father and mother, of raising a son, and of mourning all inevitable passings. Virgil recounts the reality of the world according to Mars. The world of men and ego and violence. LeGuin reminds us that our blood flows daily because we care for one another, because repeated ritual tending to the material world keeps us fed and watered, loved and living.

As in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness LeGuin sees and accepts both sides. Our necessity is to understand the two faces, the Janus, and to seek harmony with them. To choose one and reject the other leaves you with only half of the story.

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