Two Books About Vergil and The Aeneid

No doubt I will eventually fade away and be lost in oblivion, as I would have done long ago if the poet hadn't summoned me into existence. Perhaps I will become a false dream clinging like a bat to the underside of the leaves of the tree at the gate of the underworld, or an owl flitting in the dark oaks of Albunea. But I won't have to tear myself from life and go down into the dark, as he did, poor man, first in his imagination, and then as his own ghost. We each have to endure our own afterlife, he said to me once, or that is one way to understand what he said. But that dim loitering about, down in the underworld, waiting to be forgotten or reborn--that isn't true being, not even half as true as my being is as I write and you read it, and nowhere near as true as in his words, the splendid, vivid words I've lived in for centuries.

The Aeneid, Vergil's masterpiece about the founding of Rome by Aeneas, a fugitive from the Fall of Troy, was nearly lost to history: as he lay sick at the port of Brundisium, Vergil famously demanded that the unfinished manuscript be burned. The emperor Augustus countermanded the poet, who was his friend and client, and it could be argued that, of all the emperor's most lasting achievements, this is the one with the most persistent and important legacy. But why was it that Vergil demanded his masterpiece be burned? Was it simple deathbed despair, knowing that he'd be unable to shape it in the final way he desired? Or was there a deeper, more profound change of heart at work?

Ursula K. Le Guin's novel Lavinia gives us brief glimpses of the poet, lying at Brundisium, tortured by the incompleteness of his work. Vergil appears as a shade--a ghost--to Lavinia, a character in The Aeneid, and, as Le Guin argues, the greatest avatar of the poem's incomplete nature. Through these visits, Lavinia becomes aware that she has no historic reality in the same sense that the poet does, that she is a character in the poem, and she responds with force and insight to the poet who is unable to explain why she has no voice--literally, I think, she never speaks--in his poem. Lavinia is attracted to the dying poet in all sense of the word attraction; throughout the novel she describes him as one of her life's true loves--the other, of course, being Aeneas himself. Her livingness and liveliness are reproof to Vergil, who has enough will left to despair about what he has forgotten to include, but not enough to make the necessary edits that would recover Lavinia's perspective.

Lavinia seems now like a forerunner to a micro-genre that focuses on the "unspoken" stories of women in ancient literature, like Madeline Miller's novel Circe and Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, written from the perspective of the captive Trojan Briseis. I haven't read Circe, but I do think Le Guin achieves what Barker only attempts: a convincing version of the "other side of the story." Le Guin does this by making the composition of the narrative the subject of the novel; Lavinia's reflections on her own fictionality are its most persuasive and moving parts. Le Guin has Vergil appear to Lavinia at a shrine, blurring the lines between the writer and the divine. Lavinia accepts the poet's control over her life as she might accept the will of the gods; in this way the novel offers a meditation on contingency and powerless that transcend narrower themes of gender and patriarchy.

In The Aeneid, Lavinia is the subject of the war between the newcomer Aeneas and the Rutulian prince Turnus. A novelist like Miller and Barker might have had Lavinia resist both men, but Le Guin's Lavinia is content to live out the will of the author-god that she marry Aeneas, and her marriage to Aeneas proves a happy one. (You can see the impulse toward a weaker kind of novel, in which Aeneas' heroic nature is subverted, and he's made into a brute or a monster--not here.) Lavinia has no desire to change the story, but she does want to fill in the gaps, and in doing so she becomes an equal to the poet, or perhaps even his superior, because she has a kind of eternal life that he himself can never possess.

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Only at the edge of his fields had he walked, only at the edge of his life had he lived. He had become a rover, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work, a lover and yet at the same time a harrassed one, an errant through the passions of the inner life and the passions of the world, a lodger in his own life. And now, almost at the end of his strength, at the end of his search, self-purged and ready to leave, purged to readiness and ready to take upon himself the last loneliness, now destiny with all its forces had seized him again, had forbidden him all the simplicity of his beginnings and of the inner life, had deflected his backward journey once more, had turned him back to the evil which had overshadowed all his days, as if it had reserved for him just this sole simplicity--, the simplicity of dying.

Hermann Broch's landmark modernist novel The Death of Virgil begins with the same question as Lavinia: why did Vergil want to burn his masterpiece? Broch's answer is different, but perhaps the same, having to do with incompleteness and insufficiency, not in a narrative sense, but a metaphysical one. Broch's novel followed Vergil in the last twenty-four hours in life, being ferried by Augustus to Brundisium, fighting with the emperor and his literary executors about his final wishes, and succumbing to a raging fever. The fever brings the poet close to death, and close to death he begins to understand the true nature of the world, and the more he understands this true nature, the more he understands that literature grasps at something it by nature can never achieve, and its attempts are perhaps more than fruitless, but a lie.

The Death of Virgil's stream-of-consciousness is no easy read. I couldn't tell you honestly that I understood more than half of it, but there are pleasurable incomprehensibilities as well as frustrating ones, and I enjoyed the rolling, rollicking nature of Broch's writing, which recalls the rocking of the sea on which Vergil arrives at Brundisium. What I did understand is that Broch's metaphysics hinge on the falseness of perception and the seduction of beauty, which substitutes a pleasing falsehood in place of true perception, which might instead reveal a fundamental unity in the universe. Literature is metaphor, and can only point toward the unity, but in doing so it cannot participate in that unity, and so the poet's words, like all words, can only ever be false. I could be wrong about some of the particulars there, but it did seem to me that Broch shares in the general modernist suspicion of the literary project and its ability to describe the world, and like other modernists he reaches back to the literature of the past to try to provide a framework that expresses the growing slippage at the same time that it stabilizes it.

Broch's Vergil passes in and out of lucidity. He's visited by real people, like the emperor and his doctor, and sometimes he's visited by phantasms, including a beautiful servant boy, a mercurial slave, and the likeness of his beloved, Plotia. At times it's not clear who's real and who's a phantasm, but of course, we are asked to understand that such hard dichotomies belong to a world of limitations that Vergil is currently leaving behind. One of the most interesting sections of the book is a long, drawn-out argument with Augustus, who rebukes Vergil for his wish to burn The Aeneid, claiming its importance in expressing the myth of the Roman state. Augustus' resemblance to 20th century European fascism is hard to miss: he claims the superiority of the state over the individual, and claims literature for the state. Vergil's response to Augustus preserves not only the primacy of the individual but the individual as the locus of metaphysics. If the true world is to be perceived and experienced, it can only be done as the individual, and though the literary project can only fail, it must fail on the individual's terms.

Both Lavinia and The Death of Virgil seize on the doubts inherent in the legend of The Aeneid: what was it that so important, so lacking, so insufficient, in a work now considered one of the greatest produced by history? For Le Guin, the answer lies in the narrative itself, teasing out its blind spots, placing the writer and the text in a kind of generative dialectic. For Broch, the answer lies in the failure of literature itself. Both books, I think, return us to the greatness of The Aeneid by enlarging it, rather than diminishing it.