Lavinia, Part 3: Science Fiction?

Enough people thought Le Guin’s Lavinia was science fiction that it was shortlisted for the BSFA best novel award, and placed in last year’s poll of the best sf novels by women of the previous decade.

But why is it science fiction? Is it science fiction because that’s what Le Guin writes, and therefore this must be too? Is it science fiction between there’s a time traveler in the story, albeit one who makes a limited number of appearances, and those through extended vision sequences? Is it science fiction because, as I have proposed elsewhere, history is a form of science, and this story plays around with historiography in a science fictional way?

Jo Walton and Niall Harrison assert that it’s fantasy, as opposed to science fiction. Others clearly saw no distinction between science fiction and fantasy for the purposes of these particular two samplers – the BSFA Award is specifically open to fantasy, after all, despite the name of the organisation. And Niall didn’t define “science fiction” for the purpose of last year’s best-of poll, so its presence there doesn’t preclude it being only fantasy.

And yet, Niall observed that some people voted for Lavinia for the best-of poll in the same email as they said they wished they could vote for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but couldn’t because that was fantasy. Clearly, some people were consciously thinking of Lavinia as being science fiction as opposed to fantasy.

Personally, I don’t believe that one categorisation precludes the other. Above all, Lavinia is historical fiction, with a focus on the practical intricacies of daily life, and the mechanics of legend. It has one minor possible moment of mythic magic, when a group of household lares are mysteriously transported from one place to another. It has a time-traveling poet on his death bed, whose transtemporal dialogues can be interpreted as science fictional time travel, or as fantastical vision.

It also has a self-aware narrator, whose story is suffused with her consciousness of contingency. Her existence depends upon her being recounted. I’d never thought of post-modern as a mythic mode, but her self-consciousness is thoroughly both in this tale, as is the literalness embodied in her final transformation. Looked at from a different angle again, she feels a keen sense of wonder at the very fact of her own existence, under the circumstances. Perhaps her historiographic analytic self-consciousness is enough of a psychological experiment to justify Lavinia being thought of science fiction.

Lavinia, Part 2: Audience

Lavinia is one of the most recent installations in a long history of what is, in effect, Aeneid-related fan fiction. It was a particularly popular topic for authors in the seventeenth and eighteen century, when the well-educated were quite likely to have read it in Latin as part of their education. The ancient Latin work spawned a slew of elaborators and continuations, best know of which is Purcell’s opera, written about Dido and Aeneas.

Indeed, one of my own extremely rare forays into fan art was when a friend at university asked me to draw a series of small images of Aeneas and his escape from Troy. The images were quite tiny and in watercolour pencil, so barely more than stick figures at that scale. Further, I hadn’t read the Aeneid yet, so relied entirely on my friend’s description of each of eight or nine scenes. That’s how I first met Ascanius and Aeneas and their household Lares, the house gods they saved from Troy, and which find their home, ultimately, with Lavinia in Le Guin’s novel. In Lavinia, Aeneas’ first point of personal commitment to the title character is in entrusting her with their care; and one of the few moments proposed as potentially-supernatural intervention occurs when the Lares move themselves back to her custody.

I’m sure other Aeneid-related works are still being produced, if not so many as in their heyday. Certainly Troy-related works have been going strong lately, if more focused on the Trojan War itself than its aftermath. Equally certain is how well known the stories of Troy are, from their related epics to the ongoing archeological investigations into the history of a city long-since defunct. It’s as inspiring as Atlantis.* Just the other day in Paris, I saw a Trojan dog in the window of some upscale mass-market clothing store, big enough for at least three people.

So the stories generally are known. But how well is the Aeneid in particular known these days among those who haven’t studied Latin? I wonder, not in terms of judging whatever count as “reading the classics”, but in term of who the target audience for Lavinia might be. And does knowing the source material even matter?

My copy of the book is printed in a nice, clear, big font, which leaves me wondering if it was marketed – as many of Le Guin’s books have been – as that relatively-recent classification, Young Adult fiction. The story does deal with a young woman coming of age. How accessible would this book be to someone with no background in Aeneid, whether or not they were a teenager? The story itself provides a summary, in effect, of the last three books of the Aeneid, plus quite a big of its contextual background, but equally the book is written in conscious dialogue with the poem and its poet, who himself appears as an influential character in the book. Lavinia herself tells the reader that her very existence is contingent on his having told of her having been.

Le Guin’s books often deal with historically-rich civilizations, burdened from and benefitting from their layers of past. Might that mean her books would intrinsically appeal to readers with a greater historical consciousness and interest? Or perhaps it is largely through partially-derivative works like this that audiences are most familiar with the Aeneid these days, if at all?

