Seminar delivered at Berggruen Institute’s ‘Vaster Than Empires’ writers retreat, Vetralla, Italy

Lavinia was Ursula K. Le Guin’s last novel, published in 2008. The book is set in the Bronze Age, in the area in which we find ourselves today—central western Italy. Before Rome consolidated its power in the seventh or eighth century BCE, this area was a collection of politically independent communities. Latium, the setting of the book, was very close to what is now Rome.

Lavinia, the title character, is the daughter of the king of Latium. She becomes the wife of Aeneas after he returns from the underworld and leads the Trojans to settle, as foreigners, in Latium. The setting, story and characters of this novel are based on the last six books of Vergil’s epic poem, The Aeneid. The novel was an act of homage and love for Vergil on Ursula’s part. In her prefaces, she wrote:

“For a long time anybody in Europe and the Americas who had much education at all knew Aeneas’ story…During the last century, the teaching and learning of Latin began to wither away into a scholarly speciality. So, with the death of his language, Vergil’s voice will be silenced at last. This is an awful pity, because he is one of the great poets of the world…This is what urged me to take some scenes, some hints, some foreshadowings from the epic and make them into a novel—a translation into a different form—partial, marginal, but in intent at least, faithful.”

Lavinia is built on just a few grains of Vergil, the “unfolding of a hint,” as Ursula wrote. She said that everything she truly believed was in this book. When I think about what made it so important to her, I can identify several themes: pacifism, non-linearity, homecoming. But above all this is a work feminism, restoring voice and power to Lavinia, a female character who, despite being the cause of a war and Aeneas’ last wife, is barely sketched by in the epic. As much as it is an homage to Vergil, the entire book can be read as Ursula’s rebuke to him, and to every male writer who ignores and minimizes female characters, before and after. As Lavinia says about herself at the outset of the novel,

“As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all…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 then. But he did not write them. He slighted my life, in his poems. He scanted me, because he only came to know who I was when he was dying. He’s not to blame.”

As effective as the book may be as a feminism, however, it’s also a form of literary origami that plays with space and time, which is what I’d like to focus on now that I’ve given you my “brief” background.

I never heard Ursula use the word metafiction, and I’m sure she disliked the term, as she tended to dislike any term that might be used to put her or other writers’ work in critical or marketing boxes. But there is no way around the fact that this book is metafiction, constantly commenting on the act of writing in its writing. In the passage I just read, note the way Lavinia, a character written by Ursula, describes herself as writing her emotions and her existence while also attributing them to the writing of Vergil.

For me, however, the primary form of metafiction in Lavinia is as a work of time travel but more like Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope, a specific intersection of time and place, in which:

“…spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully throughout-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.” (Bakhtin, Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel).

Lavinia takes place over a human life span, but in the relationships Ursula creates, leaps across a vast amount of time. Lavinia, the person, likely did exist, but she would have lived at least 10 centuries before Vergil wrote The Aeneid. Ursula is separated from Vergil by about 20 centuries. These quantities of time are unfathomable by humans in most contexts, and can only be comprehended through imagination and through blurring the lines of history and imagination. To make all this work, in chronotopic terms, Ursula keeps the entire narrative rooted in a specific place, which we now call Italy.

I’m not that familiar with Bakhtin and I’m not great at literary theory, but what Bakhtin doesn’t address, as I understand it, is what’s outside of the narrative, that is how the time and place of the act of writing, and the times and places of the act of reading, become part of the chronotope. A writer must contend with two time periods: the moment of writing, and the time in which the writing is set. While the writer may continue to reflect and revise on past work, the act of writing fixes a relationship between the moment of writing and the moment she is writing about, whether past, present or future. Ursula complicates, or enlivens this by involving the relationship between her time and Lavinia’s, her time and Vergil’s, and between Lavinia’s and Vergil’s times.

The reader, on the other hand, must contend with three time periods: the time in which the novel is set, the time in which the writer wrote it, and the time in which the reader is reading it. In Lavinia we must contend with four periods (Vergil’s, Lavinia’s, Ursula’s, and ours, and, in some senses with two different writers, one who is telling and the other who is retelling and amplifying the story. Just as a book without a reader is just a box of words, the time travel that fiction allows is also only fully activated by that third time period—the moment when the reader reads it. Books are written only once, but they can be read many times, by many people, across many periods of time. So it’s readers who alter the nature of reality, and create the final time-space nexus, in the reading.

In this sense, Lavinia might be less a literary chronotope and more like what’s described in her short story ‘The Shobie’s Story,’ in which a starship crew must create a cohesive group narrative to alter the nature of reality and allow faster-than-light travel, a collaboration between the Ursula, Vergil, their joint character (Lavinia), and us as readers. If that isn’t time travel, I don’t know what is.