Lavinia - Ursula LeGuin

[Ian Carmichael]

I know there's a heap of you who love Ursula K. LeGuin (and so you should.)
I've just been reading her latest/very recent Lavinia (Harcourt, 2008). Since I don't know the Aeneid I can't tell yet how the story connects (that's my next major reading project - many years ago I heard parts of it as one-man reading by the amazing Australian voice actor Ron Haddrick; it was stunning.)
Anyway Lavinia, I gather, has a minor part in the Aeneid - but in this novel she meets the poet who draws her life - and Vergil (in a time shifted dream speaks with her a few times) tells her the poem. LeGuin describes it like this:
"It wasn't singing like the shepherds' songs, or rowers' choruses, or the hymns at Ambarvalia and Compitalia, or the songs women sing all day at spinning and weaving and pounding and chopping and cleaning and sweeping. There was no tune to it. Its words were all the music of it, its words were its drumbeat, clack of the loom, tread of feet, oarstroke, heartbeat, waves breaking on the beach at Troy away across the world." (p 44)

So, read it if you will. The main comment I want to leave with is - given LeGuin's description of the Aeneid, how could anyone not want to read it, and to find the experience she describes.

We've had few forays into joy recently - here's another, the inspiration that comes from another retelling their joy - not analysing it to sterility but re-evocating the experience.

Like poetry, I suspect that proper honour and response is
...quiet first.
...poetry second

This why I love Daniel Pennac's emphasis in The Rights of the the Reader on reading. The re-engaging teacher sits his class down - to read to them. He doesn't discuss the book; he doesn't introduce the cultural framework and historical setting. He starts with the roll and cadence of the book, and lets it draw its own excitement. He defeats the barriers to reading by resuming the abandoned seat of the teller, freeing his class from the fear they've learned of reading aloud.

[Laura Gibbs]

Ian, I've had this on my MUST-READ list for a while and just the small quote you included here makes me think it needs to get bumped up to the winter-break reading list instead of waiting for summer. This is really exciting! It sounds very much like the kind of story that LeGuin told in the Tombs of Atuan, if you remember that one. Although she does not call it a re-vision of the story of Theseus and Ariadne, that's what it is - but all the glamor has been taken out of it, and instead you get the life of a woman who has been consecrated to serve the ancient and terrifying gods of an underground labyrinth. The picture of the day-to-day life of this priestess, the temple, and all the goings-on there manages to circumvent all the superficial romantic way that many folks respond to Greek mythology and instead get into it as a matter of life as it is lived and religion as it is believed and, even more importantly, obeyed. Tombs of Atuan has been my favorite of LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy ever since I first read it when I was maybe 12 years old or so - and rereading it again last summer, I found it just as marvelous as ever!

About the Aeneid... this is a sore spot with me, because Vergil's Aeneid is the great locus of disaster in Latin teaching these days. The AP Latin text (which is a private exam, an EXPENSIVE exam administered by a private company which makes millions of dollars of profit every year) is a test that American high school seniors can take to get college credit. In the past year there has been a huge debate raging because the company that administers the Latin exams decided to offer only ONE exam from now on: Vergil's Aeneid. It is discontinuing an alternative exam which covered a variety of Latin poets (Ovid, Catullus and Horace, I think, although I am not up on the details, since I find the whole AP approach to Latin vile - it is an English translation exam). Anyway, I have never been a fan of Vergil's Aeneid because of the way it dominates college Latin courses, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels ... and now Vergil's hegemony over high school Latin will be complete, too. Alas.

For me, Vergil just represents everything kind of tedious about Latin: he took the fantastic and amazing oral epic of style of Homer, and made it "literary" by smoothing off all the rough edges and making everything neat and clean and perfect in that neat and clean and perfect classical way. I am a Latinist, not a classicist - and Vergil is the ultimate classical text. The Aeneid is also the arch-text of Roman imperialism, which is hard for me to stomach. For Latin epic I always preferred the sprawling and weird Metamorphoses of Ovid, or the shocking and wild Civil War of Lucan - his Julius Caesar is a dead-ringer for Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now - just as Duvall's character "loves the smell of napalm in the morning," Lucan's Julius Caesar asks to have his breakfast brought to him on the battlefield because he loves to look at the corpses of dead Romans (it is a civil war after all) while he eats. Lucan was involved in a conspiracy against the later Caesar, Nero, and when the conspiracy failed, he was forced to commit suicide. As I recall he was in his early 20s. Just think what epics we might have gotten from him if he had lived a long and prosperous life being wined and dined at the emperor's table as Vergil did, eh?

[Ian Carmichael]

Pace Vergil - as I'm getting near the end of Lavinia, I note that LeGuin herself includes an afterword about her interaction with the Aeneid and her compositional dialogue - an interesting insight into her creative process.

A propos your response to the monolithic monopoly of Vergil - I oppose them all and espouse a monopoly of none. (Vergil is interesting in the sense that it is the cosy anachronistic reflection of heroic days, similar to the faux-mediaevel material of Dunsany and William Morris. ) None has the right to usurp the field, be they fox or hegdehog.
As bad to claim that all English epic is encompassed in Piers Plowman, or Chaucer, or Longfellow.., that Shakespeare is the only dramatist... It's both arrant and errant nonsense!
Which is true gospel? Mark or Luke? Thomas or Mary Magdalene? Anyway, fulmination aside, I think you'll love Lavinia. (I missed the classic detail of the tombs of Atuan - but did at least see the echoes of Greek underworld there!)

[Laura Gibbs]

The sheer variety of ancient myth is really glorious - but it really takes some getting used to for my students. Even though the Bible itself contains variations (as with the Gospels, as you point out!), the students have this desire to find the "official" version, the "authorized" version of a myth, and when the ancient sources report different versions of a labor of Hercules, or different lists of just who the Olympian gods were, their impulse is to ask a kind of scientific or historical question, about which one is right. Luckily, I get to reassure them that they are all "right"... it is myth: not a scientific law, not a historical event. IMAGINATION. :-)