I first read Lavinia specifically because it had been nominated for the BSFA Award for best novel of 2009. Le Guin is, of course, one of the most important authors of science fiction and fantasy; but is this book even targeted at readers of those genres? (I’ll consider the degree to which it even is science fiction in my next post.)

It’s a Le Guin book, and a good and well-reviewed book, so of course it sold at least moderately well. It’s been published at least in the US, the UK, and Japan, and had both hardback and paperback editions; but who is the book’s audience?

* I was recently looking through a brochure of things to do while in Dubai. It includes a theme park devoted to how the residents of Atlantis might have lived.

Lavinia, Part 1: Voice and Identity

Ursula Le Guin’s novel Lavinia is the story of an identity, and of permutations of “I”.

The book begins with the word “I”, and, as throughout, the reader sees this world through the eyes of the titular Lavinia:

I went to the salt beds by the mouth of the river, in the May of my nineteenth year, to get salt for the sacred meal.

Lavinia was a minor figure in Vergil’s Aeneid, a voiceless treaty-bride to his hero Aeneas once he finally settles in Italy and metaphorically plants the seeds which will grow into the city and empire of Rome. Vergil had little enough to say about the young woman, and, as Le Guin’s Lavinia tells us, much of what little he said was cliché rather than accurately descriptive.

The Lavinia of the novel is a voice of several parts. The primary story is that of her more distant past, growing up in Latium, learning the rituals of worship which structure her experience of time, and encountering Aeneas, first through prophecy, then from afar, later through treaties, and finally as his bride. Interludes tell us of a later past, her time happily married with Aeneas, in the three brief years they have together – as she knows and he does not. The framing narrative is the mystery of her voice, that she has one at all, for Vergil, her poet, did not give her one in his poem.

Vergil narrated her into existence, she tells us, in turn recursively narrating his existence in to her story. He appears in her story as a time-traveler in the dreams of his death bed. He meets her that way for the first time, when it is far too late to include her properly in the poem he has already written in his own time; Lavinia, and how badly he misrepresented her that poem, become sone of his dying regrets.

Their conversations cast a long shadow over the playing out of the book’s events; his descriptions of what will happen to Aeneas and what is shown on his shield shape Lavinia’s life for the next three years, and, ultimately, leave her with the difficulty of going on after his effectively-prophetic tellings have concluded. Vergil can tell her of the future glories of Rome, but not of what might happen to her once Aeneas has died. She tells us she is contingent, existing only because of Vergil’s telling of her; and yet, she must find most of her life and the degrees of her existence for herself, because he did not know them. When the contents of the poem have finished working themselves out in her life, she tells her readers that she “has lost my guide, my Vergil.” That “I must go on by myself through all that is left after the end, all the rest of the immense, pathless, unreadable world”. (p. 183)

The end of the Aeneid is not the end of Lavinia, since the whole point, the whole argument, of the book is that she has her own life; by inference, so too does any tertiary character, especially any given woman in a story of antiquity. The rest of the book is a meditation on finding identity amongst political and social conflict.

By the end, the “I”s have multiplied from what seemed to be the simple voice of telling with which the book began; in the the “I”s of the ending, there is the English word for first-person nominative identity but in them too is also the last externally-structuring words Lavinia has – the Latin command to “go”. To go on.

And so, in her own way, she does.

Coming up: Lavinia

Next up in reading the Future Classics is a novel set in ancient Latium.

For November, what’s left of it, I’ll be looking at Lavinia, Ursula Le Guin’s retelling of part of the Aeneid from the perspective of a character who, in the original, has no lines. The book was contentious as science fiction at the time: does it even count as part of that genre? Whether or not it does – we’ll reconsider the arguments – it’s certainly a fascinating and admirable book. It won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was shortlisted for the BSFA Award.

Lavinia was published in 2008 (meaning we’ve skipped 2007). In that year, Fidel Castro resigned as president of Cuba, Bill Gates as chairman of Microsoft, the island of Sark lost its distinction for preserving feudalism, the summer Olympics were held in Beijing, and the Large Hadron Collider was officially opened. Arthur C Clarke died, and Terry Pratchett announced that he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. The BSFA began its experiment with running Matrix as an online magazine.

I can promise you a discussion of Lavinia before the end of the month. I’ll be posting on it starting a week from today.

P.S. These year recaps paid off at the BristolCon quiz for me, when, thanks to doing them, I knew in which year Pluto lost its planetary status.

Coming up: The Carhullan Army / Daughters of the North

The next book on the Future Classics list we’ll be reading is Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army, published in the US as Daughters of the North.

We’re moving steadily towards the present now. The Carhullan Army was published in 2007 and did extremely well for itself. It won the Tiptree Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award (which was won by Richard Morgan’s Black Man). The book was her third novel, the previous one having been shortlisted for the Man Booker award.

2007 was the year that Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU. The book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was published. The Writers Guild of America began the strike which would go on to give us, the following year, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog. The Hugo shortlist for best novel included Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, the only work by a female author to be nominated in that category since 2005 or until 2010. Madeleine L’Engle and Ingmar Berman died.The Science Fiction Foundation held its first-ever Science Fiction Criticism Masterclass. It was also, apparently, the Year of the Dolphin.

Tony will be leading discussion of The Carhullan Army / Daughter of the North.

(I leave it up to Niall and Tony whether we’ll be looking at Farthing or The Carhullan Army first.)

Farthing update

Niall’s been swamped, between the Strange Horizon fund-raising drive and travel, so while his posts are Farthing are still forthcoming, I can’t say when.

In the meantime, there’s some news on the subject of the book’s availability in the UK! Regardless of why it may or may not have been unpublished in the UK before now, Jo Walton has now sold world English rights for the book to Tor. The major immediate impact of this is that the audio book version of Farthing is now available in the UK (from Audible or wherever else you choose to buy it from).

Coming up: Farthing

The next book in our ongoing Future Classics series is Jo Walton’s Farthing. Niall will be leading discussion, likely starting before the end of September.

Farthing was published two years after Gwyneth Jones’ Life, which means 2005 is the first year of the last decade we have skipped. None of the books published that year made it onto our list of the top-10 science fiction novels by women of the last decade.

2006, however, gave us Farthing, the first of Walton’s Small Change trilogy. It was also the year that Pluto was demoted from being a planet; novels by five male authors were shortlisted for the best novel for the Hugo Award; and Octavia Butler, Stanislaw Lem, Jack Williamson, and Jim Baen died.

Farthing was shortlisted for a slew of awards, including the Nebula, the John W Campbell Memorial Award, the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and the Locus award. It won the Romantic Times 2006 Reviewers’ Choice Award for Science Fiction.

I hope you will be able to join us in reading and discussing Farthing.

Life: Recap

(Isn’t that a fantastic title for a post?)

Over the last few weeks, Nic has posted a series of thought-provoking explorations of Gwyneth Jones’ Life, looking at its relationship with institutions and attitudes towards scientific practice; its self-consciousness as feminist sf, as a commentary on the role of women in a science fictional world; the core of the relationships which define the plot of the book; and the fictional scientific discovery at the heart of the story and how it affects gender.

Life, the seventh book we’ve examined in the Future Classics series here on Torque Control, is our last book from 2004, the end of the first half of the decade this book list covers. The remaining four books cover the rest of the decade. For planning ahead, those are

Jo Walton, Farthing (in late September)
Sarah Hall, The Carhullan Army/Daughters of the North (October)
Ursula Le Guin, Lavinia (November)
Gwyneth Jones, Spirit (December)

My thanks to Nic for joining us for this discussion (and perhaps more in the future?), and to those of you who read along and participated in the discussion. It’s never too late to come back to these posts and do so.

Discussion: Part 1 – Science and Sensibilities; Part 2 – Feminisms; Part 3 – Roles and Relationships; Part 4 – Gender and Conclusion

A recent, related post:

bookgazing asks for insights into what new things cis-gendered women could become “in the middle of a pre-existing world full of pre-conceptions about gender and behaviour?”

Life, #4

Having discussed science, feminism, and character relationships in my earlier posts on Gwyneth Jones’ Life, it seems only natural that I should bring this series to a close with some remarks on how the book deals with gender. In many ways, this is likely to be more recap and summation than a substantially new discussion, because gender pervades all the aspects of the book I’ve looked at so far.

The novel’s central sfnal idea – the discovery that Anna spends her professional life finding and demonstrating – is that there a virus has emerged which affects how genes, and the traits associated with them, are “shuffled” during sexual reproduction (198). Usually, only the parents’ X chromosomes take part in this process; the Y chromosome, which (by and large) only males possess, is too small and unlike its counterparts to do any swapping. Genes on the Y chromosome, therefore, are passed only from father to son, whereas X-linked genes can show up in either male or female offspring. Where the phenomenon that Anna calls Transferred Y deviates from this pattern is that it allows the Y chromosome to get involved in gene-swapping. In the long run, according to experiments and simulations run by Anna – and, later, by other teams around the world – TY looks set to lead to the disappearance of the Y chromosome from the human race.

As far as I understand it (and not being a scientist, I’m not completely sure I do…), there is no suggestion, at least from the scientist characters, that this will lead to the end of biological sex differences within human beings; there will still be biologically-male (and fertile) individuals, but they will, like females, have two X chromosomes. Gender, however, is a rather different matter.

Anna steadfastly refuses to spend much time worrying over the implications of all this, focusing on it as a purely scientific issue – a question to investigate in the lab – and ignoring the warnings of colleagues that she could be playing with fire. It is, after all, already happening (indeed, there are already a number of unknowingly-XX males around, living perfectly ordinary lives but for a higher risk of infertility); she is not the cause of the phenomenon, and she had no intention of interpreting it, either. But science does not happen in a vacuum.

It is only late in the book, when her TY investigations have become a media storm – nothing stirs up public fear and anger like a perceived threat to masculinity – and her marital problems with Spence are coming to the surface, that Anna faces what she has learned. Angry and upset over the revelation that Spence is having an affair with insipid Meret (“the not-too-clever sweet feminine younger one” (326), as Anna puts it), Anna finds the temptation to fall back on gendered ways of thinking and fighting about their relationship horribly alluring. “I have become woman”, she reflects; in the Joanna Russ sense, that is: for all her attempts to escape it, she has finally been confronted with her role in the battle of the sexes:

I can be a matriarch like Rosey, who though she loves Wol truly, never forgets to treat him with contempt. Throws him out when he fails to satisfy, allows him back on sufferance. It is what they expect, it is the way relations between the sexes have to be. You have to keep the whip hand, or else they will turn on you. […]

I was afraid of Transferred Y, and I pretended other reasons, but this is why. I didn’t want to think of what it meant for real people because that means me, that means Spence… all that dirt about sexual relations, that I didn’t ever want to handle. (320-1)

I’m not completely sure how to interpret Anna’s thoughts, here (and would welcome suggestions). After some discussion on this point with Niall, my sense is that, regardless of whether or not TY will affect biological sex – or even most of the visible physical traits linked with it – the cultural narratives surrounding gender, and linking gender with sex, are sufficiently powerful that TY is dynamite. Is this Ramone’s “something new”, that will change relations between human beings beyond recognition?

Above and beyond the fact that previously Y-linked (and thus male-only) genes would presumably begin to turn up in females, simply the idea of the chromosomal difference between men and women being ‘lost’ is something that would – and, in the book, apparently does – be profoundly disturbing for some. This is regardless of the fact that, as far as I can tell, there would still be two main biological sexes (my genetics knowledge doesn’t really stretch to speculating upon how this would affect rates or presentation of intersexuality); males and females would all be XX at a genetic level, but nonetheless there would still be as many differences between any given two individuals, regardless of sex, as there ever were.

Consciously and unconsciously, people have so much invested in narratives of gendered thought and behaviour – and, in particular, in narratives of gender and of the battle of the sexes as they shape family life. Rosey, again:

“I used to think Steven and Joe were aggressive because of the childhood they had before they came to us. But boys will be boys. I was so relieved to have a girl.”

If you put a child in frilly ankle socks at birth, thought Anna, by the time she’s three no one will ever know whether genetic predisposition or nurture made her turn out wet as a haddock’s bathing suit. (285)

The possibilities are not spelled out in the book, so I can’t be sure I’m thinking along the right lines, here, and would love to know if anyone has any other suggestions. In particular, does anyone else get the sense from the book that the ‘loss’ of the Y chromosome could make a measurable difference to men – and/or to women – without an accompanying cultural shift? Are there likely to be physical or chemical implications to TY? Or might something like TY itself be enough to prompt a cultural shift? And what about transsexuality and transgenderism?

Life, #3: Roles and Relationships

Following on from my posts on science and feminism in Gwyneth Jones’ Life, it’s time to take a closer look at the two central relationships that shape and define so much of who Anna is and what she does: her marriage to Spence, and her on-off friendship (and more) with Ramone. Both are formed during Anna’s time as an undergraduate, and both send complicated tendrils out through the novel’s various themes.

Neither of them, it has to be said, are particularly easy to like.

Superficially, at least, Spence seems likeable. He’s sensitive, he’s smart, he’s quietly funny; he’s even attracted to Anna’s intelligence. (Well, mostly.)

She had no idea she was sexy. Picture it: Marilyn Monroe is sitting beside you – a brunette Marilyn, which is so much classier, and brainy, which to the male is subconsciously incredibly attractive, resist the dreadful idea as he will. […] He guessed [the other guys] had to be aware, at some level, of her wide shoulders, hand-span waist, and curvaceous little bottom; of the pert, round-as-apples breasts under her clean and modest tee-shirts. (20)

Later in this same reflective passage, Spence goes on to congratulate himself on how his “vintage feminist” mother would be proud of how much he’s not like other guys (“The menfolk of Annandale were an unregenerate lot, stubbornly resistant to the siren lure of female intelligence” (21)). So near, and yet so far; at no point during his panegyric to Anna Apple Boobs does Spence think about his object of desire as a person, whose intelligence is important to her for its own sake rather than as something that exists to attract him, Liberated Feminist Man.

This, I suppose, is the problem with Spence (or at least my problem with him). He has the occasional flash of understanding, but ultimately he never manages to move beyond thinking of Anna as part of his story: the love interest, the adjunct to his narrative arc, the woman that only he can recognise and rescue. Before his writing career takes off and his affair with (young, naive, worshipful) Meret develops, Spence is at his happiest and most focused when faced with Anna’s news of her accidental pregnancy. Oblivious to Anna’s devastation (the knowledge of her pregnancy, coming at such a crucial time in her research and spelling out the ways in which her life is out of her control, is “like a raw bereavement” to her (120)), Spence starts making wedding plans within minutes. This, you feel, is the moment he’s been waiting for: the chance to Do The Right Thing. He never stops to think about whether it is what Anna wants, and Anna is too sunk in her misery and too determined to be self-reliant to tell him, in small enough words, that it is not. This will be the pattern of their relationship.

The fact that Anna has her own story – that, indeed, the nature of Anna’s work means that in many ways Spence is far more a part of Anna’s story than she is of his – is something that he struggles with, throughout. It’s there on the several occasions when he casts himself in the role of house-husband (in Leeds, in Sungai, on the south coast in the final section of the book): he alternates between cheerful ebullience and depressed boredom, frustrated by his lack of purpose. Anna, consumed with her work, is too distracted to need, or be grateful for, his attempts to care for her. Their gender roles are flipped in more ways than the obvious: Spence takes on the job of neglected, long-suffering (whiny, demanding) wife, while Anna is the dynamic husband with her mind on higher things than domesticity (the distant, superior spouse who ignores the household labour – both physical and emotional – she doesn’t see). The problem lies in the roles themselves; the faults of those performing the roles only compound the issue.

Anna’s other major relationship, with gender-challenging Ramone, is less of a constant in her life but still a major influence. Whereas Anna so often takes Spence for granted, she spends a lot of time thinking about Ramone, “this mischievous, erratic guardian spirit” (8). Anna is frequently annoyed with Ramone, cutting off communication with her on more than one occasion, but she is always anxious to understand her: what she stands for, and what she means to her:

Who is Ramone Holyrod? she asked herself. Someone I invented. My exterior soul. The person I wished I could have been; my repository for those parts of my self I couldn’t use or didn’t want in my real life. Ideas that would have made it impossible for me to pursue my life’s work. Truths that would make me an outlaw.

Or a crackpot. (355)

Unlike Spence, Ramone has her own story, which intersects with Anna’s only at intervals: she has a career of her own with as many peaks and troughs as Anna’s does; she has a difficult, devoted relationship with her schizophrenic mentor, Lavinia; she cycles through purpose, despair, desire, turns her words into actions, changes her philosophy of life on several occasions, and adopts new personae for new situations.

Ramone’s story also comments upon Anna’s, both directly – through Ramone’s own, impassioned reflections – and through the implicit contrast between them. Anna knuckles down, Ramone acts out; Anna dresses neatly and unobtrusively, Ramone breaks every rule of cleanliness and self-presentation; Anna marries (in a church, no less) and forms a home with Spence, Ramone goes through a string of complex and sometimes abusive relationships, and has spells of living rough. Above all, Anna absorbs what the world throws at her, as a woman, and tries to make her way through life without rocking the boat too much – whereas Ramone shouts and fights and writes aggressive books and pisses off her closest friends on a regular basis. They make each other think, and deconstruct, and kick out, more than anyone else in their respective lives.

In the end, and quite inadvertantly, Anna does what Ramone never quite manages: she overturns the gender paradigm. Perhaps, anyway; but that will be the subject of the next post.